Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

by Sally Brampton

  We needed another drink to forget how we shouted at the MD for being an uptight arse for sacking us over a little bit of harmless fun. And then we seethed with resentment against that MD and blamed everyone else, except ourselves, and most particularly not the drink.

  We didn’t blame the drink because we needed another drink to stop the guilt and the shame which came from shouting at the boss about stuff that was our fault and about letting everybody, but most particularly ourselves, down. We needed the drink so we could hide the truth from ourselves and say it didn’t matter.

  And then, of course, we needed money to buy the drink. So we took some grubby little job that was way beneath us. Then we needed another drink to forget the time and the energy that had been spent on our education to turn us into the smart, functioning human beings who we’re fast pissing away on drink, and to forget the love that our mum and dad lavished on us and the sacrifices they made on our behalf. We needed another drink to stop that shame too, and then we needed another because our lives were so piss-awful, who wouldn’t drink?

  And then we write down in our notebooks, and across our hearts and our minds,

  ‘It’s the first drink that does the damage. If you don’t take a drink, you can’t get drunk.’

  And then, because it’s so hard to think that we cannot take another drink, ever, we write down,

  ‘Just for today.’

  Just for today, I will not drink. I might drink tomorrow, or next week, but just for today, I will not drink.

  And then the days and the weeks and the months and the years add up, because there is only today. Yesterday has gone and tomorrow has not yet arrived.

  Or, at least, that’s the theory.

  It’s tough, though. Some people, particularly in the early days, adopt a more immediate timetable.

  ‘Just for this moment.’

  ‘Just for this hour.’

  Nobody likes to admit that they are powerless. We live in a culture of control and success. The most money, the best job, the biggest car, the fanciest handbag. Powerlessness is weakness, failure is pathetic and surrender is giving up. I found Step One almost impossible at first but then, like most people, I like to be in control. I hate to feel needy or powerless.

  ‘Turn your head around, Sally.’ That’s what, Elizabeth, my therapist used to say to me. ‘Try a new way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Has your way worked?’

  I think about this, long and hard. ‘No.’

  ‘Then let’s try another.’

  Trying another way means understanding that there are times when a fight is not worth fighting. It cannot be won. Admitting to being powerless is not an admission of defeat, but one of liberation. You begin to understand that we are powerless over so much, even though we like to believe otherwise.

  We cannot, for example, change other people; we can only change our responses to them. People rarely behave in the way that we wish. We cannot make them love us. We cannot stop them leaving us. We cannot live our children’s lives for them. We cannot change life either; cannot undo the past or predict the future. Life rarely turns out in the way that we would wish it to, or that we have dreamed it would. We are powerless to do anything about that except to make the best, or the worst of it. Once we accept that we are powerless, not just over alcohol but over people, places and things, we accept life and all that goes with it.

  Powerlessness is acceptance. It is not just a part of the Twelve Step programme, but every belief from Buddhism to Christianity.

  Acceptance is not giving up on action or a resignation to events. Acceptance is facing reality without illusion.

  Acceptance is watching the plants in my garden grow. Acceptance is not digging them up to see how their roots are growing. They will develop in their own sweet time and there is absolutely nothing I can do about that. I can encourage them, with water and fertiliser, but I cannot make the sun shine or the days grow warmer.

  I accept that I am powerless.

  It is a rare sort of freedom.

  Step Two

  We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  ‘I’m not insane,’ Pete says belligerently. ‘How can I be restored to sanity?’

  The counsellor looks at him. ‘Is it sane to drink eighteen pints of beer a day?’

  Pete swaggers in his chair. ‘Yeah, where I come from.’

  ‘And is it sane to pass out in the hedge in your front garden and wake up covered in vomit?’

  Pete shuffles uneasily.

  ‘Is it sane to still be living with your mum and dad, aged thirty-five, because you spend every last penny you have on alcohol?’

  Pete blushes and ducks his head. ‘They don’t mind,’ he mumbles, but the fight has gone out of him.

  ‘And what about you?’ the counsellor presses. ‘Do you mind? How does it make you feel?’

  Pete sways in his chair, like a boxer ducking a punch.

  The counsellor persists. ‘What are you feeling now?’

  ‘I’m feeling that I’m fucking sick of talking about fucking feelings,’ Pete mutters. ‘And there ain’t no power greater than myself.’

  The counsellor gestures at the open window, at the trees and landscape beyond. ‘So you created all this, did you? You have the power to do that?’

  ‘Fucking god squadders,’ Pete says.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be God,’ Timothy says gently. He has taken a shine to Pete. ‘It can be anything you want. I particularly like the acronym, Group Of Drunks.’

  Pete perks up appreciably. ‘I don’t mind that,’ he says, ‘believing in a bunch of pissheads.’

