Tag Archives: AA

December 13, 2014 · 2:02 pm

Doing the Opposite: A Christmas Story

Night before last I was in the dumps – just tired of frickin’ everything. So I threw a party. I shit you not.

This is the principle we hear of a lot in the rooms – to do the opposite of what we feel like doing. I’ve been around long enough to know it pays off, and to understand that the loudest voice in my head is usually not the wisest.

Take day before yesterday, I was sitting in my empty house in the same old chair where I always frickin’ sit, looking out the same damn window at that same damn tree. I was also looking at the weeks ahead – the darkest of the year (in Seattle, dusk begins to fall around 3:30). I don’t do well in the dark. My brain’s amygdala gets its mitts on a little fear-powered megaphone, so it was broadcasting loud and clear like this:

“What is my life, really? Work. Pay the damn mortgage – house falling apart. More work. Buy groceries, eat ’em, pay the damn sewage bill. Clean my ever-dirty house. Exercise to fight getting old. Get old. Ach! – how much longer do I have to do this shit?! I’m 54, so… like… 35 years, and then maybe I’ll get put in a home. God, I hope I don’t Facebook there! I am SO sick of EVERYTHING.”

At that point, some little alarm light tripped in a different part of my brain. It said, as god often does, “BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! Re-examine! Spot inventory!”

Scanning myself, I realized I was angry – unconsciously hurt and angry. I’d been planning a weekend with my boyfriend on the beautiful island where he lives, even rearranged clients so I could catch an early ferry, then he texted that he was being sent to Copenhagen. Boom. Empty weekend. My son would be at his other mom’s. I’d be alone.

Somehow, the part of my brain that’s been paying attention in Al-Anon kicked in, letitbeginwithme1 saying: “Let it begin with me! Your happiness does not depend on what Grayson does. Your life is rich and you are loved by many. Be grateful! Spend time with friends!”

Jesus, what bunch of goodie two-shoes platitudes!

Here, dear reader, is where one has to have eaten one’s spiritual Wheaties. Because it takes a huge surge of faith to hoist yourself out from that dark groove fear has carved, turn away, and begin to do the thing you least feel like doing. I know that loving other alcoholics helps me. I know my house is very near my homegroup. So I reached for my phone. The dark voice threw everything in arm’s reach at my head as I texted a homegroup friend.

ME: If I have a game night tomorrow after the meeting will you bring games? I don’t have any fucking games.

ROB: Sounds great.

ME: Should I do it? I’m depressed so it seems like a huge deal. I just want to sleep.

ROB: Me every day.

ME: But will you come over even if nobody else does? We can just play hangman or tic tac toe.

ROB: I’ll bring Suspend.

I took that as a Yes. That’s all I needed – just one friend who understood. Forcing myself, and with the dreariest look on my face, I created an Event entitled, “Post-Meeting Games and Shit” in our local Facebook AA group, which promptly invited all 97 members. By the next day, my best friend, a sponsee, and one other person had accepted. The dark voice gloated about my pathetic neediness, how I should just watch TV alone like normal people. It buzzed in the background like a big zizzy fly while I cleaned my house and bought four jugs of spiced apple cider. Just getting the dining room table cleared of clutter for games took literally hours!

After the meeting I checked in with some non-Facebook friends, who had other plans. A few said they might be over. So I went home and plugged in the Christmas tree. I turned on Pandora carols and set a big pot of cider on the stove. My dog looked at me. I got down a bunch of cups while the voice warned, “You’re going to feel so stupid putting these away again!” No one came. I added a bunch of wood to the fire. The carols played on. My dog scratched himself.

Then, finally, he barked. The doorbell. One or two at a time, a dozen homegroup friends plus two newcomers climbed those freshly swept steps with food in their arms and light in their eyes, and they brought… god. That’s the only way I can say it. Because I loved them! All ages; all walks of life; all sober. Each had overcome their own dark voice to show up. Rob unpacked Suspend on the shining wood table where people gathered talking about how Bing Crosby beat his kids or how expensive that bakery up the street is, and, wait, what are the rules again? Before long we were ooing and ah-ing at daring Suspend feats.

Human voices, their teasing, their laughter filled up my lonely house – and I remembered what life is, saw it like a forgiven lover. I am so in love with my life! We went through the cider. We ate the food. My sponsee’s gift was an updated Trivial Pursuit that a bunch of us played in the living room, awarding pie slices that people hadn’t even won because fuck it! That question was dumb! I saw the goodness, the vulnerability of the new people joining in, and the beauty of my friends in ever-more subtle colors.

The dark voice shriveled, its megaphone dead.

Last night rekindled something in me – Love – enough to carry me through the darkest days ahead. Once again I remember that all my difficulties – my loneliness, my endless bills, my sorrow at getting older, and stings of life’s disappointments – are not mine. They’re ours. We do this thing together.

“We know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself, ‘I’m jittery and alone. I couldn’t do that.’ But you can. You forget that you have just now tapped a source of power much greater than yourself.” (A Vision for You, 163)

Life is yours. Go n’ git it!

Left by one of the smokers on my front step. To me it reads, “I love love”

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Filed under AA, Al-Anon, Alcoholism, Recovery, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Sobriety, Spirituality

Tagged as 12 steps, AA, Alcoholism, Depression, recovery, Seasonal Affective Disorder, spirituality

December 7, 2014 · 8:15 am

Authenticity in the Rooms: Striking a Sober Balance

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
——————————————— Polonius – ass-kisser & schemer (Shakespeare)

“The paradox of self-honesty is that I need the help of others to achieve it.”
———————————————(Courage to Change, 296)

Inscribed on many AA coins is the wisdom byte, “To thine own self be true,” which was probably already time-worn when Shakespeare put it in Polonius’ advice speech in Hamlet. Whoever Shakespeare was, I’m sure he was crafting irony by doing so: Polonius is false to everyone, including himself. Shakespeare’s message, as I see it, is that being true to oneself is far more easily said than done. In fact, striving for personal authenticity is the work of a lifetime.

