Naltrexone had an immediate and stunning effect on me when I first tried it. It's a sledgehammer, as I think Melissa said. I quickly migrated off alcohol save for the times I'd pop a keyfob pill when dating. (I do really dislike the 'audit' that seems to occur in social situations, and its doubly serious and intrusive when meeting a new woman.) My alcohol use has been inherently linked with my social life: when I was married, ours was the house everyone visited every Sunday, and I bought wine and booze and beer by the case; divorced, obviously, the default condition in the dating swirl is 'lets meet for drinks.'

So I used Nal, dawdled over 1.5 drinks when out for the evening, trained my girlfriends not to freak out if I didn't have anything to drink (none of them are teetotalers), drank some more at the holidays or when my father was having heart attacks. Then in December I met someone new, who induced a couple of changes in my behavior. This is where the homily begins.

I was running an errand for an old client, returning stateside, and our plane was held at the Heathrow gate past departure time. Very annoying, because I don't go in for "VIP" **** and I'd been traveling for a day and a half already. Then a small crew of people with diplomatic passports in dirty clothing jumped on and she was one of them. The next week, 30 minutes into our first date (at a bar!), she said: "I just want to get something out of the way. I was in ********. It interferes." Then she slammed another Manhattan. So anyway, two changes in my behavior:

First, I decided to see her exclusively. (I follow more of a catch-and-release relationship style, in the main, having weathered two 'opportunities' to rebuild my balance sheet and an ongoing parental kidnapping in the last 15 years.) I found myself suffused in the old, warm, euphoric glow: those feelings of care and desire; the impulse to protect; the desire to converse and express and explain. They were exaggerated with her, I suppose, as she has been damaged by work (combat trauma combined with Lord Jim-level guilt) and -- you want black humor? -- we were able to discuss EMDR therapy the way reformed addicts discuss their former highs, or football players compare notes on ACLs. We'll call her Mrs. Smith. I gently put down my other spinning plates and focused my emotional life on her.

Second, she drinks. She doesn't drink in an out-of-control or surreptitious manner; she just drinks the way, I imagine, most addicts wish they could drink. Like I would like to drink, I suppose. Casually, slowly, arbitrarily, and heavily — every night. Then, every night, I'd toss her around. Then she would take enough dope to kill a horse and sleep. In the morning, more tossing, very strong coffee, a psychotropic and off to the office. She asked me a few times in the beginning, "I don't know how people get over these things." I think what cemented our friendship was my laughter. "You don't get over them. Not unless you have a psychopathy score over 30. You're not supposed to get over them. You just learn to put them away someplace, and try to keep them there." We would sit in her living room reading, listening to music, she would sip rye as Hepburn did in the movies. (I gradually got with the program and slugged it back like Season 6 Don Draper.) I stopped taking Nal. At last I'd found someone who self-medicated more than I! I said. We would have a couple of glasses of wine with lunch, a cocktail before the movies or opera, I dug out my flask. And lots and lots of sex, which I concluded was part of our self-medication regime, so yay (more incentive).

Of course, this was the cop-out that led to weekly increases in my consumption. (Not hers. She's steady Betty.) While I was always a pretty good self-regulator — in 30 years of work no one suspected I drank abusively, and as Barry notes, if you want to do your woman right, you might not want to be hugging a bottle of Stoli first — a line was crossed a couple of years ago, and I'm really not so self-regulating as I once was. So my behavior becomes more guarded, more surreptitious, and more isolated: I can't be making mistakes in public. I *don't* make mistakes in public.

Anyway, y'all know how this story ends. Mrs. Smith, never previously married, had the freak-out that the career single woman has when she realizes she's becoming dependent. (Promiscuity and self-sabotage are learned behaviors too, and reside too in our hippocampus.) I shrugged and told myself, "Well, there's always the spinning plates regime, let's let this one calm down and see where we're at in a few months." Having restored alcoholic levels of consumption over the past several months, I decided it was a good opportunity, breaking up with the first woman I'd been infatuated with for years, for an outstanding bender, which bender I prosecuted effectively for three days. Wednesday I woke up, set the alarm for 11 a.m., ate a pill and drank my glass of hooch at noon. It went down, I got fuzzy but not high. (Good, I said to myself. Still works.) I had no interest that evening. Same Thursday. Yesterday I wanted to drink in the evening but had eaten 50 mg at 11 a.m., and I wondered about its effectiveness. I ate another 25, waited an hour, opened a bottle of wine. I didn't finish the first glass and slept.

