When a Friend Relapses

An alcoholic is an alcoholic for life. That’s it - this is not something you can change. And relapse is a big part of the disease of alcoholism. It happens a lot, but it is not something that HAS to happen.

I met my best friend, I’ll call her Carol, when I was fairly new in AA. I had about two years of sobriety, and she was just joining. I became her sponsor, and eventually she became my best friend. Over the years, we became closer and closer and unofficially adopted each other as sisters. I was there for her when she was going through crises, and she was there for me when I suffered heartbreaks. I thought - I felt - that we would be best friends forever.

Carol and I talked regularly for 19 years. We shared our souls. We had a friendship like Oprah describes when she talks about her friend Gayle. When I was in a funk, she could hear it in my voice the second she picked up the phone. For the first half of our friendship, we lived in the same town, and for the second half we lived far away. But whether we were two miles away or 500 miles away, we talked and shared and cared for each other.

Then about 2 years ago, something started to feel wrong. She was going through a divorce, and I attributed the difference to issues she was having with her marriage. The husband was drinking, the husband was angry, the husband was …. . The next week, she wanted to reconcile with the husband. Things weren’t adding up. And our conversations were “off.” Something was missing. Some element of our heart to heart conversations wasn’t there anymore.

This went on for a year before Carol finally told me that she had been drinking for a year. My best friend relapsed, was drinking for a year, and never told me. No wonder the conversations felt hollow. No wonder they lacked depth. They were the conversations of an active alcoholic.

An active alcoholic is usually lying. Lying to themselves. Lying to friends. Lying to everyone in their world. They start drinking, can’t admit it, so the lies start.

Then the drinking starts taking up their free time - the time they used to talk to their friends on the phone. But they can’t call their friends on the phone during those hours now because the friends will surely know that they are drinking. So the conversations start getting further and further apart.

Then when the conversations do take place, they have no substance. There is only one thing going on of importance in their life - and that is their drinking. But they can’t tell you that, so the conversations are no longer about anything substantive. They are about the weather and other things that matter to absolutely no one.

Carol eventually went back to AA and had varying amounts of sobriety for about a year. Then our conversations went back to the empty shell of chit chat that was a huge warning that something wasn’t right. I’d ask, “What’s wrong?” The answer was always about what someone else was doing to her - her ex, her sponsor, her “something else.”

When you have been best friends for 20 years, these conversations about absolutely nothing meaningful are unbearable. Instead of talking a few times a week, I only got calls maybe once a month. The calls were hollow.

My best friend is lost in a bottle. She won’t admit it. She focuses on everything else. When I confront it, I am told that “I am sober today and that is all I can promise.” That is the kind of bull that people learn to say after they have had years of AA but go back to drinking. In AA, we say we “have today.” In relapse, we use that as an attempt to say we are doing something about that drinking when we are doing nothing about that drinking.

Alcoholism is dangerous, powerful, deceitful. It steals our life from us. It steals our best friends from us. I am heartbroken because the Carol I knew for twenty years, the one I loved like a sister for twenty years, doesn’t exist today. How do you heal that kind of heartbreak?

But the enemy is alcoholism. The danger is relapse. It lurks. It temps us. But every recovering alcoholic must remember - every day of their lives - that you don’t have to relapse. When the “lie” or the “devil” or whatever you call it, pops into your head with the message that you will only take this “1″ drink, you must run to an AA meeting, you must call a friend, you must remember that the 1 drink will totally destroy your life and potentially the lives of everyone around you.

I lost my best friend Carol to that one destructive drink that has no end.

Submitted by alcoholism for dummies

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