Many of us believe we’re being true to ourselves when we regurgitate whatever the dominant culture – or our faction thereof – has inculcated in us. Oprah said it. Parenting magazine. Dad and the NRA. For that matter, individualism itself is an ideal of Western culture. Because we’re all an amalgamation of the belief systems we’ve been raised with, spouting what these systems maintain in the face of other systems feels like authenticity, even if it doesn’t come from our spirit.

As James Fowler outlines in his book, Stages of Faith*, the search for deeper levels of meaning requires an ability to stand back from our beliefs and evaluate them critically, changing what no longer rings true – even if it requires a break from our past or our clan. Otherwise, our faith remains childlike. He identifies Stage 1 faith, for example, in a Catholic woman he interviewed who, interpreting every symbol of her religion literally, staked an almost monetary worth in telling her beads (points “in the bank”) and worried about pissing off various saints by neglecting to pray to them. At the other end of the spectrum, Fowler places visionaries like Gandhi or King who staked their lives on a faith in love beyond the norms of their society, valuing good for humanity over good for self.

It’s the difference between obedient adherence to mere form versus courageous application of import. The more we develop toward the latter, Fowler says, the deeper our faith, and the more meaningful our lives.

When I came to AA, my belief system was a mess of contradictions. Most of what I’d cobbled together to live by had to be straight up chucked in favor of love & respect for people from all walks of life and an ethic of usefulness – values that proved their worth as they lifted me from despair to vitality. AA sponsors, friends, and sometimes strangers who spoke in meetings – these people taught me how to live. It’s a process that continues to this day. Listening, I’m transported outside my own experience into the perspectives of women and men who differ from me in countless ways, yet share my diseased alcoholic mind. My fellows in AA and Al-Anon have become a sounding board for my tentative thoughts as I navigate the unknowns of today. Their feedback pushes me beyond what I want to see, pressing me to be ever more honest with myself.

Even so, I need to examine AA meetings with some critical distance, as well. AA is amorphous, because meetings are only as constructive as the alcoholics attending them. A group of sick people makes a sick meeting.

Dry Drunk** Meetings, for example, have cast aside the Big Book in favor of some kind of open-season group therapy. Shares focus solely on “checking in,” usually venting frustrations or confessing destructive behavior, all of which is swept aside with the phrase, “but at least I didn’t drink!” Here plug-in-the-jug abstinence is touted as an asset, even if I’m still an asshole tortured by the fear and self-loathing I once treated with alcohol. I myself spent the first two years of my sobriety in such meetings, which brought on a debilitating depression.

At the opposite extreme are Competitive Sobriety Meetings, which feature the same schtick over and over: My life sucked, but now I work the 12 Steps constantly, and everything is wonderful! Yes, dammit, wonderful, because I have 7 sponsees, 5 service positions, 3 home groups, write a 10th step every fucking night and read 86-88 every morning, etc. – so my sobriety is way better than yours! Here the search for authenticity has been abandoned. In fear of relapse, I cling to the RIGHT ANSWER. The second two years of my sobriety were spent developing resentments in such meetings. The solution was there – yes – a solution that saved my life. Still, much like Fowler’s Stage 1 woman with her virtual Ken and Barbie saint collection, such meetings tend to make a golden calf of the AA program and its history.

Where is balance to be found? What rings true? That’s up to… thine own self, baby! Today, I have a home group that feels like home. For me, the most important growth guide is based, not in set rules or standards, but rather in my ways of being, my modes of consciousness – in my awareness of my awareness. To what degree am I willing to be vulnerable and loving, to admit that I don’t know, but to keep trying regardless? At a dry drunk meeting, can I offer the solution to those who want it, without judging those who don’t? In competitive sobriety meetings, do I have the courage to speak of my continuing human struggles?

J.K. Rowling may seem a questionable sage, but as I’ve been reading Harry Potter to my son, I’ve noticed how frequently she has Dumbledore preface statements with “I think…” Unlike Polonius, Dumbledore understands that he is fallible, mourns past mistakes, and acknowledges that he cannot trust himself with power. His wisdom shows itself as recurring acknowledgement that he may be wrong.

In sum, we’re always trying, never done. Sobriety and spiritual growth are, like life itself, forever touch and go, a muscle that begins to atrophy as soon as we rest it, a puzzle we work on daily even as pieces constantly vanish and reappear.

* Much of this book deals in depth with developmental psychology, but it’s still an interesting layman’s read.

**For more on Dry Drunk syndrome, see this great article by Liberty Ranch recovery.

The Codependent Alcoholic’s Quandary

Sometimes I feel pulled in opposite directions by my two programs – AA and Al-Anon – though the confusion actually arises, not from contradiction between them, but from my muddled thinking as a codependent alcoholic.

Lois and Bill Wilson, co-founders of Al-Anon and AA, respectively

AA tells the alcoholic in me that “Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend on our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs” (20). On the other hand, Al-Anon tells me that “…many of us develop the habit of putting [another] person’s needs first… To recover we have to learn to keep the focus on ourselves” (9).

How can I do both? How do I constantly think of your needs and keep the focus on me?

When I was new to AA, I resented the idea that selfishness was the “root of [my] troubles” (62). I was a victim. Other people hurt me. It took years of meetings and a fairly forceful sponsor to open my eyes to the ways I victimized myself. Living in ego, I was “[d]riven by a hundred forms of fear” (62) that there wasn’t enough to go ’round and I wouldn’t get mine. My sponsor taught me how my egocentric expectations that others do whatever would make me most comfortable laid the foundations for a life of discontent. (See What a 4th Step is and Ain’t)

In AA, to stop being a black hole of need, we have to literally reverse the direction of our energy flow. I had to learn to see others, not as appliances, but as fellow children of god to be loved. Luckily for me, god set me up a bunch of tutorials in this matter. Here’s one: In early sobriety, I used to envy a beautiful young woman who secretaried a huge meeting, ever popular and lusted after, dressed to the hilt week after week. She later relapsed, fled to her friends’ home, and while they were out, chugged a bottle of Drano from under their sink in an effort to die. Last I spoke with her several years later, she was still missing much of her esophagus and needed a feeding tube to eat. Her heart itself was scarred.

