A God Driven Life
That question around which we professionals will dance when there is that ten ton elephant in the room, that wall of logical incomprehensibility, comes up time and again. How, after all of the rational and reasoned answers, all the emotional cries for help, all the angst and tribulations, all the familial upheaval; after all of that, how can we continue to believe that sustained sobriety depends only upon a belief in the inner voice of the spirit of a higher being that some of us call God?
I cannot explain it. This flies in the face of logic, this notion that in order to live a life worth living I have to give up all of my preconceived notions of what it means to live a good life ; what constitutes a selfless existence, how I can listen to and then hear God, and then feel humble enough to accept that ; and then in accepting that I should not feel guilty because I feel special in that singular belief.
That sounds messianic, egocentric, self interested and totally un-humble and not like a set of principles that will set me up for a lifelong design for living.
And then I hear story of Sue whose faith is anything but unshakeable, in fact very difficult to maintain since she has had the hardest time getting past some ordeals during this past year. And she knows that everyone has problems. And she knows that if she prays perhaps God will hear her entreaties, but she has doubts. What is so special about her for God to hear her prayers? Aren’t her prayers of the so called fox hole variety?
Her sponsor says to let go of her world weariness. “You cannot do anything about it anyway”, speaking about life’s afflictions that threw her into that foxhole. And the things she cannot do anything about are the home disasters, health problems, the children’s school problems and the post divorce carnage, she has finally slogged through battered, bruised and beaten but has managed to live through. And she has not yet taken a drink! But she is short $15K that she owes Uncle Sam and it is tax day and she has no money to pay him. What to do?
“Pray on it”, says her sponsor, the kind of exhortation that sends chills down the spine of the agnostic but in final desperation she does just that, heavens! but with no expectations that anything will happen yet she acquiesces.
Today, tax day, she is planning on finding how to mitigate the debacle with the government and perhaps she will not have to go to jail or pay any major penalties.
But over the weekend a client sends her in a check for a job for just the amount she owes to the government. And Sue goes from Atheist to Possibilian, finding herself just this side of unable to go all the way to believer.
And thus one more moment of reprieve is granted. And a new concept is born in the universe that there is a Possibility that the Cosmos has room for the notion that faith and belief can adjust the laws of life.
But the cynic in me falls back to say that maybe you only hear of these miracles from the ones for whom the Cosmos has conspired to commit a grand delusion of coincidental serendipity and they are the “successes” of the program for whom the “miracle” worked. The cynic in me asks, “where are all the people for whom the miracle did not happen”? What was the quality of their “ moments of reprieve”?
What did God or fate or the Cosmos drive into their lives to not make the miracle happen for them?
For how many in the program does the confluence of this virtual Tigris and Euphrates combine to make one signal fertile delta? But instead of the resulting alluvial fields of this delta, the river was sucked dry like the Colorado is upstream of the Rio Grande . That is the kind of thinking that I have to fight daily, because it is that cynicism that rips away all hope from my program.
It recalls my mood when a year ago I was talking with Lanie after one meeting and she was counseling me to hold on and wait for the miracle to happen. And at each epoch in one’s sobriety I have determined, “waiting for the miracle to happen”, has a different context, a different meaning and one cannot apprehend that context until one has lived past that point in time. At which point new angsts, challenges, needs and imperatives requiring new miracles attend to one’s regard.
During that twenty minutes or so of chatting, her higher power, “which I (Lanie) choose to call God”, came up on several occasions and as a raw recruit to the program, I guess I was not used to nor ready to hear so much divine reference in such a cramped space of talk. It irritated me, it made me uncomfortable. I did not understand her and frankly her serenity annoyed me. Nobody should be that calm! Nobody has the right to appear so self-possessed!
But as I have learned, time changes perspectives. Time permits reflection to look at situations not just from one’s most feared redoubts, but to change aspects and look at things with a more benign point of view. And with that fresh perspective perhaps filled with more hope than charged with so much fear and aversion.
When we have become generous enough in spirit to allow for new viewpoints , we learn that there are genuine folk who have innate piety, goodness and charity in them. But because of our narrow dogma they just seem like unlikely and impossible characters. It is only we who have made their existence impossible in our own minds and confabulated a universe constructed with the forces of nature aligned against their being. But once we allow for their very reality, we can accept that the universe can create true goodness for no other purpose than for its own sake, and with no other motive than it is that it is.
So with Lanie, seventeen months after that discussion sounding so calm and serene, it has not been such an unruffled period as I would have expected all this time. Since then, she has revealed that she has been less than honest with herself and as a result with the people in the rooms, as to her serenity and the quality of her program. Of course, that speaks more to the needs of her own sobriety and sanity than the trust or needs of the group as a whole, since it is less a question of honesty in general, than a matter of self deception in particular. Hiding the truth from yourself can only get you in trouble in the end. “Practicing the principles of honesty, kindness, selflessness in all our affairs” is something she forgot along the way. She forgot to take the advice of others. She was prideful and stopped listening to the suggestions of her sponsor. She stopped doing the steps.
And then three weeks ago she confessed to the group that things had suddenly gone horribly wrong. Lanie began to enumerate all of these character flaws that I just listed and many of us scratched our heads. Because, as is usual in the rooms, people only reveal a small part of the deep troubles that return them to the rooms when they have strayed for any period of time. So we could only imagine the depths of the shame, and pain that had driven her back. The need to unburden herself of all of that guilt. Whatever it was, she has now taken on the coffee commitment which she had not done in years. And cake even too! And almost a daily share.
And daily we hear about her higher power, (that has not gone away) and her attachment to that power has not been weakened in the least. In fact it is stronger than ever. And I have to say that each day there is a brighter visage that adorns her face, and a lighter carriage that moves her body. She is clearly in the process of a retransformation. How and why I do not know. But she clearly attributes this to the program and her buckling down to it with greater sincerity and interest.
And I have to say that my skepticism is not nearly as challenged as it was at the beginning of last year. My empiricism has fallen away to a belief in belief. I have seen how powerful belief can be and I have come to believe that without a guiding belief, the program is just an endurance test of how long one can last until the urge to drink finally gets you into trouble.
So I have developed a firm sense of a higher power. All things are now possible to this Possibilian. I have a sense that permits faith in the future and hope for tomorrow. It allows me to take a breath so that at any stage I can say today “wait for the miracle to happen” even if that is a different miracle than I was expecting a year ago.
Ultimately, it is in that belief that I am relieved of the obsession to drink that in the final instance allows success in the program; that some power greater than myself lifts that horror from me so I no longer have to drink. It is that belief that enables me to say to myself that I, with the help of someone, something, some “other”, will enable me to stop.
And along with belief comes the concept of acceptance, a “surrender” of will, and willpower. The willpower that resists stopping drinking and the willpower that resists the power to accept help wherever it may be found. It is the act of ultimate contrition that permits one to accept that there is help to be had if one is ready to receive it.
Science cannot help take one past the empiricism. Scientific “ leaps of faith” must always be tested through theory and hypothesis. And when proof of theory fails, any “faith” in the facts that empiricism holds fails too. The only “faith” that one can have in empiricism at all is the “faith” that the scientific method will ultimately prove or disprove the theory to let it take its place in the pantheon of knowledge that we call fact. But beyond fact there is no faith. There is no hope. There is only speculation.
And no hope is no place for the perplexed, and an even worse place for the alcoholic. But for a Possibilian, a belief in the belief of faith works. Allowing for the possibility of faith can make all the difference in whether one can actually experience the “miracle” happening or is left to wait for the miracle to happen; and in that faith remains the possibility as to whether moments of reprieve really do come true.
© res 4/18/2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION
MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION
My very oldest friend and I have had this long running debate about the prudence of telling the stories of gunslingers in film as entertainments. He feels that to do so trivializes their crimes and memorializes their misdeeds. This somehow leads the audience down some primrose path of deception that reconfigures history into some glorified and rosy tale that replaces veniality for cleverness, skullduggery for slyness and slickness, and thuggery for stealth and sleight of hand.
So we continue to have debates over the greatness of “Butch Cassidy”, “The Wild Bunch”, “Tombstone” and “The Sting” which glorify the escapades and cleverness of ne’er-do-wells and crooked law men.
And where this may be somewhat of a rarefied esoteric artistic/moral debate when it comes to “liberal” notions of what constitutes great art, it is not all that uncommon in day to day skirmishes of the political/art periodical or newsroom hostilities. Recall, for example, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibits, or Cavallaro’s chocolate “My Sweet Jesus”, or any number of even more disturbing images that have graced our art galleries in order to make artistic or political statements and the ensuing press and religious reactions, that exemplifies this point.
The reason I mention this dichotomy is to illustrate that in any debate there are at least two sides, and in this one there is the side which could describe itself as coming from the point of view of “taste” and the other from the point of view of “authenticity”. Authenticity argues that art should serve the idea, and ideas often are transmitted by powerful symbols. Symbols can be subjected to artistic hyperbole, as in the above examples, in search of a means of expressing the true meaning of the symbol. “Taste” argues that authenticity oversteps the bounds of propriety when using symbols that happen to also have strong simultaneous religious ,political and moral values resulting in the request that these not be shown or displayed, or even that they be removed and taken down when these symbols are claimed to be “art” (completely disregarding our dearly held beliefs and rights of free speech and expression).
But the Supreme Court has held that one can get overly enthusiastic with the notion of “artistic” to the point where it can be called pornographic if deemed to have no “socially redeeming value”; but of course this often then becomes subjected to the Justice Stewart Potter test for pornography of “I know it when I see it” interpretation, which then throws it back into the “court of public opinion”; and by that measure, how “tasteful” (read pornographic) one sees art, must surely change with the tides of the times.
And all this is a circuitous introduction to a discussion of why I do not tell the long involved stories of the men and women in the rooms. These stories are often graphic, gutsy, dark, and hard to hear. They are frightfully similar in scope and arch. They all start similarly and all end the same way. The story in the middle, how much of what addicting substance, when, how and where is the only difference and the particular depth , the particular hole and the particular hell and the particular salvation are the only differences. And the rise to their successes pretty much tell the same story.
