Getting Beyond The Dry Drunk Syndrome – Stage II Recovery By Earnie Larson

The Dry-Drunk Syndrome

As hateful as this label is to so many people, it names a real condition that occurs when a person breaks a primary addiction (gets sober) but doesn’t deal with the underlying living problems. “Dry drunks” can afflict people who have broken a primary addiction (Stage I) but have not gotten further into recovery (Stage II). Victims of dry drunks have made a First Step relative to their addiction, but have not made a First Step relative to the living problems that underlie all addictions and ultimately limit their ability to function in loving relationships.

The salient question is, “Why did we have all that pain in the first place?” Right here, we are eyeball to eyeball with the dry-drunk syndrome.

The medical model offers a useful example. Say that a patient is lying in a hospital bed suffering from a painful disease. To alleviate this pain, the doctor prescribes large doses of a painkiller. As long as the pain medication keeps coming, the patient has no pain. But what happens when the medication is taken away? The patient has a lot of pain.

We all use our addictions as painkillers. We do what we do because we are trying not to hurt. Perhaps at the beginning we were just curious or looking for a little pleasure. But as the process slipped from use to abuse to dependency, the addiction continued because it medicated pain, not because it was interesting or fun. The lie at work in all addictions is that continued use will get rid of the hurt. The truth is, it never does. It doesn’t matter whether you’re addicted to alcohol, overeating, certain kinds of people, or gambling. What do we have when we take away the object of that addiction? A lot of pain.

If you haven’t dealt with your underlying living problems in any focused, consistent manner, pain, pure and simple, will keep you subject to the dry-drunk syndrome. In this condition, “I’m sober—when do I get happy?” is the kind of heartbreaking question so often asked. But the answer follows a different question: When does real relief come for the suffering hospital patient? Not when the painkiller goes away, but when the disease goes away.

Unlike cancer or other diseases, alcoholism cannot be cured and does not “go away.” A true alcoholic can never drink again; the disease can only be arrested. But the living problems underlying our addictions can be cured—if only we understand that dealing with those issues is where recovery takes place.

Stage II Recovery

Stage II Recovery is the rebuilding of the life that was saved in Stage I. How did our lives come to need rebuilding? In what context did all that pain come to be? Since few of us are hermits, the unsurprising answer lies in the social context—the world of personal relationships in which each of us lives and breathes and has had our being since birth. We get sick in the company of other people and we get well in the company of other people. There is no other way it could be.

I believe that learning to make relationships work is at the core of full recovery. While many people who have stopped short at Stage I may be capable of loving, they are not capable of functioning in healthy relationships. Doing so takes skill, and skills are learned. People may “feel” love but the reality of love is lived out in the context of a relationship, or it remains just a feeling.

Learning to Make Relationships Work

How good are you at relationships? Exclusive, adult, sexual relationships are obviously not the only concern here. I am also speaking of the ability to share in healthy, rewarding relationships with, first of all, yourself, your God as you understand God to be, your children, your parents, your friends, and your co-workers. Any and all relationships. How able are you to get the “good stuff that all of us are looking for? How do you know how able you are?

The first step in engineering healthy relationships is to look at yourself so you can deal with the living problems that underlie addiction. In other words, you are not doing two different things when you deal with your living problems and when you work to become a more able and trustworthy partner in your relationships. They are the same journey,

From a Stage II Recovery standpoint, there is scant difference between an abstaining chemically dependent and a co-dependent person. Both are people with living problems. From a recovery standpoint, both chemical dependency and co-dependency have to do with intimacy far more than they do with alcoholics or alcohol, and intimacy issues are always about the ability to function in relationships.

All recovering people have to work on their self-esteem. And people with low self-esteem have a terrible time believing they deserve anything good. They feel they have messed up and deserve whatever rotten fate befalls them.

The truth, of course, is that whatever we think about, we bring about. Since no doubt the best thing that can be enjoyed in a person’s life is love (which always comes in the context of a relationship), people with low self-esteem will always find a way to short-circuit or sabotage rewarding relationships. The real problem for most recovering people is not fear of failure, which we all know about and expect. The real problem is fear of success, and the solution is to get out of our own way so the riches of full recovery can be enjoyed. This is true not only for all recovering people, but for everyone. The problem is not that we want too much, but that we have too little belief in what is possible for us.

Once the primary addiction is broken, we are all in the same boat because then we’re called upon to deal with those habits, traits, and patterns within ourselves that stand in the way of our achieving more happiness, success, and love.

Therefore, let us work with these definitions of both chemically and co-dependent people. Remember these definitions are only valid from a Stage II Recovery standpoint, where the ability to express and receive love is the central issue:

Chemical Dependency: self-defeating learned behaviors, greatly exaggerated and complicated by a pathological relationship to a mood-altering substance, that diminish our capacity to initiate or participate in loving relationships.

Co-Dependency: self-defeating learned behaviors, greatly exaggerated and complicated by a pathological relationship to a chemically dependent person or any person, that diminish our capacity to initiate or participate in loving relationships.

Why tie up the definition of chemical and co-dependency (and the human situation in general) to relationships? Because relationships are the home of love, and the definition of Stage II Recovery, for everyone, is learning to function more capably in healthy, caring relationships.