When you see an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting portrayed in a film or on television, the hero or heroine stands up and says: “My name’s Bill and I’m an alcoholic.” Then it fades out to lush music and you don’t know what happens next. Well, we attended AA meetings on and off for 20 or so years. We met at an AA meeting. It is pretty much the only option available to people with a drink problem. We are convinced that what happens after the music fades away does not help everybody.
AA’s programme starts from the premise that alcoholism is an incurable illness, that alcoholics have a mental and physical allergy to booze, and that they are different from others. Their solution is to label you an alcoholic for life, browbeat you into accepting the label and insist that you give up drinking — they call it staying sober — for ever. It’s not sobriety they demand, it’s abstinence.
After decades spent trying and failing the AA way, it is plain to us that alcoholism is not a disease and is not incurable. It’s a behavioural problem, a self-harming problem. We are no longer alcoholics. We got to the root of why we drank to excess and then rebuilt our lives. Now we can even enjoy a glass of wine with a meal.
Alcoholics Anonymous started in the 1930s as an evangelical, non-denominational Christian sect. It says now that it’s not a religious organisation, yet out of the famous “12 steps”, six mention God. The Black Book — the bible of the AA movement — hasn’t changed in 70 years. You are not allowed to say the book is wrong, or to question it in any way. You may ask questions, but only as though you are consulting the oracle. There are large group sessions devoted to discussing how wonderful it is. You are never to stop reading and rereading it. From the beginning, we both felt this was wrong. For us, lifelong sobriety — the ultimate goal of AA members — is not recovery. It’s a damage limitation exercise.
There is no easy way to escape the clutches of the bottle. We met at AA in Ayr, in 1993. Three years later we eloped. Our honeymoon was a £5,000 whisky bender. We moved to Cambridge, where Murdoch planned to start a PhD. But our landlady threw us out after a drunken binge and we were reduced to begging on the streets. That was our lowest point, living rough amid the glittering spires where Murdoch had been an undergraduate; no money for food or booze, wondering where we could go from there. One night two nurses found us huddled on a park bench. They took pity on us, bought us a cup of tea and found us a place in a hostel.
From there, we began rebuilding our lives. We started writing our life stories, trying to figure out what was causing our self-destructive drinking. Going back to our childhoods, tracing the roots of my anorexia and Murdoch’s difficult relationship with his cold, distant father helped us to see why we had turned to the bottle. We spent a year figuring it all out while selling newspapers, saving money and planning a return to Ayr. We wanted to come back reasonably respectfully, with our drinking under control.
We had to believe in ourselves, and in each other. We had no other friends. All doors were closed to us, nobody wanted to know, and that’s a hell of a place to be. Murdoch still does not see his two children from his first marriage. At this point I was still speaking to my son and daughter, our only family ties.
It was Elaine, my daughter, who arranged for us to come back to Ayr. We moved into a rented flat and took whatever work we could find: door-to-door market research around the suburban fringes of Paisley with no car, no shelter, no toilet.
Slowly, things fell into place. I got up one morning and said ‘Wow!’. It was as if a veil had fallen from my eyes. At last I realised why I had been behaving like this. We took on a jobshare with a small charity, then gradually Murdoch resumed his career as a financial journalist and PR man that had fallen by the wayside. At first he wrote a column for the Ayrshire Post, then edited a new paper, Scottish Recruitment. It wasn’t grandly paid, but it was better to be writing for newspapers than selling them. Our life together, which had always been defined by drinking, was becoming normal at last. We had to relearn how to mix with people. After years on the margins it was very strange to be invited anywhere, to be socially included. To be treated with a bit of respect.
Today we have a great relationship with my son, John, 44, and are very close to Elaine, 39. She was wary the first time she saw us drinking — the AA message is so strong — but when we explained what we were doing, it made sense. She soon realised it was fine. It means she can come down on a Friday night, bring a bottle of wine and relax with us. She has been very supportive.
Now, after seven years of hard labour, we have finally published our book. We really believe that our own struggle would have been so much quicker, and less painful, if we could have read a book like it. At the time, we did not know another soul who had been through what we were going through.
It wasn’t until we came through the other end that we discovered that the first doubts about AA’s methods were voiced by the addiction expert Dr Stanton Peele as early as 1964. We were delighted when he agreed to read our book and described it as “a wonderful love story and a challenge to conventional wisdom about how people can recover from drinking problems”.
So far we have found 12 psychiatrists, psychologists or clinics in America that agree with our theory that alcoholism is a behavioural problem and that it is possible to recover and drink in a controlled way. At the same time, however, law courts are, in many US states, including compulsory AA sessions in the sentences for drink-related offences.
Another thing that alarms us is the way the AA 12-step plan has crept into the private sector. One of the only good things about AA is that it is free to whomever wants to attend. But now private clinics are piggybacking onto AA, taking the programme and selling it back at £3,000 a week for a six-week course. And then the NHS, unable or unwilling to deal with the whole problem of alcoholism, sends a percentage of its patients on these six-week courses. Who pays for this? Us. If AA works for you, if you want to give up drinking for life, that’s fine. We are not telling anyone what they should or should not do. But we do want to start a debate and open up choices.
Phoenix in a Bottle, by Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald is published by Melrose Books, £16.99
As told to Anna Burnside
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
“Alcoholics Anonymous is the last-chance saloon. Our primary purpose is to help people stay sober and to reach out to people who feel they need help to do that. Alcoholism is unique. If you told people whose health was deteriorating with cancer that by attending a meeting they might start on the road to recovery, there would be queues round the block. That’s what we can offer people who want to stay sober. It works for some. If the MacDonalds choose a different route, good luck to them.” — Alcoholics Anonymous
“Abstinence is the safest course. The danger is when controlled drinking becomes a recommendation for the majority. The more addicted someone is, the more difficult it is going to be for them to go back to very controlled drinking. There is always a danger in generalising from one person’s experience. It would be worrying if people thought this was true for everybody.” — Dr Bruce Ritson, vice-president of the Medical Council on Alcohol and honorary consultant at the Royal Edinburgh hospital.
“Our organisation directly helps people with alcohol problems — not just alcoholics — and works in education and influences policy. We are not against alcohol, we are for its responsible use. But it is generally held that for alcoholics, the way forward has to be total abstinence. I personally think people who misuse alcohol have a disease they need help to overcome. I think that once a person knows they are an alcoholic, they cannot then touch alcohol.” — Canon Kenyon Wright, chairman of Alcohol Focus Scotland