Barry and I appear to have a similar relationship with alcohol, though mine is more advanced and deleterious. I'd say we both have the same skepticism about alcohol and sex, and it's a shame that booze is bad for us and good for our women, in that context. We both, de facto, have to choose between alcohol and athletic training. Naltrexone pounds us into submission immediately, if consumed properly; both of us really, really do not like a "Nal hangover." Both of us consider "dry for the rest of our lives" a very, very long time (though in my case much shorter); at the same time, it's probably the only *logical* conclusion to reach. Both should probably default to abstinence, though my plate-spinning, vs. his monogamous/married lifestyle indicates a keyfob lifestyle for me.

So I hope I've tied my story loosely to Barry's thread, the thread about success, complacency, disruption of control, and restoration of control. Grateful for the NAL. BV out.

Good to hear from you, BV . . . and especially good to hear that you're cured again. It sounds like a fairly wild ride with your relationship.

Out of curiosity -- was there a "screw Nal; I'll drink heavily" moment, or was it more a sort-of-considered decision even though it turned out to be a bad one in the long run?

I think you're referring to the f-it moment discussed in The Heart of Addiction. No such simplicity here. Alcohol is just a coping mechanism in my case. There are a variety of things I don't wish to think about, and alcohol is great for avoiding them. There are worse things -- not that one is allowed to say this in public, or in a polygraph or background check context -- than being a functional alcoholic.

As a side note, I am highly skeptical of the "cured" trope in TSM conversation; I am equally skeptical of the "I am ill" converse conversation, which (logically) should be present in any discussion of being "cured." TSM denies the disease theory of addiction, so if I am not diseased, how can I be "cured"? It's not important for any of us to argue this point, and I'm not trying to be unpleasant. It just fails a simple logic tree test, to me, so I have a different frame for this particular issue.

In my case it's no longer practical, given my objectives, to self-medicate. I have a grudging respect for the cumulative effects (effects over years, not an evening) of alcohol consumption. In other cultures I have inhabited (e.g., Tokyo, Moscow, a few less-inviting sh*tholes) I am considered a normal or even lighter-than-average drinker. In the American context, however, I am "ill" needing of a "cure". Perhaps, in concert with Dodes' book (which I also like), the more realistic question is: "How do I "cure" me, of being me, given what I started with and what I do?" Obviously I will not ever cure myself of consciousness. But I can improve my rational understanding of that consciousness.

So I conclude that, while it's obviously absurd to contemplate "curing" oneself of core questions of personality and experience, it is reasonable to ask: Does alcohol further or degrade my efforts to achieve what novelist James Salter describes as "self-conquest." Clearly, in my case, the use of alcohol has become a distraction to, and is now destructive of, that goal.

James Salter, in _Light Years_:

“You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that."

"Further?"

"With your life. You must become free."

"She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.”

If one wishes to achieve a sovereignty of self, the evasion and muffling of consciousness that are at first pleasurable with alcohol must of necessity be, instead, just another pleasure foregone. One abandons many pleasures, some sensual, some material, some intellectual, as one ages, if one wishes to stay in the game and do hard things. I wish to be a sovereign man in all respects. I am not, at present.

In any event, naltrexone ameliorates a bad habit, the propensity to which one may choose to dial up or down in one's life. What I enjoy very much about Dodes' work is his emphasis on the role of agency in swimming (or not) in the profligacy of consciousness-altering activities.

I enjoy your blog, Melissa, and hope you keep writing.

Put another way, given the utility of Naltrexone for me, alcohol usage for me (if following the TSM protocol) is just about the least of my problems. Rarely do we encounter something that turns a big issue to a small issue, simply with the investment in a) eating a pill; and b) counting to 60. This must be true for a lot of people, given its 90% success rate. Like most people, I have spent most of my life fighting my way through open doors -- with both fists, a .380, and way too much thinking.

