My entry into recovery brought me face to face with transferring addictions. Before I came to AA I was dealing with problems with food and relationships. So, I went to OA and AlAnon.

Then I began to notice that romance that went bad had alcohol in it. My food stories did too. I told myself that I was “just having dessert”. I “ate” Irish coffees and Pink Ladies and anything with sugar and cream and alcohol. I always had a spoon in my hand. It was the perfect denial. How bad could it be? You didn’t see drunks with whipped cream mustaches, did you?

My bottom came one day when I was slumped on my kitchen floor. I had slid down the side of the kitchen island to get whiskey from the lower cabinet.

There was no more whipped cream, I didn’t have time to brew a pot of coffee, and I didn’t have patience to rim my glass with pretty sugar crystals but as I slumped on the floor, I still poured the whiskey into a coffee mug so that I could believe I was having an “Irish Coffee.” But that day I saw myself drinking whiskey from a dirty coffee cup and I got it.

So, I then had to deal with food and men and booze. Under it, of course was a messy family history of still more addiction and abuse but that took years to come out. In the beginning it was enough to stop some behaviors and try to change others.

In recovery from food addiction, we use the analogy about the tiger. It goes like this: A drinker has a tiger in a bottle, and he must put a stopper in the bottle. A food addict, on the other hand, has to take the tiger for a walk three times a day.

That was my experience. When I took the booze away it got harder to delude myself that certain other behaviors were OK. But without the booze the hole in my heart showed and my bargain basement self-esteem gapped open. I needed soothing.

Here is a place we get into tricky territory and where the best advice is “Check your motives.” Lots of people in recovery become physical fitness nuts and most of them do it for all the right reasons. After they put the booze down and want to have a life again, they want to be healthy. They stop smoking, start jogging, one thing leads to another and one day they are doing the Iron Man triathlon in Hawaii.

But another group of us take up exercise in the same way and for the same reason we used booze: FIX MY FEELINGS.

This requires discernment. This is also why at a certain point in our recovery we need to find meetings where we can talk about a wide swath of topics. It doesn’t help my growth if I am only attending meetings where the leader says, “We only talk about alcohol here.” By year seven or eight, our booze stories are old and we’re far away from our last drink, but we might be killing ourselves with food, gambling, or a sex addiction.

After I got sober, I still had to deal with food, men and money, and yes even work. Oh, I had such denial about work. How could something so good be so bad? Wasn’t I making up for lost time, finally becoming a productive member of society, doing—by working hard—what I had been unable to do in all those drinking years?

Work, like food, has to be sorted carefully. Long hours may not be the only criteria to say whether it’s an addiction or not. We have to look at motives again and the impact of our work on others. Some people work long hours because they are terrified of life at home or because they have to be at work so they can control every square inch of their workplace. Others work seven days a week and its pure joy and all for the good.

Money isn’t the root of evil, the love of it is; we know that. But money is part of recovery too. My first husband and I went bankrupt. Talk about shame in recovery. Part of it had to do with a bad real estate deal but we didn’t handle money well and the real estate deal was a big fantasy and a lot of entitlement that fed on the same kind of denial I saw that day on my kitchen floor drinking whiskey from a plastic mug.

As I sit in rooms with recovering woman, especially women who have a number of years in AA, we finally get around to talking about the money or sex or food issues. It’s all there. None of us is fixed yet.

What’s under it all? For me it’s been a special cocktail of shame and fear and “not good enough.” The shame mantra pushes me toward too many pairs of shoes or buying a too-expensive gift to impress someone—sometimes for someone I don’t even like. 

Some other “not good enough” women don’t allow themselves anything at all; they “treat” their shame with deprivation and denial. They don’t allow themselves any nice things and are tightwads with their money. If you look at the outsides, you’d think we were different but inside we’re a matched pair.

Talking to women who are recovering ten or more years it’s quickly clear that no one is “fixed” yet. But we keep on. Recovery from substances may have given us our sea legs in recovery and showed us our addictive patterns.

Can we ever get to the bottom of addictions and compulsions? Will we ever know what’s under it all? As someone said when I was newly sober, “If you want to know why you drank, just stop drinking and you’ll find out.” It was good advice. Just stop the addictive behavior and the source will reveal itself.

Diane C 
Albany, New York