That’s the pain of alcoholism we share, sans a spiritual solution. Once I could begin to know and internalize that others struggled with the same invisible demons that I did, I could begin to give from the heart. What the founders of AA knew was that sometimes you have to prime the pump by going through the actions before you feel the spirit. That’s why service work is such a foundational part of our program. When I feel the outpouring of my own good intentions in making coffee or taking time for a sponsee, I begin to actually want good things for you – to love you. As my love flows out to you, love from god flows into me, filling my emptiness – and I am healed!

That’s just a spiritual law.

Meanwhile, back at Al-Anon, the core of the program is “Live and Let Live.” That’s actually two sets of instructions. The first one, “Live,” means be true to yourself – know yourself, be yourself, love yourself. Each of these is, for me, a 400-level grad school course that meets 365 days per year. It’s tough! When I was new to Al-Anon, I resented my sponsor’s conjecture that I probably didn’t know what I wanted. How ridiculous! I’m a very passionate person! Of course I know I want… I want…

What do you think I should want? I kinda like ABC – is that okay? Do you like it? Really? So, you must like me! Yay, I win!

In Al-Anon I realized that I had little to no center, that I’d been a reactor all my life. I set up relationships of turmoil to keep myself busy so I’d never have to take responsibility for my own happiness. The greatest distraction from my assigned work of “Live” was harping on how you ought to live. Really – look at yourself! You’d be so much better off if you just did X, Y, and Z! And I can’t do ABC because you hold me back!

Here comes the second half of the Al-Anon slogan: “Let live.” Okay. You are sole boss of you. I haven’t lived your life up until this point, so I can’t know what’s best for you. That’s between you and your higher power. I can only tell you how your actions impact me and what I need, and then, based on your response, make choices for my own behavior (which may include parting ways).

But guys, you know what’s still hardest for me? Weathering disapproval from people who believe they know better than I what I should and shouldn’t do. You may have your own set of judges, but mine are my siblings; my recovery in AA put us terribly out of step. Apparently I love, climb, parent, and write wrongly. For many years I struggled to win their approval, mistaking that effort for “how [I could] help meet their needs.” But the truth is, no one needs to approve of me!

This is where Al-Anon’s “focus on ourselves” comes in, to help me recognize internal factors – hello! fear of conflict! external locus of self-worth! – that are harming me and helping no one. I can easily detach in other parts of life, but to practice detachment with our first family requires, I’m beginning to think, a black belt in Al-Anon. I’m still very much a work in progress.

The goal in both AA and Al-Anon is to grow toward my god rather than as dictated by my ego or someone else’s. God moves me to love and help others, but never toward what I decide they “ought” to be, or in ways that harm my own serenity. To achieve balance, I have to accept that my doing good for anyone depends on the foundational practice of self-care and self-love, so I can show up with my unique strengths and radiance – complete, confident, and compassionate.

Some day, that’ll be me with my sibs!

Near Death and God Stuff

I am weird. One night in 1982, when I was 22, I went out to a Manhattan night club, snorted quite a bit of coke, then bought and snorted what I thought was a gram more (though it didn’t get me high). I developed increasingly narrow tunnel vision from bradycardia (slowing heartbeat) and hypoxia (from respiratory depression), underwent a grand mal seizure, suffered a cardiac arrest, and died on the nightclub floor. That is, I was without vital signs for three minutes. I’d ingested enough lidocaine to shut down my central nervous system.

While a bartender worked at CPR and I began to look “all gray like a corpse, nothing like yourself…” according to my date, my consciousness shot off on a vivid journey. With keen awareness I traveled from sky to sea to beach to ancestral house before getting sucked through a window and over the dazzle of sunlight on the sea’s surface to plunge right into the heart of the sun. There I was subsumed by a light of love beyond measure. A strong presence was with me, beaming love through me, until abruptly it told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t done and couldn’t stay – after which cut the light to total blackness. (If you want the whole story, you have to buy my goddamn addiction memoir, but only if you’re also psyched to read about alcoholism and romantic obsession, because that’s mostly what it’s about.)

Anyway! As a result of whatever happened that night, the boundaries of my consciousness changed. I knew nothing of it. I was a smug atheist who’d never heard of Near Death Experiences or any of the related terms now commonplace in popular culture. What had happened didn’t fit with my scientifically based definition of reality, so I put it behind me. Over the next decade, however, two more distinctly impossible experiences forced themselves on me. I didn’t want them!

I didn’t much associate my secret paranormals with whatever people called God. To me, that concept involved a personification of divine power – God as a super-boss. I rejected it and still do. But once I got sober, once I opened to a higher power and began to pray, the rate of paranormal “knowings” increased dramatically. Finally, in 2003 I had an astoundingly specific clairvoyant dream, and in 2004 was shown the break in my life the dream had foretold. It was a such an undeniably personal, otherworldly message that, at 9 years sober, I broke down, sobbing with gratitude, and finally surrendered the last of my reservations: god, I finally knew beyond faith, was an energy infusing everything that lives. Spiritual energy is a force every bit as real as gravity or electromagnetism – forces nobody personifies or insists we capitalize! That’s why I refer to it as “god.”

In 2010, after accidentally and embarassingly reading a friend’s mind regarding a romantic weekend with his wife, I went ahead and Googled “Near Death Experiences.” I eventually found a Seattle group that meets monthly to hear a speaker tell his/her Near Death story (Seattle IANDS). A year later, in 2011, I finally got myself to attend one of those meetings. And in January of 2012, I was the speaker. I discovered, just as in AA, that many experiences I’d long believed unique to me were actually quite common among this group. We speak brightly of our dying experiences: “I was thrown 20 feet from the car,” “I could see the surface but knew I’d never reach it.” Some of us talk about foreknowing events or catching an afterglow in much the same way AAs talk about the phenomenon of craving. Though I never saw my guardian angel, hearing descriptions from those who did (and a few who saw other angels, though they’re reluctant to use the term) has helped me understand who/what was with me in the light.

