RECOVERY WORKS Rod Redding “I wanted not to drink more than I wanted to drink”

Editor’s Note: September is National Drug and Alcohol Addiction Recovery Month. To celebrate the success of treatment and recovery programs, and to inspire people struggling with substance abuse and addiction, a dozen Mainers agreed to share their personal stories. “Recovery Works” features these profiles each Thursday in the Well-Being section, replacing the “Finding a Fix” column today and through September.

The first time he agreed to enter an out-of-state residential treatment program for alcoholics, Rod Redding brought along a handful of Valium and a pint of vodka to help ease his transition into sobriety. “I thought I could smuggle it in,” the retired educator recalled with a rueful chuckle. “But they found it.” After 35 days of intensive personal therapy, group sessions, recovery meetings and physical exercise, he was feeling good, ready to return to his home and family and a promising academic career in Maine.

“On the way to the airport, I stopped at a bar and had two drinks,” he said. “I was showing them who was in charge. It’s such a perfect example of alcoholic thinking.”

Clean and sober for 27 years now, Rod can poke gentle fun at his fruitless attempts to control his drinking. There were the early-morning battles of conscience when he would toy with the notion that maybe drinking wine for breakfast wasn’t the best thing. There was the seductive notion that he could somehow school himself to “drink like other people.” There was the “2-2-2 plan” – an agreement he worked out with his wife, Judy – “Twice a week, I could have two beers, and twice a year, I could get drunk.”

But one chilly morning in 1979, watching the sun come up over the St. Croix River and nursing a hangover from a party the night before, “I suddenly understood that if I didn’t stop drinking, I would die young. I would lose my wife, my family, my job – everything that really mattered to me. And for the first time in my life, I wanted not to drink more than I wanted to drink.” He was 45, and, with the support of the 12-step philosophy, hasn’t taken another drink since.

In 1994, Rod Redding retired from a respected classroom and administrative career in the Maine Community College System. From 1994 to 2001, he taught classes in psychology and human services at the University of Maine at Augusta. He was recently named professor emeritus at that school. Occasionally, he and Judy still teach a course together called, appropriately enough, “Addiction in the Family.”