My Nonviolent Journey Began When I stopped Drinking

Four years ago in March, I stopped drinking alcohol. I tried to stop many times before. I was caught in a vicious cycle of shame, guilt and violence against myself. And truth be told, I became a mean, asshole to others when I drank. More violence.

Please know I have compassion for myself now. I understand why I drank. I understand through somatic work, trauma studies, therapy and spiritual direction why I became mean and ‘assholely’. But the bottom line is, as you can see from the chart above, when we drink alcohol we are more likely to cause harm to others than any other drug. Yet, it is socially acceptable and almost expected that we drink.

Pause and really engage with the chart above.

Violence is not just physical. It can be verbal, spiritual and societal. We live in a very violent culture. It’s in our words, it’s an undercurrent in our societal systems which created racism, sexism, oppression, etc. It is the domination of one over another. It’s displayed in our movies and video games. It is the harmful rhetoric heard in our public squares of the internet, social media and news media. Violence permeates almost every area of our lives.

I see violence as evil. All forms of it are evil.

Interestingly, evil is what the subculture of Evangelicalism calls Satan or demonic. But back when I was an Evangelical, the ‘other’ was usually named as Satanic. We seemed to always blame an outside entity, never ourselves. It was never within. Read church history and you’ll find that Christians, who claim to follow Jesus Christ; the very model of nonviolence, have been and continue to be violent. In our dominant culture, violence is seen as normative.

As I began to unlearn teachings and interpretations I’d been steeped in all my life, I began to understand what following Jesus Christ meant. Violence was simply not embodied by Christ. Instead a muscular, intuitive, divine power of common good and love was present. In scripture he named harm done by the Empire and spiritual leaders. He reads as a forceful truth teller. He represents a fullness of Being. His story demonstrated another way of Being. A third way.

This is what I am called to and it is my lifelong journey.

I first drank because it took the edge off. The anxiety of having a four year old child with cancer was overwhelming. The fear, the confusion, the learning curve, navigating the medical system and the sudden challenge to how I saw the world and thought it worked was too much. So a glass of wine helped calm my nerves.

My son survived, but it was long, intense and arduous for a solid nine years. Anyone who has had cancer knows it isn’t ever really “over”. So for a decade, I drank to cope. Soon one glass of wine wasn’t enough. Two was better. And if two was better, three and even a whole bottle was best.

I threw up. I felt horrible in the morning plus it messed up my sleep. And I kept drinking. Then I started sneaking. Hard liquor was kept in the garage freezer. We didn’t keep a lot around, maybe one or two bottles. I’d go out there and sneak sips, in the dark and cold, alone.

The most devastating result though, was my nasty meanness. I didn’t get physically violent, but I was verbally violent. I would dominate and run over others. I turned into a real jerk. I was awful to those I said I loved. The shame was unbearable. The guilt horrifying, as I tried to take back my unkind words. The truth is, once those violent words spewed from my mouth, they were irretrievable. The harm was done.

I tried to quit many times, but failed. Then one day, about four years after I started practicing yoga, meditation and learning about trauma, I quit. Digging deep into my childhood, seeing my shadows, cracked me open. I woke up knowing I wanted to be who I was made to Be. And this was not it. Just like that, I quit.

Grace.

That week, I flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a spiritual conference. In the Portland airport I met Suzanne, an older woman who was also heading to the conference. We easily connected. I casually mentioned at lunch that I didn’t drink.

“Oh really” she remarked. “For how long?”

“A week”, I shyly responded.

She laughed. “I’ve been sober for 30 years!”

She was a godsend. Then she calmly told me her story.

The conference culminated in a dinner with wine. As she seated herself next to me, she asked how I was doing, nodding towards the wine on the table. A temptation.

“It smells so good!” I lamented.

“That’ll get easier as time goes on,” she assured me and she was right.

I studied Kingian Nonviolence last year with a small group of people. I began to feel how violence is embedded in me just as much as love and goodness. Slowing down. Sitting in discomfort. Trusting. Knowing my deep wound and not reacting from that wound helps me to choose nonviolence.

It’s really challenging. It’s a lifelong practice.

Vote Common Good recently posted a podcast with authors David Cramer and Miles Werz discussing their book A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence. The authors have done extensive research on the history of nonviolence in the church, the various forms it takes and how the majority of Christianity has not practiced the way of Jesus Christ.

I have barely scratched the surface of what it means to embody nonviolence. The depth and scope of nonviolence is part of humanity, but we seem to choose the lazy, harmful way of violence over and over again. It’s a shocking lack of creativity.

As I work with nonviolence in me, compassion is key, especially compassion for myself. When that violent, unkind judgement of another pops into my brain, I do not condemn myself. I do not exhile her. This thought is part of me. And what we judge in others is often what we judge in ourselves. She’s telling me something. Perhaps she is protecting me. Maybe I am ashamed of her. Instead, I sit with her and ask her what she needs. Often, she just needs me to ‘be with’ her. To see and hear her. Most often there is some deep fear underneath. Then I kindly show her that we are safe, all is well. I thank her. Then she dissipates.

Obviously, this is not what I would do if I were in a physically unsafe situation. Fleeing is also appropriate. The full scope of nonviolence is so broad, I cannot address it all here!

There have always been movements of nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr’s sit ins or Gandhi’s march across India or small sects of Christianity like the Quakers, Mennonites and Amish. Interestingly, Eastern religions tend to lean more towards nonviolence like Jainism or Buddhism. But what we forget here in the West is that Christianity started in the East! Christianity is an Eastern religion.

I’ve barely touched on nonviolence here in this blog. I am not trying to shame anyone who chooses to drink. We each have agency over our lives, over our choices. Sometimes we get stuck in victim mode. It does seem easier. I was there for a while, so I know.

I am simply telling my story here. This is my testimony. Becoming sober was a baby step in my movement towards healing, towards nonviolence, towards becoming my true Authentic Self. Feeling all the feelings, stepping right into them without fear opens me up to my fullness of Being. My humanity.

I invite you to step into your full humanity too.