I can’t talk about any of this in an AA meeting. The purpose of AA shares is to allow fellow alcoholics to identify, to hear their own problems and psychic pain described by others, so they’ll be attracted to the solution of the 12 steps. No one imposes their beliefs on someone else – at least, not in theory. And the fact is, most newcomers are already freaked out by the word “God” in the steps – as I was at first. They’re worried about cultish, woo-woo weirdness. To hear someone talking about having left their body or experiencing paranormal after-effects would send them screaming from the church basement! It would help no one. And though AA friends came to hear my IANDS story, most assume Near-Death meetings must entail morbid rehashings of the close scrapes we call death, mixed with woo-woo chicanery.

I can’t talk about alcoholism at IANDS meetings, either. For NDE folks, the strangest part of my story is not that I left my body, journeyed, etc., but that I basically killed myself by snorting everything I could get my hands on whether it was working or not. Why would such a nice person be so self-destructive?! They assume AA meetings are penitent gatherings where we rehash old drinking stories and renew our determination. They express sympathy. The idea that we’re happily united in a daily immunity granted to us by a higher power, that we laugh at our own sick thinking, that we’re actually grateful for the program we live by – they just don’t get it.

Every person’s beliefs develop in the crucible of their family, social group, and culture, to be either confirmed or challenged by individual experience. Our culture at large tends to present religion versus atheism as an exclusive dichotomy, and many of us internalize that idea. My family and our academic community chose option B – atheism. For some time, I straddled belief in a higher power at AA and dismissal of the “weird things” that had followed my NDE. It took 30 years of personal encounters with physically inexplicable happenings to push me to the point where I could discard my old truth and seek out people who shared my otherworldly experience. I’ve since spoken at the Seattle Theosophical Society, been interviewed on a radio show (podcast here, starts at 15:00) and appeared in a documentary film /future television show. I am all in. But to be honest, part of me still cringes to hear, for instance, my radio talk sponsored by “Hugz from Heaven” – really? Have I gone that daft?

I often wish I could help others in AA who struggle with the god aspect to see the wide array of spiritual paths between religion and atheism, or even to discard the “God-boss” image in favor of the energy of love. Though it can be frustrating, in meetings I say nothing of my NDE or its after-effects. If it took me 30 years to accept my own experience, how the hell can I expect others to accept my words? I leave them to their own ideas, and share mine outside the rooms. Part of faith is accepting that those who want to hear – who, as I did, already share this truth deep within – will be listening.

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Filed under AA, Afterlife, Near Death Experience, Recovery, Spirituality

Tagged as AA, conception of god, Divine light, god, NDE, Near Death Experience, spirituality

November 16, 2014 · 12:08 pm

Holiday Parties: 6 Tips for the Recovering Alcoholic

…and why they may be utterly useless

.
‘Tis the season when a lot of us get invited to gatherings where the alcohol flows. If we go, we may find ourselves among normies for whom “drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination,” as well as some pre-bottom drunks. Because they’re outside recovery, chances are they’ll be a world away from understanding that for us, to drink is to die.

drinks we see others taking with impunity…

Normies view alcohol consumption from the perspective of a normal body and mind, which they assume (come on!) we must have, too – the kind that can moderate alcohol intake at will. Believing this, they may interpret our abstaining, not as avoiding the poison that can bring down in ruins everything we love, but as a party-poopy failure to “join in the revelry.” Even if we say flat out (as I do), “I’m an alcoholic,” some can’t seem to grasp what that means. They urge, cajole, and act baffled — or mourn for us. “What?! We’re talking a single glass of X, here!” (insert spiked punch, spiked eggnog, spiked cider, or plain old booze).

Standing by our own truth in the face of such reactions can be, for the more codependent among us, socially difficult. What’s more, watching others take drinks with impunity amid all the sensory experiences of alcohol – hearing the ice clinks, seeing it pour, maybe even smelling it – Whoa! – can rouse our addict from its slumber, enabling it to launch a marketing campaign about the radness of just one drink.

…it’s never enough

Yet the Big Book tells us, “any scheme of combating alcoholism that attempts to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure…. So our rule is not to avoid a place where there is drinking, if we have a legitimate reason for being there.”

Everything hinges on spiritual fitness, which I’ll discuss a little further down. Meanwhile, here are six tips that have helped me feel more comfortable at events where alcohol is served.

Go in the spirit of usefulness, not to “get” social points or further your “little plans and designs.” My sponsor used to tell me to see “what (I) could pack into the stream of life.” I show up to give. I can give others my attention, my humor, my encouragement, and my caring for them. If it’s a homemade party, I can ask the hosts what I might do to help. What matters is not how these offerings are received, but the spiritual flow they put me in.

Bring a supply of kick-ass non-alcoholic drinks if possible, that is, if it’s not a fancy catered type thing. As above, bring them not only for yourself, but others. “Hey, I just happened to pick up some Reed’s Ginger Beer, Martinelli’s, and this amazing Trader Joe’s whatever on my way over! Enjoy!”

Have a recovery buddy. Either bring a sober alcoholic with you, or arrange to check in with one before and after.

Pray your ass off. Pray before, pray during (in the bathroom or just your mind), and pray again when it’s time to leave. “God, please help me remember what’s truly important, who I am, and that you’re with me” might be a better prayer than “Help me not drink.”

Know your boundaries before you go. Once we get somewhere, it may feel loserish to leave early, but screw that. Know in advance that as soon as people start slurring and discussing their favored sexual positions, or when a certain hour arrives, you’re gone.

Have something cozy waiting at home. This can be reunion with your beloved pets/people or some treat you decide on in advance: a good movie or book, a slice of cheesecake, blankie & PJs, or all of the above – whatever makes you happy.

Now for the spiritual fitness part: None of these tips will be worth jack if you don’t love your sobriety.

As a newcomer, you may not think you love it, but at some level you do, because it’s your core, your truth, your life. You want to grow and thrive, and while your addiction promises you guzzling will accomplish this, you know better.

I love my sobriety fiercely – as fiercely as if it were my newborn child. It’s only as old as today. Some people might bring their newborn to a whoopee party. I do so when I bring my sobriety, cradling it close. Some might set their newborn down on a table and wander off in search of social adventures, forgetting about it. Others may decide partway through the party that toting this newborn around really inhibits their having a good time, so they’re just gonna chuck it in the garbage tonight and cut loose.

