I’ll never forget the first time I saw an AA sobriety token. Years ago, I was putting in another droll night as a bartender at a high-end restaurant in San Francisco. Early in the evening, before the dinner crowd had arrived, a well-dressed fellow sat at the bar, and as he downed a few shots of Jack, chasing them with beer, he politely told me how much his life sucked. A common occurrence of course; if you’ve ever bartended – or sat on the other side of the bar – you know that doing the job well requires an honorary degree in psychotherapy. I served up the usual long ears and nods of affirmation, and before long, he was on his way, leaving a hefty cash tip. As he stood up and turned to leave, he tossed a large coin on the pile of singles, and said “keep the change”.

The melodramatic irony of what he had just done honestly didn’t hit me a few minutes later when I gathered up the tip, and looked at the big bronze coin that had the Roman numeral “V” in a triangle on one side, with the words “Unity”, “Service”, and “Recovery” surrounding it, and on the other side had some prayer about serenity and courage. It didn’t really hit me until I shared it with a co-worker later. I had suspected it was some kind of sobriety thing, but as I talked to my co-worker – who had alcoholic parents – I suddenly understood for sure that this guy had just decided to throw away five years of sober time, and this was his personal and silently dramatic way of announcing it.

I view this all with a very different perspective at this point than I did in those days. Over the years I learned that I myself had a problem with alcohol and addiction, and finally, a little over a decade ago, I got “mostly” clean for about four years. I say “mostly”, because although I mostly didn’t drink for four years, I allowed myself an annual or semi-annual “drinking event”. Either around my birthday, or around the holidays. On a couple of these occasions, I just had one or two drinks, but more commonly I’d get pretty drunk, feel like crap the next day, and have no desire to drink for quite a while as a result. In spite of these “scheduled relapses” as I now think of them, my life pretty quickly improved during this period; I started a business, got my finances in pretty good order, and got seriously involved with what I thought was going to be a long-lasting relationship.

And then, for some reason, I decided it would be okay to start drinking again on occasion. Having broken my “no more than twice a year” rule, I thought I’d be smart and at least keep it to a once-a-month thing, just to be safe. Of course, pretty soon, once every couple of weeks seemed pretty reasonable, but only if it was for some kind of social reason – I wouldn’t just go out and buy some booze for myself. And frankly, once you’re drinking every two weeks, that starts to feel contrived. I mean, everybody drinks on the weekend, right? So soon once a week was just fine. And when you’re as busy and hard-working as I am, sometimes you just want to reward yourself in the middle of the week. You know where I’m heading with this. Within about a year, I was drinking every single day again, and before long the daily start time crept earlier and earlier into my day. A glass of wine with lunch was okay, right? It was only about a year later that I was having the occasional Mimosa or Bloody Mary with weekend brunch. Because that’s soooo cosmopolitan. And soon, I was finding it difficult to just plain function without a shot or a glass of wine in the middle of the day somewhere.

So I tried outpatient substance abuse counseling. Twice. And both times it seemed to help for awhile, but it wouldn’t “stick”. Finally, I put myself in inpatient rehab, because EVERYBODY knows THAT’S where they fix you for sure. And guess what? I drank four months later. So I bounced around my personal “bottom” for awhile, until I finally ran into an old friend who helped me get to some AA meetings – which I had resisted attending with any regularity or commitment – and now, a few weeks shy of exactly four years later, I’m still sober. And more at peace than I have ever been in my life. So I should be REALLY EXCITED to celebrate my four year AA anniversary in a few weeks, right?

Well, maybe not.

Most of what you hear about or read about regarding “sober anniversaries” is how it’s a great time to celebrate the sober person’s new life, and give some positive reinforcement to their new behavior. And that may be true in many cases, but in my opinion, it’s also another potential setup for relapse. My personal experience was that my first year anniversary was just plain annoying, since I felt I still had so far to go before I should celebrate anything. I thought I’d heard all the old-timer jokes by now, but when I shared this though recently, a woman at the table said “well, like they say, congratulating an alcoholic for not drinking is like congratulating a cowboy with hemorrhoids for not riding a horse”. And I have to be honest, my next two anniversaries were relative non-events. It felt kind of gratifying for my sponsor and my home groups to acknowledge them with tokens and whatnot, but frankly, I was so happily living day to day (one of the great results of working a halfway decent program!) that it was really just a blip in the course of things.

But with my fourth anniversary approaching, everything has been quite different. A few weeks ago, I found myself stuck for several days in that “squirrel cage brain” that most addicts and alcoholics know all too well. It took me a couple of days to even recognize it for what it was. Why? Probably because my life has been going so well that at most, I had been going to one meeting a week. Once I realized it wasn’t my hectic schedule and project delays that were making me nutty, about 50% of the uneasiness went away. And even more restlessness was alleviated when I simply went to a meeting the next day!