I was born, I drank, I got drunk, I blacked out, I almost lost my life, I found AA, I found my higher power and now I am sober, one day at a time by the grace of God. Sounds pretty simple. But like my friend who objects to the glorifying of the debauching tales of crooks, I have elected not to tell the debauching tales of drunks, so colorful in their individuality, so broad in their scope of the human condition yet so similar as to make it the very touchstone that allows AA to survive. If our stories were not all the same more or less, then we would see no identity in each other’s tales, we would find no empathy in our fellow AA’s and the program would fail. They are the very symbols of our recovery and aural/graphical means by which we gain membership in the AA fellowship.
These stories are the histories that Joseph Campbell calls “The Power of Myth”. They are the glue that keep societies together, the common ancestry, the handed down wisdom, the tales of ancestors and founders, the rise of the nations and the spread of the culture. These stories are the way we find our way into the rooms. We diagnose ourselves by means of our stories. In fact, if we come into the rooms and after having been there a very brief time and we haven’t heard our story being told, I am sure that we could say in clear conscience that we are neither addicts nor alcoholics.
The story makes the diagnosis. And it is crystal clear that the degree of our “perversion” ill fits how much of an addict we are. We are or we aren’t one in a sense. Our ability to recover often has little to do with how much of an addict we were. In fact initially our recovery may have more to do with fear than anything else. The fear of death, the fear of life, the fear of social ostracism or familial castigation.
And recovery often has little to do with the degree of support and support system we have. Those who have the most in material wealth often fail repeatedly while those who have fallen the most and have the least can be the most shining successes. The story does not tell us anything more than that we can recover and how we recover and why we recover. It cannot tell us to recover. Because to recover we must want to recover and only we can want to recover.
We can want to recover when and only when it no longer is a debate in the head between a bad and a good. Whether it is a moral bad or a moral good; a political bad or political good; or a debate as to whether it is something that one can do or one cannot do. It is all irrelevant to the task. And that task is that the debate is over. One has then determined that you can do it successfully.
Recovery is neutral in and of itself. Recovery is only good for the drunk in that it saves the life of that drunk and with that life gives that soul a chance to pass on that gift to others. The soul then saved can work in the spirit of a greater good or power greater than himself for the betterment of human kind.
Otherwise, the story does not mean much of anything.
© res 4/15/2011
My very oldest friend and I have had this long running debate about the prudence of telling the stories of gunslingers in film as entertainments. He feels that to do so trivializes their crimes and memorializes their misdeeds. This somehow leads the audience down some primrose path of deception that reconfigures history into some glorified and rosy tale that replaces veniality for cleverness, skullduggery for slyness and slickness, and thuggery for stealth and sleight of hand.
So we continue to have debates over the greatness of “Butch Cassidy”, “The Wild Bunch”, “Tombstone” and “The Sting” which glorify the escapades and cleverness of ne’er-do-wells and crooked law men.
And where this may be somewhat of a rarefied esoteric artistic/moral debate when it comes to “liberal” notions of what constitutes great art, it is not all that uncommon in day to day skirmishes of the political/art periodical or newsroom hostilities. Recall, for example, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibits, or Cavallaro’s chocolate “My Sweet Jesus”, or any number of even more disturbing images that have graced our art galleries in order to make artistic or political statements and the ensuing press and religious reactions, that exemplifies this point.
The reason I mention this dichotomy is to illustrate that in any debate there are at least two sides, and in this one there is the side which could describe itself as coming from the point of view of “taste” and the other from the point of view of “authenticity”. Authenticity argues that art should serve the idea, and ideas often are transmitted by powerful symbols. Symbols can be subjected to artistic hyperbole, as in the above examples, in search of a means of expressing the true meaning of the symbol. “Taste” argues that authenticity oversteps the bounds of propriety when using symbols that happen to also have strong simultaneous religious ,political and moral values resulting in the request that these not be shown or displayed, or even that they be removed and taken down when these symbols are claimed to be “art” (completely disregarding our dearly held beliefs and rights of free speech and expression).
But the Supreme Court has held that one can get overly enthusiastic with the notion of “artistic” to the point where it can be called pornographic if deemed to have no “socially redeeming value”; but of course this often then becomes subjected to the Justice Stewart Potter test for pornography of “I know it when I see it” interpretation, which then throws it back into the “court of public opinion”; and by that measure, how “tasteful” (read pornographic) one sees art, must surely change with the tides of the times.
And all this is a circuitous introduction to a discussion of why I do not tell the long involved stories of the men and women in the rooms. These stories are often graphic, gutsy, dark, and hard to hear. They are frightfully similar in scope and arch. They all start similarly and all end the same way. The story in the middle, how much of what addicting substance, when, how and where is the only difference and the particular depth , the particular hole and the particular hell and the particular salvation are the only differences. And the rise to their successes pretty much tell the same story.
I was born, I drank, I got drunk, I blacked out, I almost lost my life, I found AA, I found my higher power and now I am sober, one day at a time by the grace of God. Sounds pretty simple. But like my friend who objects to the glorifying of the debauching tales of crooks, I have elected not to tell the debauching tales of drunks, so colorful in their individuality, so broad in their scope of the human condition yet so similar as to make it the very touchstone that allows AA to survive. If our stories were not all the same more or less, then we would see no identity in each other’s tales, we would find no empathy in our fellow AA’s and the program would fail. They are the very symbols of our recovery and aural/graphical means by which we gain membership in the AA fellowship.
These stories are the histories that Joseph Campbell calls “The Power of Myth”. They are the glue that keep societies together, the common ancestry, the handed down wisdom, the tales of ancestors and founders, the rise of the nations and the spread of the culture. These stories are the way we find our way into the rooms. We diagnose ourselves by means of our stories. In fact, if we come into the rooms and after having been there a very brief time and we haven’t heard our story being told, I am sure that we could say in clear conscience that we are neither addicts nor alcoholics.
The story makes the diagnosis. And it is crystal clear that the degree of our “perversion” ill fits how much of an addict we are. We are or we aren’t one in a sense. Our ability to recover often has little to do with how much of an addict we were. In fact initially our recovery may have more to do with fear than anything else. The fear of death, the fear of life, the fear of social ostracism or familial castigation.
And recovery often has little to do with the degree of support and support system we have. Those who have the most in material wealth often fail repeatedly while those who have fallen the most and have the least can be the most shining successes. The story does not tell us anything more than that we can recover and how we recover and why we recover. It cannot tell us to recover. Because to recover we must want to recover and only we can want to recover.
We can want to recover when and only when it no longer is a debate in the head between a bad and a good. Whether it is a moral bad or a moral good; a political bad or political good; or a debate as to whether it is something that one can do or one cannot do. It is all irrelevant to the task. And that task is that the debate is over. One has then determined that you can do it successfully.
Recovery is neutral in and of itself. Recovery is only good for the drunk in that it saves the life of that drunk and with that life gives that soul a chance to pass on that gift to others. The soul then saved can work in the spirit of a greater good or power greater than himself for the betterment of human kind.
Otherwise, the story does not mean much of anything.
© res 4/15/2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS
FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS
For the past three months I have been moderating an evening AA meeting at a substance abuse rehab facility. I had approached this commitment with some trepidation because of some pretty unsophisticated fears.
First was the fact that I was going into a rehab facility and they were all addicts of one kind or another. What was I to expect? Drunks, addicts of every stripe and color (figuratively speaking), and maybe even a crazy or two; people in for a psyche tune up whose decompensation happened to become manifest through an alcohol or drug overdose when they really were just depressed or bipolar or both. (Not to mention the occasional schizophrenic or two clapped in for hearing people or seeing voices).
And there were days at the beginning when I would feel that I was approaching the campus as if it was some far flung gulag where the chances of my return were problematic at best, not to mention those of the poor inmates.
Yet I was assured, by said ‘inmates’, that this ‘gulag’ took good care of them, it rated high on the internal exile scale when compared to other facilities that accepted state insurance. And to tell the truth, it was small, clean, comfortable and to all appearances well run. So when tonight there was some stirring of grumblings about the inattentiveness of the staff, it came as somewhat of a surprise as the first hint of disappointment during my tenure as this group’s leader.
But I had to place matters of “comparative desiccation facilities” on hold in pursuit of my mission to run my weekly meeting which had as its launching point Steps One and Two, Admitting that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, and that as a result of the unmanageability, we Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I try to stress for the newcomers who have landed here that some higher power must have placed them here; either the guiding hand of a friend, a physician, a relative, or their own desperation. And most people appreciate that I do not go off on a God jag but stress a gentle approach to spirituality grounded in necessity and the happenstance of their presence at the meeting in this facility, this night for reasons of substance abuse.
They realize that they were not invited to a cotillion and that they gladly accepted the invitation. They had been that desperate.
So the first two steps are discussed because it is the failure of those two steps that brought them to this room and this facility in the first place, and it will only be by reasserting the dominance of these principles that they will survive outside the four walls of this institution. So we talk about their journey of how they got here and how they are going to use the tools of AA differently in order to avoid returning to this predicament again.
Nick said that he had always been an alcoholic and although he had been to AA, it had been under duress, court ordered in fact and he could not remember much about it except the fact that he recalled that most times he was there he had a buzz on. He admitted that that wasn’t the best learning experience but no one was going to teach him anything at age twenty. And now at forty he was brought here by his best friend as an act of almost hopeless faith since he had not known what else to do. But Nick says, it was just what he needed but was too frightened to ask for anyone’s help. Now five days sober, he thanks God and his friend for dragging him in, in the depths of his despair, not knowing where to turn nor what to do, frozen like a frightened deer in the headlights, not knowing whether to turn this way or that but knowing that if he did not get out of the way he surely was going to get run down by his own folly.
And this story kept repeating itself with Dawn trying to escape an abusive relationship and drinking herself into a blackout, finding herself in the emergency department and then being given the option of returning home or finally tackling her addiction in a rehabilitation facility where she would not be exposed to the constant parade of people flopping into her apartment bringing in booze and drugs, stalking her and her escaping by drinking to oblivion. No way to live and a sure way to die.
