Dry, but not cured E-Book

Richard Müller

• Herausgeber: R.G. Fischer Verlag
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Richard Müller has been away from alcohol for 14 years when he wrote this unsparingly frank and ­personal account of his journey out of alcohol ­addiction. 30 long years in which the author became increasingly dependent, hit the ground "hard" and over three inpatient and various outpatient therapies slowly and with various setbacks fought his way back into life. At some point, he makes the most ­important decision for his future life and that of his family: the decision against alcohol. With the aim of offering other addicts help with their addiction, he describes the various manifes­tations of his illness, tries to fathom the causes of ­addiction and compiles factors that can contribute to achieving and maintaining longterm stability.

Leseprobe

Richard Müller

Dry, but not cured

Richard Müller

Dry,but notcured

My way out of alcohol addiction

R. G. Fischer Verlag

Bibliographic information of the German National Library:

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2025 by R. G. Fischer Verlag

Sontraer Str. 13, D-60386 Frankfurt/Main

[email protected]

All rights reserved

Font: Bergamo 11pt

Production: rgf/1A

ISBN 978-3-8301-1960-9 EPUB

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the people who have lovingly accompanied me on my difficult journey, who have given me strength time and again, who have suffered unimaginable pain through my illness and yet have stayed with me. My wife and my two children have always given me support and have simply been there for me, even in what was basically a completely hopeless situation. The stress caused by the many facets of the progressive disease has often far exceeded the limits of what is bearable.

Today, some 14 years on and having recovered to an extent that could not have been expected at the time, we are all doing really well and I hope that over the coming years I will be able to actively give back to the three most important people in my life at least part of what ultimately enabled us to survive as a family.

With love and gratitude for my wife, my son and my daughter.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I My own story

A look back at the painful time

How could alcohol dependency develop?

What I try to pass on in a way that everyone can understand

Beliefs and their effects

My first love and the pain

The first serious mistake in my life

The entry into substance dependence

A remedy that suddenly makes me feel better

An initial retrospective classification

Military service and change to electrical engineering studies

The second serious mistake in my life

My first job with no real prospects

17 years of professional development with alcohol

An overwhelmed therapist can mean death

Part II The facets of my disease

The further the content and my problems with it

Medical doctor, addiction therapist and sufferer

Realistically assessing our limits

Alcoholics Anonymous

The self-help group

My own experiences

An online self-help group as a perspective?

I am an alcoholic

The Black Panther – part of me?

The 12-step program

My 7-point concept

Addiction and what it means

How does an addiction develop in the first place?

Addictive pressure and well-being

A look at our society from the outside

Getting started in outpatient therapy

My first inpatient therapy

My disastrous relapse after three weeks

The loss of my driver's license

The loss of my family connection

My second stationary therapy

Hit hard

The door is closed – locked ward

Now I live alone – is it still worth living?

My driver's license is back

My third inpatient therapy

My survival therapist

In the municipal park

Therapy center or luxury hotel?

Part III My exit into life

The last alcohol purchase

Where does the power against alcohol come from?

Two weeks between life and death

Now I have recognized my only enemy

No prospects for the time being

The opportunity for a return to work

Many things are going through my mind

Once an alcoholic – always an alcoholic

I will miss the alcohol

Gratitude that I was allowed to survive

14 years apart and our lives are worth living

Part IV What may be able to help us

What protects me from a relapse

Healthy, but not cured

The time gap does not protect against a relapse

Not everyone necessarily becomes addicted to alcohol

Is it the others' fault?

Anyone who goes to a therapist is crazy

Which therapist can even treat the alcohol issue?

Those in need of help tend to be outside the clinic

Are we less worthy as alcoholics?

Where can we find others who are like us?

The online self-help group as a real alternative?

Do I have to say anything in the self-help group?

Facing up to my topic means self-respect

Does it matter that others look down on me?

When we cross the bridge, we leave others behind

I pass on my experience – if desired

I am healthy, but no longer the “old” me

Preface

The creation of this book has taken about 14 years. Time that I needed to gather the many experiences, impressions, situations and feelings and to put them into a written framework that ref lects what happened over a period of more than 30 years as authentically and, above all, comprehensibly as possible. Time that was necessary to understand the past events and developments piece by piece in retrospect of my entire life and to shed light on them with the knowledge that has gradually developed through my life, my inpatient and outpatient therapies and the information from various books.

Apart from my first and undoubtedly most important therapist, I owe the fact that I am still alive above all to my cardiologist of many years (I will therefore refer to him as my “survival therapist”), who became my second addiction therapist during our collaboration. During the critical phase of my life, my cardiologist stayed with me unconditionally and was the only one to do so after everyone else had given up. More than once I turned up at his practice in a bad state and he took a lot of time to try and understand me. I'm sure he also had our family as a whole in mind at the time.

