The Three Ps of Alcoholism: My Answer

Several people tried their best, but no one was able to come up with my answers to this riddle....except me.  Funny how your own riddles are easiest to solve!  Anyway, without further ado, here are my answers to the question/riddle in regards to the Three Ps of Alcoholism and how all of them end up being summarized by the one word, Powerlessness:

The disease of alcoholism, as described in the long version of the first step (p.30 of the Big Book), is:

1.  Physical or Physiological in nature:  "Most of us were unwilling to admit that we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think they are bodily or mentally different from their fellows."  One of the most important aspects of this disease to me was that it was physiological in nature.  My disease was not a moral failure on my part.  My past actions in relation to alcohol weren't due to a weakness of moral fiber or willpower: everything became clear to me when I woke up and realized that my body processed alcohol differently than those who were not alcoholics.   Ahhh, that's why I did that and felt that....  When it says here that "no personal likes to think that they are bodily (physically) or mentally (here you may think this is not physical, but I'd challenge you to think about what organ in the body does all the mental stuff (the brain) and that the brain is physical!) different from their fellows." --- I take that to mean that we didn't like to think that we alcoholics were physically different from our non-alcoholic fellows: but too bad!!!  We are different!  And that's ok.

2.  Permanent, not temporary:  "We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control. But such intervals, usually brief, were inevitably followed by still less control which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization."  When I was younger, I learned somewhere that alcoholism was a disease but (and I didn't realize this until after I was sober...) somehow I thought that this disease was something more akin to a bout with the flu.  It would come and go.  In this framework, I was able to think that I had a few "alcoholic incidents" over my first 30 years of drinking but that I was always able to recover from those drunken and shame-filled incidents with a new and powerful resolve "never to do that again" -- and I wouldn't!  I would never again drink 151 rum!  I would never again drink beer, then tequila, then scotch, then more beer! (I would, of course, drink tequila, then beer, then more beer, then scotch!)  It was a real awakening to truth the morning I woke up and realized that this disease was no intermittent or temporary: it was permanent.  This was the way my body works and that will never change for the better.  It will, however, change for the worse....which leads me to...

3.  Progressive:   "We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period of time, we get worse, never better."  This physical and permanent condition is not static in nature: it's progressive.  Progressively worse, not progressively better.  That is, the way my body processes alcohol is such that once I've started putting alcohol into my body, my body will act as though I desperately need more...and more....and more.  There is no amount that will ever be "enough" for any period of time.  What might be enough when I was 20 was no longer enough when I was 30.  And by the time I was 48, I knew that there was really no quantity that would ever be enough.  I was hopeless.

Well, I was hopeless until I discovered through watching my son and two other young people get and stay sober for 5 months and 10 days.  When their success blinded me to my own delusions, I woke up and saw myself as I really was: an alcoholic, a man whose body process alcohol differently than non-alcoholics, whose body would always process alcohol differently and who disease would continue to get worse and worse as long as I kept putting alcohol into this same body.

So when I'm reciting this long version of the 1st step, the most important part of the reading comes in the middle: "We learned that we had to fully concede to our inner most selves that we were [Physically, Permanently and Progressively] alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed." 

Well, this delusion of mine got smashed October 21, 2001.  The Powerlessness referred to in the Reader's Digest version of the first step found on p.59 of the Big Book, does not get me thinking about me vs. a glass of scotch.  No, powerlessness gets me thinking of the Three Ps: that my Physical body processes alcohol the exact way an alcoholic's body processes alcohol; that my body will always--Permanently--do that and if I were to put alcohol into my body now, this disease would reactivate and begin its Progressive destruction of me, body and soul.  I'm not so much powerless over alcohol as I am powerless to be someone other than who I am: at least in regards to alcohol and other outside solutions to inside problems.  Thank God or Whoever.

If you feel any sense of disappointment that you couldn't figure out my riddle, please don't feel bad.  The only reason that I think this became so clear to me is that I decided to add this long version of the 1st step to my daily routine of reciting things to myself while I drive to/from work every day.  I suspect that I have recited p.30 to myself probably close to a 1,000 times in the last five years.  You try that and you will find things within such a passage that you never saw before.  You'd be amazed at what I've found in How It Works after reciting it a comparable number of times AND hearing it in probably 700+ meetings each of the last almost 8 years:  and I'm still able to hear one "new" word in that passage now that I never saw before!  Shaking my head...  Some are sicker than others.

Take care!

Mike L.