Compatability, Of Course (Step Twelve contineud)

Compatibility, of course, can be so impossibly damaged that a separation may be necessary.  But those cases are the unusual ones.  The alcoholic, realizing what his wife has endured, and now fully understanding how much he himself did to damage her and his children, nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a willingness to repair what he can and to accept what he can’t.  He persistently tries all of A.A.’s Twelve Steps in his home, often with fine results.  At this point he firmly but lovingly commences to behave like a partner instead of like a bad boy.  And above all he is finally convinced that reckless romancing is not a way of life for him.

Included, again, just to be thorough.  I can’t help but think that this was a far different time.  I’ve been reading the stories included in the first edition of the Big Book, and it looks like people stayed married through far more than they do today.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but there it is.

What Is AA?

It’s a “self-help” group where completely powerless people help each other overcome a fatal obsession.

It’s built on Twelve Steps which, when they work (are worked), help an alcoholic stop drinking, stop fighting the obsession to drink, make a new start at life, and live following ancient principles of honesty and good works.

The organization of AA follows Twelve Traditions that make it run smoothly and protect is from things like politics, personalities and brand names.  Members give voluntary, very small monetary donations and the overhead is kept to a minimum.

For me, the Steps would eventually enable me to live a life without alcohol.  The people in the meetings helped me understand is and kept me company throughout.  A crucial element of AA is one alcoholic helping another because some of us need to know, in the flesh, another person who has gone through this and who has succeeded.  We need it in order to have enough faith to keep trying over long periods of time.

A vibrant and active AA community has, for me, fulfilled a social need and given me most of my friends.  It’s where I spend most of my social leisure time and spending it there helps me stay away from alcohol.  People share at a very deep level in AA, and most of what I’ve learned about people in general I’ve learned there.  It makes me close to people in a way I can’t imagine I would have in any other setting.  The topic at meetings is life and how we deal with life.  Hearing things I disagree with helps, but with the Steps as a common framework, I agree with most of what’s said and I gain invaluable insight into my specific issues.

AA is a place where I see people who are unable to stop drinking despite horrible and worsening consequences, and where my presence as a sober member who once couldn’t get sober might help them live instead of die.

AA is the last thing in my life that I would give up, because if I gave it up before something else, I’d surely lose the something else anyway.  I was that unable to cope and live life and I don’t feel at all bad about admitting that.  That’s the admission that set me free.

Trust God, Clean House, Help Others

This synopsis of the Twelve Steps is, I believe, attributed to Dr. Bob.  The first three steps involve trusting God, four through eleven show me how to get my “house,” my mind, my life, in order and keep it that way, and Step Twelve tells me to help other people do the same.

I think catchy summaries like this are helpful when, sometimes, the Twelve Steps can seem like lots of complicated words and not-very-precise instructions.  They are precise, and I’m very grateful, but there are a lot of words involved.

When I read some AA history (which I love to do) it seems to me that in early AA, a belief in a higher power was a kind of prerequisite.  On the other hand, I’ve heard Bill W say in recordings of talks he gave that we can pray to a higher power as, if we need to, only an experiment.  Belief was not a prerequisite.

I needed to believe that the collective wisdom of the sober people of AA was a power greater than me.  That made sense and to me, it was obviously true.  I can personally right here, right now, on my back porch on this summer morning, testify to the fact that I was an alcoholic of the hopeless variety.  I was.

Now it has been twenty-six summers since I took my baby daughter to the gazebo pictured here.  I brought her there when she couldn’t walk or talk or protect herself from anything, including her alcoholic mother.  She didn’t need protection from me and I helped bring her to the place where she wants to travel back there and she can navigate it on her own.  This is a “miracle.”

I was talking to someone yesterday who believes in the “meant to be” kind of universe where what is meant to happen, happens, and what isn’t, doesn’t.  My own understanding of “a” or “the” higher power doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t need to.  My friend and I can have radically different beliefs and we can both stay sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Another young woman I know has started on her Ninth Step.  She’s cleaned her house as far as making and sharing her list, considering her defects and asking to have them removed.  I’m so excited for her to experience all of the Ninth Step and to walk away from it having finished it.  Like when they read the “promises,” it is a phase of development and there will be a different phase after it.  The maintenance of the new way of life comes with instructions that, for me, have prevented it from becoming old or boring or finished or dull.  I will never completely understand and know how to do daily inventory and prayer and  meditation.

