DAY OF OUR LIVES
Every day brings something new to blame yourself for. Rather each day renews old opportunities to use old reasons to blame yourself for old things. Or better said, is that each day we look for ways to feel bad rather than feel good. It is almost a default position born from years of low estimations of self worth and often having circumstances and poor behavior confirm those low estimations.
Even when life is filled with all sorts of positive and life reaffirming things we often fall back on the negative. Like Naomi whose son found out that she had used cocaine and for which she had made ample amends. And now, for this, he was bummed. Had he not heard it before? Had he been asleep at the wheel when she brought out the cat o' nine tails, bared her back and showed him the scars?
And she started to really feel horrible having to hear now about how scandalized, and 'scarred' her son 'all of a sudden was'.
So she sat back and listened to his complaint, his pain and took it in. She took many deep breathes and finally came to an understanding with herself and shared that with our AA group that having made her amends, she had cleaned up her side of the street and had done that years ago and repeatedly. It was now time for her to move on and not re don the mantle of guilt that she had born for so long and worked so hard to rid herself of.
And Naomi decided that if her son needed to hold onto that anger, grief and rage, she offered to pay for any therapy sessions he might need to attack his problem, but would not go down that road again with him. A very healthy choice. And she makes that choice by bringing it to the group and letting it go so that she can restart her day, not dwell on the pain anymore and look forward to a more positive next twenty four hours.
Today in our Living Sober meeting we were reminded to live one day at a time, live in 24 hour intervals and remember to reset the day at any time. The importance of this is manifold. First, any mood does not have to last a full 24 hours; any mood that starts a day can be interrupted by restarting the day and terminating that bad feeling.
Living one day at a time is a chunk of life that any mind can wrap his head around. Staying sober for two days or two weeks or two years is no guarantee of sobriety for tomorrow. (One does not stay sober for two days, two weeks or two years.) I don't have to face an unknown piece of time that seems too daunting to contemplate, one that seems impossibly difficult to achieve. I only need to face a chunk of time that I can swallow and that can be this minute, this hour this day whatever is do-able. And then I can do it. And I don't have to count my time because I really only need to worry about the next twenty four hours. The past twenty four are just that, past and I can have three thousand past days but they won't help me stay sober tomorrow. Which is why everyone and I say that we are always new to the program because time may make things a bit easier, but I am only just one drink away from disaster.
I have to continually remind myself that my disease is very patient. So during one of my paroxysms of coughing recently, I had some errant thoughts of lying helplessly, alone on the floor and not being able to help myself. And when this happens, fear shoots through me practically paralyzing me. Thoughts of being bravely independent flee from my mind. Because I realize that I am at my most alone when I am gasping for and catching my breath, barely able to get enough O2 to sustain another gasp before hacking away again and my courage fleas like a pride scatters when the lion king approaches the kill.
I would truly love to be free of the horror of dependency but, if truth be told, I have been down that road of helplessness and it strikes terror in my heart. When I could not walk for the pain in my legs last year and called my wife for help and she initially refused I did not know what to do. Having been so used to her help, I did not understand what it was like to do for myself and it was terrifying to have to try to think it through alone. And it did not help that I was incoherent from fever and sepsis.
So I guess I just have to get used to being alone and being dependent upon the kindness of strangers. That seems so alien after forty years of interdependency in marriage and when I do think about it, it throws my mind down a rabbit hole with no bottom, and I find the pit of my stomach in my throat.
I don't always have these fears but when I do I go to the worst possible places with them and when that happens I have to be extra careful not to pity myself too much. Because the disease of alcoholism never sleeps. It is said that I have a disease that tells me that I don't have a disease. And that my disease is very patient, always waiting for situations when my guard is down (poor me, poor me, pour me a drink!) I have to be vigilant so that when I feel like this I have to tell on myself both to me and to my group.
And then I remember John at today's meeting saying that for awhile he had to keep kicking himself to remember to stop living in the problem and to start living in the solution. And I understand what that means but I'm not sure how that works. Because when the forces of the solutions conspire to prevent you from achieving that solution it is hard not to live in the problem because the solution isn't presenting itself despite all efforts to bring it to fruition .
But I guess that is what one day at a time is all about, because today all I see is all those lines of force aligned against a successful outcome and I guess I need to just take just one hurdle at a time to not over think, over dramatize and over negativize the outcome.
Because like a self fulfilling prophecy, I may be causing an effect that has not yet happened simply by over thinking the problem and over thinking the solution.
'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…'
© res 1/29/11
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
TRUST
Trust
In the context of the healing of the family during the throes of alcoholic mayhem and then the very precarious sobriety to follow, today's discussion talked about how families tend to recover from the trials of the alcoholic member. And it is or should be a given that when a family is involved with an alcoholic, the family itself should be considered a casualty of the disease as well as the alcoholic himself. Spouses have lived through raging behaviors of blackouts, physical abuse, absenteeism, emotional as well as physical, and infidelity both sexual and economic.
Trust is at an all time low and regaining trust is a journey not all marriages and families are able to recoup. And this happens because the depths that the alcoholic has sunk to and dragged the others in the family through can only be imagined; and the degree of sober familial forbearance can only be calculated based on the tolerance, love and faith and often sheer folly of the sober spouse.
And the dilemma that the alcoholic usually finds himself in is that after a brief time of sobriety (and by brief I mean by the calculation of the sober family members although this may seem an eternity to the alcoholic) he has a certain level of expectation of acceptance for his efforts in not drinking. He feels he should be acknowledged as being sober. And these feelings are expressed regardless of whether he is truly sober or not.
Because we know that being sober is a far cry from not drinking. We know that people may abstained from drinking for years but that they are anything but sober. For sobriety is a way of behaving and living not just what one ingests. True, the ingestion of inebriating substances prevents sober thinking and behavior, but the absence of drinking by itself does not promote sober thought and living.
In the Big Book chapter 'The Family Afterward' it cautions the newly not drinking drunk that getting the family back together is a work in progress. That work is haunted at every turn by the demons of the behavior of the drunk and the history of the family battles that came along with that history. As indicated above and as is related in every AA’s story, all recovery involves retrieval of trust, dignity, faith, honesty and truth. All of which have been in meager supply during the ravages of the trial of the alcohol war.
So the Big Book advises the family to be patient with the recovering alcoholic. He is brittle, can easily be damaged and has only tentative experience early on with truth and honesty, faith and dignity. But this chapter likewise cautions the alcoholic not to take advantage of the equally disadvantaged family that has been beaten down by his alcoholism by his lying, cheating and unfaithful behavior. This will ultimately cause sobriety to fail. Honesty and dignity is something that one should practice with oneself too. Practicing these principles in all your affairs will make for a better understanding in the family, but acting superior, as if the family did not understand sobriety or higher powers or God does not promote a healthy stable family environment.
We are told by our sponsors not to beat ourselves up, not to live in the past and in fact 'abandon all hope of a better past'. It just isn't going to happen. Repeated recriminations for things that cannot be changed is silly and hurtful to self and ultimately self defeating. We cannot make the past better, only the future. We must accept our past for what it was and live with it hoping that we will not repeat it in the future.
I particularly recall, that I first realized that I could get sober when I finally acknowledged that I could not change the things that had happened to me. I could not wish away my regrets. I could not be another me. My circumstances could not be other than what they were. I could, however, accept my life from this day forward and not waste another minute regretting the past.
I could stop blaming myself and everyone around me for the me I did not know and thought I could have been. I could stop drinking about that past and perhaps with some time, maybe I could think straight. And when that happened, I would be able to contemplate what I would do in the future based on the honest principles of truth, faith and love.
That was a nice thought and had I acted on that earlier in my drinking career I do believe that it would have worked. I might have succeeded in keeping my marriage intact. We are taught in AA to learn to accept a lot of things and to accept the fact that we are wrong in many ways in our daily lives and own up to these wrongs is a lesson not easily learned. We must learn to live better and more moral lives. Because in this life we have to grow and just being sorry for our behavior doesn't always cut it; we have to start to live soberly, not just not drink. (Had I learned this earlier in my life I might have save a marriage!)
So as Alice said, it is not alright to shoot someone and say you’re sorry and call that progress in AA. You must actually decide first not to shoot that someone...acceptance that not shooting someone is a GOOD THING.
I had started off the meeting acknowledging the regret that I had not sobered early enough to save my marriage. Although I am actually really angry when I think of the depths to which others in the program have sunk I find it astonishing that I remain unable to salvage my marriage yet they have salvaged theirs. And I know that it may be fruitless to compare but for my own sanity I have to get this out because like Lear, I feel I need to rail against the elements.
Mark says that he drank, did dope and was unfaithful to his wife. He did this for years. And during this time he promised over and over to get sober and yet he continued to bang other women and use dope etc. So when he finally did get sober and he developed some credibility and salvaged his marriage he is at a point where he is wondering what percentage of trust he has salvaged in his marriage. And today he speculated that if trust were measured on a 1-10 scale he thought that he may have salvaged a 5. But when he was talking to his wife just the other day, the quality of her questions to him made him understand, a full two years after their reconciliation, that the best he may have achieved is a 2.
And then Ethan who was prepared to divorce just a month ago has announced that he and his wife have agreed to postpone that and continue their separation in the hope that they will eventually reintegrate in six months. And this is after five years of dope, vodka and whores and weekends in hotel rooms. And he is just on cloud nine as a result of this development.
But he said in announcing this, in the same breath that his wife agreed to this, she speculated that he still had a girlfriend in his apartment and that he was still doing drugs and alcohol. Now whether she truly believes that or not or just wants to keep him on notice that her trust fuse is shorter than disbelief itself, is not clear but what is clear is that he does not have her unencumbered sentiments in his corner.
So family reintegration is a challenge that goes on like walking on broken glass for years, if we are to believe Bob, who has 20 years now. And his wife still comes out with a zinger or two just to let him know that trust is a commodity that is continually bought with good works. Any slips and the whole purchase must be reordered.