The shares rounded to Anne who had admitted herself because she was ashamed that after more than twenty years of sobriety, she was coming to understand that she had been under the influence of prescription medications, which she had not wanted to face up to for years, because it had been prescribed for pain. But after running recovery groups for years she finally felt a bit hypocritical after listening to case after case that sounded like hers, but hers she would try to rationalize since she was in pain and thus had reasons for taking medication.
But the more she examined her story, and the more honestly she looked at herself, the more she understood that she was manipulating her physicians and prescriptions and maybe, just maybe the pain was not as bad as she had made it out to be. But that honesty had been honed by the grindstone of addiction; when she realized the degree to which she was manipulating her “medication” she spiraled into greater and greater addiction until she feared for her life and her sanity. So she took the brave and honest step toward detox and rehabilitation.
And finally at the end of the hour we came to Delia who sat in her chair, knees to chest, face buried in her legs blurting out “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to believe that I am alcoholic. I love to drink! I love the atmosphere of drinking, I love the cachet, the wine with the meal, the wine on the boat, the wine with the friends, the wine on the beach, the wine before bed, the wine…”
As the litany petered out she began to catch herself up and said “I know! It all sounds so stupid. I AM an alcoholic, I just don’t want to admit it. There I said it, I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT!
“But how am I ever going to be able to stop. I don’t want to stop I love it so much. I love the bars, I love their smell I love the people, all my friends drink. How am I going to find new friends? I like my friends!” And she could have gone on waxing poetic about the marvels, wonders and magic of alcohol even after describing the horrible hangovers she would have. Even after she was the last one still at the party, the one who needed to be taken home, and the one who was already counting the number of liter bottles she would drink in a week.
This sad but revealing affair would have gone on but we had to close our meeting since our time had expired. So we ended with a group prayer and I caught her before she left the room to discuss this life changing quandary she had.
I wanted to see if she could finally see reality and it to bear in her current situation. We went over her story just to make clear to her that she had made her own diagnosis that she was an alcoholic, she had admitted step one pretty much unequivocally and after two DWI’s it was absolutely clear that her life was unmanageable. I urged her to take some time to look at this a bit more objectively putting the great things about drinking in one column and then all the negative things and consequences that she had related to us in the other. And she readily admitted that there was no contest; that the negative aspects of drinking at least for her, outweighed any positives for her and that continued drinking would only lead down some dark defile, and some much deeper and darker and harder bottoms than we had heard about earlier in the meeting.
So the only question now was, how much effort was she willing to put into her sobriety? How great a fall was necessary for her to scream uncle? Had she hurt herself enough or had she burnt enough bridges behind her?
I told her that I once wondered how I was ever going to be able to live without drinking. It seemed unnatural and unlikely that the sober life and fellowship provided in the rooms was going to be a reasonable substitute for a fine pinot noir, particularly with a rare rack of lamb. But I finally learned that I could eat that lamb and savor it without the false enhancement of that wine, and with my mood being “unenhanced” I could in fact remember that flavor in the morning.
It wasn’t going to be easy for her either. But if she liked lamb as much as I, she would soon be looking forward to more fond memories of meals unenhanced and therefore not missed because of the grape.
She looked skeptical as I left the meeting. And it was good that she had paid for her stay till the end of the week. She was going to be in for a bumpy ride.
© res 4/13/11
For the past three months I have been moderating an evening AA meeting at a substance abuse rehab facility. I had approached this commitment with some trepidation because of some pretty unsophisticated fears.
First was the fact that I was going into a rehab facility and they were all addicts of one kind or another. What was I to expect? Drunks, addicts of every stripe and color (figuratively speaking), and maybe even a crazy or two; people in for a psyche tune up whose decompensation happened to become manifest through an alcohol or drug overdose when they really were just depressed or bipolar or both. (Not to mention the occasional schizophrenic or two clapped in for hearing people or seeing voices).
And there were days at the beginning when I would feel that I was approaching the campus as if it was some far flung gulag where the chances of my return were problematic at best, not to mention those of the poor inmates.
Yet I was assured, by said ‘inmates’, that this ‘gulag’ took good care of them, it rated high on the internal exile scale when compared to other facilities that accepted state insurance. And to tell the truth, it was small, clean, comfortable and to all appearances well run. So when tonight there was some stirring of grumblings about the inattentiveness of the staff, it came as somewhat of a surprise as the first hint of disappointment during my tenure as this group’s leader.
But I had to place matters of “comparative desiccation facilities” on hold in pursuit of my mission to run my weekly meeting which had as its launching point Steps One and Two, Admitting that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, and that as a result of the unmanageability, we Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I try to stress for the newcomers who have landed here that some higher power must have placed them here; either the guiding hand of a friend, a physician, a relative, or their own desperation. And most people appreciate that I do not go off on a God jag but stress a gentle approach to spirituality grounded in necessity and the happenstance of their presence at the meeting in this facility, this night for reasons of substance abuse.
They realize that they were not invited to a cotillion and that they gladly accepted the invitation. They had been that desperate.
So the first two steps are discussed because it is the failure of those two steps that brought them to this room and this facility in the first place, and it will only be by reasserting the dominance of these principles that they will survive outside the four walls of this institution. So we talk about their journey of how they got here and how they are going to use the tools of AA differently in order to avoid returning to this predicament again.
Nick said that he had always been an alcoholic and although he had been to AA, it had been under duress, court ordered in fact and he could not remember much about it except the fact that he recalled that most times he was there he had a buzz on. He admitted that that wasn’t the best learning experience but no one was going to teach him anything at age twenty. And now at forty he was brought here by his best friend as an act of almost hopeless faith since he had not known what else to do. But Nick says, it was just what he needed but was too frightened to ask for anyone’s help. Now five days sober, he thanks God and his friend for dragging him in, in the depths of his despair, not knowing where to turn nor what to do, frozen like a frightened deer in the headlights, not knowing whether to turn this way or that but knowing that if he did not get out of the way he surely was going to get run down by his own folly.
And this story kept repeating itself with Dawn trying to escape an abusive relationship and drinking herself into a blackout, finding herself in the emergency department and then being given the option of returning home or finally tackling her addiction in a rehabilitation facility where she would not be exposed to the constant parade of people flopping into her apartment bringing in booze and drugs, stalking her and her escaping by drinking to oblivion. No way to live and a sure way to die.
The shares rounded to Anne who had admitted herself because she was ashamed that after more than twenty years of sobriety, she was coming to understand that she had been under the influence of prescription medications, which she had not wanted to face up to for years, because it had been prescribed for pain. But after running recovery groups for years she finally felt a bit hypocritical after listening to case after case that sounded like hers, but hers she would try to rationalize since she was in pain and thus had reasons for taking medication.
But the more she examined her story, and the more honestly she looked at herself, the more she understood that she was manipulating her physicians and prescriptions and maybe, just maybe the pain was not as bad as she had made it out to be. But that honesty had been honed by the grindstone of addiction; when she realized the degree to which she was manipulating her “medication” she spiraled into greater and greater addiction until she feared for her life and her sanity. So she took the brave and honest step toward detox and rehabilitation.
And finally at the end of the hour we came to Delia who sat in her chair, knees to chest, face buried in her legs blurting out “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to believe that I am alcoholic. I love to drink! I love the atmosphere of drinking, I love the cachet, the wine with the meal, the wine on the boat, the wine with the friends, the wine on the beach, the wine before bed, the wine…”
As the litany petered out she began to catch herself up and said “I know! It all sounds so stupid. I AM an alcoholic, I just don’t want to admit it. There I said it, I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT!
“But how am I ever going to be able to stop. I don’t want to stop I love it so much. I love the bars, I love their smell I love the people, all my friends drink. How am I going to find new friends? I like my friends!” And she could have gone on waxing poetic about the marvels, wonders and magic of alcohol even after describing the horrible hangovers she would have. Even after she was the last one still at the party, the one who needed to be taken home, and the one who was already counting the number of liter bottles she would drink in a week.
This sad but revealing affair would have gone on but we had to close our meeting since our time had expired. So we ended with a group prayer and I caught her before she left the room to discuss this life changing quandary she had.
I wanted to see if she could finally see reality and it to bear in her current situation. We went over her story just to make clear to her that she had made her own diagnosis that she was an alcoholic, she had admitted step one pretty much unequivocally and after two DWI’s it was absolutely clear that her life was unmanageable. I urged her to take some time to look at this a bit more objectively putting the great things about drinking in one column and then all the negative things and consequences that she had related to us in the other. And she readily admitted that there was no contest; that the negative aspects of drinking at least for her, outweighed any positives for her and that continued drinking would only lead down some dark defile, and some much deeper and darker and harder bottoms than we had heard about earlier in the meeting.
So the only question now was, how much effort was she willing to put into her sobriety? How great a fall was necessary for her to scream uncle? Had she hurt herself enough or had she burnt enough bridges behind her?
I told her that I once wondered how I was ever going to be able to live without drinking. It seemed unnatural and unlikely that the sober life and fellowship provided in the rooms was going to be a reasonable substitute for a fine pinot noir, particularly with a rare rack of lamb. But I finally learned that I could eat that lamb and savor it without the false enhancement of that wine, and with my mood being “unenhanced” I could in fact remember that flavor in the morning.
It wasn’t going to be easy for her either. But if she liked lamb as much as I, she would soon be looking forward to more fond memories of meals unenhanced and therefore not missed because of the grape.
She looked skeptical as I left the meeting. And it was good that she had paid for her stay till the end of the week. She was going to be in for a bumpy ride.
© res 4/13/11
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
KEEPING THE DOGS AT BAY or Finding Salvation at Thirty Thousand Feet
KEEPING THE DOGS AT BAY
Or
Finding Salvation at Thirty Thousand Feet
We were talking about how we try to manage the temptations to drink. What do we do when we can’t avoid people places and things that are around alcohol? In my many recovery incarnations I have been diligent in avoiding weddings, dinners and other convivial occasions and I realize now that I did that with good reason. My sobriety was on anything but a solid footing. I knew at that time that these occasions were opportunities in waiting just to disappoint both myself and my family. They were challenges that I did not need.