I think we should branch this out into a new topic. We're kinda hijacking Barry's thread, but there's some good stuff here that I'd like to continue discussing.

I'll split some of it off when I type up a better response.

Yeah, I was wondering about a Dodes moment. I think his paradigm has value, although it certainly doesn't explain every addiction (at least not in its simple form).

I've never much liked "cured" either . . . but The Cure for Alcoholism does state that "alcoholism is a disease," so based on that, "cured" is a reasonable term with which to describe the state in which alcohol-seeking behavior is completely extinguished. I'm skeptical of the whole idea of behavioral illness, though. I always have been.

Hey, I did it! I split a topic without breaking anything!

I'm not sure that it is obviously absurd 'to contemplate "curing" oneself of core questions of personality and experience.' If the undesired components in question are seen as damage to something which should be in a different state, altering them to the more desired state could be seen as a repair or a cure. This may be impossible in practice, or it may be better modeled otherwise in theory, but it's not obviously absurd.

Dodes is big on the idea of displaced helplessness and believes that we can solve our issues more effectively if we lose the displacement and identify what's really going on. That does make sense, but if the displaced helplessness continues to elude, we may have to just take away the broader suggestion of becoming experts on ourselves.

Those of us who seem to have been born addicts usually developed our addictions in our late teen or early adult years, and those are years when we don't yet know ourselves very well.

I see utility in many of these paradigms. Self-medication, displaced helplessness/shame/rage, spiritual or emotional hunger, simple unpleasant emotions such as strong grief or sadness . . . any or all of these might provide a good working model. The map is not the territory.

"Disease," though, doesn't work for me. It's only barely a theory, since its predictive value is low, and insofar as it's a theory it's been pretty thoroughly falsified IMO.

I like the image of fighting our way through open doors. What are we fighting, or what do we think we're fighting? If the door is actually open, the enemy must be within us.

Thanks for the conversation. I'm enjoying it.

He's hardly hijacking my thread, since it's his thread. BV's my bro.

Anyway...back again. So, last night I wake up about 5AM feeling all sweaty and hangovery. Thinking about alcohol -- and I haven't had a drink in 54 days! It was sort of a weird dream state (I was actually just overdressed and needing to pee), but it just reinforces my point that, as you once told me, all the drinking has permanently altered my brain. So true. I suppose, like you, it will always be the go-to drug of choice for "self-medicating." Honestly, if I were in your sitz im leben I would likely be drinking, too. That's what's so weird about this whole experience of 24-year-record-breaking sobriety on my part. If just a few things changed here and there, I'd be intensely drawn to alcohol as a default setting.

As small as this forum is, it's actually helpful to post here every once-in-awhile as a way to achieve my goals. It's strange but true that anonymous internet strangers can take the place of actual people we're talking to -- the power of imagination. I hope you can take that up -- maybe a weekly musing with your highly-advanced prose.

On the up side, it sounds like you're not experiencing the horrible side-effects of Naltrexone that I have. My last drinking session / nightmarish Naltrexone experience (for the record, taking the pill well after I was intoxicated and violently reversing the high as the drug Narcan does for opioid overdose in a hospital) has carried me far this time. One of the worst (and, thus, best) drinking experiences of my life.

Roosh actually talked one time about alcohol and women, basically saying that women need alcohol to abandon themselves to their "inner slut" (or, at least abandon themselves to him). His "game" requires drunk (and probably ovulating) females. I wonder what would happen if you started spinning some teetotalers. Probably a totally different experience and outcome than you've been having (which would have some pluses, some minuses).

Heh . . . Roosh might be surprised to learn how the young ladies think of it. Here's a hint: he could ditch the entire Game if he just paid for the drinks.



Part of the standard TSM paradigm is that our brains are "cured" when they are restored to their pre-addiction state. That can't mean memories, though. We will always have our memories of heavy drinking, and that's bound to influence stuff like dreams and middle-of-the-night moments.

It does mean that the alcohol-seeking compulsion is completely extinguished. It doesn't mean that those years never happened even in memory. What else does it mean or not mean? Is it even useful as a concept, or is it too vague?

How has your brain been permanently altered?

Melissa, are you a moderator or something? I think I can decide for myself where I post and why.