One of the facets of my illness at the time was lying. Today I know that lying is part of the illness and an experienced therapist has to be able to deal with it and, in particular, not take lies personally. Unfortunately, not all of my therapists were at this level. In retrospect, I now know that an addiction therapist who interprets lying personally as a breach of trust and cannot cope with it because he feels betrayed does not have the ability to successfully guide this patient out of his life crisis. Moreover, it would certainly be vital for the patient concerned if such therapists would limit themselves to areas of treatment in which they are not overwhelmed due to their training and experience and thus cannot cause any harm.

Furthermore, I owe my current stability to my current therapist of many years, who has accompanied me tirelessly to this day, but also with a certain consistent strictness, and who still gives me the feeling of a safe place to go, within a somewhat wider time frame. After recovery from an addiction, an essential aspect of achieving long-term stability is accompanying support over a certain period of time, which may vary greatly from person to person.

I owe my entry into outpatient therapy to my first therapist, who guided me with a lot of love and patience to a point where I was able to gently open up for the first time in my life. He prepared the first two inpatient therapies with me and also worked through my total failure in the first therapy. He was always there for me, even though I lied again and again, didn't recognize the truth for a long time and was unfair and sometimes disrespectful towards him. I don't want to say any more at this point. The fruits of working with this most important person in my life in terms of addiction are ref lected in many chapters in which I will try to describe the experiences, the lessons learned, the pain involved and many other things. From today's perspective, being able to work with this person over many years and over long stretches of my descent is perhaps the greatest gift I have received in my life. I only realized this much later, when I found my way back into life after my crash.

The time of the first mental sorting, of “recalling” many experiences, some positive, some negative and some severely distressing, has repeatedly brought up very painful memories for me. At some point, though I can no longer say exactly when, I finally decided to write down my journey into illness and recovery and to work through it. I wrote it down, on the one hand, to ref lect intensively on what I had experienced piece by piece, and on the other hand, to make the different forms of alcohol addiction accessible to people who are directly affected or to their relatives.

Due to my many years of illness, the experiences associated with it and the healing that developed through consistent work and intensive support from outside, I am healthy today, but not cured. I will explain exactly what this distinction means in a separate chapter. I am quite sure that the processes and mechanisms I have experienced can only really be understood in depth by those people who have walked this path themselves, from the first day of illness right through to recovery.

Many people who have been severely damaged by the cell poison alcohol at the time of quitting, if they are allowed to experience it at all, they are so physically and mentally destroyed that they can no longer communicate their own experiences to the outside world in a comprehensible way. Those who are lucky enough to still be able to use their minds, or to use them again, have all the more responsibility to pass on what they have experienced. In the interests of all of us, it is essential to find a way that does not focus primarily on the treatment of existing or advanced illnesses. Rather, it is time to start where the causes of pathological changes originate.

Introduction

During my childhood and also in my youth, there were some experiences that have had a central inf luence on my entire further life. Things whose implications I was initially unaware of and which only triggered subsequent events much later, the causes of which I was then equally unaware of at the time. It is only today, after a long, sometimes very painful and sometimes life-threatening journey, that I am able (from a state of recovery) to understand causes and effects in their interplay and also to implement the insights gained from them for myself. Over a long period of time, I gradually felt that I had lost contact with myself at some point. Due to my strongly technology-oriented education and the associated way of life, access to my own emotional world was completely blocked for me for a long time. For me, a situation arose in which it was not possible for me to stay with myself and thus develop my own fulfilled life.

Today, as I write all these things down, it is clear to me that every person can only truly live if they are given the chance to find their own path and then to follow it. As for me, I was not able to stay with myself because I had not learned to find myself in the first place and to accept myself as I am (that is, to learn to treat myself lovingly first). Learning to treat myself lovingly is something that took me about 50 years. Years in which I was or remained more with all the others than with myself.

My development was characterized by times of love, friends and happiness, but also, from a certain point on, by times of longing, deep sadness and the feeling of unbearable loneliness. Due to my parental home and, as I only now realize, due to my own nature in interaction with my environment, fixed patterns of behaviour were established in me early on. Behavioral patterns that I developed partly out of a longing for love and security and partly out of a will to survive.

I am certain that we are all filled with a deep longing for love, warmth and security. Failure to achieve or preserve these precious goods paves the way for an illness that develops gradually and therefore often goes unnoticed. If we have lost contact with ourselves, we are naturally also unable to establish real contact with other people or living beings. The resulting isolation from ourselves and other living beings inevitably makes us lonely and vulnerable. We are social beings and therefore cannot survive in solitude in the long term.

In this situation, coupled with the looming prospect that our condition will probably remain the same, we develop mechanisms to turn off the pain or at least alleviate it to some extent. Out of yearning (for quality of life), we look for methods or aids that can help us achieve this. Aids that promise or offer us improvement… apparently.

A mechanism that is increasingly used today is the consumption of our “friend alcohol”. It promises a quick, easy, affordable “instant emotional relief”. It leads millions of people so insidiously, but just as inexorably, to certain death or to a life without perspective. In this way, the relatives or others directly or indirectly affected are often led into a severe life crisis themselves, from which many only emerge with immense psychological and physical damage – if at all.