So I missed weddings in California and Florida and I almost missed my nephew’s in Cleveland and so countless family get-togethers for fear of drinking. And at those I did attend, my behavior was anything but sober. I know that these were trying events during my two year “dry spell”; and I was anything but sober and the only reason for my sobriety at that time was that I went to meetings and stayed away from a drink one day at a time. But it was such an effort! Daily cravings, thoughts that I could actually drink again at some future time plagued me, and each event where I was around liquor became more challenging than the previous; until going to daily meetings did not keep me away from a drink anymore.
So what hadn’t I done? I hadn’t read the big book, I hadn’t truly gotten beyond step two. I never sought the counsel of my sponsor and even though I took him with me to a meeting nearly every day, I probably kept him sober more than he kept me. But my lack of sobriety was not his fault. I chose not to use him nor the tools of the program.
And did I really see myself as a spiritual individual? Did I truly understand and examine my character defects? Did I “take a searching and fearless moral inventory” and take responsibility for my peculiar predicament in terms of my poor job and career situation? Well without having done a fourth step that would have to be a no. And in the absence of a successful step four how could I seek out the help of a higher power, how could I surrender all of my character defects to God?
In other words, was I being scrupulously honest in the problem of self to self and to the spirit of the rooms and the groups? And the answer to that was a resounding NO!
So when I hear others in the rooms who after one or two years of solid sobriety fall into periods of challenged sobriety, I have to stop and listen to that story. And that is for many reasons, not the least of which is to avoid overindulgence in confidence in my own sobriety, and why I should not get too cocky about it. For it has been sixteen months since I had even the slightest twinge of desire for a drink and that is surely a miracle.
I have been to jazz clubs, traveled airplanes, been to restaurants and at many reunions without the smallest twitch of desire for alcohol. And whereas that is great for me, when I hear some veterans in the program speak of strong temptations to drink and the circumstances in which they occurred, I sit up and take notice.
In particular, I always get a kick out of Tom’s airplane tale which he repeats often but only because it is instructive and he needs to employ the technique over and over again on business flights. As he tells it, early in his sobriety Tom was on a transcontinental flight to San Francisco and as he settled into his first class seat, the flight attendant immediately started to serve drinks ( which in first class are “free”) and when she arrived at his seat she asked what he would like to drink.
And Tom actually considered this question over in his mind! Really! This is how our thinking goes – just weeks out of rehab. And he is saying to himself one drink won’t hurt, after all it’s just one, and after all it’s free and who’s going to know anyway and …
And then he remembers his backstop thought from his sponsor “It’s the first drink that get’s you drunk”. So Tom turns to the attendant and says “I have a problem with alcohol and if you give me that first scotch, you won’t have enough alcohol on this plane for me for the rest of the flight”. At which they both laughed and he did not have to worry about that situation again on that flight.
Tom now gives that admonition preemptively now whenever he flies. And I have to remember techniques like that, simple, powerful but effective, and infused with humor to deflect embarrassment.
Which brought me to recall a similar interesting occurrence when Wildman was flying on business down South. Normally, he commutes between Connecticut and Boston; so much so that I noted just the other day that his cell phone has a Boston area code. And he found himself on a fairly crowded flight to Atlanta and unlike Tom, his company had not sprung for first class seats so his seating arrangements are more crowded. Of course any in-flight business of his then is also his neighbor’s too and vice versa. Like Tom’s flight, drinks were flowing freely, which Wildman did not partake of and although he doesn’t typically get squirrely under these circumstances, this flight occasioned an anxiety about the substantial quantities that his row mate was imbibing. And with periodic nudging and queries from him if he wished to have a drink, Wildman was getting restless, irritable and fatigued.
So in desperation he pulled out his copy of the Big Book and buried himself in one of the stories. But soon he felt the eyes of his neighbor on him, piercing his shoulder in order to read the story in his Big Book that he had been furtively reading. And in his semi slurred but gentle way the fellow inquired as to whether “that was a good book?”
Wildman replied that is was very good and seeing an opening, proceeded to tell him not only the title, but why he was reading it and what he got out of it. And the gentleman sheepishly asked if he could look at it and soon was glued to the pages. By the time the plane had landed the fellow had gotten through “The Doctor’s Opinion” and “Bill’s Story”, the first two chapters, and Wildman could see that flicker of recognition in his face.
As the plane pulled up to the gate Wildman suggested that the fellow keep the book since he had another copy at home. And indicating that he read the first 164 pages and should he find the contents familiar he should then try to find a meeting of AA in any city that he happened to be in. “You may have found yourself a resting place” Wildman said reassuringly.
Every four months or so, Wildman has a new remarkable story to tell in which he has serendipitously changed a total stranger’s life through some small act of kindness. A few more of those and his place in heaven will have been assured.
© res 4/3/2011
Or
Finding Salvation at Thirty Thousand Feet
We were talking about how we try to manage the temptations to drink. What do we do when we can’t avoid people places and things that are around alcohol? In my many recovery incarnations I have been diligent in avoiding weddings, dinners and other convivial occasions and I realize now that I did that with good reason. My sobriety was on anything but a solid footing. I knew at that time that these occasions were opportunities in waiting just to disappoint both myself and my family. They were challenges that I did not need.
So I missed weddings in California and Florida and I almost missed my nephew’s in Cleveland and so countless family get-togethers for fear of drinking. And at those I did attend, my behavior was anything but sober. I know that these were trying events during my two year “dry spell”; and I was anything but sober and the only reason for my sobriety at that time was that I went to meetings and stayed away from a drink one day at a time. But it was such an effort! Daily cravings, thoughts that I could actually drink again at some future time plagued me, and each event where I was around liquor became more challenging than the previous; until going to daily meetings did not keep me away from a drink anymore.
So what hadn’t I done? I hadn’t read the big book, I hadn’t truly gotten beyond step two. I never sought the counsel of my sponsor and even though I took him with me to a meeting nearly every day, I probably kept him sober more than he kept me. But my lack of sobriety was not his fault. I chose not to use him nor the tools of the program.
And did I really see myself as a spiritual individual? Did I truly understand and examine my character defects? Did I “take a searching and fearless moral inventory” and take responsibility for my peculiar predicament in terms of my poor job and career situation? Well without having done a fourth step that would have to be a no. And in the absence of a successful step four how could I seek out the help of a higher power, how could I surrender all of my character defects to God?
In other words, was I being scrupulously honest in the problem of self to self and to the spirit of the rooms and the groups? And the answer to that was a resounding NO!
So when I hear others in the rooms who after one or two years of solid sobriety fall into periods of challenged sobriety, I have to stop and listen to that story. And that is for many reasons, not the least of which is to avoid overindulgence in confidence in my own sobriety, and why I should not get too cocky about it. For it has been sixteen months since I had even the slightest twinge of desire for a drink and that is surely a miracle.
I have been to jazz clubs, traveled airplanes, been to restaurants and at many reunions without the smallest twitch of desire for alcohol. And whereas that is great for me, when I hear some veterans in the program speak of strong temptations to drink and the circumstances in which they occurred, I sit up and take notice.
In particular, I always get a kick out of Tom’s airplane tale which he repeats often but only because it is instructive and he needs to employ the technique over and over again on business flights. As he tells it, early in his sobriety Tom was on a transcontinental flight to San Francisco and as he settled into his first class seat, the flight attendant immediately started to serve drinks ( which in first class are “free”) and when she arrived at his seat she asked what he would like to drink.
And Tom actually considered this question over in his mind! Really! This is how our thinking goes – just weeks out of rehab. And he is saying to himself one drink won’t hurt, after all it’s just one, and after all it’s free and who’s going to know anyway and …
And then he remembers his backstop thought from his sponsor “It’s the first drink that get’s you drunk”. So Tom turns to the attendant and says “I have a problem with alcohol and if you give me that first scotch, you won’t have enough alcohol on this plane for me for the rest of the flight”. At which they both laughed and he did not have to worry about that situation again on that flight.
Tom now gives that admonition preemptively now whenever he flies. And I have to remember techniques like that, simple, powerful but effective, and infused with humor to deflect embarrassment.
Which brought me to recall a similar interesting occurrence when Wildman was flying on business down South. Normally, he commutes between Connecticut and Boston; so much so that I noted just the other day that his cell phone has a Boston area code. And he found himself on a fairly crowded flight to Atlanta and unlike Tom, his company had not sprung for first class seats so his seating arrangements are more crowded. Of course any in-flight business of his then is also his neighbor’s too and vice versa. Like Tom’s flight, drinks were flowing freely, which Wildman did not partake of and although he doesn’t typically get squirrely under these circumstances, this flight occasioned an anxiety about the substantial quantities that his row mate was imbibing. And with periodic nudging and queries from him if he wished to have a drink, Wildman was getting restless, irritable and fatigued.
So in desperation he pulled out his copy of the Big Book and buried himself in one of the stories. But soon he felt the eyes of his neighbor on him, piercing his shoulder in order to read the story in his Big Book that he had been furtively reading. And in his semi slurred but gentle way the fellow inquired as to whether “that was a good book?”
Wildman replied that is was very good and seeing an opening, proceeded to tell him not only the title, but why he was reading it and what he got out of it. And the gentleman sheepishly asked if he could look at it and soon was glued to the pages. By the time the plane had landed the fellow had gotten through “The Doctor’s Opinion” and “Bill’s Story”, the first two chapters, and Wildman could see that flicker of recognition in his face.
As the plane pulled up to the gate Wildman suggested that the fellow keep the book since he had another copy at home. And indicating that he read the first 164 pages and should he find the contents familiar he should then try to find a meeting of AA in any city that he happened to be in. “You may have found yourself a resting place” Wildman said reassuringly.
Every four months or so, Wildman has a new remarkable story to tell in which he has serendipitously changed a total stranger’s life through some small act of kindness. A few more of those and his place in heaven will have been assured.
© res 4/3/2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
SANITARY PRECAUTIONS (OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS)
SANITARY PRECAUTIONS
(OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS)
Sometimes the decision in the rooms seems to orbit in the purported esoterica regarding how to proceed with this step or that; is it best to do this step quickly and to get through it or to make a considered step not rushing into territory which, after all, in the newly minted AA is terra incognito? Experience tells us that procrastination inevitably leads us to put off ‘till tomorrow what we should do today, and we repeatedly do this until we never do today what we had determined we should have done yesterday.
