Breaking Through:Discovering The Riches Within Book

The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 140 million alcoholics in the world. Many, many of those lives will end tragically after causing untold heartache and suffering for the abusers, their families and society at large.

Allan McDougall's life as an alcoholic does not fit the stereotype, yet it had every indicator of ending terribly.

Allan is born to dirt poor dairy farmers in southwestern Ontario, Canada in 1950. Shortly after birth, his mother suffers a postpartum psychotic break and refuses to care for her infant son. The rejection scars Allan but that is only the first in a long chain of childhood traumas: an asthma attack that requires an adrenaline shot to the heart to save his life; a severe stutter that makes him the object of ridicule and bullying; a case of ring worm; and a growth on his appendix that strangles his intestines and stunts his growth until it is removed during his teenage years.

Allan's mother had a ferocious temper and lashed out frequently at the family. She came into Allan's room at night with demands that he not get sick overnight because they cannot afford to take him to the doctor. The boy's childhood is alternately as harsh as the long Canadian winters and as stifling as the short, hot summers.

We get a vivid picture of the life of impoverished farmers: Allan's mother placing her feet in the oven on winter evenings to warm them; going to bed with clothes on and piling on the blankets in an unheated bedroom; icicles a meter long on the windows; and home remedies such as goose grease smeared on the feet to ward off colds.

Because of his asthma, Allan cannot do much work around the farm and this further reduces his self-esteem. School, however, provides no respite from the unhappiness at home. Allan is bullied because of his size and stutter. The one room schoolhouse is nearby the farm so Allan is constantly reminded of the problems at home as he struggles in the classroom. A yearly nightmare for him is the speech each student must present before the class. Year after year, Allan stammers the first few words to the class before breaking into tears in utter humiliation.

By the time he is a teenager, Allan's life is one big problem in need of a solution. During harvest time, he is able to help some around the farm and one afternoon while waiting in a hayloft for another load of bales to arrive, someone offers him a beer. It changes Allan's life. Magically, Allan feels himself relax. Suddenly, he can bear to live inside the same skin with that small, asthmatic, stuttering, painfully insecure boy. The three beers he has that day are a balm for the sting of his mother's scolding and the mocking of the bullies at school. By the time Allan is 18, alcohol is the love of his life. For him, it is better than romantic love, it is better than sex. So begins a passionate affair with the one thing that buries all the problems Allan carries around in his troubled life. While others drink for pleasure, Allan drinks only for the transformative effect that allows him to live with himself.

The only time Allan applies himself in school is his last year in high school and he manages to graduate. By now, he is an alcoholic. Life after high school gives Allan more time to indulge his growing addiction. He works road construction and fulfills his only other real interest, cars, by buying a new Chevrolet Camaro.

One morning, his father sees an ad in the paper for miners. The mines around Sudbury are hiring and Allan applies. It is the worst decision a budding alcoholic could make but, in the end, becoming a miner will save Allan's health.

He moves to Sudbury and integrates into the culture of Canada's hard rock miners. Alcoholism is endemic in the mining industry. Allan's affinity for drinking goes unnoticed except in later years when his ability to drink prodigiously earns him, for the first time in his life, the admiration of his peers.

Work in the mines is hot, noisy, dirty and dangerous, but the money is good and there are ample bars and whorehouses to spend it on the weekends. Allan takes us a kilometer underground into the stopes where drills and dynamite loosen the riches of the earth and where one misstep in the pitch blackness can mean certain death. Several times a year the men take time off to attend the funerals of those who die in the mines. Allan is unsparing in taking us behind the bravado that miners put up to hold back the terrors of the trade.

Allan marries the first girl who comes along, herself the daughter of alcoholic parents, and while she and Allan project the image of a hardworking mining family raising their three children, alcohol makes it a sham. The love of his wife cannot compete with Allan's affair with alcohol and the marriage is loveless. Allan's three children grow up with a father who provides a roof and bread but little else.

Unlike many alcoholics who cannot hold a job, Allan somehow manages to compartment off his addiction and show up to work each day. He understands that to keep his affair with the bottle alive, he must pay for it and so he drags himself into the mines each morning even though he often feels like hell, a condition that worsens over time. One telling fact about the depth of his sickness: Allan does not drink water even though it is 100 degrees underground and he is wearing long johns and overalls to protect because he knows that there is a case of cold beer waiting for him in his van after his shift.

At one point, whiskey replaces beer because Allan needs progressively more to receive the effect he needs. The returns, increasingly, are less and Allan's life begins to go out of control. One night on vacation, Allan is celebrating and the police pull him over after a high speed chase during which Allan is clocked at 100 mph. They administer a breathalyzer test and Allan's blood alcohol is .328, more than four times the legal limit. The police say that he should be in a coma. Allan replies that he is just getting started.

Allan ignores the signal flare this episode represents and during the next three painful years he leaves his family (on a daughter's birthday no less) and moves into a seedy transient hotel. People at work now realize he has an alcohol problem and, as Allan puts it, he is "lying in a ditch looking down on the world," some nights literally sleeping in parks under bushes.

Then, one day, Allan is sitting alone in a bar. He takes a drink, and for the first time in his life, his body rejects it. He throws up in the toilet, goes back takes another drink and vomits again. That desperate dance carries on for the next five hours until Allan realizes that his affair with alcohol is over. His body can no longer pay the price for what his mind needs.