And then two things became glaringly evident to me. One I already knew on an intellectual level, but the other blew me away; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it.

The first was something that a lot of people with long-term recovery experience know all about. There’s a common pattern for people in recovery that involves relapsing around the 4-5 year mark. People will talk about it in a lot of different ways, but the basis of this phenomena is probably rooted in the fact that for most people, 3-4 years is just enough time to get one’s life fully in order, and once your life is “in order”, there’s a fairly good chance you’re going to be hungry for something more than basic stability or financial success. This hunger may manifest as loneliness, restlessness, a bloated sense of self-satisfaction, or a myriad of other things. I followed this pattern like clockwork with my first period of “dry time”. Never mind the strict AA-based observation that I was relapsing annually, the fact was that I was naturally going through a lot of the cycles someone would go through working a twelve step program. Just not as thoroughly, and certainly in a way that was going to lead to a much larger fall when the five year wall came along. So what happens at this magic 4-5 year point? A failure to embrace and cultivate the emotional and spiritual maturity that’s finally in one’s grasp. Go read steps six and seven if you don’t understand why someone would choose not to pursue continued spiritual growth when it’s placed right in their lap.

So there’s that. But what was this other big epiphany I had missed? I had overlooked another kind of anniversary, the kind often discussed in therapeutic settings, that’s based on the human tendency to relive emotions or traumas on anniversaries. What I had failed to ponder as I approached this four year mark was that I HAVE NEVER BEEN CLEAN THIS LONG IN MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE. No matter how you slice it, I’m in new territory here, and that wily addict in my head is rubbing his pesky little hands together in delight. For now I’m just winking at him knowingly. I think I have a strategy for this new phase of my sobriety, one that involves doing some better follow up on some step work, and re-energizing my connections with folks in the fellowship. Pretty easy stuff!!!

So what am I doing in a few weeks on the day of my four year sober anniversary?

I don’t know. It isn’t here yet.

Science only recently seems to be identifying something that poets and pop songwriters have known for ages: It’s a fine line between love and addiction. Which can raise some difficult to answer questions. Like “Did I put in 12 hours of work today because I love my work, or because I’m a workaholic?”, or “Did we get rip-roaring drunk last night to celebrate our friends birthday, or because we’re a bunch of alcoholics?” Adding to the possible confusion is the fact that the current popular definition of the word “addiction” allows it to be applied to just about anything. The list of possible addictions these days includes gambling, food, sex, pornography, computers, internet, work, exercise, shopping, even self-injury. Oh. And drugs of course. So if you’re wondering if you have an addiction problem, how can you find the answer? Well, there are legitimate online tests for everything from internet addiction to alcoholism, but we suspect it’s just as likely that you can get addicted to addiction tests, and never end up actually doing anything. Another little problem you’ll encounter is that a genuine addiction is in fact very similar to love. Chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine, phenylethylamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin are all running around suppressing or assisting neural activity and triggering all manner of pleasure and pain responses, and the associated senses of reward or remorse that comes with them. But knowing what all these chemicals are and what they’re doing in your brain right now isn’t really of any practical use; you can’t control any of them on a direct granular level, even with the most sophisticated modern pharmaceuticals. If you could, addiction research wouldn’t still be a multi-million dollar industry.

So How Do You Figure Out If You’re Addicted?

According to the book America Anonymous by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, about 1 in 10 Americans twelve or older are hooked on alcohol or drugs, another 61 million smoke cigarettes, and millions more are addicted to other things like gambling, compulsive overeating, and sex and pornography. So statistically, you have a pretty good chance of having an addiction problem. Below is a quick checklist for what would seem to be more obvious indicators:

• You just wrapped your car around a tree and a police officer is giving you a Breathalyzer
• Your spouse has left you saying “call me if you ever quit [INSERT ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR]
• You’re reading this on a library computer because you’ve lost your home because of your cocaine budget

This is of course part of the dark humor of addiction and recovery. As a person in recovery myself, I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard at AA meetings that would blow your mind; stories about how far things can go down before a person is willing to look at their drug of choice as a possible factor in their situation. Which highlights one of the first problems in facing addiction. I’m going to make reference here to the legendary poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, i.e., the Known Knowns. If you’re not familiar with it, he made the following statement at a press briefing in 2002: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”. This remark has received a lot of criticism, but is in fact very straightforward and logical. However, it leaves out an important fourth possibility, which is critical to an understanding of addictive behavior. That fourth possibility is the “unknown known”. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek coined the term to describe “unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it”. He was using it in a different context, but it is exceptionally apt when exploring one’s perception of their possibly addictive behavior. The concept is more typically referred to by the thoroughly abused term “denial”, which has in my opinion reached the status of “psychobabble” via the constant popular use of the word. I would outline this first problem in recognizing and acknowledging one’s addiction with the following simple list of possibilities that is fairly analogous to the “Known Knowns” concept:

