If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. 1) We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
2) We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. 3) We will comprehend the word serenity and 4) we will know peace. 5) No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. 6) That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. 7) We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. 8) Self-seeking will slip away. 9) Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. 10) Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. 11) We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. 12) We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Too often, people take the 9th step promises out of context, calling them the “AA promises” and ignoring the condition that precedes them. The “phase of our development” that requires we be “painstaking” is amends — Steps 8 and 9. As I’ve written elsewhere, sloppy amends are worse than no amends at all. By sloppy I mean done too soon, before we’ve really had a psychic change, which can lead to all sorts of blunders, including revealing harms unknown to the victim: “I slept with your partner; I never really liked you; I told so-and-so you were a liar.” No, no, no! That’s why we go through Step 8 with a sponsor, to figure out what will set things right for the recipient rather than cause new pain.
Anyway, the reason the Big Book authors
placed the promises after Steps 8 & 9 is that to seek out the sheer awkwardness, humble pie, and admission of wrong-doing entailed in these two steps is something no ego-driven person would do — especially not hardcore bridge-burners like active and dry alcoholics. “Did I wrong that person? Fuck that, they wronged me!” This was the pre-steps attitude that produced more and more people to avoid and more thoughts to shove to the back in our minds, with drinking needed to mute them.
By contrast, after a psychic change, we’re trying to live by what’s right and good or, in other words, to show up as god and our own spirits would have us be. I remember several instances of sitting in my car cramming from my 8th step notes before I stepped off what felt like the roof of a skyscraper to meet people I’d wronged. I did so because I trusted god. And in each case, I walked on air: I calmly spoke the truth, and recipients warmly forgave me.
Many years have passed since I completed my amends, but I continue to live in the frame of mind that supported them. As a result, I get to live IN the 9th step promises! Freedom and happiness, for starters, characterize my sober life. Sick voices still sound off in my head, but they project poorly, and I’ve learned to roll my eyes at them. I focus instead on what I want to do with my life — with this one-time amazing journey of living in the world.
For example, I love climbing mountains. In July, friends and I made a bid for the summit of 14,411′ Mount Rainier – the most prominent peak in the contiguous US and 5th highest. We started too late (midnight) and had to wait repeatedly for the teams ahead of us to pass through areas where they’d trigger rockfall on us, then wait again when a ladder laid over a crevasse partially collapsed, so a number of my teammates got hypothermic and we had to turn back. Even so, it was a huge, gorgeous, thrilling experience — the kind of adventure I used to fantasize about while drinking.
How far we got
Camped at 10,000′
Crossing a crevasse
Despite having lost some of my left lung to radiation for breast cancer, I power-breathed to 13, 200′; and despite acrophobia and balance issues, I walked over boards laid on a ladder across a deep crevasse — not to mention daring this stuff at 59. We will try again next year, having learned from our mistakes.
And yet… and yet… during the exhaustion that overtook me on the long descent to base camp, a voice started up in my head: “No one likes you. You’re an annoyance to everyone. Everything you say is trite and boring so everyone wishes you’d just shut the hell up.” Freedom was the insight that my alcoholism, which survives in my mind, was taking advantage of my fatigue to get some good punches in. Freedom was replying to that voice, “You’ve been saying that since middle school. Fuck off.” Then I deliberately bellowed some dumb jokes most people couldn’t even hear (because we were still on ropes and too far apart), just to piss off the voice.
Last week, I hiked 82 miles with my friend Sally, retracing only the best parts of the 127-mile hike I soloed last year. This experience outshone any fantasy joy, because love for god’s beauty in the mountains absolutely saturated my consciousness for days.