  ‘Every time you want a drink, call another pisshead,’ Rosie says. ‘When you think you can’t do it on your own, go to a meeting with the other pissheads, who also think they can’t do it on their own. Tell them how you feel.’

  ‘Fucking feelings,’ Pete says, but he looks at her with a shy grin.

  Timothy says, ‘Or you could use, Good Orderly Direction.’

  Pete snorts.

  ‘Or perhaps not,’ Timothy says.

  ‘No,’ Pete says. ‘You’re all right. Thanks.’

  Molly came to visit me at the clinic. We were allowed visitors only one day a week, on a Sunday afternoon. This made her quite cross.

  ‘Why can’t I see you whenever I want?’ she said. ‘I could in the other hospitals.’

  ‘This one’s a bit different.’

  ‘Why?’

  I did not particularly want to tell Moll about my drinking. I felt she should have something left to admire in her mother. But better the truth than a lie.

  ‘My mum? Well, she’s a depressive and a drunk. Oh, and a liar too.’

  So I said, ‘As well as suffering from depression, I’ve been drinking too much. I’ve come here to get help to stop.’

  Molly was outraged. ‘You don’t drink much.’

  ‘Darling, I’ve always got a glass of wine in my hand.’

  ‘I thought you were just partying.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, I was, but I was partying alone which is not good. I got addicted to alcohol, which is not good either. It makes depression much, much worse.’

  ‘Well, you’d better stop.’

  ‘Yes, darling. I will.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Actually, I’m much more worried about your coke habit.’

  My voice went up an octave. ‘My coke habit?’ Had I got so drunk that I had taken coke in front of Molly? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken coke. Before she was born, surely? Perhaps I’d blacked out. I had never blacked out, had I? Or, perhaps I drank far more than I thought I did.

  ‘You drink at least six cans a day and Diet Coke is really bad for you.’

  I hugged her. ‘You’re right. I should stop.’

  She held out her hand.

  ‘OK, if you stop drinking Coke, I’ll stop eating sweets.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’
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br />   She smiled, a smile sweet enough to break your heart. ‘I know I don’t have to. I want to.’ She slapped her hand in the air. ‘Give me a high five.’

  Step Three

  We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

  One definition of addiction is, ‘doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.’

  It’s a borrowing from Albert Einstein (attributed, the jury’s out on whether he actually said this), ‘The definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.’

  Either will do for me. Addiction? Insanity? It’s a close run thing.

  The God question, though, was tricky. I have been a fully paid-up and passionate atheist all my life. God is for other people. I still believe that, in the sense of any organised religion, but I have come to believe in the possibility of a spiritual community. Perhaps that’s why, like so many depressives before me, I was drawn to Buddhism, which follows an atheistic principle in that Buddha was not a god, he was a man, and a flawed one at that. I am not a Buddhist. I simply admire some of the beliefs and practices it follows, although not all of them.

  I follow a similar adherence to the Twelve Step programme. I admire some of the principles, but not all. I take what I need, and the rest I leave behind. But, as somebody who has suffered from severe depression and alcohol dependence, I also know the terrible nihilism of hopelessness. I lost belief in everything, in myself, in other people, in the future and in life itself. The only antidote to hopelessness is faith, trust, belief—call it what you like—and, through attending AA and seeing the love, kindness, compassion and respect that people regularly show each other in the meetings, I began to believe again in the kindness of strangers and in community. You might say that AA restored my faith. It taught me not to interrupt, to listen to other people and look at them without judgement. It taught me compassion, forgiveness, tolerance and understanding and not just for other people, but for myself. Most of all, it taught me about the redemptive power of love and friendship.

  ‘I hate that name, AA,’ Molly said. ‘Alcoholics Anonymous. It makes you sound like a loser.’ She made an L shape with her fingers and held it to her forehead. ‘And you’re not. You’re cool.’

  I laughed. ‘Its other name is “The Fellowship”. It’s the name I prefer because that’s what it is, a fellowship of men and women who look out for each other.’

  Moll considered this for a moment. ‘I like that. I’d like to belong to a fellowship. It’s wicked. I might start one of those at school.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ I said, thinking of the other parents and the amount of money they were spending on setting their little darlings on the right road. On the other hand, a London girls’ day school: top of the league, filled with bright, competitive, relentlessly driven type-A personalities susceptible to drugs, drink, eating disorders…

  If I am forced to name a Higher Power (and I resist that directive, even in AA) it is other people. More importantly, it is life. I knew, when I was drinking heavily, that it was no life. It was a dark, despairing living death. So was depression, and alcohol was keeping me there. So, when I finally decided to stop drinking I decided that I had two choices. I could choose to go on drinking myself to death, or I could choose to live.