We alcoholics are fond of saying that we lost our right to drink a long time ago. And I guess that along with that is having lost the right to be accepted at face value without any skeptical eye. For we have earned peoples' healthy skepticism, with good reason. We have disappointed so many for so long that there is no easy way to regain that trust. They have no reason to expect a fair shake from us so we should not expect that they give us a fair shake in return where the issue of trust is concerned. We accomplished that the old fashioned way...we lost it.
© res 1/19/11
In the context of the healing of the family during the throes of alcoholic mayhem and then the very precarious sobriety to follow, today's discussion talked about how families tend to recover from the trials of the alcoholic member. And it is or should be a given that when a family is involved with an alcoholic, the family itself should be considered a casualty of the disease as well as the alcoholic himself. Spouses have lived through raging behaviors of blackouts, physical abuse, absenteeism, emotional as well as physical, and infidelity both sexual and economic.
Trust is at an all time low and regaining trust is a journey not all marriages and families are able to recoup. And this happens because the depths that the alcoholic has sunk to and dragged the others in the family through can only be imagined; and the degree of sober familial forbearance can only be calculated based on the tolerance, love and faith and often sheer folly of the sober spouse.
And the dilemma that the alcoholic usually finds himself in is that after a brief time of sobriety (and by brief I mean by the calculation of the sober family members although this may seem an eternity to the alcoholic) he has a certain level of expectation of acceptance for his efforts in not drinking. He feels he should be acknowledged as being sober. And these feelings are expressed regardless of whether he is truly sober or not.
Because we know that being sober is a far cry from not drinking. We know that people may abstained from drinking for years but that they are anything but sober. For sobriety is a way of behaving and living not just what one ingests. True, the ingestion of inebriating substances prevents sober thinking and behavior, but the absence of drinking by itself does not promote sober thought and living.
In the Big Book chapter 'The Family Afterward' it cautions the newly not drinking drunk that getting the family back together is a work in progress. That work is haunted at every turn by the demons of the behavior of the drunk and the history of the family battles that came along with that history. As indicated above and as is related in every AA’s story, all recovery involves retrieval of trust, dignity, faith, honesty and truth. All of which have been in meager supply during the ravages of the trial of the alcohol war.
So the Big Book advises the family to be patient with the recovering alcoholic. He is brittle, can easily be damaged and has only tentative experience early on with truth and honesty, faith and dignity. But this chapter likewise cautions the alcoholic not to take advantage of the equally disadvantaged family that has been beaten down by his alcoholism by his lying, cheating and unfaithful behavior. This will ultimately cause sobriety to fail. Honesty and dignity is something that one should practice with oneself too. Practicing these principles in all your affairs will make for a better understanding in the family, but acting superior, as if the family did not understand sobriety or higher powers or God does not promote a healthy stable family environment.
We are told by our sponsors not to beat ourselves up, not to live in the past and in fact 'abandon all hope of a better past'. It just isn't going to happen. Repeated recriminations for things that cannot be changed is silly and hurtful to self and ultimately self defeating. We cannot make the past better, only the future. We must accept our past for what it was and live with it hoping that we will not repeat it in the future.
I particularly recall, that I first realized that I could get sober when I finally acknowledged that I could not change the things that had happened to me. I could not wish away my regrets. I could not be another me. My circumstances could not be other than what they were. I could, however, accept my life from this day forward and not waste another minute regretting the past.
I could stop blaming myself and everyone around me for the me I did not know and thought I could have been. I could stop drinking about that past and perhaps with some time, maybe I could think straight. And when that happened, I would be able to contemplate what I would do in the future based on the honest principles of truth, faith and love.
That was a nice thought and had I acted on that earlier in my drinking career I do believe that it would have worked. I might have succeeded in keeping my marriage intact. We are taught in AA to learn to accept a lot of things and to accept the fact that we are wrong in many ways in our daily lives and own up to these wrongs is a lesson not easily learned. We must learn to live better and more moral lives. Because in this life we have to grow and just being sorry for our behavior doesn't always cut it; we have to start to live soberly, not just not drink. (Had I learned this earlier in my life I might have save a marriage!)
So as Alice said, it is not alright to shoot someone and say you’re sorry and call that progress in AA. You must actually decide first not to shoot that someone...acceptance that not shooting someone is a GOOD THING.
I had started off the meeting acknowledging the regret that I had not sobered early enough to save my marriage. Although I am actually really angry when I think of the depths to which others in the program have sunk I find it astonishing that I remain unable to salvage my marriage yet they have salvaged theirs. And I know that it may be fruitless to compare but for my own sanity I have to get this out because like Lear, I feel I need to rail against the elements.
Mark says that he drank, did dope and was unfaithful to his wife. He did this for years. And during this time he promised over and over to get sober and yet he continued to bang other women and use dope etc. So when he finally did get sober and he developed some credibility and salvaged his marriage he is at a point where he is wondering what percentage of trust he has salvaged in his marriage. And today he speculated that if trust were measured on a 1-10 scale he thought that he may have salvaged a 5. But when he was talking to his wife just the other day, the quality of her questions to him made him understand, a full two years after their reconciliation, that the best he may have achieved is a 2.
And then Ethan who was prepared to divorce just a month ago has announced that he and his wife have agreed to postpone that and continue their separation in the hope that they will eventually reintegrate in six months. And this is after five years of dope, vodka and whores and weekends in hotel rooms. And he is just on cloud nine as a result of this development.
But he said in announcing this, in the same breath that his wife agreed to this, she speculated that he still had a girlfriend in his apartment and that he was still doing drugs and alcohol. Now whether she truly believes that or not or just wants to keep him on notice that her trust fuse is shorter than disbelief itself, is not clear but what is clear is that he does not have her unencumbered sentiments in his corner.
So family reintegration is a challenge that goes on like walking on broken glass for years, if we are to believe Bob, who has 20 years now. And his wife still comes out with a zinger or two just to let him know that trust is a commodity that is continually bought with good works. Any slips and the whole purchase must be reordered.
We alcoholics are fond of saying that we lost our right to drink a long time ago. And I guess that along with that is having lost the right to be accepted at face value without any skeptical eye. For we have earned peoples' healthy skepticism, with good reason. We have disappointed so many for so long that there is no easy way to regain that trust. They have no reason to expect a fair shake from us so we should not expect that they give us a fair shake in return where the issue of trust is concerned. We accomplished that the old fashioned way...we lost it.
© res 1/19/11
Sunday, January 16, 2011
ARTICLES OF FAITH
ARTICLES OF FAITH
Responsibility for others weighs heavily upon me lately when I think about what I owe another drunk and another human being. The latter is a sort of generic obligation and the former is a rather specific obligation that because of personal circumstance, bestows a certain gravitas upon it. And the reasons I am ruminating over this is that every drunk in his recovery experience has to deal with his responsibility in dealing with himself and his promises to others in and about his alcoholism in the first instance and in having to deal with the promises made to him by other alcoholics in the second.
Each circumstance carries with it different ethical and obligational dilemmas. How does one feel or should one feel when you have promised to stay sober and you have, in fact, not? Well let's examine what actually happens when you do just that.
Imagine you have three months sobriety and along the way you have made a bevy of friends who are now rooting for you. They have taken you under their wing. Your sponsor has spent time with you, perhaps treated you to many breakfasts, sort of meetings after the meetings, the meetings where the real work of AA starts to get done. And others, who have befriended you have contributed, if nothing else, just time and friendship, evenings going to the movies, spent at home chatting over cake or coffee or both and even prepared a dinner or two.
And through your own grit and a lot of the good graces and pure good hearted spirit of people whose only personal benefit from your sobriety is that you remain sober and healthy and happy, you start to accumulate some sober time under your belt.
So this is the back drop. And against this scenario we have the very labyrinthine set of complex feelings and relations one starts to feel toward oneself and toward the people with whom you have had all these developing relationships.
And then you go out.
And let's put aside for a moment, the incredibly dense reasons for that happening, and look at the explosive feelings that this behavior generates both within yourself and within and among the friends that you have developed.
This sets up conflicting dilemmas for the people who are your friends. First they don't know what to say. Second they don't know what to believe. Third they don't know what to feel.
Say: They want to be encouraging but they also want to scream at you and ring your neck, they want to pet you on the head, pat you on the back and say that whatever your reason for going out they aren't good enough for staying out and you should return to the fold. They also want to give you the hardest dope slap they can deliver without causing brain damage. Why? So that you can remember what that feels like the next time you have any temptation to pick up a drink. Sense memory can be a powerful motivator.
Believe: What do they believe about your intentions to get and remain sober? And this goes to the heart of what we call trust. Do they trust you to be good to your word? If you say you will get sober will you? If you say you want to borrow 30 dollars will you pay them back? If you promise to pick them up at 5 o'clock will you? If you say you will be there when they need you for some critically important task will you?
Feel: How am I to feel about you now that you betrayed my trust in you; now that you betrayed your trust in you. You have made me feel like I have failed you. You have made me feel like a failure, and I had so much hope for you that your failure is my failure. And then I might begin to start to say 'why couldn't you just not drink or just stop drinking?' 'Almost forcing us to sound like civilians. You have made us sound like civilians and that's not fair!' HOW IS THAT FOR CRAZY THINKING.
The truth of the matter is that when you go out, there is a snowball effect not only on you and all of your feelings and relations between you and those closest to you but also between all those around you and you. And between all those around you and themselves. REMEMBER, THEY ARE ALCOHOLICS TOO AND THEY THINK ALCOHOLICALLY.
When you go out, they may not drink, but that does not stop them from thinking, and that thinking is in every way just as alcoholic as yours and may have as profound and devastating affects to their sober families that are not even yours.
So as Eugene Odum, the famous ecologist said, we weave and live in a 'web of life'. In AA, ours is a social web with profound psychological interstitial penetration from one AA to another. We are deeply interdependent, and as individualistic as we would love to believe ourselves to be, we can rarely escape the effects of each others' follies. Even the most peripheral of relations has some effect on distant relations in AA, not to mention the damage and joy they can have on those closest to us.