Any time a well-meaning acquaintance urges me to have a drink, they’re holding a garbage can under my newborn. They have no idea what deep fury they’re fucking with. My sobriety is the source of my joy, my awakeness, my love for all the beauties of this life – and no dumbass party can tempt me to drop it. I don’t need to vent this at them; I just need to remember my life is at stake.

Yet, dear readers, the inescapable fact remains that I can’t always remember. Addiction lives inside my brain – the very same brain needing to remember. It can usurp the helm at any time and disguise a drink as a fine idea. AA’s ‘spiritual fitness’ refers to my connection to a god that, for reasons unknown, intercedes during these curious mental blank spots to let me pause (provided my steps 1, 2, & 3 stand in earnest) until the truth returns. To the extent that following these tips reflects my commitment to those steps, they may help me enjoy myself in the midst of boozers.

Yet the bottom line remains: Party or no party, tips or no tips, I’m safe anywhere if my god is with me, and nowhere if it’s not.

21 year old girl, drunk, killed family of 4 as well as her two passengers. Will she continue drinking, no matter how much she wants to stop?

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Filed under Alcoholism, Recovery, Sobriety, Twelve Steps

Tagged as 12 steps, AA, addiction, alcoholic, Alcoholism, drinking, Holiday drinking, New Year's, not drinking

November 11, 2014 · 9:24 am

Off the Beam – Head Static Returns

Sorry, there’s no inspiring blog this week because Louisa doesn’t have her shit together. That’s right, I’ve wandered off the spiritual path and found myself befuddled in some remote, unspiritual bog surrounded by brambles and having just accidentally used my only map as TP.

Why am I so off the beam? I guess because I’ve been deluged with work, something I kept praying for with those stupid Santa prayers that aren’t supposed work. For the past few weeks I’ve been zooming around town meeting clients and editing like a mo-fo in between, so my eyes are all bloodshot and my poor brain feels encased in pantyhose. Every now and then I feel a lurch of vertigo that would flare into a full blown panic attack if I couldn’t spot their wolf-cryin’ asses a mile away by now. Hyperventilating, again! In other words, I’m running on fear.

So, how does being off the beam show up? Regression! It’s ridiculous. I get to go through high school all over again. Take the other night, when I went to my mountain climbing group’s annual gratitude banquet, where the faces of the (cool kids’) Glacier Climbing Course I was once so active in have all changed for the younger. I arrived late, so there were no seats. I felt like a has-been. But then my ego got a great idea to fix this: I tracked down two of the new leaders and said I’d be happy to deliver some of this year’s presentations if they needed someone – you know, sort of like Barry Manilow offering to perform at the Grammys.

Or at least, so it seemed to me the next morning. I was mortified. With dozens of new grads able to present, why had I nosed in? Ach! What should’ve been dismissed with a quick “f*ck it” prayer seemed like a huge deal and colossal embarrassment. My old buddies – wounded pride, concern with what others think of me, and self-loathing – stopped by for breakfast and hung out all morning. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we chatted for hours about how pathetic I was, how dumb I must’ve looked – lots of productive stuff. There was even a dark, dreary day plus some menopausal symptoms to set the stage. Good times!

To knock that stuff the hell off when I’m in spiritual disarray seems next to impossible. No matter what I tell myself, I’m back to square one, worrying about the same shit. It’s like waving away a determined yellow jacket.

Contrast me in this tizzy with the Native American panhandler I talked to last week while the light was red at the Aurora Denny exit. He described the “irony” of having felt lucky the day before to find a sheet of plastic so he could wrap his backpack against the rain, only to return from walking the car line and find it – everything he had – stolen. “Who would do that?!” I asked, incensed. He flashed me a toothless smile. “Just somebody being a jerk,” he shrugged. “I’ll be okay, though. Today’s been a good day.”

This man’s acceptance blew me away. He wasn’t drunk. He was just unafraid of life with nothing. Can I say that again? Unafraid. Of life. With nothing. Every bit as poor as Jesus or the Buddha, his outlook was brighter than the majority of us schmucks lined up in traffic.

In only one area do I have that man’s caliber of faith, and that’s around my sobriety. I know I’ll be okay, so long as I hang on to god. No matter how frazzled I get, whether by small stuff or big stuff, this description from the Big Book’s pages 84-85 still applies:

“For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame… We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us… That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.”

How does that work? I know that on one level, I have nothing to do with this gift. As described in the Robin Williams post, I’m sober because of grace alone, for reasons I’ll never understand – a miracle that is never guaranteed.

Yet there is such a thing as underlying spiritual fitness, which offers grace a landing strip to show up in our lives, even during tizzies. Mine shows up as an understanding that I’m never in charge, ever, of anything – least of all emotions that come over me. I’ve somehow internalized Step 3. In the past, thoughts, emotions, and judgements that defined my reality amounted to an unacknowledged false god, one that used to tell me I could fix stuff with booze. Through practicing the steps consistently, however, I’ve withdrawn my trust from those voices and given it instead to a higher power, a god of love. Nothing that happens to me can shake that. It’s in my bones, even when self-defeating thoughts ricochet around my silly brain.

If I live to be 100, I think I’ll always have episodes like this, when I transform into SUPER TWIT and anguish for hours over a visible booger or even an imagined visible booger. I’m kind of glad about that: I’ll always be a fool. Being a fool – freaking out about piddly-shit – is actually one of the most endearing aspects of being a fallible human being. Part of me misses it already, and I’m not even dead.

I know I need to slow down, maybe even decline some work to make time for self-care. I will. But listen, my lovely alcoholic readers, I do want to add this: No matter how busy or pressed for time, I always go to my meetings, meet with my sponsees, and pray all over the place. No matter how wacky I get, I know these actions are my only recourse against the disease that wants to ruin my life. On them, I never compromise, because if that monster ever escapes from my brain stem, it won’t compromise with me.

POST SCRIPT, 2/8/15: It turns out I was asked to give a presentation on gear to this year’s Glacier Climbing Class, which I delivered yesterday. And out turns out it did prove valuable to climbers both new and old, for which everyone was grateful. Who knew?