Sally with Glacier Peak
Sally with Lyman Glacier
Me and TJ moochies, 6,440′
And yet… and yet… addiction was with me. I’d needed a tooth extraction the day before we were to leave for this trip and, at the oral surgeon’s insistence, delayed a day for healing, then brought along antibiotics in case of infection and 12 Vicodin in case the socket clot came out or some other intense pain developed. As it turned out, the socket felt fine, healing gradually. But my knee did not. One night I couldn’t sleep for the knee pain, and sharing my tent was the Vicodin. “Take it!” said my addict. “You have pain — a perfect justification — so cross Go and collect $200!” I responded, “That Vicodin is for unendurable nerve pain, not some nagging knee pain that keeps me awake.” “Whatever!” said my addict. “It’s for pain! It’s right there – no more pain! Much-needed sleep! Just take it!”
Midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m. passed by. I don’t remember praying, but what came to me were the words of my dear friend Rob: “Yah know, if I’d of known what I would become after a few Vicodin, I’d a shoved them up my doctor’s ass!!” Rob, originally a purebred alcoholic, got hooked on opiates as a result of a prescription and died from overdose in 2016. He seemed to remind me that my own sobriety, despite its 24.5 year length, was equally fragile. With the help of Rob’s memory and several more ibuprofen, I eventually fell asleep. The next night, I asked Sally to keep the pills in her tent.
Really, the principles that free me to live the life I love are the same ones that carried me through my amends: love, humility, and faith. That’s why realizing the promises is contingent on a “painstaking” completion of those steps.
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I made this video of our hike. If this ain’t living happy, joyous, and free, I don’t know what is!
Category Archives: Pain Medication
9th Step Promise #1: “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.”
Filed under happy, joyous, & free, living sober, Pain Medication, Recovery, Spirituality, Step 9
Hurting Out Loud
Nine months ago I published “Prescribed Relapse,” a post on how doctors sabotage our sobriety and threaten our lives as alcoholic addicts by prescribing us vast supplies of opiates. Telling us to “take them as directed” is about as good as recommending we “stop at the second drink” – as if we had any power to drink or drug “like a gentleman.” We don’t! If it cops us a buzz, we default to MORE.
In that post I quoted friend’s Facebook message. This was Rob, whose doctor turned him on to opioids years ago, hatching a fresh addiction that promptly took over his life:
“Yah know, if I’d of known what I would become after a few Vicodin, I’d a shoved them up my doctor’s ass!! I was never into opiates as a kid. But eight years into sobriety I hurt myself really really bad, and I guess I needed them. But in hindsight, if I had a choice between acute pain and becoming a heroin addict, I would have probably chose the pain. But whatever. It’s done. It’s over, right?”
Last week Rob was coming up on a year clean when he died from accidental overdose. My friend is gone. He was 44. I miss him terribly. About 20 of us gathered at his sponsor’s house the other day, wrote him a shoe box full of notes, and circled the bonfire where we burned them to share our memories and weep. I have dialed his voicemail just to hear his voice and bawled my guts out, remembering how I could call any time, how he’d offer me that sweet mix of empathy and “whaddaya gonna do?” acceptance of life’s pains. He was one I leaned on to help me through my horrific break up, because he’d suffered one, too.
The more recent break up that triggered this fatal relapse was much less of a big deal. He missed, not so much his ex-girlfriend as her son – a little boy he’d played dad to for about a year. Building cushion forts, taking the Big Wheel out for a spin, tickling on the grass – we all saw the happy Facebook photos.
I wish to god he’d told me. When we talked about missing the boy, he said a lot of “whatever” and “I’m fine.” Maybe he really thought he was. Or maybe he was just loath to admit that all his old wounds were re-opened, his heart re-cracked, his loneliness bleeding, a despair darkening his skies, that he’d never have a little family of his own. Instead, he asked me for help setting up a Tinder dating profile. That conversation was goofy – lots of “shit -wait a sec, k?” – because we were both on our phones working on phone apps. It was the last we’d ever have.
Telling others we hurt, and how bad we hurt, is one of the hardest things to do. We’re afraid of looking weak, looking naive or over-dramatic, or maybe even deserving of the blows dealt us. For me, with decades of sobriety in AA, the biggest obstacle is pride: I should be more spiritual. I should see through the dust of my collapsed dreams to recognize my part, take responsibility for my delusions, own my self-centered blindness, and, most of all, have faith that all is as it should be.