So it may be an extra burden on us to think of the responsibility that we bare when we join and participate in the fellowship. And the greater our success, the greater our responsibility to one another for that success, which comes from the life spirit of the fellowship. And it is an unspoken pledge that we make when we join the group that we will do everything in our power to do no harm. Like the Hippocratic oath, it undergirds not only how we should live, but how we do live.
©res 1/16/11
Responsibility for others weighs heavily upon me lately when I think about what I owe another drunk and another human being. The latter is a sort of generic obligation and the former is a rather specific obligation that because of personal circumstance, bestows a certain gravitas upon it. And the reasons I am ruminating over this is that every drunk in his recovery experience has to deal with his responsibility in dealing with himself and his promises to others in and about his alcoholism in the first instance and in having to deal with the promises made to him by other alcoholics in the second.
Each circumstance carries with it different ethical and obligational dilemmas. How does one feel or should one feel when you have promised to stay sober and you have, in fact, not? Well let's examine what actually happens when you do just that.
Imagine you have three months sobriety and along the way you have made a bevy of friends who are now rooting for you. They have taken you under their wing. Your sponsor has spent time with you, perhaps treated you to many breakfasts, sort of meetings after the meetings, the meetings where the real work of AA starts to get done. And others, who have befriended you have contributed, if nothing else, just time and friendship, evenings going to the movies, spent at home chatting over cake or coffee or both and even prepared a dinner or two.
And through your own grit and a lot of the good graces and pure good hearted spirit of people whose only personal benefit from your sobriety is that you remain sober and healthy and happy, you start to accumulate some sober time under your belt.
So this is the back drop. And against this scenario we have the very labyrinthine set of complex feelings and relations one starts to feel toward oneself and toward the people with whom you have had all these developing relationships.
And then you go out.
And let's put aside for a moment, the incredibly dense reasons for that happening, and look at the explosive feelings that this behavior generates both within yourself and within and among the friends that you have developed.
This sets up conflicting dilemmas for the people who are your friends. First they don't know what to say. Second they don't know what to believe. Third they don't know what to feel.
Say: They want to be encouraging but they also want to scream at you and ring your neck, they want to pet you on the head, pat you on the back and say that whatever your reason for going out they aren't good enough for staying out and you should return to the fold. They also want to give you the hardest dope slap they can deliver without causing brain damage. Why? So that you can remember what that feels like the next time you have any temptation to pick up a drink. Sense memory can be a powerful motivator.
Believe: What do they believe about your intentions to get and remain sober? And this goes to the heart of what we call trust. Do they trust you to be good to your word? If you say you will get sober will you? If you say you want to borrow 30 dollars will you pay them back? If you promise to pick them up at 5 o'clock will you? If you say you will be there when they need you for some critically important task will you?
Feel: How am I to feel about you now that you betrayed my trust in you; now that you betrayed your trust in you. You have made me feel like I have failed you. You have made me feel like a failure, and I had so much hope for you that your failure is my failure. And then I might begin to start to say 'why couldn't you just not drink or just stop drinking?' 'Almost forcing us to sound like civilians. You have made us sound like civilians and that's not fair!' HOW IS THAT FOR CRAZY THINKING.
The truth of the matter is that when you go out, there is a snowball effect not only on you and all of your feelings and relations between you and those closest to you but also between all those around you and you. And between all those around you and themselves. REMEMBER, THEY ARE ALCOHOLICS TOO AND THEY THINK ALCOHOLICALLY.
When you go out, they may not drink, but that does not stop them from thinking, and that thinking is in every way just as alcoholic as yours and may have as profound and devastating affects to their sober families that are not even yours.
So as Eugene Odum, the famous ecologist said, we weave and live in a 'web of life'. In AA, ours is a social web with profound psychological interstitial penetration from one AA to another. We are deeply interdependent, and as individualistic as we would love to believe ourselves to be, we can rarely escape the effects of each others' follies. Even the most peripheral of relations has some effect on distant relations in AA, not to mention the damage and joy they can have on those closest to us.
So it may be an extra burden on us to think of the responsibility that we bare when we join and participate in the fellowship. And the greater our success, the greater our responsibility to one another for that success, which comes from the life spirit of the fellowship. And it is an unspoken pledge that we make when we join the group that we will do everything in our power to do no harm. Like the Hippocratic oath, it undergirds not only how we should live, but how we do live.
©res 1/16/11
Thursday, January 13, 2011
THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE
THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE
Yesterday was an intense snow day. It was one of those snows that when you look out the window you see a blanket of white over everything . Upon walking outside a profound sense of silence settled on me, muffling the sound of the few cars that went by and almost no other sounds of nature birds or even the creaking of branches in the wind. It was like the world was talking through a pillow.
I got up early to go to my meeting yesterday morning but the best that I could do was clear the foot of snow off of the car, clear the windshield and dig an access path to the car door to warm it up. But I couldn’t clear a foot of snow from around the car and I did not want to risk a cardiac event, not being a shoveler in the best of times. The plow crew which on other occasions I had to beat to my car before they would actually plow me into my parking spot, I actually beat to the punch and they were nowhere to be found. And I later determined that I had awakened a good two hours before they arrived and was therefore unable to get to my meeting.
I felt bad since during the blizzard two weeks ago I easily (well it was a bit tougher than that) got to the meeting despite the fact that only I, John and Bill were able to make it to the meeting , and of course Cyrus, the 19 month 90 pound German Shepherd puppy. Well we were all a bit tired. But we did have our meeting, informal though it was.
So I was a bit nonplussed that on a relatively light snow day I could not get out of the driveway to get to my meeting and today it became even more troubling when I found out some additional information. Part of what was bothering me was that I had promised A that I would pick him up for the meeting. He did not have a ride and he was early in his sobriety (about three months) and he lives with an unrepentant drunk (his girlfriend) and is constantly on edge about the challenges to his sobriety. Well she had a snow day so she was going to stay in.
And two nights before, he had begged off dinner with me because his girlfriend was not ‘feeling well’, which I read as ‘was two sheets to the wind’ which is why I constantly offer A respites to have lunch, dinner, some time at least, with me. But for whatever reason he chooses to stay with her and ‘care’ for her.
Well on this snow morning when I had to beg off picking him up I offered to have him come to an evening meeting that I was chairing at a detox center that evening and then offered to pick him up earlier that afternoon to get him out of his apartment have dinner with me and away from his girlfriend. His answer was “absolutely” and I thought all would be well.
Then a text, “Alice going out to liqer store because not going to work which may mean I need to stick around” to which I replied “That may not be good for you but u gotta do what u gotta do, Let me know if you still want to do dinner and go to H—brk.”
And then silence for the rest of the day.
So I went out to do some shopping and while I was in the supermarket fighting the ghosts of shoppers past, I called again and there was no phone pickup so I left a message once again inviting him but stating that in the absence of a reply I would assume that he was not going to take me up on my offer. And a pall settled on my fairly good mood for a snowy afternoon. I began to be mildly concerned but sometimes you have to let things be.
And this morning I got a call. A chastened voice sounding from afar, A, sounding pretty miserable, stating that he did not feel particularly well and feeling obliged to call me that he drank yesterday. And not just one drink but a lot. But he needed to come clean with me since he knew that I had been trying to keep him sober in his trying circumstances, especially on the day I thought would be the most difficult for him. And he realized that.
Having been there myself before , I could not take him to task for this ,although I did want to reach through the phone wire and shake him by the shoulders. I had given him many chances yesterday to get out from under the thumb of temptation. But I know that we don’t just slip. Slips don’t just happen. Slips are planned. They aren’t planned yesterday, or the day before, or even consciously. His slip may have been planned since the previous snow storm. Who knows, but it started at the last temptation and Christ! It was delivered yesterday.
Could it have been avoided? I don’t know, for if I am correct, having put that much effort into subconsciously planning a slip how does the subconscious ego get satisfied unless the drink is actually consummated? I guess one has to become conscious that you have been working up to that drink all along and become grateful for having been saved from drinking in order for an intervention to work. Otherwise the intervention just becomes another resentment and sets the stage for the next 'slip' which will then not be long in coming.
So rather than lecturing A, I just reminded him that I have lived in that glass house too and also reminded him that I have been extending and continue to extend a helping hand. But it is up to him to reach out and take it. I cannot make a schoolchild learn having provided a school house. And I cannot make a drunk sober unless he wants to be sober. All I can do is offer the tools. He has to be willing to use them.
Daiyanu.
©res 1/13/11
Yesterday was an intense snow day. It was one of those snows that when you look out the window you see a blanket of white over everything . Upon walking outside a profound sense of silence settled on me, muffling the sound of the few cars that went by and almost no other sounds of nature birds or even the creaking of branches in the wind. It was like the world was talking through a pillow.
I got up early to go to my meeting yesterday morning but the best that I could do was clear the foot of snow off of the car, clear the windshield and dig an access path to the car door to warm it up. But I couldn’t clear a foot of snow from around the car and I did not want to risk a cardiac event, not being a shoveler in the best of times. The plow crew which on other occasions I had to beat to my car before they would actually plow me into my parking spot, I actually beat to the punch and they were nowhere to be found. And I later determined that I had awakened a good two hours before they arrived and was therefore unable to get to my meeting.
I felt bad since during the blizzard two weeks ago I easily (well it was a bit tougher than that) got to the meeting despite the fact that only I, John and Bill were able to make it to the meeting , and of course Cyrus, the 19 month 90 pound German Shepherd puppy. Well we were all a bit tired. But we did have our meeting, informal though it was.
So I was a bit nonplussed that on a relatively light snow day I could not get out of the driveway to get to my meeting and today it became even more troubling when I found out some additional information. Part of what was bothering me was that I had promised A that I would pick him up for the meeting. He did not have a ride and he was early in his sobriety (about three months) and he lives with an unrepentant drunk (his girlfriend) and is constantly on edge about the challenges to his sobriety. Well she had a snow day so she was going to stay in.