On the other hand, we are equally experienced in rushing in with involving ourselves in and with situations prior to considered thought, with the result of some disturbing outcomes. So we are confronted with the irritating dilemma, do it sooner or do it later? Temporize or make “tempus fugit”?
So in addressing Step Nine, “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”, we undertake the task of engaging the people we listed in Step Eight who we have determined we have harmed and to whom we feel we are willing, and indeed, required to make amends. This discussion of how to proceed, that is, with all due haste or with all deliberate speed, is often not a topic of small debate. Both camps have their champions, often quite vocal, and single minded in their resolution as to how this step should be approached.
At one such meeting much talk was spent on the concept that many of the 12 steps are a work in progress and that work is not static. One should be prepared to repeat the steps time and time again throughout one’s life and in particular steps four through eleven. For these steps are, in effect, AA’s “design for living” and crucial to that design is the foundation that it calls for in the building of our new moral-ethical edifice.
So in a sense, whether we approach our amends quickly or deliberately, these steps are an Ouroboros, a life circle, meant for eternal revisiting. Because we can only progress toward perfection to achieve the kind of spiritual equanimity that we aspire to through the vehicle of these steps.
To the outsider this surely must appear like theological mumbo-jumbo. But it is more like asking the pitcher of a ballgame with one out and batters on first and second whether he should throw a fast or curve ball, attempt a pick-off or sacrifice fly-ball. These are strategic choices to get to win the game, and in this case the game is the life of the drunk and all those he loves on his team.
What should or can an outside agency offer in the way of advice to the drunk in the throes of such decision making dissonances? First of all, unless one is a trained counselor or a concerned party or trusted friend, I would say, very little. Stay back and stay away from the alcoholic mind. As the saying goes, “Don’t play in my mind without adult supervision”. This is dangerous terrain, not subject to the normal rules of physics or even of typical human psychology.
But, if forced to play a part, the best advice one can give is that one never has to act. There is almost never any compelling requirement for any action steps. Amends do not have to be made instantaneously – they can always be put off until tomorrow, more thought can always be brought to bear on the subject.
One thing is clear, one more lame and insincere “apology” is not needed. We have offered more than enough meaningless apologies all of our drinking lives, and one more, hastily delivered insincerity will only be greeted with the disdain that it deserves. An amend requires a “quid pro quo”, a something for something else. And in this instance, the drunk offers some form of restitution, monetary, emotional, temporal or social. What does he get in return? Peace of mind! We like to say that is permits us to ‘clean up our side of the street’.
But in the context of the concept of amends that we provide now and in the future, whether monetary, emotional or social, we commit to restitution and the honorable discharge of duty which we have hitherto not been assiduous in performing during our lives. And with these positive acts we not only clean up our side of the street as a beautification project; but we also make it possible for us to walk down our side of the street finally as people of honest,humble and dignified integrity.
© res 4/12/11
(OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS)
Sometimes the decision in the rooms seems to orbit in the purported esoterica regarding how to proceed with this step or that; is it best to do this step quickly and to get through it or to make a considered step not rushing into territory which, after all, in the newly minted AA is terra incognito? Experience tells us that procrastination inevitably leads us to put off ‘till tomorrow what we should do today, and we repeatedly do this until we never do today what we had determined we should have done yesterday.
On the other hand, we are equally experienced in rushing in with involving ourselves in and with situations prior to considered thought, with the result of some disturbing outcomes. So we are confronted with the irritating dilemma, do it sooner or do it later? Temporize or make “tempus fugit”?
So in addressing Step Nine, “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”, we undertake the task of engaging the people we listed in Step Eight who we have determined we have harmed and to whom we feel we are willing, and indeed, required to make amends. This discussion of how to proceed, that is, with all due haste or with all deliberate speed, is often not a topic of small debate. Both camps have their champions, often quite vocal, and single minded in their resolution as to how this step should be approached.
At one such meeting much talk was spent on the concept that many of the 12 steps are a work in progress and that work is not static. One should be prepared to repeat the steps time and time again throughout one’s life and in particular steps four through eleven. For these steps are, in effect, AA’s “design for living” and crucial to that design is the foundation that it calls for in the building of our new moral-ethical edifice.
So in a sense, whether we approach our amends quickly or deliberately, these steps are an Ouroboros, a life circle, meant for eternal revisiting. Because we can only progress toward perfection to achieve the kind of spiritual equanimity that we aspire to through the vehicle of these steps.
To the outsider this surely must appear like theological mumbo-jumbo. But it is more like asking the pitcher of a ballgame with one out and batters on first and second whether he should throw a fast or curve ball, attempt a pick-off or sacrifice fly-ball. These are strategic choices to get to win the game, and in this case the game is the life of the drunk and all those he loves on his team.
What should or can an outside agency offer in the way of advice to the drunk in the throes of such decision making dissonances? First of all, unless one is a trained counselor or a concerned party or trusted friend, I would say, very little. Stay back and stay away from the alcoholic mind. As the saying goes, “Don’t play in my mind without adult supervision”. This is dangerous terrain, not subject to the normal rules of physics or even of typical human psychology.
But, if forced to play a part, the best advice one can give is that one never has to act. There is almost never any compelling requirement for any action steps. Amends do not have to be made instantaneously – they can always be put off until tomorrow, more thought can always be brought to bear on the subject.
One thing is clear, one more lame and insincere “apology” is not needed. We have offered more than enough meaningless apologies all of our drinking lives, and one more, hastily delivered insincerity will only be greeted with the disdain that it deserves. An amend requires a “quid pro quo”, a something for something else. And in this instance, the drunk offers some form of restitution, monetary, emotional, temporal or social. What does he get in return? Peace of mind! We like to say that is permits us to ‘clean up our side of the street’.
But in the context of the concept of amends that we provide now and in the future, whether monetary, emotional or social, we commit to restitution and the honorable discharge of duty which we have hitherto not been assiduous in performing during our lives. And with these positive acts we not only clean up our side of the street as a beautification project; but we also make it possible for us to walk down our side of the street finally as people of honest,humble and dignified integrity.
© res 4/12/11
Saturday, April 9, 2011
A MOMENT OF QUIET DESPERATION
A MOMENT OF QUIET DESPERATION
“Just speak from the heart and that is all anyone can do when he shares. The rest will follow on its own.”
And so I did. I sat at the head of the table practically paralyzed in front of 25 or so men, some of whom I knew, most of whom I did not, but none of whom I had spoken before at this meeting. And I was to share with them my frustrations and my hopes for my “solutions” to my problems.
So I said that I did not know that I could share any solutions but I could certainly share my despair at having sobered nearly fourteen months ago after having been picked as a project of my two sponsors and sent away to sober up; telling how after the first month I asked whether I was “there yet” and one sponsor saying that I was just where I was supposed to be and then repeating that scenario again at month two and then three and again at month six. And then I gave up.
I admitted that I gave up trying to find out whether I was there yet because after whatever time I had been in the program I felt that “the miracle hadn’t happened yet” and I was definitely not there. I shared that even as I went to a meeting daily and didn’t drink, I felt that that was not enough to stay sober. That I had to embark on finding and Identifying my higher power and that it was a grueling process, was one which I have at times despaired of finding.
At some point I shared about my desperation of not being employed for over eighteen months and the continued Catch 22 of not being able to get employed because I wasn’t already employed and how utterly devastating and demoralizing that has been in a life that had been one long step up a long success ladder.
And after about five minutes I turned to Jim and said rather glumly that that was the whole sad and rather uninformative story and I was sorry that I could not have been a bit more upbeat and positive with more solutions as the meeting’s moniker would indicate.
The group sharing started to my right and each person appeared moved by what I considered a rambling mess of a story, each man seemingly drawing some message of hope or recollection of where he had been when he was in a similar situation, and words of cautious advice to hang in there. What surprised me was that each man’s sharing made reference to my alluding to my thoughts of suicide that I made during my share.
Oh? … I looked at Don, the first to look sympathetically at me and acknowledge the shared anguish that he witnessed when he heard what I was saying. And he urged me to listen to myself but not to give up. And then another and another and as each man shared there were repeated references to my thoughts of suicide and I had to query myself again did I really say that out loud?
And surely I must have since I could not hide from these echoes of my confession yet they were not hollow reverberations of empty pleas but deeply felt sorrows of people who had been there and through their own strength, had not done that. And they proffered that hope and strength now and allowed that they got through their despair by sharing it with the other men around them and not allowing it to permeate their gut and soul, but let the soul to breathe and air the vapid vapors of their sorrowful moods.
Which was I guess, the point when my sponsor asked me to speak in front of this group, he only told me that I was to share just what might be on my mind and left it at that. He did not say that I was going to be the jumping point for the meeting’s discussion, nor did he mention that what I said would be of any import, for had he, I might have really clammed up and nothing of any moment would have been blurted out nor any truth, if any was to be said, would have been delivered.
So deep self- destructive thoughts had finally been aired and now it was public knowledge. I suppose that is a good thing since I awoke this morning thinking that maybe I should skip this meeting. I was tired, I had been up late to a concert last night and although the performance was other-worldly, my mood was too and as I noted above, my thoughts were certainly tending to put me in an other worldly place, one not very healthy for me.
So I had promised my sponsor that I would go to the meeting. And because I said I would be there, I went. I did not want to cause him any angst; we had been having difficulty touching bases during the week and I have learned of late that he needs my company as much as I need his. So I needed to go for him as much as for me.
But I was really depressed when I arrived. I did not want to sit in front of twenty five guys, I did not want to spill my guts. I did not want to expose myself to …WHAT? Help? What was I thinking?
Did I really not want the help of twenty five other men?
And when the hour was up and all sixty minutes had been squeezed out of the meeting, and each of the men had thanked me for telling my story to remind them that there is pain out there, that they had it, and some of them still had it, they urged me to hold on. Not because all things were going to be better instantly. But because if I waited, things would get better, eventually. But if I did not wait, I would never be able to experience when that eventuality would come.