  Or, to put it another way, life or death?

  I choose life.

  Critics of AA will say that it is a cult; that it peddles a dangerous, addictive form of religion. That is not my experience. Alcoholics tend not to be meek, agreeable sorts; most dislike intensely being told what to do or what to believe in. That’s why there are no rules in AA, only suggestions. That’s why there is no one god, only the god of somebody’s individual understanding.

  It is not, anyway, a religious programme but a spiritual one that has its roots in a conversation between the psychiatrist Carl Jung and one of the founders of AA, who went to Jung for help. The conversation is printed in the Big Book (the nickname for the AA book containing the principles of the Twelve Step programme). The Big Book was first printed in the 1930s, so some of its wording may sound quaint. The meaning, though, is entirely modern.

  The doctor described in the following extract is Carl Jung.

  Some of our alcoholic readers may think they can do without spiritual help. Let us tell you the rest of the conversation our friend had with his doctor.

  The doctor said: ‘You have the mind of a chronic alcoholic. I have never seen one single case recover, where that state of mind existed to the extent that it does in you.’

  Our friend felt as though the gates of hell had closed on him with a clang.

  He said to the doctor: ‘Is there no exception?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the doctor, ‘there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me those occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions and attitudes, which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce such emotional rearrangements within you. With many individuals the methods which I employed are successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description.’

  Upon hearing this, our friend was somewhat relieved, for he reflected that, after all, he was a good church member. This hope, however, was destroyed by the doctor’s telling him that while his religious convictions were very good, in his case they did not spell the necessary vital spiritual experience.

  Here was the terrible dilemma in which our friend found himself when we had the extraordinary spiritual experience, which as we have already told you, made him a free man.

  We, in turn, sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God. A new life has been given us or, if you prefer, ‘a design for living’ that really works.

  The ‘extraordinary spiritual experience’ which made the writer a free man was a blinding and sudden belief in a power greater than himself, and which convinced him that there was a better way than killing himself with alcohol.

  I had no such experience and nor do I expect one, although I did (slowly) become convinced that there was a better way than alcohol. My belief in AA does not involve God but, rather, that ‘design for living’ mentioned above. I remain an atheist. I put my faith firmly in people and the power of the group. In that spirit, nobody in the fellowship has ever taken issue with my beliefs, and I have never taken issue with theirs. One of its guiding principles is non-judgement, or taking one’s own inventory (paying attention to your own faults) and nobody else’s.

  I also like Jung’s ‘emotional rearrangements’ which is pretty well what I was after, not just for alcoholism, but for depression too. As research indicates that large numbers of depressives abuse alcohol or drugs in order to medicate pain, the AA Twelve Step programme of emotional rearrangement seems to me a blessed thing. It is group support and therapy (for lack of a better word), based around sound psychotherapeutic and spiritual principles, offered on a massive, global scale. It embraces every creed, gender, colour, nationality, religion and social and economic background. And it’s free: going to AA costs nothing.

  I’m sure that if most modern therapists, particularly CBT practitioners, took the Twelve Step programme apart, they would recognise many of the principles embedded in their own disciplines.

  This is particularly true of two of the newest and most exciting forms of therapy emerging at present; Positive Psychology (emerging out of the US and based on practical solutions that encourage mental health rather than dwelling upon the symptoms of mental illness) and Cognitive Mindfulness Behavioural Therapy (a step on, and up, from the drier scientific model of c
hallenging negative thinking used in CBT to include Buddhist principles of acceptance, faith and self-governance).

  These therapeutic models prefer to play to people’s strengths, rather than their weaknesses. They maintain that we need to look to a better future in preference to living in a difficult past. We might consider the past and our part in it, but once we have done so, we need to move on.

  And so it is with the Twelve Step programme. It encourages people to look at their own behaviour, and how they might be sabotaging their own happiness. It asks them to look at how they might be at fault, rather than casting blame on others. It asks them to examine and to know themselves, and to work persistently at changing their more destructive behavioural patterns. It does, in essence, what psychotherapists of all sorts encourage.

  Here are the principles of the Twelve Step programme, presented as a list. There are more principles included here than there are steps, because each step embraces many principles. I use them on a daily basis to help me with depression, or with any emotional pain that might make me want to self-medicate or drink. Nor are they just for depressives (we have no favourites here) but for anyone who might want a better design for living.

  Open up.

  Ask for help.

  Accept help.

  Accept yourself.

  Be completely honest.

  Take a daily inventory.

  Whenever you are in the wrong, make amends.

  Face reality.

  Reach out.

  Communicate.

  Show kindness.

  Share your concerns and your worries with another human being.