And two nights before, he had begged off dinner with me because his girlfriend was not ‘feeling well’, which I read as ‘was two sheets to the wind’ which is why I constantly offer A respites to have lunch, dinner, some time at least, with me. But for whatever reason he chooses to stay with her and ‘care’ for her.
Well on this snow morning when I had to beg off picking him up I offered to have him come to an evening meeting that I was chairing at a detox center that evening and then offered to pick him up earlier that afternoon to get him out of his apartment have dinner with me and away from his girlfriend. His answer was “absolutely” and I thought all would be well.
Then a text, “Alice going out to liqer store because not going to work which may mean I need to stick around” to which I replied “That may not be good for you but u gotta do what u gotta do, Let me know if you still want to do dinner and go to H—brk.”
And then silence for the rest of the day.
So I went out to do some shopping and while I was in the supermarket fighting the ghosts of shoppers past, I called again and there was no phone pickup so I left a message once again inviting him but stating that in the absence of a reply I would assume that he was not going to take me up on my offer. And a pall settled on my fairly good mood for a snowy afternoon. I began to be mildly concerned but sometimes you have to let things be.
And this morning I got a call. A chastened voice sounding from afar, A, sounding pretty miserable, stating that he did not feel particularly well and feeling obliged to call me that he drank yesterday. And not just one drink but a lot. But he needed to come clean with me since he knew that I had been trying to keep him sober in his trying circumstances, especially on the day I thought would be the most difficult for him. And he realized that.
Having been there myself before , I could not take him to task for this ,although I did want to reach through the phone wire and shake him by the shoulders. I had given him many chances yesterday to get out from under the thumb of temptation. But I know that we don’t just slip. Slips don’t just happen. Slips are planned. They aren’t planned yesterday, or the day before, or even consciously. His slip may have been planned since the previous snow storm. Who knows, but it started at the last temptation and Christ! It was delivered yesterday.
Could it have been avoided? I don’t know, for if I am correct, having put that much effort into subconsciously planning a slip how does the subconscious ego get satisfied unless the drink is actually consummated? I guess one has to become conscious that you have been working up to that drink all along and become grateful for having been saved from drinking in order for an intervention to work. Otherwise the intervention just becomes another resentment and sets the stage for the next 'slip' which will then not be long in coming.
So rather than lecturing A, I just reminded him that I have lived in that glass house too and also reminded him that I have been extending and continue to extend a helping hand. But it is up to him to reach out and take it. I cannot make a schoolchild learn having provided a school house. And I cannot make a drunk sober unless he wants to be sober. All I can do is offer the tools. He has to be willing to use them.
Daiyanu.
©res 1/13/11
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
NOSTALGIA NEEDS SERVICE
NOSTALGIA NEEDS SERVICE
I am getting a lonely nostalgia lately as the sale of my house becomes imminent. I don't exactly know why since I haven't lived there in two years but I guess I have secretly harbored the thought that I may have returned there at some time. And the thought that it would be gone lends a certain permanence to my marital separation; a separation which I had thought I was quite 'sanguine' about for quite some time now. Because throughout this 'separation', I have always had access to the house, however limited, and despite all of the rights to it which I have given up. I was always granted access to use the laundry, to get to 'things' and to see the dogs and the 'kid' when she was home and I guess when the wife wanted or needed me there.
But in a few months, at most five, it will have been sold. And when the wife finally gets another house, it will be all hers and I will, for the first time in over thirty years, be property less. Growing up in Brooklyn, I never originally grew up wedded to the idea of property. I had always been an apartment dweller. But now that the greater part of my life has been spent as the landed rather than the landless gentry, it feels strange. I mean, I don't even own land anymore, having ceded the last of it to my friend in order to pay debts.
And the magnitude of the fall from 'Grace', if that is what you could call it, is finally becoming real to me. Why this should be, I am not sure and I suppose it is just a brief phase of adjustment that I have to go through, a period that I had not previously anticipated because I had not truly lived through it before.
'One day at a time' had not truly prepared me for this. Not that it hasn’t. But I had not yet lived through that stage of loss for this particular occasion and now since it is coming I guess I have to prepare myself for it.
I'm glad and fortunate that I recognized this on this snowy morning, not only fighting the fatigue of a poor night's sleep but the fatigue of pushing a foot of snow away from my car before the snow plow got to my driveway this morning in my vain attempt to get to my AA meeting this morning. So I am physically exhausted as well and then these thoughts of loss wheedle their way into my mind and bore into my serenity like a boll weevil undermining my well being and mental quietude. And I leave my car, freed from the snow but I personally feel imprisoned by these new thoughts of loss.
So 'move a muscle change a thought' as one of the adages goes and I called Aaron to ask him to come with me to the meeting that I am going to chair at Holbrook tonight. It is the first time that I am doing this as a service commitment. It is to volunteer to present the AA program to newly detoxed residents of this in patient psych unit and introduce them to the tenets of AA and what we offer, from my personal perspective.
After all, I cannot truly proselytize. I'm no good at that. I'm not born again, I just personally found myself, not religion. I can only present my story of how I found how to deal with my own alcoholism and how they might deal with their addictions.
I had been to this meeting run by John last week and these were surely a raw group of individuals, not just wet behind the ears but still with wrinkles on the skin. These people still did not have all of their faculties about them. It is sometimes difficult to reach folks who have trouble thinking because they are still in a drug induced fog. They are not quite mentally ambulatory. But you have to start somewhere and sometime and that is why I am volunteering. But I would be less than honest if I said that I was confident in my ability to sway or convince anyone of the benefits of AA. And then I have to remind myself that AA is 'not a program for people who need it, but a program for people who want it'. I can only do my best to introduce what AA stands for and offers and then they have to want it. I'm not selling anything. That is the advantage I have when I walk out of that conference room at the end of the hour. I am truly my own audience.
But going there tonight will help me not only to stay sober, but it will help Aaron who will go with me, to stay sober also. It will also enable me to deal with these troubling feelings that I have so ably squelched during this past year and now have to deal with because events are rapidly coming to a head on its own time table not mine. So I have to begin to deal with it on its own terms.
Not so hard when you recognize it, acknowledge it, deal with it and place it in its proper cubby hole and go on with your own life.
© res 1/11/11
I am getting a lonely nostalgia lately as the sale of my house becomes imminent. I don't exactly know why since I haven't lived there in two years but I guess I have secretly harbored the thought that I may have returned there at some time. And the thought that it would be gone lends a certain permanence to my marital separation; a separation which I had thought I was quite 'sanguine' about for quite some time now. Because throughout this 'separation', I have always had access to the house, however limited, and despite all of the rights to it which I have given up. I was always granted access to use the laundry, to get to 'things' and to see the dogs and the 'kid' when she was home and I guess when the wife wanted or needed me there.
But in a few months, at most five, it will have been sold. And when the wife finally gets another house, it will be all hers and I will, for the first time in over thirty years, be property less. Growing up in Brooklyn, I never originally grew up wedded to the idea of property. I had always been an apartment dweller. But now that the greater part of my life has been spent as the landed rather than the landless gentry, it feels strange. I mean, I don't even own land anymore, having ceded the last of it to my friend in order to pay debts.
And the magnitude of the fall from 'Grace', if that is what you could call it, is finally becoming real to me. Why this should be, I am not sure and I suppose it is just a brief phase of adjustment that I have to go through, a period that I had not previously anticipated because I had not truly lived through it before.
'One day at a time' had not truly prepared me for this. Not that it hasn’t. But I had not yet lived through that stage of loss for this particular occasion and now since it is coming I guess I have to prepare myself for it.
I'm glad and fortunate that I recognized this on this snowy morning, not only fighting the fatigue of a poor night's sleep but the fatigue of pushing a foot of snow away from my car before the snow plow got to my driveway this morning in my vain attempt to get to my AA meeting this morning. So I am physically exhausted as well and then these thoughts of loss wheedle their way into my mind and bore into my serenity like a boll weevil undermining my well being and mental quietude. And I leave my car, freed from the snow but I personally feel imprisoned by these new thoughts of loss.
So 'move a muscle change a thought' as one of the adages goes and I called Aaron to ask him to come with me to the meeting that I am going to chair at Holbrook tonight. It is the first time that I am doing this as a service commitment. It is to volunteer to present the AA program to newly detoxed residents of this in patient psych unit and introduce them to the tenets of AA and what we offer, from my personal perspective.
After all, I cannot truly proselytize. I'm no good at that. I'm not born again, I just personally found myself, not religion. I can only present my story of how I found how to deal with my own alcoholism and how they might deal with their addictions.
I had been to this meeting run by John last week and these were surely a raw group of individuals, not just wet behind the ears but still with wrinkles on the skin. These people still did not have all of their faculties about them. It is sometimes difficult to reach folks who have trouble thinking because they are still in a drug induced fog. They are not quite mentally ambulatory. But you have to start somewhere and sometime and that is why I am volunteering. But I would be less than honest if I said that I was confident in my ability to sway or convince anyone of the benefits of AA. And then I have to remind myself that AA is 'not a program for people who need it, but a program for people who want it'. I can only do my best to introduce what AA stands for and offers and then they have to want it. I'm not selling anything. That is the advantage I have when I walk out of that conference room at the end of the hour. I am truly my own audience.
But going there tonight will help me not only to stay sober, but it will help Aaron who will go with me, to stay sober also. It will also enable me to deal with these troubling feelings that I have so ably squelched during this past year and now have to deal with because events are rapidly coming to a head on its own time table not mine. So I have to begin to deal with it on its own terms.
Not so hard when you recognize it, acknowledge it, deal with it and place it in its proper cubby hole and go on with your own life.
© res 1/11/11
CHARACTERISTICS OF RECOVERY
CHARACTERISTICS OF RECOVERY
Recovery can only begin when the problem of alcoholism is recognized and once recognized then acknowledged. Between acknowledgment and recovery is acceptance and between recognition and recovery people experience many frightening emotions among which are fear, anger, shame, and resentment of the problem. And all of these sentiments must be experienced before one can acknowledge and accept one's problem as a disease and diagnosis. This goes for the professional recognizing his own problem as well as his ability to guide his patients through these spelunking tours of the mind and soul. And as physicians it is important to acknowledge our limitations here if we are not up to the task of guiding our charges through territory that we have no professional training in. And I refer here, of course, to that task of guiding our patients in the path of spirituality.