Helping others.  One of the awesome, unique (I think) aspects of this program of recovery.  I’m sure it serves different functions for different people and the same functions for all of us.  For this introvert, it keeps me out there.  Sometimes (oldtimer confession) I feel like it’s a great service I do, just showing up in my third decade of recovery to say with my presence that it works.  Most of the time I understand that it’s important for me to do that, but it’s truly not all that’s required of me.

Helping others makes sure we all continue to learn as we seek to teach and explain.  The social aspect of this program of recovery is one of the reasons I believe that it succeeds when all else fails.  A paid professional cannot, I don’t think, impart the understanding and experience that I need to enable me to stay sober one day at a time.

Trust God, clean house, help others.

Taking God out of AA

This article is about two groups in Toronto that took God out and edited the steps.  My personal opinion is that they should not call themselves Alcoholics Anonymous groups, and the region is right to delist them.

The Best-Intentioned of Us (Step Twelve continued)

The best-intentioned of us can fall for the “two-step” illusion.  Sooner or later the pink cloud stage wears off and things go disappointingly dull.  We begin to think that A.A. doesn’t pay off after all.  We become puzzled and discouraged.

Again, I’m in absolutely no danger of becoming a two-stepper.  I guess in my case the danger would be acting as a one-stepper, and just not drinking.

I wonder if this is where the expression “pink cloud” comes from.  A quick search showed me that mostly people use it the way do, as a sort of happiness that happens quickly when someone stops drinking.  That person is relieved of  many of the bad things that drinking brought, and has embarked on a new and wonderful way of living, and is just oh so happy, it cannot last.  If I experienced a pink cloud stage it has been lost in the haze of my continued relapses, and I don’t remember it at all.

I stopped writing the step at that point because the paragraph that follows is one of the most important paragraphs in all of the literature for me, and I want to set it apart.  At times I certainly find AA to be dull, but at no time do I forget that since I’m alive, it’s paying off.  As I write these words and think about this, I say a little inward prayer that if someone who is struggling with sobriety reads them, this person might see the light.  The light that I saw, that enabled me to stay sober.

AA may be dull, and dialysis may be dull, and chemotherapy may be dull.  No, those things are much worse than dull, yet people count themselves fortunate every day to be able to participate in them.  What I have to do for my life is not dull, and so what if it was?  If I said I hoped for any kind of life without AA, I would truly be insane again.

Now Comes the Biggest Question Yet (Step Twelve continued)

Now comes the biggest question yet.  What about the practice of these principles in all our affairs?

Oy.

I DO love AA folks above all others, in a universal love kind of way.  I NEED these people in order to have anyone else in my life.  In order to have a life at all.  I have seen it work over time, how I can have nothing, yet everything, in common with people who seem so very different from me.  The rooms, especially if I travel just a bit out of my home town, are filled with people with whom I ordinarily would not mix.  I have had an awesome education in this by growing up and spending my entire adult life as an active member of AA.

And yet.  I’m having a “debate” of sorts with a “friend” of Carole’s on Facebook.  Someone I “know” from the rooms of AA.  Someone who, at this moment, I would like to hurt.

OK then.  I will now be mindfully looking for opportunities to practice these principles in all my affairs.  I’m sure I do it, maybe a lot.  Maybe not.  Let’s see.

Time (Time Takes Time)

Looking for a picture to illustrate something about time, I found this one.  This kitty is 20 years old, and on Thanksgiving we thought he was going to die that day.  He didn’t.  At this point it looks like he will greet the new year with us.  My kids were 2 and 5 when he joined the family, and he’s been there through their entire schooling.  And 20 years of my 26-year sobriety.  This cat has never seen me drunk!

I’ve previously written about Phyllis here, here, and here .  Carole learned that they are not going to treat Phyllis’ cancer any further, and that they give her nine to twelve months to live.  Phyllis is someone who came to the program at age 70, after a life time of drinking, and while she didn’t stop drinking or using drugs completely, she had some periods of sobriety.  And while she didn’t work the program completely (or even very much), on reflection at this point, if this is really to be the last year she has with her family, I believe sobriety and the program has made it and the last several years better than the years before.