So here I am after the meeting and I can’t tell you when and who lifted that boulder from my chest. But somewhere about halfway around the table, after a few tears of mine had trickled down my cheek, I understood why my sponsor wanted me to come and speak. Where I had been going was not doing me the trick that I needed; and I needed to get some real estate off of my chest. And as I was leaving, Adamno, our resident Muslim whom I have known for at least five years but with whom I have had no more than three conversations, reached around and gave me a hug and told me to hang in there.
I still did not have a job. My future still seemed as impenetrable as before, and my problems were still there as I left the room. But my grief about it all wasn’t.
© res 4/9/2011
“Just speak from the heart and that is all anyone can do when he shares. The rest will follow on its own.”
And so I did. I sat at the head of the table practically paralyzed in front of 25 or so men, some of whom I knew, most of whom I did not, but none of whom I had spoken before at this meeting. And I was to share with them my frustrations and my hopes for my “solutions” to my problems.
So I said that I did not know that I could share any solutions but I could certainly share my despair at having sobered nearly fourteen months ago after having been picked as a project of my two sponsors and sent away to sober up; telling how after the first month I asked whether I was “there yet” and one sponsor saying that I was just where I was supposed to be and then repeating that scenario again at month two and then three and again at month six. And then I gave up.
I admitted that I gave up trying to find out whether I was there yet because after whatever time I had been in the program I felt that “the miracle hadn’t happened yet” and I was definitely not there. I shared that even as I went to a meeting daily and didn’t drink, I felt that that was not enough to stay sober. That I had to embark on finding and Identifying my higher power and that it was a grueling process, was one which I have at times despaired of finding.
At some point I shared about my desperation of not being employed for over eighteen months and the continued Catch 22 of not being able to get employed because I wasn’t already employed and how utterly devastating and demoralizing that has been in a life that had been one long step up a long success ladder.
And after about five minutes I turned to Jim and said rather glumly that that was the whole sad and rather uninformative story and I was sorry that I could not have been a bit more upbeat and positive with more solutions as the meeting’s moniker would indicate.
The group sharing started to my right and each person appeared moved by what I considered a rambling mess of a story, each man seemingly drawing some message of hope or recollection of where he had been when he was in a similar situation, and words of cautious advice to hang in there. What surprised me was that each man’s sharing made reference to my alluding to my thoughts of suicide that I made during my share.
Oh? … I looked at Don, the first to look sympathetically at me and acknowledge the shared anguish that he witnessed when he heard what I was saying. And he urged me to listen to myself but not to give up. And then another and another and as each man shared there were repeated references to my thoughts of suicide and I had to query myself again did I really say that out loud?
And surely I must have since I could not hide from these echoes of my confession yet they were not hollow reverberations of empty pleas but deeply felt sorrows of people who had been there and through their own strength, had not done that. And they proffered that hope and strength now and allowed that they got through their despair by sharing it with the other men around them and not allowing it to permeate their gut and soul, but let the soul to breathe and air the vapid vapors of their sorrowful moods.
Which was I guess, the point when my sponsor asked me to speak in front of this group, he only told me that I was to share just what might be on my mind and left it at that. He did not say that I was going to be the jumping point for the meeting’s discussion, nor did he mention that what I said would be of any import, for had he, I might have really clammed up and nothing of any moment would have been blurted out nor any truth, if any was to be said, would have been delivered.
So deep self- destructive thoughts had finally been aired and now it was public knowledge. I suppose that is a good thing since I awoke this morning thinking that maybe I should skip this meeting. I was tired, I had been up late to a concert last night and although the performance was other-worldly, my mood was too and as I noted above, my thoughts were certainly tending to put me in an other worldly place, one not very healthy for me.
So I had promised my sponsor that I would go to the meeting. And because I said I would be there, I went. I did not want to cause him any angst; we had been having difficulty touching bases during the week and I have learned of late that he needs my company as much as I need his. So I needed to go for him as much as for me.
But I was really depressed when I arrived. I did not want to sit in front of twenty five guys, I did not want to spill my guts. I did not want to expose myself to …WHAT? Help? What was I thinking?
Did I really not want the help of twenty five other men?
And when the hour was up and all sixty minutes had been squeezed out of the meeting, and each of the men had thanked me for telling my story to remind them that there is pain out there, that they had it, and some of them still had it, they urged me to hold on. Not because all things were going to be better instantly. But because if I waited, things would get better, eventually. But if I did not wait, I would never be able to experience when that eventuality would come.
So here I am after the meeting and I can’t tell you when and who lifted that boulder from my chest. But somewhere about halfway around the table, after a few tears of mine had trickled down my cheek, I understood why my sponsor wanted me to come and speak. Where I had been going was not doing me the trick that I needed; and I needed to get some real estate off of my chest. And as I was leaving, Adamno, our resident Muslim whom I have known for at least five years but with whom I have had no more than three conversations, reached around and gave me a hug and told me to hang in there.
I still did not have a job. My future still seemed as impenetrable as before, and my problems were still there as I left the room. But my grief about it all wasn’t.
© res 4/9/2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
IT WAS NOT EXACTLY PARIS
IT WAS NOT EXACTLY PARIS
“Of all the men in my life, there is only you”. A rather wistful and longing ending to a ballad sung by Nancy LaMott that I heard this afternoon set me to remembering my AA meeting today.
It was not my usual step meeting. Of late I have not been getting what I need from my men’s meetings where every week I feel I am treated to a torrent of encomiums to AA, sentiments that I do not exactly agree with although that appears to be the general conviction in the room. And how I long to have that feeling as others do, to feel that “AA saved my life and then gave me a life”.
Well AA may have saved my life, but as yet is hasn’t given me one and without exploring other venues, I’m not sure that I will find it in my usual haunts. So I have been striking out in new places. And this new meeting was a “Twelve and Twelve” (Twelve steps and Twelve traditions) meeting where we read and study the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in detail, what they mean and how we should try to apply them to our lives; how we “take” the steps. And while most groups typically read a chapter of a reading at a time and then throw the topic open to discussion, this group goes paragraph by paragraph and the reader gives his opinion of what that paragraph means to him personally in his life.
I find that particularly refreshing because it gives people who do not ordinarily share, and I count myself among those, a chance, even an obligation to share to get people out of their shells. More opinions are achieved and there is more knowledge that is shared, certainly more experience.
And today we were talking about Step Seven, “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” which follows hard on the heels of Step Six “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character” which we enumerated during “our fearless moral inventory” of Step Four. The operative word is humbly, and what it means to us and what it takes to reach the state of humility to have all those character defects removed from us.
Humility is a trait we AA’s have worked hard to bury and exhuming it can be a 'humiliating experience', something that we become more familiar with daily as we approach sobriety. As we begin to humble ourselves the first thing we feel is humiliation at the devastation that we have caused, the shame and the pain that we have been so much the cause of, in the lives of family, friends and associates.
And I was stuck with a paragraph that talked about how we often get sidetracked from learning humility in the search to satisfy our comfort needs of life first. When we do so, often to the exclusion of our spiritual needs, our stores of humility never quite get filled and we become spiritual and moral wastelands by the time we have reached “maturity”. And that then becomes our ethical superstructure for living which at best is tenuous.
But if our materialism is undermined by alcoholism, it is our alcoholism that attacks our very core material values. And then there is no underpinning for humility to support a moral design for living.
I, of course, feel this way since I am challenged daily by my material world which has collapsed around me, and it has been crumbling bit by bit over the past three years inexorably toward the point that it has reached today. And what frightens me is that sobriety has not yet allowed me the peace of mind to feel secure in the knowledge that the crumbling has stopped.
Humility does not thrive in that kind of environment except to feel that I humbly am thankful that I am not yet dead, dying, suffering from a debilitating disease or some other horrible fate. But then I sometimes, in my darker moments wish I was dead and acknowledge that I suffer from debilitating and paralyzing depression to the point where it is preventing me from pursuing jobs, and perhaps there are diseases I will not even investigate for fear of running up a mountain of debt that I can ill afford to spend.
So much for working on humility. But then there was a woman at this meeting who suffered from the same delusion of pursuing life for its material goods; a good home, private schools for her kids, summer camps, fancy cars and more. And then 2008 happened and the unthinkable happened to her and she lost the house.
And the fancy cars, and private schools and camps for the kids. And now she says humbly, that she thanks God from preventing worse things from happening. And I can see her point except we did not truly get into as to whether all the shoes have really dropped. I would love to think that everyone around that table is a successful seventh stepper but since we can only share for two minutes... pardon my cynicism. In this woman’s case, I hear more zapatos in the wings.
Which returns me to Nancy LaMott whose song triggered this whole remembrance. As we approached the meeting’s end with the five minute “anyone with a burning desire to share” ritual, a woman piped up that she felt that she was not being honest with the men she dated and that was her burning need as to why she needed to be at this meeting. She was not a regular attendee and she really should have been in Manhattan by now, where she lived, but needed to be at a meeting to deal with this “honesty” issue. “I have more than enough men who date me and usually I am brutally honest with them about whether I am dating other men, or should they propose to me I am honest about my desire not to marry, or if there are any other “issues”.
I turned to get a good look at this woman, blondish? in her mid fifties, slim, face getting lined but handsome in a maturing-lined sort of way. But after the claim that she had more than enough men dating her with marriage proposals galore, all of which she had to fend off with a baseball bat, my interest was piqued. She was particularly upset because she had come up to Connecticut from her NYC haunt to spend the weekend with some new? beau and now she was feeling guilty because she had not told him that she was dating other men in the city.
And not only did she not want to tell him, but she did not think it was any of his business and she did not want a marriage proposal out of him anyway, she had too many of those already and they always foundered as all her relationships did on the fact that she spent so much time with her AA business. With 20 years sober this had certainly become a priority and the usual complaint was that she loved AA more than she loved the men.
How do you answer that to someone who doesn’t get it? “YES I Do? If that’s the way you see it and that is a problem with you, then I probably do love AA more than you.”
But she was tired of feeling guilty of “hiding” her dating, AA had made her so scrupulously honest that she could not allow herself the luxury of this “privacy”. And she suffered for it. And the scene was wearing her out and truly the only man she loved ….her voice trailed off.
