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