But when shit hits the fan, when the bottom falls out of your 
sky-castle and you’re plummeting, all you feel is WAH! NO! I DON’T WANT THIS! I’m sad! I’m mad! I’m hurting! You want to bawl like a toddler, throw a kicking, floor-pounding fit at god and fucking life and those fuckers who hurt you. It’s not exactly the most flattering spiritual pose.
But it’s truth. We have a disease that wants to kill us, and it’s favorite subterfuge is pride. The most powerful trust we can have is to go to a meeting with our spiritual pants around our ankles for all to see – trusting that we’ll be caught by love. When I learned my boyfriend had been screwing a girl from work for two and a half years, I went to my homegroup and cried to fifty people: “My boyfriend has been screwing a girl from work for two and a half years!” How many of them thought, Tch! How self-deluding that woman must be! My disease tells me half the room, but god tells me, in the moment of my deepest vulnerability, no one. Not even that guy in the corner pissed about his DUI. Every person in that room beamed me human compassion.
My message to you is that, though your fan 
may whirl so shit-free at the moment that dramatic squalor seems far from hitting you, pain will find you. And when it does, you’ll need trust in god just to feel it. Trust in god to forgive yourself for fucking up. Trust in god to own pain as part of your journey. But most of all, you’ll need trust in god to reach out and ask for help. Not just once. Not just stopping when you think it might be getting old for others. As alcoholics, what we cover up festers, becomes an emotional abscess fed by our disease, swelling with resentment and self-pity until eventually it bursts as the emotional nihilism of fuck it. Fuck sobriety. Fuck trying for a good life. I tried, and look what it got me: misery.
Sure, it’s self-centered to keep bending people’s ears about your troubles if you’re not also doing the work to heal yourself. Sure, there are assholes who’ll hear you wrongly, who will twist what you’ve shared against you. But the deeper truth is this: trust is a form of love, and love is what heals us.
If Rob had loved himself enough, maybe he’d have given himself permission to feel a degree of pain that, rationally, made no sense to him. And maybe he’d have tapped into the trust to call somebody, maybe me, maybe another of those loving friends gathered in tears around our pyre of goodbye notes, and say, “I can’t do this. I can’t do life. It hurts too much.”
Maybe he could have given us, instead of heroin, a chance to love him.
Filed under AA, Addiction, Alcoholism, Pain Medication, Recovery, Sobriety, Spirituality
Prescribed Relapse
“I’m happy to tell you the surgery went quite well, so you’re going to be on the mend! Obviously, you’re going to have some pain from this, so what I’ll just do is ruin your life, happiness, and relationships by giving you an opiate. Sound good? So… you’ll start off taking it according to these directions I’m jotting until, of course, your brain’s addictive wiring trumps your reason – haha, just like the old days! – and you find yourself helplessly abusing it. Eventually, I’d like to see you transition to your drug of choice. When you do that is up to you, but within a couple months, you should find yourself back in full-on relapse. Okay? Does that sound good? I’ll just call it in now.”
If only doctors actually said this, we alcoholic-addicts might have a better chance of protecting our sobriety from the pain management substances that work fine for normies (i.e. non-addictive people). The trouble is that, even today, the vast majority of doctors don’t get recovery. They see before them a reasonable and sane person who, they assume, will self-administer a prescribed drug reasonably and sanely.
What they don’t get is that we’re different. Our brains are forever like a duplex we share with an insatiable lunatic who is temporarily napping. Rap on its door with an opiate and – no matter how intently we self-manage the dosage – once that beast wakes up, all bets are off. It’ll rage, it’ll bust shit up, it’ll burn the whole damn house down, motherfucker. Because that beast has a hold on us more powerful than anything that well-meaning doctor can possibly imagine.
It’s more powerful than reason, than resolve, than all things human. It’s run our lives before, and it’s psyched to do it again.
