TRANSCRIPT
Although I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Alcoholics Anonymous, for this video I would just like to take one concept from Alcoholics Anonymous that I really do like, and I think is applicable to a bigger subject. That is the low bottom alcoholic.
The low bottom alcoholic is the person who has to really, really hit a very low bottom before they wake up and can acknowledge that they’re an alcoholic and start changing their lives. What is the low bottom for an alcoholic? Well, from people I’ve heard who are in A.A. or people who are not even in A.A. who use this term, a low bottom for them has been things like they find themselves sleeping on the street, denying that they’re an alcoholic. “I’m not an alcoholic,” but their alcoholism has had them lose their home, lose their apartment, lose their wife, lose their kids, lose their jobs, sleeping on the street, sleeping in a cardboard box, freezing, sleeping outside, losing fingers because they had frostbite when they were drunk and sleeping outside. Oh, all sorts of things like this. Getting their teeth knocked out, cirrhosis of the liver, all sorts of different problems that low-bottom alcoholism can cause. Ending up in the hospital for having repeatedly, for having alcohol toxicity, fighting, getting beaten up, ending up in jail, committing crimes, beating up other people. These are all things that are associated with being a low-bottom alcoholic.
Now, the reason I bring this up is because I think as a whole, writ large, our species, Homo sapiens, human beings, are a low-bottom alcoholic in terms of how we are living as a species overall. Now, there are individuals who are exceptions. There are individuals who are smarter, who live healthier, who are fighting against this. But as a whole, the seven billion of us, and how many years before it’ll be eight billion, nine billion, ten billion, we’re a low-bottom alcoholic. We’re not waking up to the reality of the destruction we’re causing. The destruction we’re causing to the planet, the destruction we’re causing to our children, the destruction we’re causing to the oceans, to the forests, to the land, to the air. We’re profoundly destroying our planet. We’re really ruining it, just trashing it at such a rapid rate. I see it all over the world as I travel. You can’t turn on the news and not see it.
Yet, in terms of really changing our behavior in a really profound way that’s gonna do something about it, I don’t see us waking up. I really don’t see us waking up, certainly not quickly. Yeah, people talk, “We got to change this, we got to change that,” but on a mass scale, really doing something about it, I think we’re a lot like the kind of low-bottom alcoholic who I saw. They would come to therapy sometimes. They would tell me, I know they’re like missing three quarters of their teeth and they’re still sleeping out on the street, homeless. They say, “Yeah, I know, I know I got a drinking problem. I got to do something about it,” but they don’t do anything about it. To me, that’s still a form of denial of their alcoholism. If you’re not doing something about it, in a way you’re still saying it’s okay to be this way.
Or maybe it’s just that we’re suicidal as a species. Tunnel-like, I think some alcoholics, they just say, “You know, I’d rather die than change my life. I’d rather die than feel my pain. I’d rather die than make the sacrifices I need to get back on a healthier course.” And I also think in terms of humanity being like a low-bottom alcoholic, I think for a lot of low-bottom alcoholics, they do such damage to their bodies, to their lives, to their relationships, to their reputations that by the time they wake up, it’s not that it’s too late to salvage something, but some things just can’t ever come back. And I think, I think I know it. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what human beings are doing as a whole. We’re ruining things that you can’t, you can’t clean up so quickly. You can’t change just like an alcoholic who’s lost all their teeth. Yeah, they can get fake teeth put in, but you don’t grow your, you can get a liver transplant, but you can’t regrow your liver. Hmm. So many things that low-bottom alcoholics can’t get back once they’ve trashed it. And that’s a really sad thing I think about humanity, that we’re causing such destruction and such harm.
And in a way, the question is why? I was going to say it’s an aside, but it really isn’t just an aside. I think actually the reason that humanity is a low-bottom alcoholic is the same reason that alcoholics who are low-bottom alcoholics are a lot of alcoholics. It’s unresolved trauma. It’s too painful to look at this unresolved trauma. It’s easier in a way to numb oneself with all the addictions, to numb oneself with all the things that we’re doing as human beings. As a species, we’re at large, then on a mass scale to look at it, to out our parents for being as terrible as they were across the whole human species, all the inappropriate things that they’ve done, and our grandparents did, all the intergenerational trauma, and to look at the trauma that each of us as individuals has absorbed, has become, has carried on by the things that we’ve done.
I think of the big book, the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous. To get back to it, something that I noticed, I read the book. It’s actually quite an interesting book. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but there’s a lot of wisdom in there still. I think the main thing that I found very interesting is the first word. I believe it’s chapter one of the big book. It might be the prologue. I haven’t read it in 10-15 years, but I think it’s chapter one if I’m right. The first word of chapter one, “war.” Waa. Our war. The first word, “war.” Fever was running high. It was about World War One. It was about Bill W talking about World War One. Well, war fever was running high. I find that very interesting in light of my perspective of what alcoholism, what drug addiction really, really is, what trauma really is about. War. War is trauma, but it’s just one expression of trauma.
I think the real war for most people is the war that they had to go through by being raised in family systems that were troubled, family systems that were in denial, family systems that were abusive and pathological. And this is writ large across all of humanity, and not just this generation, but the last generation, and the generation before that, and the generation before that. It’s trauma. It’s unresolved trauma. And implicitly, without stating it explicitly, I don’t even know if the word trauma is ever used in the big book, but implicitly the first word of the big book is totally related to trauma. And that’s where I think alcoholism comes from. That’s where low-bottom alcoholism comes from. And that, I think, is where all these problems of our whole species come from.
And if we’re ever gonna want to have hope of turning it around, of raising ourselves up, and as a species getting sober, changing our way, making things back on a course toward healthiness, trying to salvage what’s left of the mess we’ve created, we’re gonna have to deal with that trauma. We’re gonna have to grieve. We’re gonna have to start healing. And I hope we do.