Due to short-term success in creating or improving the desired quality of life through the creeping development of substance and non-substance dependencies or addictions, we continue in the direction we have once taken. We continue in the deceptive awareness that we can turn back at any time. And so at some point we cross the “point of no return”.

If we are then perhaps lucky enough to realize at some point that we are on the wrong path, each of us has the opportunity to turn back at any time. We ourselves must make the decision to turn back. The decision for ourselves, for our lives, because no one else can make this decision for us. No one else can take this path for us and no one else bears the responsibility for it.

Part I My own story

A look back at the painful time

After many years of pain, sorrow and sometimes unimaginable suffering for me, but especially for my family, I am now at a point in my life where I am looking “out of the sunlight and back into the dark shadows”. It feels very strange. Although the whole thing happened just 14 years ago, I feel as if I have many decades between me and the past; indeed, sometimes when my thoughts dip into the past, I perceive myself more as an observer or rather as a fictitious listener to myself, following all these events from a safe distance and, above all, as a bystander.

When I write, depending on the emotional depth to which I immerse myself in my life at the time, I sometimes temporarily feel that maybe it wasn't so bad after all. I also ask myself from time to time whether anyone really cares. However, remembering that I am by no means an isolated case brings me back. Today, I often ask myself how it could have come to this or why I didn't notice the development much earlier. I also ask myself how it could be that, despite many, sometimes clear indications from my immediate and indirect environment, I didn't notice the changes in my own nature and why I couldn't interpret the numerous signs anywhere near correctly.

One of the reasons, I am quite sure of this today, was the fact that I had a rather strongly altered self-perception at the time. Inf luenced by the years of development of my illness, I only saw some things the way I wanted to see them, only perceived them the way I was comfortable with, how it fitted into my world view at the time. Everything around me that didn't fit was either made to fit or simply ignored by me. I felt safe and secure in my deeply entrenched structure. Over time and as my illness progressed, I developed a sophisticated strategy to protect this state, as fatal as it may sound from the outside. The idea that this might prolong my suffering didn't occur to me at the time and I didn't even want to think about the fact that it was only making me worse and worse.

Why couldn't I open up to anyone? Why did I increasingly bury myself? Why did I develop an increasing aggression towards many people and – this is really frightening for me – especially towards my wife? I can now pinpoint the causes of my aggression towards my wife quite precisely. Today there is no more aggression towards my wife, and she is and remains the most important person in my life.

At some point, I developed the secure feeling that my overall situation was or is determined exclusively by external inf luences, events and, above all, by other people. In psychotherapy, this is referred to as the so-called “victim role”, in which the patient sees himself, but in truth is not really in. It is much more a mental construct that represents an important part of the shift of responsibility from the addict to the “rest of the world” or even makes it possible. This strategy, which I developed partly unconsciously, brought me relief on the one hand and on the other hand it was a solid basis for my withdrawal from personal responsibility at that time. The victim theory, which can certainly be seen as a component of the addictive disorder, creates a solid basis for not dealing with myself at all, but instead – and this is much easier and, above all, more pleasant – unloading the guilt on the rest of the world. This way, we don't need to look at ourselves in the mirror, because what we might recognize there is certainly not what we really want to see.

Looking back, I now place the start of my studies in the fall of 1977 close to my first low point in life. I'll come back to this in more detail a little later. This low point is the beginning of a long downward wave. Over the course of time, further lows at a significantly lower level were to follow. In addiction therapy, one of the lessons learned is that some people first have to touch bottom on their way down before they even realize where they are. This took a very long time for me and for a long time I successfully resisted a realistic perception of my situation with all my strength.

From my current perspective, the events of the following years are so clearly classified as advanced illness that, in retrospect, I should have recognized the seriousness of my illness many years ago. However, the factor of the gradual development of alcohol-induced depression alone made it extremely difficult to sort out my thoughts and ultimately pushed the view through the right glasses into an unattainable distance. To make matters worse, the developing depression led to further profound changes in my nature, which brought with them an additional distortion of reality and an increasingly disturbed perception of it. In this way, events occurred that gradually caused the illness to take on a life of its own and isolate me from any possibility of recovery.

Something inside me has mobilized enormous reserves to maintain the “achieved” state, in the knowledge that any change would inevitably lead to further deterioration. What was also fatal in this situation was the growing feeling that I was 100 percent in control of my own situation. I was therefore sure that outside help was not necessary or could be more harmful than beneficial.

Self-deception, a disturbed external perception and an increasing lack of contact created the conditions for a “picturebook-like development of addiction”, which was not noticed by anyone close to me for a dangerously long time. Like so many other addicted people before and after me, over time I became more and more perfect in the disciplines of “concealment”, “trivialization”, “cover-up” and, above all, “lying”. From this position, finding and walking the path towards healing was a long and intensive process. A process that required both my own realization and a firm will (to recover) as well as intensive, qualified support from outside, which I was then able to accept.

How could alcohol dependency develop?