By spirituality I do not mean religion because there are few among us truly qualified for that vocation and even fewer among our afflicted who would accept such advice particularly from their physician. Rather they should seek this from their religious leader. But a spiritual leader is another thing, and that could be anything and anybody who 'delivers the goods' as it were.
In my case I have been guided by reformed drug addicts, old hippies, women who have walked the streets and almost died at the point of a gun or knife but have found a higher power of their understanding that has brought them out of the depth of that bondage to substance and negative thinking. How were they able to do this when my psychiatrist, after ten years could not even touch areas that they reached?
Well I could tell their story but I am most familiar with mine and through mine I will go through those milestones of emotions that were required of me to get to acceptance so that I could begin to recover in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous . And I will state flat out that as I said above, you can stop drinking but that doesn't mean you are sober. And recall that the major part of alcoholism is that it is a 'thought disorder' and it cannot be cured by medication, at least not any medication that has yet been formulated. It is a thought disorder characterized by magical thinking, confabulative behaviors, wishful thinking, and poorly grounded reality. And without constant vigilance very easily is side tracked from the road of normal behavior onto the side rail of disastrous behaviors and ultimate death. And only by adopting new meaningful superego characteristics can one begin to live a normal life.
Some are able to achieve this with intensive individual psychotherapy but the gentler, more supportive, and enduring way is through the group efforts of being with others who suffer from the same malady, who have succeeded where you haven't and can offer that support any time of the day or night when the urge to drink should occur. Because we cannot rely on normal people for our sobriety. They don't get it. They may sympathize, they may empathize but ultimately we are a mystery to them and they do not have the least inkling what we go through and there is no point in trying to get them to understand. At best, they can take our word for it and have them step aside when the time comes for them to give their understanding of us 'to the care of their God as they understand him'.
So if it seems that I am advocating that we as professionals throw up our hands and say that we cannot treat alcoholics I am saying that is only true to the extent that we do not know how to include bringing spirituality into our practice. And maybe Blue Cross Blue Shield does not reimburse for this specifically but it is counseling none the less. But we must realize, however, that we do not receive this training in medical school or post graduate medical education. That is where professionals who are also 'in the program' are at a distinct advantage . If we have 'gotten it' we have learned the tools of the program in the program and we have learned how to pass it on and give it away.
Not everyone wants to be a member of AA, and I understand that. But they should at least have the benefit of the AA perspective so that once they leave your care they will have the opportunity to check out other systems of recovery. Those who will be most successful will return to the 12 steps and their principles, because those principle are a design for living and that is the new prescription that we are writing when we begin to treat our new charges.
FEAR
Fear is so basic to life it almost goes without saying that a life without fear is like a day without sunshine. It drives so much of life that is both good as well as destructive. Fear of poverty drives us to work, and fear of economic insecurity drives us to ever more lucrative forms of remunerative livelihood so that we may accumulate 'things and more things' until we are buried by our trinkets. Instead of us choosing to choose things in life, things start to choose how we live our lives. And when we have to then pay the mortgage, the car payments and are forced to stay in employment situations that are no longer any fun or are downright unpleasant, we get pissed off. But we are afraid because we have accumulated a life time’s worth of things and attention must be paid to all the bills that we have accumulated along the way; and we are afraid of the destitution that it would mean if we just threw up our hands had we wanted to just chuck it all. So the fear begets pissed ‘offedness’, or in other words anger.
ANGER
Anger is what I felt about everything in my life . My life was governed by anger and it wasn't just because I was angry that I was drinking or that I was afraid that I was alcoholic. I was angry that I had to pay the monthly mortgage that was so high. I was angry that I had made lousy investments. I was angry at the profession that I was working in or at the particular job or hell, that I had to work at all! And so I drank. So that I did not have to feel anger. And at first that helped. But of course that did not change the job, the bills, the work and so I drank some more. Until I was angry when I could not drink because I had to work. And then the cycle of anger, a drink to calm the anger, agitation when the drink wore off, more anger and on and on. Emotion feeding upon alcohol feeding upon emotion. All this usually led to family strife in the form of minor skirmishes, challenges over how money is spent, sexual relations and then finally the challenge that I drank too much itself. And of course I denied it. (Denial is a diagnostic sign, a sine qua non, of alcoholism taken up in other chapters, but certainly germane here and in any discussion of the diagnosis of alcoholism and its treatment). But when denial cannot be denied anymore shame sets in.
SHAME
And shame almost makes everything too hard to bare. You (I) look at yourself in the mirror and cannot believe that I (you) behaved that way, spent money, treated others, and ultimately drank that way. And you feel all alone not knowing what to do or where to go or who to turn to. And you can't turn to those who are closest to you because 1) you have alienated them already and 2) they really don't understand what is going on in your head so any help they could give you, even in their kindest most helpful moments, would be well -intentioned dribble. It would be completely off the mark. As my wife said, she gave up helping me because every time she tried to help, things came out worse and she finally realized that she could not help; it could only turn our worse regardless of her good intentions. So I began to resent the situation, my life, my family, my world.
RESENTMENT
This is the emotional state that can truly derail the whole process because it is at this point where we realize that there is something wrong, and things have been tried, some perhaps with some success but, as noted, with inevitable failure. And it is here that the towel can get thrown in. We get exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually. We see no end to this and things truly look black and at this point and we go into deep despair. Without help or hope many of us seek an out through suicide. And if we are not careful as patients and with our patients, we may become lost or lose our patients. A critical stage. We must guide our charges from this stage to understand that we can give these resentments up if we acknowledge the problem of alcoholism and accept a new path to rehabilitation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND ACCEPTANCE
Until now I have been working, what in AA would be getting to, step 1, Admitting that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. Having admitted the former we have acknowledged a great deal and with that is implied that if we want to heal we will be willing to do anything to get better. If we are truly honest with ourselves and have realized that we have tried so many ways of getting sober and that none have worked, perhaps we are now willing to try another way and that is to admit that there is a power, ANY power greater than myself that I can believe in to help restore me to sanity. Whatever that power is, it must be out there and it can help me as it has helped others. (step 2) Others may call this power God, I can call this a power, a Higher power of My Understanding and I believe that I can give myself up to the CARE of this power whatever it may be. (I may choose to believe it is the greater conscience of the people in the Rooms of AA and the spirit of the program as I personally believe). (Step 3).
So what does all this mumbo jumbo mean? I understand it to mean (and others have a different interpretation) that I cannot do this thing called alcohol recovery by myself but I will go to any length to lick this problem and I believe that a higher power which I choose to call the spirit of the people in the rooms of AA can help me to do it. And I give myself up to the care of that spirit. (Not to a religion or a god but for me a philosophy of life, a modus vivendi, a way of looking at the world and living in it, to live by certain principles which I will say are consonant with the principles of the Golden Rule.
And what I have described for me is like a reset switch. A moral reset switch if you will, that puts aside all of the mired, frenzied challenged behavior of my past and places it on a shelf for consideration at a later time (later steps of the program) and starts my life afresh. It is a kick start. I cannot restart my life with all of the twisted baggage of my former life. I must leave that in the past and set myself to learn or relearn the NEW principles of life in order to move forward to enter the sober life ahead. Why is this so?
Alcohol has lead me (us) into very morally challenged murky waters. At times we were truly not responsible for the scrapes that we got into because the alcohol masked our moral compasses and sent us on the wrong heading. Without the haze of alcohol we have had to obtain a new compass. And that compass may lead us back to territories which may revisit old behaviors and history and we must be able to face them with a clean and clear mind, fully ready to accept responsibility for our actions and to make amends when they are appropriate.
This is the new spiritual basis of the program and we cannot get this through psychotherapy, drug therapy, jail, hypnosis or acupuncture. But it is the only true new design for living out there and for those who truly learn to follow the principles and practice them in all their daily affairs, you will find a true guide to a new life design.
© res 1/10/11
Recovery can only begin when the problem of alcoholism is recognized and once recognized then acknowledged. Between acknowledgment and recovery is acceptance and between recognition and recovery people experience many frightening emotions among which are fear, anger, shame, and resentment of the problem. And all of these sentiments must be experienced before one can acknowledge and accept one's problem as a disease and diagnosis. This goes for the professional recognizing his own problem as well as his ability to guide his patients through these spelunking tours of the mind and soul. And as physicians it is important to acknowledge our limitations here if we are not up to the task of guiding our charges through territory that we have no professional training in. And I refer here, of course, to that task of guiding our patients in the path of spirituality.
By spirituality I do not mean religion because there are few among us truly qualified for that vocation and even fewer among our afflicted who would accept such advice particularly from their physician. Rather they should seek this from their religious leader. But a spiritual leader is another thing, and that could be anything and anybody who 'delivers the goods' as it were.
In my case I have been guided by reformed drug addicts, old hippies, women who have walked the streets and almost died at the point of a gun or knife but have found a higher power of their understanding that has brought them out of the depth of that bondage to substance and negative thinking. How were they able to do this when my psychiatrist, after ten years could not even touch areas that they reached?
Well I could tell their story but I am most familiar with mine and through mine I will go through those milestones of emotions that were required of me to get to acceptance so that I could begin to recover in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous . And I will state flat out that as I said above, you can stop drinking but that doesn't mean you are sober. And recall that the major part of alcoholism is that it is a 'thought disorder' and it cannot be cured by medication, at least not any medication that has yet been formulated. It is a thought disorder characterized by magical thinking, confabulative behaviors, wishful thinking, and poorly grounded reality. And without constant vigilance very easily is side tracked from the road of normal behavior onto the side rail of disastrous behaviors and ultimate death. And only by adopting new meaningful superego characteristics can one begin to live a normal life.
