August | 2014 | A Spiritual Evolution

Monthly Archives: August 2014

August 26, 2014 · 10:21 am

A Lil’ Note on Fear

What’s that saying we hear around the rooms – “Be careful what you pray for – you just might get it” – ? In the last few weeks I’ve learned that when you do get what you thought you wanted, it turns out not to be what you thought.

A week ago Wednesday a client of mine canceled, so I thought I’d grab the time to write a post. I’d skipped the previous week because of a long hike, so I pushed myself to just crank something out. News of Robin Williams’ suicide had shaken me. My own years of battling depression were but a drop in the bucket to his, I knew, but after Google brought me his choice words on the inner experience of alcoholism, I’d felt a powerful upwelling of compassion. Could I remember and describe that feeling?

An hour and a half later, it was online. That entire day, the post got one (1, uno) view. I considered deleting it, seeing as it didn’t “fit” with most of my blog. Except that I liked it. It said what I’d felt. So, after adding the opening disclaimer, I posted a link to Facebook and left for work.

When I got home that evening, there were 187 views. Since my previous all-time high had been 80, I thought something must’ve gone haywire with my WordPress stats. Two friends had shared the link – that’s it. But just for shits and giggles, I posted it on an open AA Facebook page as well. In the next 24 hours there were 1,600 views, a number doubled or tripled daily. As of right now, the total number of views has reached almost 75,000 from over 100 nations.

Two weeks ago, I’d have told you my only reaction would be elation. Every writer wants to be read, right? But the inflow of comments gave me a feeling more like when you’ve put too much lighter fluid on the briquettes and light them too soon. The flames leap higher and higher until – aack! – what have you done?!

Exposure was a scary feeling I’d not anticipated. The blog had traveled to readers critical of AA and recovery, a few of whom accused me of discounting depression, glorifying myself, or forcing AA on others – none of which I’d intended. In these voices I felt aggression, like flaming arrows entering my home. They seemed certain I thought I knew shit, that I was saying, “Here’s the real deal on Robin Williams.” But there is no high horse to knock me down from. I never claimed to know anything. I’d written my feelings – what I’d wondered, and how that felt.

I’ve never seen this in AA literature, but it seems to me that, just as there plain hamburgers and cheeseburgers, so are there two basic types of alcoholics: plain and codependent. Plain alcoholics fear god won’t care for them, and codependent alcoholics fear they’re not worth caring for, period. That is, unless others say they are. Codependents try all kinds of ways to win the approval that, this time, might just fill that painful hole in their soul. It’s a double disease that divides the adult self, who of course knows better, from the inner child who still pleads, “Like me! Like me!”

In my case, apparently, that means everybody. My emotional balance often seems as precarious as if I were riding a unicycle, so that any disturbance makes me wobble and flail absurdly all over the place. Because this fear was absurd! Even with tens of thousands of folks quietly re-posting, and kind comments outnumbering critical ones by 10 to 1, every damn time I went to checked email, my body anticipated criticism with huge shots of adrenaline – that flush in your stomach that fills you with dread.

During the two days of highest blog traffic, my constant state of fear obliterated mindful presence. I got a parking ticket (too many thoughts to feed the meter), a speeding ticket (too many to notice speedometer), and went without sleep. When I described my critic-angst to sober friends, their advice was either “Fuck ’em!” (by far most common) or “It’s self-centered to expect others to see what we see.” But neither helped. I’d originally started this blog to publicize my addiction memoir, which I secretly hoped might some day take off the way the blog has, but now I had doubts about even wanting that. Maybe I was just too easily bruised, I thought, to be putting myself out there that way.

The irony is, I don’t fear the world. This past weekend, I loaded up the car with my son, dog, and two backpacks, drove 138 miles into the North Cascades, hiked a mile in, rented a canoe, and paddled 4 miles on a glacier-melt lake to find a small inlet where our sober friends were camping – no roads, no cars. Sunday morning, along a trail where for the past two years we’ve encountered bears, I went for a run carrying a collapsed, pointed trekking pole just in case. Sure enough, major bear poop showed up on the trail about a mile in – dark with lots of berries – but since it didn’t look fresh, I kept on, just keeping my eyes open and blowing out a trumpet-style farty noise every so often as a bear-bell. That kind of courage I don’t lack.

Codependence makes me over-reactive to others’ responses, because I think I need approval to outweigh my deepest fear – that dark secret that I do suck and am going to be exposed as a fake and a fraud. It’s the fear that others will discover how flawed and therefore vile I am and react with disgust. On this camping trip, surrounded by loving, flawed alcoholics and the beauty of mountains, I saw my fear as something I need to make peace with until god takes it. When fear of judgement comes on, I can only accept it as I would a sneezing fit, involuntary and inevitable. Whoops! Adrenaline rush! I’m a fake and a fraud who’s unworthy and everybody’s gonna find out! …Gesundheit!