Hitting Bottom, Remembered

Looking back can make us grateful

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we could never say, “Dad’s drunk again,” because it might sound like we didn’t love dad. And truly we all loved Dad, so we showed it by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we couldn’t say, “Mom’s frustrated with Dad’s drinking,” because it might sound like Mom didn’t love Dad. And we all knew Mom loved Dad, so we respected them by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where I could never say, “I’m afraid I’m not good enough to be loved,” because it might sound like there was something wrong with me or my family’s ways. I knew I needed to do what others wanted in hopes of being loved, so I stayed silent… until gradually I forgot how to know what I felt.

As a child I grew to resemble an android navigating templates of what I thought others wanted me to do. Inside my polished shell, a sea of vibrant emotions and passions raged, a crazy frothing of all different colors longing to get out. I’d been taught to censor whatever didn’t fit the judgements my family held, but as my body grew up, forbidden urges sometimes burst out of me, shameful and bizarre compulsions that frightened me. I hid them. There was no way to integrate my outer good girl and that inner chaos – no way that I, at least could see.

Until here came the magic of alcohol. Alcohol dilated the zillion pores in my shell-like skin so the truth of me could gush out into the world, like it or not! Alcohol dissolved those walls of shoulds and musts, blasted to hell that relentless rubric of inner criticisms. I flowed; I fit; I flourished! Soon life had only two states: drinking, and waiting to drink. Naturally, I could never say, “I’m ill with alcoholism,” because that would cast aspersions on the one thing that made life livable.

Plus it would throw light on a family disease, declare that my father and I were equally ill. And the song we all knew, the chorus we sang whenever we still gathered, was all about how nothing was wrong with any of us – though plenty was wrong with outsiders.

But, as the years passed, my android shell, because it was made of unnatural materials and not grown from within, began to obsolesce – to fall apart. More and more it cracked at the joints – my elbows, my waist – so that my inner mess, which had churned around unsupervised through the years until all its vibrant colors merged to a muddy ugliness, began to spew on the sensible arrangements of my life. It smelled bad. It hurt people. But I told myself, “Ah, well! Everybody spews!”

Now the mess for alcohol to clear got heavier – landslides filled with large, trashed objects it had to plow aside to reopen the flow. And given that it had only masqueraded as love, but really grew from self-hate, it began to slack in its duties. The magic grew thin. And so I hit bottom. The keel of my consciousness ran aground on the rock of despair. I’d tried all I knew with all that I had and ended here: failure. Existence sucked. And Option B, to abandon ship, began to seem the saner solution.

But, wait… Wasn’t there something I’d forgotten? Hadn’t there been – before the android sealed me off, before my passions turned putrid – something? So distant a memory but faintly recalled – that once there was a time when I believed in… goodness. And now, if all roads were marked with skull and crossbones but one, a path signed “Goodness →,” would I follow it, no matter how cliché and pointlessly breakfast-cereal-box-maze-like it looked?

AA~?! Me, going to AA?! Ha! What a grim joke. These people’s problems were generic. Mine were unique. And yet, among all these stupid, brainwashed nobodies who failed to see the world rightly as my family did, around these cultish zealots with their scrolls of numbered steps and traditions on the walls, was I just imagining it, or was it in the air? Goodness. And maybe from under the floorboards, subsonic, maybe diffused in some elaborate code these people sprinkled through their words, that ancient, sacred radiance I’d long since dismissed as worthless: Love.

A plant with just one dangling leaf may still rejuvenate. Slowly, the love from these strangers permeated the cracked husks of my old armor. “You can lay that stuff down,” they smiled. “If you work these 12 steps and stand up in honesty with all your deformities and wounds exposed, the sunlight will heal them.”

Sunlight?! Of course I didn’t believe in sunlight! So what if I’d never even tried looking up! I saw stuff because it was there – not because of some hokey-ass Light Bulb in the sky! And yet, reluctantly, one piece at a time I shed those dented old plates and cuffs meant to protect me. Then I felt it: something warmed my skin, my face, and before I’d even realized it, my heart – sunlight! Colors revived, my sores healed, and the textures of the world that I’d been numb to for so long became vivid. I remembered how to play.

So began a lifelong inner expedition that continues to this day, bumbling around the dim passageways of my consciousness, discovering how I really feel, what I really love, and who I really am – each step illuminated by my own small lantern of sunlight, which I need to recharge daily. In the rooms of AA, Al-Anon, and ACA, I meet people who grew up in the very same house I did. Imagine that! They’ve given me field guides to flora and fauna to help me to identify those strange creatures I come across in my psyche, some older than I am, spawned by my ancestors.

My father died in regret, and my siblings text that I’m wrong – but I know joy, and I know its source. I’m now loved freely in a raucous, imperfect new family where I like to sing out loud – as you may have noticed!

This is the story I tell in my addiction memoir.

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October 14, 2014 · 9:21 am

Step 9: Mending the Past

I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Who the heck wants to read about amends? Nobody! I don’t even really want to write about them, but I’m going to trust, and ask you to trust, that taking a good look will reveal their beauty.

Angry-Woman So here’s the quandary. You may hear people in the rooms kicking around the question: “Who are amends for? Me or the other person?” I recall about a dozen years ago hearing a woman announce with contempt, “I’m not making this amends for her! I’m doing it for me!” Something sounded wrong in that, but I wasn’t sure what.

Sure, the steps are our pathway to freedom. But they work because they’re a pathway to change, not self-help. Didn’t we try every way of helping ourselves when we were drinking, doing whatever our monkey-brains thought would work best? And what happened? As I seem to recall, most of us ended up alone and fucking miserable. The fact is, self-help refers to motivational adjustments to an otherwise successful model of living, such as, “I’m going to exercise more!” or “I’m going to procrastinate less!” not, “I’m going to quit submerging my entire existence in a cesspool of self-disgust caused by senselessly poisoning myself on a daily basis!”

So, no. We don’t need self help. What we need is a transformation, a psychic change beyond anything we could engineer ourselves that redirects our energy toward maximum usefulness to god and our fellows. If Step 3 led us to stake the best 4th step inventory we could, if we’ve read it to a sponsor who’s made clear our faulty thinking, then something has shifted in us. In Steps 6 and 7, we opened to asking god to render us better human beings. Now we revisit our past in this new light.