Some are able to achieve this with intensive individual psychotherapy but the gentler, more supportive, and enduring way is through the group efforts of being with others who suffer from the same malady, who have succeeded where you haven't and can offer that support any time of the day or night when the urge to drink should occur. Because we cannot rely on normal people for our sobriety. They don't get it. They may sympathize, they may empathize but ultimately we are a mystery to them and they do not have the least inkling what we go through and there is no point in trying to get them to understand. At best, they can take our word for it and have them step aside when the time comes for them to give their understanding of us 'to the care of their God as they understand him'.
So if it seems that I am advocating that we as professionals throw up our hands and say that we cannot treat alcoholics I am saying that is only true to the extent that we do not know how to include bringing spirituality into our practice. And maybe Blue Cross Blue Shield does not reimburse for this specifically but it is counseling none the less. But we must realize, however, that we do not receive this training in medical school or post graduate medical education. That is where professionals who are also 'in the program' are at a distinct advantage . If we have 'gotten it' we have learned the tools of the program in the program and we have learned how to pass it on and give it away.
Not everyone wants to be a member of AA, and I understand that. But they should at least have the benefit of the AA perspective so that once they leave your care they will have the opportunity to check out other systems of recovery. Those who will be most successful will return to the 12 steps and their principles, because those principle are a design for living and that is the new prescription that we are writing when we begin to treat our new charges.
FEAR
Fear is so basic to life it almost goes without saying that a life without fear is like a day without sunshine. It drives so much of life that is both good as well as destructive. Fear of poverty drives us to work, and fear of economic insecurity drives us to ever more lucrative forms of remunerative livelihood so that we may accumulate 'things and more things' until we are buried by our trinkets. Instead of us choosing to choose things in life, things start to choose how we live our lives. And when we have to then pay the mortgage, the car payments and are forced to stay in employment situations that are no longer any fun or are downright unpleasant, we get pissed off. But we are afraid because we have accumulated a life time’s worth of things and attention must be paid to all the bills that we have accumulated along the way; and we are afraid of the destitution that it would mean if we just threw up our hands had we wanted to just chuck it all. So the fear begets pissed ‘offedness’, or in other words anger.
ANGER
Anger is what I felt about everything in my life . My life was governed by anger and it wasn't just because I was angry that I was drinking or that I was afraid that I was alcoholic. I was angry that I had to pay the monthly mortgage that was so high. I was angry that I had made lousy investments. I was angry at the profession that I was working in or at the particular job or hell, that I had to work at all! And so I drank. So that I did not have to feel anger. And at first that helped. But of course that did not change the job, the bills, the work and so I drank some more. Until I was angry when I could not drink because I had to work. And then the cycle of anger, a drink to calm the anger, agitation when the drink wore off, more anger and on and on. Emotion feeding upon alcohol feeding upon emotion. All this usually led to family strife in the form of minor skirmishes, challenges over how money is spent, sexual relations and then finally the challenge that I drank too much itself. And of course I denied it. (Denial is a diagnostic sign, a sine qua non, of alcoholism taken up in other chapters, but certainly germane here and in any discussion of the diagnosis of alcoholism and its treatment). But when denial cannot be denied anymore shame sets in.
SHAME
And shame almost makes everything too hard to bare. You (I) look at yourself in the mirror and cannot believe that I (you) behaved that way, spent money, treated others, and ultimately drank that way. And you feel all alone not knowing what to do or where to go or who to turn to. And you can't turn to those who are closest to you because 1) you have alienated them already and 2) they really don't understand what is going on in your head so any help they could give you, even in their kindest most helpful moments, would be well -intentioned dribble. It would be completely off the mark. As my wife said, she gave up helping me because every time she tried to help, things came out worse and she finally realized that she could not help; it could only turn our worse regardless of her good intentions. So I began to resent the situation, my life, my family, my world.
RESENTMENT
This is the emotional state that can truly derail the whole process because it is at this point where we realize that there is something wrong, and things have been tried, some perhaps with some success but, as noted, with inevitable failure. And it is here that the towel can get thrown in. We get exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually. We see no end to this and things truly look black and at this point and we go into deep despair. Without help or hope many of us seek an out through suicide. And if we are not careful as patients and with our patients, we may become lost or lose our patients. A critical stage. We must guide our charges from this stage to understand that we can give these resentments up if we acknowledge the problem of alcoholism and accept a new path to rehabilitation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND ACCEPTANCE
Until now I have been working, what in AA would be getting to, step 1, Admitting that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. Having admitted the former we have acknowledged a great deal and with that is implied that if we want to heal we will be willing to do anything to get better. If we are truly honest with ourselves and have realized that we have tried so many ways of getting sober and that none have worked, perhaps we are now willing to try another way and that is to admit that there is a power, ANY power greater than myself that I can believe in to help restore me to sanity. Whatever that power is, it must be out there and it can help me as it has helped others. (step 2) Others may call this power God, I can call this a power, a Higher power of My Understanding and I believe that I can give myself up to the CARE of this power whatever it may be. (I may choose to believe it is the greater conscience of the people in the Rooms of AA and the spirit of the program as I personally believe). (Step 3).
So what does all this mumbo jumbo mean? I understand it to mean (and others have a different interpretation) that I cannot do this thing called alcohol recovery by myself but I will go to any length to lick this problem and I believe that a higher power which I choose to call the spirit of the people in the rooms of AA can help me to do it. And I give myself up to the care of that spirit. (Not to a religion or a god but for me a philosophy of life, a modus vivendi, a way of looking at the world and living in it, to live by certain principles which I will say are consonant with the principles of the Golden Rule.
And what I have described for me is like a reset switch. A moral reset switch if you will, that puts aside all of the mired, frenzied challenged behavior of my past and places it on a shelf for consideration at a later time (later steps of the program) and starts my life afresh. It is a kick start. I cannot restart my life with all of the twisted baggage of my former life. I must leave that in the past and set myself to learn or relearn the NEW principles of life in order to move forward to enter the sober life ahead. Why is this so?
Alcohol has lead me (us) into very morally challenged murky waters. At times we were truly not responsible for the scrapes that we got into because the alcohol masked our moral compasses and sent us on the wrong heading. Without the haze of alcohol we have had to obtain a new compass. And that compass may lead us back to territories which may revisit old behaviors and history and we must be able to face them with a clean and clear mind, fully ready to accept responsibility for our actions and to make amends when they are appropriate.
This is the new spiritual basis of the program and we cannot get this through psychotherapy, drug therapy, jail, hypnosis or acupuncture. But it is the only true new design for living out there and for those who truly learn to follow the principles and practice them in all their daily affairs, you will find a true guide to a new life design.
© res 1/10/11
Saturday, January 1, 2011
GRACE
GRACE
I have known J, my cousin, for the past sixty two years and I have never known her to complain about anything - anything. I have rarely seen her in bad humor and God knows she has had ample reason to be in bad humor. When we were little kids, well that was the last time I saw her run. I think that was when she was about ten years old and I was perhaps four? and she was running and jumping like a normal kid. Do I really remember that or am I just remembering the old films that my father took that I recall seeing? No matter, those are my memories and she was smiling and from the stories that we talk about on summer evenings at her home at Montauk she is always impish about how she would misbehave with grandma, playing on her sympathies and getting her to play favorites.
Who knows whether that worked but she was always scheming and living and laughing and getting along; living and not thinking about what she couldn't do but what she could do and perhaps what she could also get away with. That was the kind of impish attitude that she had which served her well during her youth into adulthood.
Always an independent spirit, she insisted on living in her own apartment in Manhattan, she had a career as a laboratory technician; this in a person who has a degenerative condition that gradually caused her to lose the fine motor function of her hands fingers and ultimately the upper and lower extremities. But she maintained a position in the clinical laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital well into her thirties until her abilities failed, and she needed to seek a new outlet for her prodigious curiosity and talent. And now when the nineteen eighties approached and the era of disability awareness was neigh, she jumped on that horse with all of the athleticism of a pro.
J never wavered and went on to take up career counseling at Long Island University where she became tenured. When I first heard of this I thought, 'well those who can do and those who can't counsel'. (What a presumptuous idiot I was!) She was so much ahead of the game! And all during this political ferment she met and married D, that court jester of a man who has brought the kind of light to her life and mine that is measured in decades of friendship.
During the years that passed, J's condition has deteriorated but she has adapted, with automated wheelchairs, special home help, and special home appliances. Her life has been more difficult than my life but she knows how to live hers with more grace than I ever learned how to live mine.
And D has not been free of the tsuris that has plagued his family . Back in the eighties while D and I were walking in a field with a slight incline, I noticed the difficulty he had in getting up the hill and that began his long struggle and decline with a lower extremity neuromuscular weakness of mysterious origin. It's still pretty much an unknown and there certainly is no treatment, so that in addition to his burden of having to care for J, with her infirmities, he has his own to contend with and yet I have never seen him complain with anything less than good humor. A shrug and a sigh and some resignation perhaps. Not to say there haven't been moments of sheer terror in his life from the unknown aspects of this disease but the acceptance of life that both he and J have undergone is truly remarkable and typically found in people who are much more spiritual than they. And yet here they are!
Some relatives are relatives, I have friends in J and D for the past thirty five years; people of intellect, joy, humor and just plain fun. And sometimes when I hear people complain about how much pain, mental or physical they may be in I just think about J and D and think about how uncomplaining these two joy filled friends are.
Of all the folks I know who have reason to complain in this life here are two prime candidates - but they don't; they live, they don't just manage. They overcome, supersede and conquer whatever obstacle may be in their way because it costs less to focus their energies on solving their problems than on stewing about them. They live through, not aside from life. They are the result and not the consequence of life and I love them for their lives and their friendship.