We’re neighbors, and before Phyllis presented herself at our meeting, we witnessed several scenes of police or bar friends bringing her home, too drunk to get herself there from a bar a few blocks away.  We heard some of her husband’s shouted pain at those times, and that hasn’t happened since she started coming to meetings.  One of her sons also became the father of twins last February, and Phyllis has been able to participate in their lives as much as her health has allowed, which is a lot.

My “time” sits heavily on my shoulders, at times, and the sober mother I’ve given my kitty (and of course my children) is a blessing beyond measure.  I would never ever down play it.  For some reason Carole felt it necessary to tell me about some of my drunken awfulness that my mother had shared with her.  There are years of my life I don’t remember.  I was truly on the edge of functioning.  My transformation is a miracle.  That first life I was given, with genetics or predisposition or the behavior I learned from my father or the coincidence of being someone who cannot stop drinking no matter how desperate the situation becomes was ended and I was given a new life I don’t deserve.

In that way, I can’t compare my experience as a sober alcoholic in AA with Phyllis’ life as such.  We have very little, yet everything in common.  If I could go back a few years and tell Phyllis at that first meeting that a few years from then, she would be facing terminal cancer, what difference would it make?  She couldn’t have fast-forwarded through her struggles with the program, and worked it better or more completely.  She did what she did when she did it – when she was ready, and not a moment before.

So, Practicing These Steps (Step Twelve continued)

So, practicing these Steps, we had a spiritual awakening about which finally there was no question.  Looking at those who were only beginning and still doubted themselves, the rest of us were able to see the change setting in.  From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn’t got the “spiritual angle,” and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.

Taken from the beginning of my sobriety, the steps have had a revolutionary effect on me.  Number one, I stopped drinking.  I was a non-functioning, dangerous, intoxicated mess.  I accepted the possibility of a god in my life, and decided to keep trying to live for the good of myself and others.  I still keep trying to name and understand and lessen my faults.  I still keep trying to improve my spiritual condition.  That’s nothing like I was.  I feel totally comfortable calling that a spiritual awakening and claiming it for myself.

The foundational, basic truth of AA that caught me in the beginning was that these alcoholics had stopped drinking.  They did, I could, and I did.  I can see that carried forward into the “spiritual angle,” although nothing after that is as straight forward as drinking versus not drinking.

I don’t see a way a person could participate in AA and get better spiritually.  Listening to others and reflecting about myself has got to improve me a little, if only by osmosis.

In A Very Real Sense He Has Been Transformed (Step Twelve continued)

In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself.

This made me ponder strength, especially what we mean by strength in experience, strength and hope.  Without looking the word up, to me it means being strong, growing as vigorously as possible, using all my faculties to their fullest potential.

Drinking sapped my strength almost to death.  My body should have been young and healthy and strong, my intellect should have been young and healthy and strong.  I couldn’t use the good things within me to improve or be happy or advance or even just get by.

I couldn’t use sources of strength from the outside world like excellent schools, good neighbors, and good church, a good family.

All these good things, inside and outside of me, were drowned and unavailable to me.

Probably the text means God as the source of strength, and I do believe in a sense that God provides all these good things and the means to use them.  I have trouble with the thought that they are supplied to me in abundance where others don’t have enough.

Anyway, transformation.  I was someone who could not benefit from the good the in the world, and I am now someone who, to a degree, can.

The Joy of Living (Step Twelve)

The joy of living is the theme of A.A.’s Twelfth Step, and action is the key word.  Here we turn toward our fellow alcoholics who are still in distress.  Here we experience the kind of giving that asks no rewards.  Here we begin to practice all Twelve Steps of the program in our daily lives so that we and those about us may find emotional sobriety.  When the Twelfth Step is seen in its full implication, it is really talking about the kind of love that has no price tag on it.

It is a very special and unique kind of giving that I see happen in AA.  In my time and place, we don’t, as Bill W sometimes described it, get a call, get in the car, and travel great distances to help another alcoholic.  That must have been amazing and exciting and rewarding in a way I can only imagine.  I’ve gone through a few modern day extreme situations, though.  I find it amazing, the way we all truly, truly, want each other to succeed, and the time and effort we’ll put in to people year after year  It’s just different than anywhere else.

I haven’t previously considered it in the way I’m reading it now, that by practicing the steps in all of my life and becoming a better person, in that way I also help the people in my life be emotionally healthy, whether they are alcoholics or not.  I do influence and affect people, for good and for bad, whether I want to or not.  The better I do with the steps, the better I’ll do by them.