Breaking free from the grip of the bottle to the bottom

Date Published: {J}

Peals of laughter and jokes aren’t exactly what you’d expect to hear when members of Alcoholics Anonymous get together to talk about their experiences, but life is full of surprises.

James, Michael and Joan had all reached their own personal rock bottom when they joined the fellowship and all credit it with saving their lives.

Not only that, but they say the meetings are where they learned to laugh again after years of misery. James has been a member for 25 years, Michael for almost five and Joan for three and a half and all were in desperate need when they joined.

They were among several hundred participants at the Galway West AA Convention in Galway City earlier this month, where dancing and socialising were the order of the day. All normal enough for a social gathering – except this one was without the lubrication of alcohol.

An open meeting was held during the convention’s first night, giving newcomers an opportunity to attend an AA gathering, without having to speak. Open meetings are held regularly in Galway, explains James, who is the Association’s Public Information Officer.

“When people reach the level when alcohol isn’t working for them, there are a lot of bridges to cross,” he says. “Frequently people will drive past the venue where AA meetings are being held, before they summon up the courage to enter.”

For those who do, it’s life changing.

“I’ve got a life now,” says Michael who was “in and out of hospitals” for about seven years before joining.

The father of a young teenager also had a psychiatric condition, for which he was being treated and was a psychiatric hospital when he first attended an AA meeting.

“Now I know I have two conditions. The psychiatric one, which I have recovered from, and alcoholism. For a while I wondered if I fitted in AA, but then I met other people and I knew.”

In the five years since he has been sober he hasn’t been hospitalised once.

“My life is a lot better. I exercise. I eat and I enjoy people’s company. Before I wasn’t studying, I wasn’t eating properly; I lived in doss houses and could go drinking any hour of the day.”

He didn’t drink every day, he adds, which allowed him to believe he didn’t have a problem.

But people had mentioned his drinking to him, and he had attended the AA previously, although he hadn’t stuck it out.

His moment of realisation came when he was in a dingy bedsit one morning, after having been on an all-night bender with friends.

Having drunk himself sober, he was cooking breakfast when it dawned on him that “most people don’t live their lives like this”.

“I realised I wasn’t being a rebel or artistic and that I was wasting my life.”

When he was in hospital, Michael went back to AA meetings and hasn’t had alcohol since, although he says that in the early day, he was more a ‘dry drunk’ than a recovering alcoholic, because acceptance took a while.

Now he goes to meetings regularly and says they are where he is “learning about life and other people”.

“The first meeting I was so mixed up in my head at that time, and there was a man there talking about his life and I was wondering how someone could be so honest and would people not be gossiping about him. . . now I love that honesty.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.