Sober but not sane

Isn't not drinking enough?

May 24, 2024

Step two of the twelve steps reads: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” When I first read that I focused on the word “Power” with a capital “P” - that was the part that seemed troubling to me. My main concern was having to deal with the “god” thing, and I kind of glossed over the “restore us to sanity” piece. I took it for granted that sobriety was intended to be analogous to sanity. If I stop drinking in order to deal with life, then I’ll be more “sane”. I didn’t work the steps or participate in AA for a year after I stopped drinking. If I learned anything in that time, it’s that abstaining from alcohol did not solve anything. All not drinking did was make my problems more obvious and harder to deal with. That’s why I decided to try AA - I discovered that I could stop drinking on my own, but I couldn’t not drink and feel good.

On some level, my experience with not drinking taught me that life without alcohol contains a whole set of challenges that I hadn’t fully paid attention to, especially around relationships with other people and with myself. I had, and continue to have, many realizations as I forge ahead, but I never really arrived at the conclusion that when I drank I was “insane” and now I was being “restored to sanity”. Probably I hadn’t accepted the idea that I was not sane to start with. When I was diagnosed with Autism, it felt like a validation of the fact that I have always felt different than the people around me, and I leaned into the idea very easily. I wasn’t insane; my brain worked differently. Recognizing that enabled me to acknowledge that I had a dependence on alcohol - drinking made me feel normal, and I used it for that purpose.

In AA, I’ve met many people who describe feeling different for their whole lives, feeling othered, feeling excluded. One woman said it in a way I found particularly resonate: “I didn’t know how to be.” One thing many people in AA have in common is that we felt more normal when we drank. If anything, alcohol made me feel more sane than I usually felt. My overwhelming sensation the first time I really drank was “This is what I’ve been missing!”, as if I had finally discovered the key to life that everyone else had known about the whole time. The idea that drinking was somehow analogous to a lack of sanity would never have occurred to me. (This, despite the fact that while drunk I would often do things like break into what I called “interpretive dance”, at least one time wearing a child’s halloween costume.)

The more I’ve thought about this idea of being restored to sanity the more I’ve wondered what sanity is exactly. I looked it up in the dictionary. Then I asked a few different large language models if they could explain where the word comes from. I learned that the word “sane” comes from the Latin “sanus”, which could used to describe physical health and also implied mental well being a moral integrity1. I found words like sound, healthy, sensible, and sober in association with the Latin “sanus”2. I realized that I had a narrow idea in my head of what “sane” means. I thought of it only as meaning the opposite of psychotic. As in, I’m not committed to a mental institution, so I must be sane. But if I think of sanity as being another word for healthy, or sensible, or even sober, it’s easy for me to see that, indeed, I could use some help in being restored to sanity. Or perhaps in being brought to sanity in the first place (was I ever a sound, sensible person? I probably appeared so, but I never felt that way, except when I drank, which is when other people probably questioned my sanity).

My instinct when it comes to words like “sanity” is more about judging other people than about self awareness. If someone else does something I don’t like, if someone else makes me uncomfortable, I might think they are weird. But weird compared to whom? To me? To some undefined notion of normalness? One of the biggest challenges that I have faced in my sobriety has been accepting things as they are. Accepting circumstances has been easier for me than accepting other people and their behavior. There appears to be a tension between acceptance of others and the desire to change oneself. It feels one sided. Like everything is my fault - you can stay as you are and I will try to accept you, but I need to change to make myself easier to be accepted by others. But that thought is an example of the insane thinking that I’m trying to change. There is a saying that sums it up nicely, “resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”3 For me, the insane thinking is the reflex of resentment, the impulse to blame others instead of thinking about how I contribute to or interpret situations, the assumption that every problem is caused by someone else screwing something up.

In that sense, it is very easy to be sober but not sane. Not drinking didn’t change my feelings of resentment, self centeredness, or victimhood. All not drinking did was take away my ability to seek relief from those feelings. This is why sobriety by itself - not drinking but not working any kind of program - was so painful: it took away the medicine without doing anything to fix the illness. In the past, I had a dose of alcohol every day to make me feel normal, or to give me relief, or to calm me down. That was a “power greater than myself” and I believed in it. It doesn’t matter if I describe my natural state as “insane” or “uncomfortable” or something else. It’s just that I seem to need help to feel good. Instead of drinking, I’m now finding it in meetings, calls with my sponsor, talking to other former drinkers, and reading about other peoples’ experiences. It indeed feels more sane than the alternative.

Predisposition

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