She became quiet for a moment and began to cry a bit, pulled herself together and then admitted that what she was doing was what her husband had done to her fifteen years ago just before they got divorced.
And yes, he was the only man she ever truly loved and now she thinks that divorce was the worst mistake she ever made.
As I absorbed this peculiar scenario I tried to remember where I had heard this before when I remembered that Maltby and Shire* song, “Life Story” and thought she’s singing it right here, right now. Life imitating art! There is truly nothing new under the sun.
….(“But I’m not complaining”)
©res 3/27/2011
LIFE STORY
…..
…And in the evening at my window
As I watch Jersey growing dim
I feel this troubling emotion
Summed up in this notion
I wished I’d stayed with him
Lord knows each day with him was madness
As I have spent my life maintaining
But more and more I recall the joy
My golden dreamer
My lost boy
Our life was life in the twilight zone
But no worse than a life alone
But oh,
Well I chose my way
And I’m not complaining
* “Closer Than Ever”, Maltby and Shire
“Of all the men in my life, there is only you”. A rather wistful and longing ending to a ballad sung by Nancy LaMott that I heard this afternoon set me to remembering my AA meeting today.
It was not my usual step meeting. Of late I have not been getting what I need from my men’s meetings where every week I feel I am treated to a torrent of encomiums to AA, sentiments that I do not exactly agree with although that appears to be the general conviction in the room. And how I long to have that feeling as others do, to feel that “AA saved my life and then gave me a life”.
Well AA may have saved my life, but as yet is hasn’t given me one and without exploring other venues, I’m not sure that I will find it in my usual haunts. So I have been striking out in new places. And this new meeting was a “Twelve and Twelve” (Twelve steps and Twelve traditions) meeting where we read and study the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in detail, what they mean and how we should try to apply them to our lives; how we “take” the steps. And while most groups typically read a chapter of a reading at a time and then throw the topic open to discussion, this group goes paragraph by paragraph and the reader gives his opinion of what that paragraph means to him personally in his life.
I find that particularly refreshing because it gives people who do not ordinarily share, and I count myself among those, a chance, even an obligation to share to get people out of their shells. More opinions are achieved and there is more knowledge that is shared, certainly more experience.
And today we were talking about Step Seven, “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” which follows hard on the heels of Step Six “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character” which we enumerated during “our fearless moral inventory” of Step Four. The operative word is humbly, and what it means to us and what it takes to reach the state of humility to have all those character defects removed from us.
Humility is a trait we AA’s have worked hard to bury and exhuming it can be a 'humiliating experience', something that we become more familiar with daily as we approach sobriety. As we begin to humble ourselves the first thing we feel is humiliation at the devastation that we have caused, the shame and the pain that we have been so much the cause of, in the lives of family, friends and associates.
And I was stuck with a paragraph that talked about how we often get sidetracked from learning humility in the search to satisfy our comfort needs of life first. When we do so, often to the exclusion of our spiritual needs, our stores of humility never quite get filled and we become spiritual and moral wastelands by the time we have reached “maturity”. And that then becomes our ethical superstructure for living which at best is tenuous.
But if our materialism is undermined by alcoholism, it is our alcoholism that attacks our very core material values. And then there is no underpinning for humility to support a moral design for living.
I, of course, feel this way since I am challenged daily by my material world which has collapsed around me, and it has been crumbling bit by bit over the past three years inexorably toward the point that it has reached today. And what frightens me is that sobriety has not yet allowed me the peace of mind to feel secure in the knowledge that the crumbling has stopped.
Humility does not thrive in that kind of environment except to feel that I humbly am thankful that I am not yet dead, dying, suffering from a debilitating disease or some other horrible fate. But then I sometimes, in my darker moments wish I was dead and acknowledge that I suffer from debilitating and paralyzing depression to the point where it is preventing me from pursuing jobs, and perhaps there are diseases I will not even investigate for fear of running up a mountain of debt that I can ill afford to spend.
So much for working on humility. But then there was a woman at this meeting who suffered from the same delusion of pursuing life for its material goods; a good home, private schools for her kids, summer camps, fancy cars and more. And then 2008 happened and the unthinkable happened to her and she lost the house.
And the fancy cars, and private schools and camps for the kids. And now she says humbly, that she thanks God from preventing worse things from happening. And I can see her point except we did not truly get into as to whether all the shoes have really dropped. I would love to think that everyone around that table is a successful seventh stepper but since we can only share for two minutes... pardon my cynicism. In this woman’s case, I hear more zapatos in the wings.
Which returns me to Nancy LaMott whose song triggered this whole remembrance. As we approached the meeting’s end with the five minute “anyone with a burning desire to share” ritual, a woman piped up that she felt that she was not being honest with the men she dated and that was her burning need as to why she needed to be at this meeting. She was not a regular attendee and she really should have been in Manhattan by now, where she lived, but needed to be at a meeting to deal with this “honesty” issue. “I have more than enough men who date me and usually I am brutally honest with them about whether I am dating other men, or should they propose to me I am honest about my desire not to marry, or if there are any other “issues”.
I turned to get a good look at this woman, blondish? in her mid fifties, slim, face getting lined but handsome in a maturing-lined sort of way. But after the claim that she had more than enough men dating her with marriage proposals galore, all of which she had to fend off with a baseball bat, my interest was piqued. She was particularly upset because she had come up to Connecticut from her NYC haunt to spend the weekend with some new? beau and now she was feeling guilty because she had not told him that she was dating other men in the city.
And not only did she not want to tell him, but she did not think it was any of his business and she did not want a marriage proposal out of him anyway, she had too many of those already and they always foundered as all her relationships did on the fact that she spent so much time with her AA business. With 20 years sober this had certainly become a priority and the usual complaint was that she loved AA more than she loved the men.
How do you answer that to someone who doesn’t get it? “YES I Do? If that’s the way you see it and that is a problem with you, then I probably do love AA more than you.”
But she was tired of feeling guilty of “hiding” her dating, AA had made her so scrupulously honest that she could not allow herself the luxury of this “privacy”. And she suffered for it. And the scene was wearing her out and truly the only man she loved ….her voice trailed off.
She became quiet for a moment and began to cry a bit, pulled herself together and then admitted that what she was doing was what her husband had done to her fifteen years ago just before they got divorced.
And yes, he was the only man she ever truly loved and now she thinks that divorce was the worst mistake she ever made.
As I absorbed this peculiar scenario I tried to remember where I had heard this before when I remembered that Maltby and Shire* song, “Life Story” and thought she’s singing it right here, right now. Life imitating art! There is truly nothing new under the sun.
….(“But I’m not complaining”)
©res 3/27/2011
LIFE STORY
…..
…And in the evening at my window
As I watch Jersey growing dim
I feel this troubling emotion
Summed up in this notion
I wished I’d stayed with him
Lord knows each day with him was madness
As I have spent my life maintaining
But more and more I recall the joy
My golden dreamer
My lost boy
Our life was life in the twilight zone
But no worse than a life alone
But oh,
Well I chose my way
And I’m not complaining
* “Closer Than Ever”, Maltby and Shire
Friday, April 1, 2011
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ABSENCE OF GREGOR MENDEL?
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ABSENCE OF GREGOR MENDEL?
The question of how one becomes alcoholic often comes up as to how much is nature and how much is nurture? After all, in the family where alcoholism is the forme fruste of family character dysfunction rather than by inheritance how does one sib become alcoholic and another remain normal?
We alcoholics often point to character defects as the basis for our alcoholism or the amplification of it and at the base of much of it is our over active egos, our overly grand sense of self. We are often born with genius or develop genius talents, and because of or in spite of these talents we find life for us often much too easy and unchallenging. In fact because it is easy we don’t like to be challenged by life.
Because of this ennui, laziness sets in and we do not try as hard at things and so we get frustrated when things are not solved very quickly. At times we skimp on the details. We become lax in attempts to get to the heart of things, get things done, finally delivering a slipshod product.
I recall that when I was young I studied classical piano, which I was very good at; so much so that my teacher and my mother had a performance career laid out for me. This did not jibe with my desires to play punch ball and stick ball on the Brooklyn streets, nor fungoing softballs in the school yard of PS 226 on spring afternoons with my brother. But it did serve my ego to enroll in the annual performance recording contests in which soloists from all over the nation competed to win recognition as up and coming talents. I was so full of myself that I never considered that others would be taking this competitive thing seriously and I proceeded to record my sessions on a 150 pound Webcor tape recorder that my father had. And I would insist on recording my pieces in single sit down sessions since I was too undisciplined to play pieces and then edit them. If I did not lay down a “perfect” performance, I would give up in frustration and then I would send in the “best” of the lot, mistakes and all. The result, brilliance interspersed with embarrassingly shrill clunkers. And I certainly look back on my pig headed hubris and think “just what was I thinking of ?”
Untamed ego, pride and laziness were prime examples of my early alcoholic character, even before I had started to drink. And this was a result of having been brought up where the only attention that anyone paid me was because of my piano prowess and for nothing else, not my scholasticism, not my athleticism not my looks or my grace or anything else.
For when I was growing up, most attention was focused on my brother, because my parents were told by some “psychologist” that he was performing below grade, (not below potential, because my parents were specifically told that he had no potential; that he would not go to college and most probably not graduate from high school). This was the current state of knowledge that my parents were led to understand existed about “highly nervous children” which my brother purportedly was.
And my parents accepted this diagnosis! Maybe they got a second opinion but I’m not convinced that they did but they swallowed the diagnosis hook line and sinker.
Which is not to say that they gave up. Not at all. My mother, as far I as I can tell, dedicated the greatest part of her attention for the next twenty years to the attending of my brother to make sure that he never reached excitability so that he was able to cope as best as he was able to do.
And it worked? I don’t know. My brother went on to get a PhD and an MBA, and was still hyperactive; but I think that although her attention helped him, he pretty much pulled himself to his own success because he channeled his prodigious nervous physical energies into productive avenues to focus his mental energies. My mother could not have done that for him. That was not her métier , nor would she have thought to suggest it had it crossed her mind.
