Slips, Inevitablity or Part of the Growth?

It is Labor Day here in the United States and if the typical course of events is to play out today, there will be much celebration, family and friend get-togethers and the usual holiday libations. If memory serves well those festivities will tend towards the over zealous and more inebriated and therefore are to be avoided or stood apart from by those of us in AA. And of course this morning's AA meeting, which was attended by at least sixty bright eyed drunks focused on the perils of holidays and the dangers of "slips".

The meeting was a beginners meeting and there were many in their first week of sobriety, some recently returned from 'experimenting' after periods of sobriety ("maybe I can have just one drink"), and others just joining the fellowship in order to achieve a modicum of peace in their lives trying to pick themselves up from the wreckage of some former existence. And the moderator turned the discussion to the topic of trying to avoid slips because, (and he quoted another AA from a few days before, "a drink isn't just a slip, it is a disaster"). And Emit shot his hand up to tell his story how he had after two sober years found himself romancing a drink in the most peculiar set of circumstances.

Emit had been two years sober, tidied up a previously codependent relationship, steadied his financial footing and generally regained years of whittling away of his physical and social life till he was well on the way to recovering a new life. So when he went on a date he felt he had his sobriety under control. She offered some wine and he felt he had this whole thing under control and would be able to take a glass of wine.

Two days later in jail, having committed a crime in a blackout, his fiscal and social equanimity in a shambles he now learned that he cannot trust himself with one glass of wine. Because, he now knows that that led to 4 liters of vodka, blackouts, violent behavior and the lock up.

There are those who maintain that slips are not a requirement for growth in the program and others who warn that there is no guarantee that if you go out you will ever come back in. My experience has led me to believe that for myself, I could not convince myself of the severity of my disease until I "slipped" once, twice, three times, each time the recovery being more difficult, each time the fall even farther, each time hitting bottom even harder. But for me, and for most others sobriety does not come without a spiritual awakening and until that point sobriety only means not drinking and that is just being a dry drunk.

Until I began to see that I needed to cleanse my soul, to look into the center of my being, sobriety meant and would mean very little to and for me. Until this last time when I saw the reason for being sober. Actually I did not "see" any reason at all but rather "felt" the need for sobriety... the "need" to live. And until that happened, I would have never appreciated or understood life without a drink.

So as to whether slipping is the 'organic' way that one achieves sobriety, there are many who will attest to the fact that it is not a requirement.But for those lost souls like myself, if we are lucky enough to find our will and need to live before alcoholism claims us, then slips probably are an organic and inevitable part of the cycle of recovery.

Because one can try to adopt the steps with all one's heart, but actually believing them to the point where you can save yourself is where the promise of AA meets that desperate hope for life.