© November 28, 2010 res
I have known J, my cousin, for the past sixty two years and I have never known her to complain about anything - anything. I have rarely seen her in bad humor and God knows she has had ample reason to be in bad humor. When we were little kids, well that was the last time I saw her run. I think that was when she was about ten years old and I was perhaps four? and she was running and jumping like a normal kid. Do I really remember that or am I just remembering the old films that my father took that I recall seeing? No matter, those are my memories and she was smiling and from the stories that we talk about on summer evenings at her home at Montauk she is always impish about how she would misbehave with grandma, playing on her sympathies and getting her to play favorites.
Who knows whether that worked but she was always scheming and living and laughing and getting along; living and not thinking about what she couldn't do but what she could do and perhaps what she could also get away with. That was the kind of impish attitude that she had which served her well during her youth into adulthood.
Always an independent spirit, she insisted on living in her own apartment in Manhattan, she had a career as a laboratory technician; this in a person who has a degenerative condition that gradually caused her to lose the fine motor function of her hands fingers and ultimately the upper and lower extremities. But she maintained a position in the clinical laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital well into her thirties until her abilities failed, and she needed to seek a new outlet for her prodigious curiosity and talent. And now when the nineteen eighties approached and the era of disability awareness was neigh, she jumped on that horse with all of the athleticism of a pro.
J never wavered and went on to take up career counseling at Long Island University where she became tenured. When I first heard of this I thought, 'well those who can do and those who can't counsel'. (What a presumptuous idiot I was!) She was so much ahead of the game! And all during this political ferment she met and married D, that court jester of a man who has brought the kind of light to her life and mine that is measured in decades of friendship.
During the years that passed, J's condition has deteriorated but she has adapted, with automated wheelchairs, special home help, and special home appliances. Her life has been more difficult than my life but she knows how to live hers with more grace than I ever learned how to live mine.
And D has not been free of the tsuris that has plagued his family . Back in the eighties while D and I were walking in a field with a slight incline, I noticed the difficulty he had in getting up the hill and that began his long struggle and decline with a lower extremity neuromuscular weakness of mysterious origin. It's still pretty much an unknown and there certainly is no treatment, so that in addition to his burden of having to care for J, with her infirmities, he has his own to contend with and yet I have never seen him complain with anything less than good humor. A shrug and a sigh and some resignation perhaps. Not to say there haven't been moments of sheer terror in his life from the unknown aspects of this disease but the acceptance of life that both he and J have undergone is truly remarkable and typically found in people who are much more spiritual than they. And yet here they are!
Some relatives are relatives, I have friends in J and D for the past thirty five years; people of intellect, joy, humor and just plain fun. And sometimes when I hear people complain about how much pain, mental or physical they may be in I just think about J and D and think about how uncomplaining these two joy filled friends are.
Of all the folks I know who have reason to complain in this life here are two prime candidates - but they don't; they live, they don't just manage. They overcome, supersede and conquer whatever obstacle may be in their way because it costs less to focus their energies on solving their problems than on stewing about them. They live through, not aside from life. They are the result and not the consequence of life and I love them for their lives and their friendship.
© November 28, 2010 res
A FAITH THAT WORKS
A FAITH THAT WORKS
And then James said 'What is so characteristically true about AA and so different from everything else is that we are promised a path to a faith that works.' I don’t know of anything else that I have ever experienced that has brought me closer to other humans,to other men than AA.
Picture a room of 50 odd (and I do mean odd) men who get together every Sunday at 7:30 AM to spend time in a church social hall in order to share our hopes, fears, dreams, problems and hopefully solutions with each other. But mostly it is the shared experience that lets us know that we are not alone in feeling the way that we feel. As men we are brought up to be islands of stoic resolve, never breaking down that wall of unbreachable feeling so that the outside world will know just what we experience in our hearts.
They don’t know how we love. They don’t know how we fear; for ourselves, our families, our souls our wives and children. We never permit them to see into that well of emotion for fear that what they will witness will make them think less of us.
Yet we need them to see it. Without that experience the most important people in our lives don’t know us. So we must seek it elsewhere and we do that in AA.
Palter,our re-frocked priest, notes that if any men attend the Sunday services after our meeting, one would be hard pressed to see half the number of men in attendance than we have at our meeting. Why? Because the spiritual sustenance that men get from a church service is valueless to a man. It is at best an intellectual exercise.
Our rooms provide an emotional battle ground to face our enemies, choose our weapons and fight our demons with the help and support of men who have been to the same Waterloo and fought against the same demons and have learned to hold them at bay.
And now, we are here to help us learn to keep our demons at bay. But we must join the club, learn some of the principles and start to 'practice those principles in all our affairs' as the twelfth step says. And then we are promised a path to a faith that works. But we have to trudge that path, we must work the steps, the faith being only promised if we practice the principles in all our affairs.
I come to listen to a group of men speak in metaphors like I’ve never heard before. Like Albert; - 'I have to take out my tool kit all the time in order to fix the problems that I face daily. But as I join in facing these situations and apply my tools to them, they get dull. And I come here on a weekly, even daily basis in order to sharpen those tools. You men are my sustenance and my whet stone. And I remember to bring my sharpening stones to polish and buff my tools to keep them sharp so that they will be ready to handle those situations that repeatedly present themselves to me.'
And Jon E remarked that at Christmas dinner he could have engaged his mother in law in some repartee that would have ended in fireworks which nobody would have enjoyed. But instead 'I took your counsel and put on my cooking smock and helped with the cooking'. And Darryl who knew that the Christmas day was going to be difficult but he could not put his finger on just why, was looking kind of odd. His son asked 'what’s the matter Dad?' , and in the past just such a small interrogative would have caused him to launch into harangues of the grossest proportions, leaving no one unscathed. But yesterday he had the good sense just to say (as would any ordinary person) 'I don’t know, I’m just feeling a bit squirrelly'. And his son knew exactly what he meant and said, 'don’t sweat it Dad, just leave all the heavy lifting to us'. 'And if I hadn’t been in the program who knows what kind of radioactive chain reaction I would have launched.'
And Connor noted that he had stopped for breakfast before the meeting and had seen the front page of The Post on which was a picture of two servicemen taking fire in Kandahar. They had red stocking hats on. Which caught him up for a moment for his son was an officer in that province in some redoubt that was in the mountains by the Pakistan border in the Pashtun Kush with Delta company.
And with some pride he said that he felt sure that his son would be alright because two days ago his son had emailed his fiancée with a note saying that he was really happy and confident he would be fine,'this is what I’ve been trained to do'. Connor choked a bit and said that he truly believed what his son said. He got that faith from being with men in the rooms by drawing on their faith that things are as they should be and his son is where he should and wanted to be.
I left the meeting knowing I was going to see my wife to have that ultimate discussion of whether we were going to stay together as a couple or not. One thing I was sure of. A year had gone by leading to this point and I knew that the answer was going to be different from what I wanted and imagined it to be a year ago. But I was alright with that answer. Because after a year of thinking about it and learning about me, and understanding finally about the me and the her and the us, I finally realized that the us was no longer working and in the back of my mind I was hoping and expecting that she would come to that realization too.
Frankly neither of us had the energy required to put into repairing the relationship; that too much energy was needed to go into the repair of our individual lives. The time for that repair was a decade, perhaps two ago. The window of that opportunity, if ever there was one, was long gone. Now, there was only a window of recognition,acceptance and acknowledgment. Well, we finally did that and I think we two have finally come to terms and are good with that without all the recriminations that could have gone along with that but won't.
I owe that to that 'promised path of faith.' My wife may owe it to some series of deductive reasons. Which may be fine for her. But I just know that for me, mine is the softer and gentler way and if I am ever able to find the promises of the program, it will be through that spiritual awakening in the ‘faith that works.’
© res 12/25/10
And then James said 'What is so characteristically true about AA and so different from everything else is that we are promised a path to a faith that works.' I don’t know of anything else that I have ever experienced that has brought me closer to other humans,to other men than AA.
Picture a room of 50 odd (and I do mean odd) men who get together every Sunday at 7:30 AM to spend time in a church social hall in order to share our hopes, fears, dreams, problems and hopefully solutions with each other. But mostly it is the shared experience that lets us know that we are not alone in feeling the way that we feel. As men we are brought up to be islands of stoic resolve, never breaking down that wall of unbreachable feeling so that the outside world will know just what we experience in our hearts.
They don’t know how we love. They don’t know how we fear; for ourselves, our families, our souls our wives and children. We never permit them to see into that well of emotion for fear that what they will witness will make them think less of us.
Yet we need them to see it. Without that experience the most important people in our lives don’t know us. So we must seek it elsewhere and we do that in AA.
Palter,our re-frocked priest, notes that if any men attend the Sunday services after our meeting, one would be hard pressed to see half the number of men in attendance than we have at our meeting. Why? Because the spiritual sustenance that men get from a church service is valueless to a man. It is at best an intellectual exercise.
Our rooms provide an emotional battle ground to face our enemies, choose our weapons and fight our demons with the help and support of men who have been to the same Waterloo and fought against the same demons and have learned to hold them at bay.
And now, we are here to help us learn to keep our demons at bay. But we must join the club, learn some of the principles and start to 'practice those principles in all our affairs' as the twelfth step says. And then we are promised a path to a faith that works. But we have to trudge that path, we must work the steps, the faith being only promised if we practice the principles in all our affairs.
I come to listen to a group of men speak in metaphors like I’ve never heard before. Like Albert; - 'I have to take out my tool kit all the time in order to fix the problems that I face daily. But as I join in facing these situations and apply my tools to them, they get dull. And I come here on a weekly, even daily basis in order to sharpen those tools. You men are my sustenance and my whet stone. And I remember to bring my sharpening stones to polish and buff my tools to keep them sharp so that they will be ready to handle those situations that repeatedly present themselves to me.'
And Jon E remarked that at Christmas dinner he could have engaged his mother in law in some repartee that would have ended in fireworks which nobody would have enjoyed. But instead 'I took your counsel and put on my cooking smock and helped with the cooking'. And Darryl who knew that the Christmas day was going to be difficult but he could not put his finger on just why, was looking kind of odd. His son asked 'what’s the matter Dad?' , and in the past just such a small interrogative would have caused him to launch into harangues of the grossest proportions, leaving no one unscathed. But yesterday he had the good sense just to say (as would any ordinary person) 'I don’t know, I’m just feeling a bit squirrelly'. And his son knew exactly what he meant and said, 'don’t sweat it Dad, just leave all the heavy lifting to us'. 'And if I hadn’t been in the program who knows what kind of radioactive chain reaction I would have launched.'