When my sponsor asked me to generate compassion toward those I’d resented, it felt like she was asking for some crazy move of spiritual gymnastics. But really, all I had to do is acknowledge that I’ve fucked up many times myself, out of fear and pitfalls in thinking. Let’s say I was trying to protect my beloved A when I accidentally nudged B into the boiling oil. “Doh!” Or in reaching after that prized X, I forgot I was supposed to hold Y and let it fall into the mile-deep chasm. “Shit!” Maybe I heard the enticing, faint calls of J through the tall grass and, in stepping toward them, crushed underfoot the tiny, delicate K. “Oh, no! Poor K~!!”

Such botched moves fill at least 75% of my addiction memoir; they’re the stuff of which all our deepest conflicts are made. That’s why my double backward flip in the pike position comes about as I accept that you, like me, were doing only the best you could. Now watch this move in slo-mo: I decide to cut you the same slack I wish others might cut me – the slack to be human. It may take me days or years to get there, but eventually, your wrongs become moot. The focus closes in on the behavior I exhibited toward you. Would I want those wrongs carved on my tombstone? Do I want to carry them until then?

Remember, though, that 9 comes after 8, and “became ready” refers to more than just working up nerve. In early sobriety, I thought I was working Step 9 by writing impulsive letters to my ex’s and telling them way more than they needed to know. By contrast, when I worked Step 8 in earnest, my sponsor wrested my ways of thinking from old to new. For each person on my list, she crossed out and scribbled notes all over the accounts of harms I thought I’d caused, eliminating 75% of what I’d thought was the issue. Each time she had me…

1) highlight ONLY those behaviors and attitudes the person was well aware of, to avoid causing further harm

2) boil down the harms via the rubric of selfish, dishonest, thoughtless/inconsiderate

3) come up with one specific example to illustrate each

I was not to apologize. Rather, I was to articulate the behavior I’d shown and the ways it was wrong, and to ask what I might do to set it right. She said, “It’s like you left a turd lying somewhere in this person’s life. You swoop in, say, ‘I believe that’s mine!’, scoop up the turd, and ask if you got it all.”

Amends don’t mean you become buddy-roos with the person. And some may continue to lob fireballs at you, requiring you to maintain a safe distance. But when I’ve sat down with people from my past and owned, often with my voice shaking, my very human fuck-ups, I’ve witnessed in almost every one of them the blossoming grace of compassion. Many have spontaneously confessed fuck-ups of their own. And sometimes, in the pool of truth we shared for those moments, I would behold in them a dignity and beauty to which our old conflict had blinded me.

The 9th step means taking our new way of life out into the world and trusting god in a free fall. As I once heard it put: “I make amends to restore that person’s faith in basic human decency. And when I do that, I restore my own.”

peace

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October 7, 2014 · 7:27 am

Humility and Gratitude

“If you claim to have humility, you don’t have it.” That saying has some validity. But there’s a bigger picture here. Saying you have humility is a bit like saying you inhale. That is, it’s never a constant state we can hang onto, but part of a fundamental rhythm. I’m not really sure what the hell I’m saying here, but I’m going to keep writing.

We all have egos and self-will built in to help us hold our own in this hazardous world. It’s when they exceed their useful scope, as they often do for alcoholics, that we run into trouble. We become selfish and egotistical because those states seem to grant us power, to make us bigger and badder so we can vanquish whatever we fear (i.e. most of life). Unfortunately, what they really do is shut us off from faith in god – our only true recourse against fear.

Richard Rohr, in his discussion of the Twelve Steps (Breathing Underwater), quotes the bible in relation to Step 7. Now, don’t run screaming from this blog! I’m not a Christian and, trust me, not even a monotheist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize wisdom from a Franciscan friar who dares to challenge his church. Just roll with me a minute. Anyway, Rohr quotes Luke quoting Jesus: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” But he moves right along from there. He says it’s not the possession of stuff per se that blocks us from god, but an attitude of entitlement. “I am the shit!” is a stance that blocks us from spirit, as does its mirror image of self-c0nsumed self-pity, “I am a piece of shit.” Neither can co-exist with humility and faith.

The points Rohr asserts that I want to highlight are these: 1) That our truth is not in what we claim to believe, but in the way we live. 2) That we pray not in order to “change God” (i.e. kiss ass and win approval) but to “change ourselves.” 3) That prayer opens us to god, and that the gist of all prayer – here I’m paraphrasing – is essentially, I lack. I need you. Rohr writes,

So it is important that you ask, seek, and knock to keep yourself in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to you without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to… receive life at ever-deeper levels…

What really wakes me up is to substitute the word “sobriety” in place of “life,” above. Sobriety is indeed a gift, given to me freely every day. And it started on the day I turned to god and said simply, “I lack. I can’t do this. I need you.” Something shifted then, some channel opened that allowed god to help me do what I’d spent years and thousands of desperate, failed attempts trying to do: Get well. God, not I, removed my mania for drinking.

Prayer relinquishes the illusion that I can do life, including sobriety, on my own. As a spiritual being, I am intricately connected to both my Source and my fellows. Prayer acknowledges this, re-opening the channel. And it stays open at meetings if I listen knowing I can’t stay sober on my own. Here’s where that mixed nature of humility comes up. Truthfully, I go to meetings in a hybrid of mind frames. Part of me (ego) says, “I’m comin’ up on 20 freakin’ years, dude! I so know this drill!” Part of me (compassion) says, “I’m here to help the newcomer and those who are struggling.” But a key part of me – the seed of genuine humility – says, “I am here to be taught. I am here to listen to god speak through my fellow addicts; and whether they drank just this morning, are fresh out of prison, or have thirty years and sponsor a jillion alcoholics does not matter.”

Humility and gratitude are inextricably interwoven, and both are essential to the fabric of sobriety. Both can be cultivated in mindfulness – living in the simplicity of the present moment, saying to ourselves, “I am a living creature doing this here now,” and seeing, as Rohr says, that all of it is a gift we can love. Ego lives in the thought-movies that our minds play, in the loveless illusion that we make shit happen, in the Teflon of coolness that causes meaning and responsibility to slide off us until we’re only half alive. Ego refuses to appreciate that we are everywhere dependent on one another for survival, and on god for sanity (and everything).

