The Roundabout Interview
Many thanks to Sean, Lenzie 12 Step Friday 8pm.
What brought you to AA?
The drink had stopped working. From a young teenager onwards I drank to escape my feelings and emotions, to change the way I felt. My total inability to deal with life, with people, places and situations meant that I was full of fear. I couldn’t function in society on any level without drink. With drink I could, or I thought I could. Drink took my fear away and then it didn’t, I was drinking and the fear was still there.
Was there one thing that made you realise you had a problem with drink?
Not one thing more a catalogue of things. At 18 my mother told me I had to go to AA or I was getting put out the house. I went to a meeting and then tried …show more content…
I knew it existed as a family friend went. He wasn’t drinking and his life had changed.
How did you contact AA?
Physically I was in a bad way, alcoholic paralysis was setting in. I was living in a bedsit and I crawled along the hall, got hold of a phonebook and called the AA Helpline. I couldn’t make a meeting that night but about two or three days later I got to the AA Rooms in Glasgow.
What do you remember of your first meeting?
I was given half a cup of tea, a friendly welcome and was asked to come back. The chairperson was a man just a few years older than me and he and two women, when they realised how ill I was, took me to hospital to get checked out. He then took me to meetings for over 90 days sometimes two or three a day – especially ones where there was food as we were both …show more content…
Before my current sobriety I had seven and five years off the drink, but I was only dealing with the allergy. I knew what happened to me when I took the first drink. I remember clearly a night a friend took me for a drink and after two pints said we were going home. I wanted to choke him as I’d taken the first drink and needed more. When I read about the allergy in the Doctor’s Opinion in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous I knew what they were talking about straightaway. Off the drink I got all the things I thought you were supposed to get that showed you had a successful life – well-paid job, fancy car, university degree, bought house, relationship. Then I started having panic attacks and didn’t know why. I went to doctors, had mental breakdowns when everything shut down, started using cough bottles, over-the-counter drugs and then street drugs – anything to take me away from feeling restless, irritable and discontented. I lost hope in AA, nothing worked. I was ready to commit suicide, I couldn’t take another minute of the way I was feeling. When I made the decision to kill myself a weight was lifted from me, I relaxed. I instantly got that sense of ease and comfort I used to get when I got the first drink or knew I was going to get it. Then the thought came in if I’m going to kill myself I might as well have a drink and if that doesn’t work I can still kill myself. My drinking then was just more of the same, only worse, I lost everything. I experienced
Many thanks to Sean, Lenzie 12 Step Friday 8pm.
What brought you to AA?
The drink had stopped working. From a young teenager onwards I drank to escape my feelings and emotions, to change the way I felt. My total inability to deal with life, with people, places and situations meant that I was full of fear. I couldn’t function in society on any level without drink. With drink I could, or I thought I could. Drink took my fear away and then it didn’t, I was drinking and the fear was still there.
Was there one thing that made you realise you had a problem with drink?
Not one thing more a catalogue of things. At 18 my mother told me I had to go to AA or I was getting put out the house. I went to a meeting and then tried …show more content…
I knew it existed as a family friend went. He wasn’t drinking and his life had changed.
How did you contact AA?
Physically I was in a bad way, alcoholic paralysis was setting in. I was living in a bedsit and I crawled along the hall, got hold of a phonebook and called the AA Helpline. I couldn’t make a meeting that night but about two or three days later I got to the AA Rooms in Glasgow.
What do you remember of your first meeting?
I was given half a cup of tea, a friendly welcome and was asked to come back. The chairperson was a man just a few years older than me and he and two women, when they realised how ill I was, took me to hospital to get checked out. He then took me to meetings for over 90 days sometimes two or three a day – especially ones where there was food as we were both …show more content…
Before my current sobriety I had seven and five years off the drink, but I was only dealing with the allergy. I knew what happened to me when I took the first drink. I remember clearly a night a friend took me for a drink and after two pints said we were going home. I wanted to choke him as I’d taken the first drink and needed more. When I read about the allergy in the Doctor’s Opinion in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous I knew what they were talking about straightaway. Off the drink I got all the things I thought you were supposed to get that showed you had a successful life – well-paid job, fancy car, university degree, bought house, relationship. Then I started having panic attacks and didn’t know why. I went to doctors, had mental breakdowns when everything shut down, started using cough bottles, over-the-counter drugs and then street drugs – anything to take me away from feeling restless, irritable and discontented. I lost hope in AA, nothing worked. I was ready to commit suicide, I couldn’t take another minute of the way I was feeling. When I made the decision to kill myself a weight was lifted from me, I relaxed. I instantly got that sense of ease and comfort I used to get when I got the first drink or knew I was going to get it. Then the thought came in if I’m going to kill myself I might as well have a drink and if that doesn’t work I can still kill myself. My drinking then was just more of the same, only worse, I lost everything. I experienced