She loved music, theater, art, literature. Not basketball, which was the avenue that he chose.
But she did not have the energy to shower attention on two children, not to the extent of sitting up at nights doing his typing, studying with him, making sure his work was finished, making sure his fever was attended to, making sure that his attentions were focused on the tasks that he needed to focus on when basketball was not enough to focus them.
I got attended to only at the piano, and I resented that!
Attentions not showered on people or even attended to often lead to at-drift children who are left to their own devices to figure out moral and ethical dilemmas of everyday life often to the detriment of the proper conclusion. And without proper guidance strong super ego development flags.
Our parents did not intend to rear their children in any way but the best that they felt that they could. And they did what they thought they did was the best. And they truly believe and believed that they did.
Parents, much to their surprise, find themselves at a complete loss when their child goes astray believing that they have given them the benefits of their wisdom when in reality they have “showered” them with only the minimum of attention that they thought they could get away with. And so parental behavior that may not be alcoholic in actuality may be alcoholic in its presentation (dry drunk) Just enough attention not to make a murderer but not enough to prevent producing a moral degenerate, alcoholic or juvenile delinquent.
So in the absence of a clear genetic lineage to alcoholism there is often direct parental nurturing evidence for producing an alcoholic through parental withdrawal of affection, attention, detachment and involvement. Otherwise ordinary childhoods in which both parent and child proclaim to have been completely normal, or in fact believe it to have been ideal, in a “Leave It to Beaver Childhood” way, were diffused with privation of love, inattentiveness and actual disengagement in the ordinary upbringing tasks of parenting.
Often not because the parents were bad but because they lacked the experience themselves of having adequate parenting, often from immigrant families forced to spend inordinate time to make ends meet away from the home to provide for family needs, or in other circumstances to care for large families or families struck by the illness of one or more family members, thus sidetracking the attention of the parents from the care or attention of some children to others or from the children to the affected spouse.
Parents with overly busy social or otherwise full lives do not necessarily share these wide experiences with their children to their betterment. Their self or selfish involvement excludes the child from the timely parenting needed for ordinary daily growth.
The child needs the daily input of an attentive parent not just for homework but to just acknowledge small triumphs as well as note small defeats and share the tears of fear, hope and joy. And the laughs as well. But if the parents are always going to “charity functions”, political events, or other society balls, or even just to work, the children become distanced and prepared to become poor parents themselves thus perpetuating the cycle of inattentive and inadequate parenting for the next generation.
But when this inattentiveness accompanies dysfunctional intrafamilial behaviors such as excessive drinking (purely as a social outlet or as a byproduct of skewed social status), it is this observed behavior that becomes imprinted on the children as a coping behavior for stress.
And all this is accomplished without the need for genetic predispositions. So at times it is difficult to distinguish between nature and nurture. In families with generations of rearing dysfunction, teasing apart the genetic components of alcoholic predisposition from the conditioning as a result of exposure to negative parental behavioral proclivities can be a daunting and perhaps futile exercise in logic and demology (the study of human behavior).
All of the preceding is in no way an excuse for any behavior that results in the alcoholic. It is just an explanation of derivation and maybe a salient to keep in mind when we return to the family to make amends and continue a more healthy relationship; when we have begun to recover from the ‘disease of self’. Where we have been guilty of being remiss in our attentions to our own children and spouses, we need to recommit ourselves to those relationships. Our love must be renewed and rededicated. Not just by words. We have said enough words. We need to demonstrate our intentions by actions. They are the actions of everyday life, uncomplaining, unprodded and unassisted actions that in the long run are the activities that will bring the rewards to us more than any longed for acknowledgment or praise but will be endorsement for itself and in its own right.
©res 4/1/2011
The question of how one becomes alcoholic often comes up as to how much is nature and how much is nurture? After all, in the family where alcoholism is the forme fruste of family character dysfunction rather than by inheritance how does one sib become alcoholic and another remain normal?
We alcoholics often point to character defects as the basis for our alcoholism or the amplification of it and at the base of much of it is our over active egos, our overly grand sense of self. We are often born with genius or develop genius talents, and because of or in spite of these talents we find life for us often much too easy and unchallenging. In fact because it is easy we don’t like to be challenged by life.
Because of this ennui, laziness sets in and we do not try as hard at things and so we get frustrated when things are not solved very quickly. At times we skimp on the details. We become lax in attempts to get to the heart of things, get things done, finally delivering a slipshod product.
I recall that when I was young I studied classical piano, which I was very good at; so much so that my teacher and my mother had a performance career laid out for me. This did not jibe with my desires to play punch ball and stick ball on the Brooklyn streets, nor fungoing softballs in the school yard of PS 226 on spring afternoons with my brother. But it did serve my ego to enroll in the annual performance recording contests in which soloists from all over the nation competed to win recognition as up and coming talents. I was so full of myself that I never considered that others would be taking this competitive thing seriously and I proceeded to record my sessions on a 150 pound Webcor tape recorder that my father had. And I would insist on recording my pieces in single sit down sessions since I was too undisciplined to play pieces and then edit them. If I did not lay down a “perfect” performance, I would give up in frustration and then I would send in the “best” of the lot, mistakes and all. The result, brilliance interspersed with embarrassingly shrill clunkers. And I certainly look back on my pig headed hubris and think “just what was I thinking of ?”
Untamed ego, pride and laziness were prime examples of my early alcoholic character, even before I had started to drink. And this was a result of having been brought up where the only attention that anyone paid me was because of my piano prowess and for nothing else, not my scholasticism, not my athleticism not my looks or my grace or anything else.
For when I was growing up, most attention was focused on my brother, because my parents were told by some “psychologist” that he was performing below grade, (not below potential, because my parents were specifically told that he had no potential; that he would not go to college and most probably not graduate from high school). This was the current state of knowledge that my parents were led to understand existed about “highly nervous children” which my brother purportedly was.
And my parents accepted this diagnosis! Maybe they got a second opinion but I’m not convinced that they did but they swallowed the diagnosis hook line and sinker.
Which is not to say that they gave up. Not at all. My mother, as far I as I can tell, dedicated the greatest part of her attention for the next twenty years to the attending of my brother to make sure that he never reached excitability so that he was able to cope as best as he was able to do.
And it worked? I don’t know. My brother went on to get a PhD and an MBA, and was still hyperactive; but I think that although her attention helped him, he pretty much pulled himself to his own success because he channeled his prodigious nervous physical energies into productive avenues to focus his mental energies. My mother could not have done that for him. That was not her métier , nor would she have thought to suggest it had it crossed her mind.
She loved music, theater, art, literature. Not basketball, which was the avenue that he chose.
But she did not have the energy to shower attention on two children, not to the extent of sitting up at nights doing his typing, studying with him, making sure his work was finished, making sure his fever was attended to, making sure that his attentions were focused on the tasks that he needed to focus on when basketball was not enough to focus them.
I got attended to only at the piano, and I resented that!
Attentions not showered on people or even attended to often lead to at-drift children who are left to their own devices to figure out moral and ethical dilemmas of everyday life often to the detriment of the proper conclusion. And without proper guidance strong super ego development flags.
Our parents did not intend to rear their children in any way but the best that they felt that they could. And they did what they thought they did was the best. And they truly believe and believed that they did.
Parents, much to their surprise, find themselves at a complete loss when their child goes astray believing that they have given them the benefits of their wisdom when in reality they have “showered” them with only the minimum of attention that they thought they could get away with. And so parental behavior that may not be alcoholic in actuality may be alcoholic in its presentation (dry drunk) Just enough attention not to make a murderer but not enough to prevent producing a moral degenerate, alcoholic or juvenile delinquent.
So in the absence of a clear genetic lineage to alcoholism there is often direct parental nurturing evidence for producing an alcoholic through parental withdrawal of affection, attention, detachment and involvement. Otherwise ordinary childhoods in which both parent and child proclaim to have been completely normal, or in fact believe it to have been ideal, in a “Leave It to Beaver Childhood” way, were diffused with privation of love, inattentiveness and actual disengagement in the ordinary upbringing tasks of parenting.
Often not because the parents were bad but because they lacked the experience themselves of having adequate parenting, often from immigrant families forced to spend inordinate time to make ends meet away from the home to provide for family needs, or in other circumstances to care for large families or families struck by the illness of one or more family members, thus sidetracking the attention of the parents from the care or attention of some children to others or from the children to the affected spouse.
Parents with overly busy social or otherwise full lives do not necessarily share these wide experiences with their children to their betterment. Their self or selfish involvement excludes the child from the timely parenting needed for ordinary daily growth.
The child needs the daily input of an attentive parent not just for homework but to just acknowledge small triumphs as well as note small defeats and share the tears of fear, hope and joy. And the laughs as well. But if the parents are always going to “charity functions”, political events, or other society balls, or even just to work, the children become distanced and prepared to become poor parents themselves thus perpetuating the cycle of inattentive and inadequate parenting for the next generation.
But when this inattentiveness accompanies dysfunctional intrafamilial behaviors such as excessive drinking (purely as a social outlet or as a byproduct of skewed social status), it is this observed behavior that becomes imprinted on the children as a coping behavior for stress.
And all this is accomplished without the need for genetic predispositions. So at times it is difficult to distinguish between nature and nurture. In families with generations of rearing dysfunction, teasing apart the genetic components of alcoholic predisposition from the conditioning as a result of exposure to negative parental behavioral proclivities can be a daunting and perhaps futile exercise in logic and demology (the study of human behavior).
All of the preceding is in no way an excuse for any behavior that results in the alcoholic. It is just an explanation of derivation and maybe a salient to keep in mind when we return to the family to make amends and continue a more healthy relationship; when we have begun to recover from the ‘disease of self’. Where we have been guilty of being remiss in our attentions to our own children and spouses, we need to recommit ourselves to those relationships. Our love must be renewed and rededicated. Not just by words. We have said enough words. We need to demonstrate our intentions by actions. They are the actions of everyday life, uncomplaining, unprodded and unassisted actions that in the long run are the activities that will bring the rewards to us more than any longed for acknowledgment or praise but will be endorsement for itself and in its own right.
©res 4/1/2011
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