Willpower

considered a “lady’s drug” so minor it wasn’t worth mentioning.
    Clapton remained sober for several years after that stint in rehab, but then one summer evening, near his home in England, he drove past a crowded pub and had a thought. “My selective memory,” as he puts it, “told me that standing at the bar in a pub on a summer’s evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke, and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.”
    He ordered the beer, and before long he was back to binges and suicidal feelings. On one particularly low night, he started work on “Holy Mother,” a song pleading for divine help. He hurt his career and wrecked his marriage, but he couldn’t stop drinking even after being seriously hurt in a drunk-driving accident. The birth of his son inspired him to return to Hazelden, but toward the end of his rehab he still felt powerless to resist the bottle.
    “Drinking was in my thoughts all the time,” he writes in his autobiography, Clapton . “I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.” As he was panicking one night alone in his room at the clinic, he found himself sinking to his knees and begging for help.
    “I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether,” he recalls. “I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help, and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered.” Since that moment, he says, he has never seriously considered taking another drink, not even on the horrifying day in New York when he had to identify the body of his son, Conor, who had fallen fifty-three stories to his death.
    That night at Hazelden, Clapton was suddenly blessed with self-control, but how he got it is more difficult to explain than how he’d lost it. His problems with alcohol could be described in precise physiological terms. Contrary to popular stereotype, alcohol doesn’t increase your impulse to do stupid or destructive things; instead, it simply removes restraints. It lessens self-control in two ways: by lowering blood glucose and by reducing self-awareness. Therefore, it mainly affects behaviors marked by inner conflict, as when part of you wants to do something and part of you does not, like having sex with the wrong person, spending too much money, getting into a fight—or ordering another drink, and then another. This is the sort of inner conflict that cartoonists used to illustrate with the good angel on one shoulder and the bad angel on the other, but it’s not much of a contest after a few drinks. The good angel is out of commission. You need to intervene earlier, to stop the binge before it begins, which is no problem when there’s a staff at a place like Hazelden to do the job for you. But what would suddenly give you the strength to do it on your own? Why did Clapton’s decision to “surrender” leave him with more self-control?
    “An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude,” he says, “and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that.” Ever since then, he has prayed for help every morning and night, kneeling down because he feels the need to humble himself. Why kneel and pray? “Because it works, as simple as that,” Clapton says, repeating a discovery that reformed hedonists have been reporting for thousands of years. Sometimes it happens instantly, as with Clapton or St. Augustine, who reported receiving a direct command from God to stop drinking, whereupon “all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”
    And sometimes it takes a while, as with a supremely cynical agnostic like Mary Karr, the author of The Liars’ Club, her bestselling memoir of growing up in an oil-refinery town in East Texas. Her mother, who married seven times, was an alcoholic who once set her daughter’s toys on fire and tried to stab her to death, according to the memoir. Karr grew up to become a successful poet and to struggle with her own alcoholism. After one binge that ended with her car spinning out of control across a highway, Karr resolved to remain sober and dutifully followed the Alcoholics Anonymous advice to seek a higher power. She put a cushion on the floor and knelt for the first