• There are people who truly don’t know they have a problem
• There are people who know they have a problem but don’t care yet
• There are people who know they have a problem but don’t know what to do
• There are people who know they have a problem but are enmeshed in denial

In the case of the first scenario, a person under the influence of a mind-altering substance may be the worst judge of their state, and may take a long time to even realize they have a problem. In the case of the second scenario, the societal norms of the first world may make it easy to mask a serious problem with humor or connoisseurism, so that person may have to have a tragic event like an auto accident before the problem is apparent to themselves. And in the case of the person who “doesn’t know what to do”, it’s easy to say to oneself for years that “I should really do something about this”. The addictive brain is very adept at delaying choice by maintaining varying degrees of depression and impaired long-term reasoning.

Maybe You Just Have Bad Habits

The peril in assessing the possibility that you have a real addiction problem is that a lot of negative behaviors can be thoroughly entwined with the substance abuse itself, and it’s also possible that an individual is “self medicating” a legitimate disorder of some kind. Only a professional can help you assess the latter, and only self-honesty can help you assess the former. But one indication that you don’t have a substance abuse problem is if – duh – you don’t actually ingest an addictive substance! That doesn’t mean you don’t have other “addictions” you might look at. In his book Life! By Design (I haven’t actually read it, for the record), real estate consultant and coach Tom Ferry talks about four addictions that are common for modern people: addiction to the opinions of others people, addiction to drama, addiction to the past, and addiction to worry. This is actually a useful list; routinely if I ask someone if they feel they have one of these “addictions”, they’ll admit to at least one. My personal advice to someone who finds their life blocked up in a manner that’s indistinguishable from that of an addict’s? Explore therapy if the issues are trauma-based or deeply rooted in the past, or find a life coach if they’re not. Sometimes the best action is simply action, and much like with “real” addiction, the first step is admitting the problem, and the next is DOING something about it. The bottom line, in any case – at least as stated by the DSM-IV – is quite simple: “When an individual persists in use of alcohol or other drugs despite problems related to use of the substance, substance dependence may be diagnosed”.

But What If You ARE An Addict?

As someone who has been in recovery for a few years after various failed approaches, I have some simple advice. Therapy – unless the therapist is in recovery themselves – isn’t very productive. And simply quitting is a set up for either using again, or eventually becoming a slightly brittle, slightly abrasive person, the kind of person often referred to as a “dry drunk”. Why do I say these two things? Because after a lot of exploration and personal failure in dealing with my addictions, I eventually discovered that for many addicts (including myself), the problem isn’t just behavioral or chemical, it’s spiritual. And before you run away in terror, let me define what I mean by “spiritual”, because for many, the word tends to evoke images of airy-fairy new age types or “prosperity Christians”. By “spiritual” all I mean is “living correctly”, and by that all I mean is being responsible for one’s actions, taking care of and loving oneself, and as a natural result of these actions, possessing compassion and love for others, and peace of mind. One of the slow and difficult to detect side effects of long-term substance abuse is a slow deadening of the subtler aspects of one’s character. And one of the only effective ways I’ve found to heal this damage is through the fairly rigorous methods of conventional 12-step programs. It took me a long time to embrace this approach, because it takes some real focus and tolerance to attend enough meetings to get the best of what the approach has to offer. Like any spiritual practice or other kind of discipline (including major religions), AA and NA attract all manner of people, from the “Sunday Only” type to the dogmatic and rigid-minded “thumper”. It personally took me a while to filter through the crap to get to the good stuff, which is the basic principles themselves, and the massive support group that is available literally 24/7, at an unbeatable price. Which is FREE. And this support is going to be crucial should you ever decide to deal with your addiction, because your problem doesn’t really go away, you just learn to live with its existence.  As this Harvard Mental Health Letter piece points out: “Long-term memories are formed by the activity of brain substances called transcription factors. All perceived rewards, including drugs, increase the concentration of transcription factors. So repeatedly taking drugs can change the brain cells and make the memory of the pleasurable effects very strong. Even after transcription factor levels return to normal, addicts may remain hypersensitive to the drug and the cues that predict its presence. This can heighten the risk of relapse in addicts long after they stop taking the drug.” So those brain chemicals we mentioned at the top ARE important, even if you can’t directly manipulate them in the short term.

In an upcoming piece, I’ll outline what I jokingly call “Alcoholics Anonymous Lite™”, which is a primer for people who – like I did – might miss out on the best that 12 Step programs have to offer, simply because of all the heavy-handed and quasi-religious attitudes that its more hard-core devotees seem to possess.