I remember the first time I raised my voice at a 
medical authority – my very kind dentist, a British woman – when I was about four years sober. She’d just extracted one of my molars, and I’d just declined pain meds. I remember the room we were in when she insisted, because it seemed to shrink and turn more yellow and seal off every doorway connecting me to AA. I could feel the excitement rise in my chest: Meds! Something GOOD! There was hope! Something really delightful perched just on the horizon! Sure, I’d take ’em sensibly! Of course!
…And I can’t say where it came from, but that small counter-voice, that love for the gift of sobriety and all the goodness it nurtured in my life – that sprang up in me, too. They fought. So by the time the words came out my mouth, sloppy from novocain, they were way too loud, too urgent, and too emotional.
“No! I told you, I’m an alcoholic!”
“Yes, I know. But this is a very safe drug – Vicodin. You’ll be fine.”
“No, I won’t! I’m sober and I want to stay that way!”
I remember the look of distaste on her face, that this normally calm and socially appropriate patient was going off on her. She tried again, emphasizing the small dosage, but by that point tears spilled from my eyes and I had just one tremulous, throaty word for her: Ibuprofen. Ibuprofen. I’ll take ibuprofen…
And I did. End of anecdote.
I’m not blaming doctors. They’re rational; it’s we who make no sense! That’s why the onus is on us to keep out of our lives what docs assure us is safe. They don’t get 
the “curious mental blank spot.” They haven’t heard the heart-rending shares of misery, helplessness, and loss sometimes dragging on for years – all triggered by a sensible prescription. I have a huge number of friends in recovery. And in contrast to the one alcoholic I know who successfully manages back pain with meds her partner doles out*, I know at least a dozen who have relapsed catastrophically – not counting those who have died.
I was messaging with one of them yesterday, my friend Rob. He’s a wonderful guy traveling the country, working odd jobs, and struggling to stay off heroin for more than a few months at a time. But failing. He had a week. Here’s what he messaged:
“Yah know, if I’d of known what I would become after a few Vicodin, I’d a shoved them up my doctor’s ass!! I was never into opiates as a kid. But eight years into sobriety I hurt myself really really bad, and I guess I needed them. But in hindsight, if I had a choice between acute pain and becoming a heroin addict, I would have probably chose the pain. But whatever. It’s done. It’s over, right?”
Maybe. Maybe not.**
When we want to drink or use, only god can help us. But when someone else tells us it’s not a problem, we can use our brains. Remember: the doctor is going to offer you 
something so legitimate, so routine, so neat! The prospect of those little pills fucking up your life will seem so overly dramatic! What I do is this: I picture a set of balance scales with two big pans. On one side I put the prospect of perturbing my doctor, making a stink, sounding like an uncooperative bitch, no one getting it, and, quite likely, some physical pain. On the other side I put every blessing I’ve won back sober, every person I love, every friend who needs me, my self-respect, my inner dignity, my body’s health, my spirit’s channel to god – and every beauty and joy of this life.
Then I bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Don’t you dare fuck with my sobriety!” But it’s right there – that sense of defending what I love.
If your pain is such that you’ve absolutely got to take some meds, agree to a prescription of five pills. Maybe eight. Then call someone for each goddam pill you take and say, “It is 4:00, and I am taking a percocet now.” Draw up a chart to keep exact track of what time you dosed, whom you called, and whom you’re calling next. Stay in touch with your sponsor. And as soon as you can, switch to ibuprofen and get the pills out of your house. Do nothing alone because – remember – you’re not really alone: there’s that slumbering beast in the duplex, and you’re making a racket.
I recall the sadness I felt post-surgery many years ago, flushing the three remaining Vicodin I’d been given. The magic was gone. Now there was just me… and my stupid old life. It took about five minutes for gratitude to return: the vial was empty, but my future was full. I was sober.
*UPDATE: She relapsed after a year – knew where the pills were. After about a year of wallowing in opioid chaos, she’s clean again.
**UPDATE: Rob died of overdose less than a year later.
Filed under AA, Alcoholism, Drinking, living sober, Pain Medication, Pill addiction, Recovery, Sobriety
A Spiritual Evolution 