And Connor noted that he had stopped for breakfast before the meeting and had seen the front page of The Post on which was a picture of two servicemen taking fire in Kandahar. They had red stocking hats on. Which caught him up for a moment for his son was an officer in that province in some redoubt that was in the mountains by the Pakistan border in the Pashtun Kush with Delta company.
And with some pride he said that he felt sure that his son would be alright because two days ago his son had emailed his fiancée with a note saying that he was really happy and confident he would be fine,'this is what I’ve been trained to do'. Connor choked a bit and said that he truly believed what his son said. He got that faith from being with men in the rooms by drawing on their faith that things are as they should be and his son is where he should and wanted to be.
I left the meeting knowing I was going to see my wife to have that ultimate discussion of whether we were going to stay together as a couple or not. One thing I was sure of. A year had gone by leading to this point and I knew that the answer was going to be different from what I wanted and imagined it to be a year ago. But I was alright with that answer. Because after a year of thinking about it and learning about me, and understanding finally about the me and the her and the us, I finally realized that the us was no longer working and in the back of my mind I was hoping and expecting that she would come to that realization too.
Frankly neither of us had the energy required to put into repairing the relationship; that too much energy was needed to go into the repair of our individual lives. The time for that repair was a decade, perhaps two ago. The window of that opportunity, if ever there was one, was long gone. Now, there was only a window of recognition,acceptance and acknowledgment. Well, we finally did that and I think we two have finally come to terms and are good with that without all the recriminations that could have gone along with that but won't.
I owe that to that 'promised path of faith.' My wife may owe it to some series of deductive reasons. Which may be fine for her. But I just know that for me, mine is the softer and gentler way and if I am ever able to find the promises of the program, it will be through that spiritual awakening in the ‘faith that works.’
© res 12/25/10
REPAIRATIONS [SIC]
REPAIRATIONS [SIC]
I find it astonishing and perhaps a little bit unnerving that with only eleven months of solid sobriety in me that I am considered an authority on anything in the rooms. Yet the other day I shared my desperation about my relationship with my wife and that with her resistance to resolving our marital discord she finally precipitated my insisting that we either come to an agreement to talk or I will file for official separation. Now in truth, I cannot afford to do that but I hoped that the threat would get her to move her ass from this ‘deer frozen in the headlights’ position and move on with her life so that I could move on with mine. But all that is beside the point.
The point as I said, is this notion that I have any expertise in this business of life, marital relations and 'what one does do after 38 years of marriage when it all has started to crumble around you.' And I am just as at fault for the implosion of my marriage as surely as Joshua was for the implosion of Jericho. No doubt at times I felt as self righteous about bringing it all down around me as he, but I have since learned to moderate my anger and self righteousness because I have learned that however justified I may feel about pointing the finger of blame at my spouse for her collusion in this marital maelstrom, I have to suck it up because unleashing that pent up anger, energy and bile will not do either of us any good and surely will redound to our mutually assured destruction.
So when I sat down with Peter for breakfast today, ostensibly because he felt that my experience was one that he shared, I felt a bit ill at ease since I was unsure what he expected of me and doubly wary since we had just finished a chapter in the Big Book entitled 'Working with Others'. Well was I going to be working with others? This was clearly what we call Twelve Step work, which is taking the program to others or in this case helping another alcoholic out. And really I, we, can only help 'others' out by sharing our 'experience, strength and hope' with them so they can try to see themselves in our dilemmas and pain in order to see their way clear of their dilemmas and pain.
What I told Pete was that after I shared at that meeting I had fully intended to confront my wife with an ultimatum and tell her that she had had a full year to determine whether she wanted to get back together. That I was not happy being strung along waiting for her to get her emotional act together. And she had better make a decision or else I would make one for her. But somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that she had not done the emotional leg work that I had done and been doing for the past year. She had basically tread water, and her strength was giving out and she was going under. She was in fact, going to drown.
And I began to be frightened and worried for her. She told me that she couldn't think through all the emotional problems in her life while she was working on her PhD and needed a few weeks to get through this semester; and then we could talk. I guess I'm a sucker for my wife's tribulations and certainly don't want another meltdown, nor be present for her Gotterdammerung or be the cause of it.
And what Pete gleaned from this was that with ninety days under his belt neither he nor his wife yet had the emotional perspective to come to an informed, mature and sober decision about their lives together. They were still wet behind the ears, as it were, and hadn't yet begun to explore their character defects to the point where they could recognize them before they could act on them. Well at least Pete understood that much in his first ninety days, that he needed to keep on coming and that the adage in AA of trying not to make any major decisions in the first year was sage advice acquired from the experiences of thousands of alcoholics over the past many years.
I shared another bit of what I had been thinking which while not a secret was never said outright in the rooms before and that was that just not drinking and coming to meetings would not keep you sober. It will keep you from drinking but not sober. And Pete knows all about that, because for eighteen years he was a dry drunk and as soon as the familial restraints came off, the dry modifier came off and he became just an ordinary drunk. And he realizes that without solidifying his program through spiritual acceptance, humility, and attempting to live life on a completely different energy level among friends, he will never achieve a lasting sobriety and with that any hope for a stable marriage or in the absence of that, an equitable and serene separation.
We have agreed to check in with one another pretty much on a daily basis since we have a lot in common. We are the same age, children about the same age and education and similar marriage situations and certainly married for the same period of time. Slightly different periods of non sobriety but that does not matter as much as finding a common solution.
So I am beginning my journey into twelve step work and it is not as daunting as I thought it would be. But knowing how fragile my sobriety was and how fragile it could be gives me pause whenever someone asks for help. And that's good. For I should never feel so confident in either my sobriety or my abilities to help others in theirs that I should feel cocky enough to place either in jeopardy. A good lesson for me in the coming New Year.
© res 12/22/10
I find it astonishing and perhaps a little bit unnerving that with only eleven months of solid sobriety in me that I am considered an authority on anything in the rooms. Yet the other day I shared my desperation about my relationship with my wife and that with her resistance to resolving our marital discord she finally precipitated my insisting that we either come to an agreement to talk or I will file for official separation. Now in truth, I cannot afford to do that but I hoped that the threat would get her to move her ass from this ‘deer frozen in the headlights’ position and move on with her life so that I could move on with mine. But all that is beside the point.
The point as I said, is this notion that I have any expertise in this business of life, marital relations and 'what one does do after 38 years of marriage when it all has started to crumble around you.' And I am just as at fault for the implosion of my marriage as surely as Joshua was for the implosion of Jericho. No doubt at times I felt as self righteous about bringing it all down around me as he, but I have since learned to moderate my anger and self righteousness because I have learned that however justified I may feel about pointing the finger of blame at my spouse for her collusion in this marital maelstrom, I have to suck it up because unleashing that pent up anger, energy and bile will not do either of us any good and surely will redound to our mutually assured destruction.
So when I sat down with Peter for breakfast today, ostensibly because he felt that my experience was one that he shared, I felt a bit ill at ease since I was unsure what he expected of me and doubly wary since we had just finished a chapter in the Big Book entitled 'Working with Others'. Well was I going to be working with others? This was clearly what we call Twelve Step work, which is taking the program to others or in this case helping another alcoholic out. And really I, we, can only help 'others' out by sharing our 'experience, strength and hope' with them so they can try to see themselves in our dilemmas and pain in order to see their way clear of their dilemmas and pain.
What I told Pete was that after I shared at that meeting I had fully intended to confront my wife with an ultimatum and tell her that she had had a full year to determine whether she wanted to get back together. That I was not happy being strung along waiting for her to get her emotional act together. And she had better make a decision or else I would make one for her. But somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that she had not done the emotional leg work that I had done and been doing for the past year. She had basically tread water, and her strength was giving out and she was going under. She was in fact, going to drown.
And I began to be frightened and worried for her. She told me that she couldn't think through all the emotional problems in her life while she was working on her PhD and needed a few weeks to get through this semester; and then we could talk. I guess I'm a sucker for my wife's tribulations and certainly don't want another meltdown, nor be present for her Gotterdammerung or be the cause of it.
And what Pete gleaned from this was that with ninety days under his belt neither he nor his wife yet had the emotional perspective to come to an informed, mature and sober decision about their lives together. They were still wet behind the ears, as it were, and hadn't yet begun to explore their character defects to the point where they could recognize them before they could act on them. Well at least Pete understood that much in his first ninety days, that he needed to keep on coming and that the adage in AA of trying not to make any major decisions in the first year was sage advice acquired from the experiences of thousands of alcoholics over the past many years.
I shared another bit of what I had been thinking which while not a secret was never said outright in the rooms before and that was that just not drinking and coming to meetings would not keep you sober. It will keep you from drinking but not sober. And Pete knows all about that, because for eighteen years he was a dry drunk and as soon as the familial restraints came off, the dry modifier came off and he became just an ordinary drunk. And he realizes that without solidifying his program through spiritual acceptance, humility, and attempting to live life on a completely different energy level among friends, he will never achieve a lasting sobriety and with that any hope for a stable marriage or in the absence of that, an equitable and serene separation.
We have agreed to check in with one another pretty much on a daily basis since we have a lot in common. We are the same age, children about the same age and education and similar marriage situations and certainly married for the same period of time. Slightly different periods of non sobriety but that does not matter as much as finding a common solution.
So I am beginning my journey into twelve step work and it is not as daunting as I thought it would be. But knowing how fragile my sobriety was and how fragile it could be gives me pause whenever someone asks for help. And that's good. For I should never feel so confident in either my sobriety or my abilities to help others in theirs that I should feel cocky enough to place either in jeopardy. A good lesson for me in the coming New Year.
© res 12/22/10
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