One of the greatest gifts I’ve received in sobriety is the distance allowing me to not believe my own thoughts. I have faith in something far greater than my own mind, something that shapes my life with wild turns of events that I could never, ever see coming. For now I can tell fear, “Thanks for sharing.” I can hold up the “Please wrap it up” card. But I can also trust that god is teaching me in ways I can’t yet fathom, and that fear, like pain, is a voice for what still needs healing.

Boy and dog on Ross Lake: what does matter.

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Filed under AA, Alcoholism, Codependence, living sober, Recovery, Sobriety, Twelve Steps

Tagged as alcoholic, fear, recovery, sobriety, spirituality

August 13, 2014 · 12:13 pm

Robin W., Alcoholic

Note: This is the first time I’ve written about something outside my own personal experience, but it’s been on my mind enough that I felt moved to.

When Amy Winehouse’s body was found with a blood alcohol content of .4% (five times the DUI level), lying among scattered vodka bottles like so many smoking guns, most of the media and public understood that her death was caused by alcoholism.

Not so with the loss of Robin Williams – also caused by alcoholism, but in a much subtler sense. The press does note that he had checked into rehab a few weeks prior, but his prolonged suspension of active drinking causes them to dismiss his addiction as conquered. It seems to me only my fellow alcoholics are able to intuit the close relationship between his alcoholism, depression, and the unbearableness of being that led him to take his life.

Williams was very open about his 2003 relapse after 20 years’ sobriety. He told Parade:

“One day I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then that voice — I call it the ‘lower power’ — goes, ‘Hey. Just a taste. Just one.’ I drank it, and there was that brief moment of ‘Oh, I’m okay!’ But it escalated so quickly. Within a week I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street. I knew it was really bad one Thanksgiving when I was so drunk they had to take me upstairs.”

A Guardian reporter asked if friend Christopher Reeves’ death was what triggered his relapse.

“No,” he says quietly, “it’s more selfish than that. It’s just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn’t.” What was he afraid of? “Everything. It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.”

He added, about the demise of his second marriage in 2008, years after he’d managed to get sober again:

“You know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that’s hard to recover from. You can say, ‘I forgive you’ and all that stuff, but it’s not the same as recovering from it. It’s not coming back.”

If you’re an alcoholic, you don’t just read these words; you identify with them because you’ve lived them. You know that wheedling voice of the “lower power,” that all-pervading fear of existence, and the burden of shame Williams describes. And if you’re like me, you feel tremendous empathy for this man, who had recognized his depression as a spiritual malady linked to his alcoholic disease and had tried his best to combat it by strengthening his spiritual connection in treatment.

According to the press, over the previous year Williams had been shooting movies and shows back to back, maintaining a “manic pace.” To me, this frenzy of activity seems a way of trying desperately to live, to stay engaged in life. My friend Dave McC fought depression in a similar way in the year before his suicide, hiking the Cascade Mountains at a furious pace. But the disease catches up. It gets to us when we’re alone, worming into that inmost chamber of self where no one can reach us – except god. What most pains me and frightens me about Williams’ death is that he knew the solution. He had a program. He was trying to help himself. And yet for reasons we’ll never know, he could not access that “Power which pulls [us] back from the gates of death.”

So often, I want to think of sobriety as a set equation rather than a blessing. That is, I want to believe that if you take certain actions, working the three sides of the triangle by going to meetings, working with a sponsor, and doing service work, then you’re guaranteed a certain result: lasting sobriety. Williams’ death reminds me that’s anything but the case. In fact, it’s all grace. We’re guaranteed nothing. We’re never home free – not even with twenty years’ sobriety and all the talent, intelligence, and accomplishment a person could ask for.

Rather, the fact that I – an alcoholic child of alcoholic children going back many, many diseased generations – write this with 19 years and 7 months’ sobriety is nothing short of miraculous. The fact that you’re reading it with however many days or years you have sober – you, who are also hardwired to drink – is likewise a miracle. Every day that we live in the light of sanity and sobriety is a gift. It’s another day we can be grateful not to find ourselves in that tortuous nightmare of spiritually starving depression that led Williams – knowing alcohol and drugs would not help him – to choose the one-way exit of suicide.

From a broader perspective as an Near Death Experience survivor, I do believe Williams found not only relief but bliss in leaving his body. For whatever reason, though, we are born into these earthly lives with a sense of mission to carry them out, and a love for the material world that anchors us here for their duration. I’d like to live out mine, certainly. But my sobriety, my faith in a higher power, directions to love and honor others through kindness and service, and the happiness I’ve been granted by pursuing this path all unite to remind me I am never in charge. Certainly, I’m not in charge of my sobriety. I can take the steps I know to nurture it, but the results are out of my hands.

In the end, the loss of this talented, accomplished man who could no longer stand his life reminds me to be grateful for today. I don’t have a lot of the stuff our culture equates with success. But no gifts are more precious than sanity, sobriety, peace of mind, and the strength they grant me to love others freely.