One more note, though. It’s important, too, for me to cultivate humility about my own arrogance. Here’s my fav quote from Thomas Merton (another Christian, but oh well), part of which kicks off my addiction memoir:

This is the terrible thing about humility: that it is never fully successful… [O]ur humility consists in being proud and knowing all about it… and to be able to do so little about it. *

Pride goes with the turf…and Merton didn’t even Facebook!

The bottom line is, I’m human and I’m flawed. I have a big, gaping hole in my guts and an ego determined to fill it with bullshit. I can either grab at mood altering drugs, attention, food, merchandise, etc. to try to fill the hole ego’s way, or I can acknowledge my incompleteness, my flawed nature, and turn to god for help. I can do this not only about drinking, but about my unmanageable life in general. When I open with asking, when I am humble and admit I am wounded, I let god in. And god lets me flourish.

Love to you, alcoholic! Love to you, seeking person!

*Thomas Merton, Thoughts on Solitude, p. 59

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September 30, 2014 · 9:31 am

Not-Enoughness

A worthy life is simply one of honesty with oneself and god…

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I go through phases when I wake up almost every morning with a gut-level anxiety, a feeling of guilt that I’m somehow not doing all I’m supposed to, shame for lacking “success,” and alarm that I’m getting old at a mile a minute. My whole life, the feeling claims, is a failure. Before I’ve even sat up in bed, this “not-enoughness” jabs at my mind, prompting vague solutions that pop up like slot machine combos: “Earn more!” “Lose weight!” “Socialize more!”

Whether my not-enoughness, a default setting from childhood, will ever go away I don’t know. What’s changed is how I respond to it. Today I understand that it’s just a feeling launched by the part of me that’s still broken. I return its topspin tennis serve with a quick prayer: “God, please take this away and guide my thinking today.” While I put on my morning clothes and weigh myself, not-enoughness still chides at me. I dismiss it automatically and try to focus on the moment: gift of what I am doing, the good fortune of where I am, and the blessings of my reality. I commit to loving what is instead of lacking what isn’t.

The power for this practice comes from my god, a connection nurtured through many years of working all 12 Steps. Back when I relied on active drinking and codependency, I believed not only the not-enoughness, but the solutions my mind proposed. My high school refrain, “Excel more!” gradually morphed into “Be more liked!” If I could just win your admiration, I’d overcome not-enoughness. Sans alcohol I was terrified to converse with people, not realizing the main obstacle had to do with the coordinates of my head, which was firmly lodged up my ass. I could scarcely hear what you were saying, so preoccupied was I with self: what was up with me, what I thought you thought of me, and what I might say to impress you (usually figured out after you left). Sober socializing was, in short, torture.

Drinking, of course, fixed all that. It made me smart, funny, beautiful, and worthy. Sure, I was still biding my time while you talked, but who gave a shit? I’d get my turn to blab soon enough and, whether you were impressed or not, I, at least, was fine with whatever the fuck I’d just said. The drunker I got, the wider my range of just fine became. Maybe you didn’t care to hear about ex-partner’s sexual foibles, but fuck it! Lissen! It’s hilarious!

Moi, back in the day

The infatuation addiction detailed in my memoir was really just a souped-up version of that same dynamic, with all my need concentrated on a chosen, magical person whose admiration (or even company) worked like cocaine. Sadly, these worth-seeking projects frequently morphed into real relationships – meaning that the magic one, by committing, lost all magic. Subsequently, when attacks of not-enoughness struck, I had no “soon things will be different!” to counter it with. I could only muffle its penalty buzzer with more booze and great ideas. All I’d end up with was a wreckage of mishaps, huge amounts of money blown, and a hangover like a brain full of puss.

Sobriety has by no means been a picnic. I spent over two years dry and tortured – fleeing the conversation clusters after meetings with mutters of “fuck ’em!” – before I finally worked the steps and became teachable. Slowly teachable, that is: I spent nine years in a codependent cocoon focusing all my anxious attention, from the moment I woke, on fixing my partner’s “problems” and ignoring my own. Really, that morning gong of not-enoughness did not emerge for me as a distinct phenomenon until I found myself waking up alone. “What is this feeling?” I finally asked.

Self-knowledge may not save us from drinking, but it sure helps with other problems! The steps have transformed my economics of worth. The only worth I can feel, I understand now, is self-worth. I am the only agent who can generate that rebuttal to not-enoughness, no matter what anyone else may think of me. God has shown me how to cultivate self-esteem by doing estimable works. It has guided me to grow a loveable life by loving my life. It has taught me to connect with others more through my heart than my words.

Despite what the zillion ads we’re bombarded with would have us believe, a worthy life is simply one of honesty with oneself and god – whatever that may look like for the individual. For me, it means I do the best I can with what’s right in front of me and trust god that whenever a suitable door approaches, god will not only alert me, but open it. Why did I start up the small business I run today? Doors would not open to the 500+ jobs I tried for following my layoff, whereas with just one little ad, the business practically threw itself at me. Like incremental promotions at a firm called Happiness, Inc., small choices I’ve made have gradually steered my life away from money and prestige toward more time and freedom. Thrift at home is part of my work. True, I drive a beater and shop at Goodwill, but I also get to walk my 13-year-old son to school each morning, laughing about this and that. I get to write instead of wishing to. I see friends. I take loads of ballet classes, raise cute hens, and execute my own half-assed home repairs. Overall, my life today reflects the truth of who I am – a plenitude of what I value and a shortage of what I don’t. That’s the true test.

In fact, by the time I go to bed each night, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for my beautiful, rich, love-filled life. My only prayer is, “Thank you, god, for all of it. I love you.”

Tomorrow, I know, it all begins again.

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Tag Archives: AA

Doing the Opposite: A Christmas Story

Authenticity in the Rooms: Striking a Sober Balance

* Much of this book deals in depth with developmental psychology, but it’s still an interesting layman’s read.

**For more on Dry Drunk syndrome, see this great article by Liberty Ranch recovery.

The Codependent Alcoholic’s Quandary

Near Death and God Stuff