Back at his dingy flophouse room, Allan realizes his three options: 1) continue drinking and wind up in an institution, 2) commit suicide or 3) seek help. Even as a stabbing is taking place outside his window, something in Allan persuades him to choose life over death and the next day he goes to the Employee Assistance Program down at the union hall. He is terrified as he stands at the EAP office door, afraid to go in but afraid to turn around. His terrible stutter returns with a vengeance when the men suggest that he attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Allan blurts out excuse after excuse why he can't go until the men tell him there is a meeting that very day at noon.

Though Allan's life is at its lowest ebb, there is nowhere left for him to go but up. It is a painful and tortuous process, however. Allan has often scoffed at AA, even having a T-shirt printed at one time that reads "Alcoholics Unanimous." Now, stripped of all dignity, having lost his family and friends, he sits at an AA meeting in the hotel where he often drank.

That afternoon while car pooling to work (miraculously, he has not lost his job), Allan fully expects his passengers to rib him for admitting his problem. Instead, they respond with understanding and compassion. For a time there in Allan's car, the brutal facade of hard rock miners softens at the sight of a man badly hurting and utterly vulnerable.

Yet, this story is no fairy tale and Allan now pays a steep price for his decades of heavy drinking and bad decisions. His mind is a fog and he remains in a very dark place. Two weeks into his sobriety, he decides he can't take it anymore and he heads to a bar for a drink. By chance, he runs into an old drinking buddy who has climbed on the wagon and fallen off again repeatedly. Even he recognizes the state Allan is in and persuades him to have a coffee instead of a drink. (Years later, as Allan is about to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of his sobriety, he finds his old friend in a bar and convinces him to come to his celebration, at which Allan presents him with his medallion award for what he did for Allan that day many years before.)

Allan begins to find people coming out of the woodwork to help him. A bartender convinces him to stop counting his days of sobriety and just live one day at a time. The owner of a greasy spoon makes lunches for Allan when he has no money for food. The husband of a cousin gets him a good deal on a used car.

Six weeks after his last drink, Allan enters rehab. He finds himself surrounded by people like himself as well as by compassionate staff who know what he is going through and who assist him on his road to recovery. Allan, however, makes little progress in confronting the underlying causes of his alcoholism. In group therapy sessions, he says little and insists that he is fine. He isn't causing trouble but neither is he opening up. He is a tightly wound bundle of denial and nothing the staff does can crack him. His emotions are deeply encysted and he is unable to contact them.

The staff planned to send him out of the program a failure but then decide to give him one last chance. While sitting alone writing a detailed account of the issues he had with his mother, Allan receives a letter from his seven-year-old son who says he loves his dad and misses him. In the envelope is a photograph of the boy on a fishing trip standing alone smiling sweetly and holding his rod and reel. Allan is missing in the photo and he realizes how fitting that is. A wave of sadness rises up and overwhelms him. Years of bottled up pain pour out in a torrent through Allan's tears. He says later that though he spent years underground battling unyielding rock for Mother Nature's mineral wealth, the hardest distance he ever traveled were the eighteen inches from his head to his heart. At last, though, he breaks through and successfully completes the program.

The years underground may have contributed to Allan's recovery in a roundabout way. Doctors later tell him that the heat in the mines and the constant sweating likely saves his health by flushing out his system each day of the poisons he ingested the night before.

Still, that first year remains a fog. Allan continues to attend AA meetings and the people at the Employee Assistance Program help him move out of the flophouse and rent an apartment, purple walls and all. Some of Allan's drinking buddies are not keen on the drastic change Allan has made in his life and relations become strained. Allan's wife sues for divorce and, while he tries to maintain relationships with his children, it is tough.

Through it all, Allan begins to become accountable for the people he has harmed. He goes to great lengths to find a man he owes $50 to and he begins to become a father to the children he was never there for while drinking.

A year into his sobriety, Allan badly injures his back at work hoisting a drill. Unable to attain the high production bonuses that miners make, Allan's financial situation worsens, but the injury ultimately proves to be a blessing. He can no longer work underground so he becomes more involved with the union, even returning to the classroom to become educated as a substance abuse counselor.

Allan becomes certified and goes to work for the EAP himself. He begins doing interventions with substance abusers. Some of his adventures are stressful. During one, he is shoved against a fence with a knife to his throat. In another, a man tries to run Allan down with his car and a company representative refuses to take Allan to the man's house for fear of the stash of weapons he keeps. Despite the risks, Allan becomes a successful interventionist.

Now divorced, Allan becomes deeply interested in self-improvement and throws himself into a multitude of approaches. He has spent so many of his years avoiding life, now he throws himself into it. He attends seminars, tries different remedies to restore his health and ventures into different spiritual practices. He becomes interested in the work of motivational speaker Les Brown and realizes the importance of mentorship in his life. Allan learns to give motivational addresses from Les and begins speaking at union functions and for a chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It is as though he is driven to redeem his life and make up for wasted time.

With each milestone in his sobriety, Allan's confidence grows: his 90 days of sobriety, his first sober year, speaking in front a class at a community college, going back to school and earning a degree, going on spiritual retreats and, finally, confronting his mother about their lifelong issues and forming a new relationship based on mutual respect and love.

The lessons Allan learns from winning his devastating battle with alcoholism and the wisdom he gains on his road up from the ditch serve him well in his work with the United Steelworkers Union. He becomes head of their Emergency Response Team and flies all over North America when there is a workplace tragedy to direct and coordinate the union's response. He begins a secondary career as a speaker, motivating people and inspiring them to turn their weaknesses into strengths. He knows it can be done because he did it.

Allan's story ends with the realization he had when facing his own tough situation years ago: that he alone can do it, but he cannot do it alone.