How I broke through denial to achieve sobriety.

`My problems with the Bar paled in comparison with the illness which was ever so slowly killing me.'

I always felt awkward, different, or inferior. I never felt like I measured up, until I found the magic elixir--alcohol. Alcohol removed my inhibitions and insecurities. It made me feel like I fit in. It provided relief from those feelings of awkwardness. I felt like a witty, intelligent beauty queen, although in reality I was probably anything but witty, intelligent, or beautiful when I was drunk.

I never drank like most people. I remember that one of the very first times I drank I alienated everyone around me. This should have given me a clue that I handled alcohol differently than most people, but I was able to ignore this fact by surrounding myself with people who drank like I did.

I look back on my life and see several times when I made choices, or rather my disease of alcoholism made choices for me, which enabled me to continue drinking alcoholically. The choices included everything from my friends to my divorce.

Alcohol ruled my life, but I could not acknowledge that. To do so would mean I would have to do something about it; I would have to face the dreaded "C" word: Change. I was not ready for that. The thought of living without my crutch was too frightening.

Toward the end of my drinking and drugging career I was in such deep denial that when I was arrested for possession of drugs, I read the newspaper article written about my arrest as saying there was not widespread evidence of drug abuse in my home, when in fact the article quoted the police as saying there was such evidence. My denial was so strong that my disease was able to take the printed word and turn it around, so I could continue to drink and drug with impunity.

A great deal had to happen before I could break through my denial. One would think that a felony arrest would do that, but in my case it did not. I had gone to great lengths in order to hide my disease from the people I encountered in my professional life. In fact, the first time I read Alcoholics Anonymous--the textbook from which AA draws its name--I could only relate to two sentences. An attorney wrote that "[w]henever a situation arose that fast talk wouldn't explain away, I simply withdrew. In other words, I fired the client before the client fired me."

Those words really jumped out at me. Even I could not deny that was what I had been doing. I had set up my life so that I could insulate myself from outside...