WHEN MARLEY COMES MARCHING HOME AGAIN
There are times when I think that some things are placed in the “24 Hours a Day Book” intentionally. Of course they are, but by intentionally I believe that maybe they have the date specifically in mind say, on Christmas, New Years, maybe Easter and perhaps in this instance Memorial Day. And it may have been a completely subconscious thought on the part of the author of the prayer and meditation for today in the “24 Hours a Day Book” that stressed the 12th step in this day before Memorial Day ( i.e. helping other alcoholics who have not found their way to sobriety and into the rooms of AA. And more generally, to help other people in need out.)
Or maybe it is I who have changed on this Memorial Day and finally I am sober enough to realize that change; and today I shared that recognition in the room. And I began, “I am of a certain age that I did not appreciate Memorial Day in years past and when my daughter would pester me to see the Norwalk parade, I would, in my drunken mind, be very put out, not wanting to celebrate a holiday for which I had no simpatico. I hated war, and in particular, I hated the most recent wars which many of the marchers were representing. And I completely lost the understanding at the time, that because I hated a principle, that I should not despise the people who, for whatever reasons, were called upon to be the instruments of policies which they may not have been free to resist implementing or had not thought enough about resisting.
“But since becoming sober, I have become self-shamed into realizing that the instruments of policy are not the enemy, and are often the victims of forces way beyond their control; and often enough suffer and are vilified as instruments of policy they had no say in and were not in control of. They were maimed, physically, mentally and spiritually and for their efforts were ill supported by the government that sent them to war and the society that was not prepared to bring them home. (In this I was referring to the Viet Nam War). But in this most modern adventure I am equally chagrinned to find that although we have trained and supplied our troops magnificently to go out and die, we were still ill prepared to welcome them home with the same vigor with which we sent them off to war. We were still ill prepared to bring them home to a safe and nurturing environment that would not only return them welcomed to society, but would ease them back into a society that was not trained to accept and understand what people are like when they come back from war. And in a country of three hundred plus million people, when you return more than a million citizens who have been to war and who have been cooked in its cauldron, the best we know how to do is say ‘thanks for your service’ without understanding how to sit them down and ask the simple question ‘how was it there for you?’
“And as a sober man now, I know that I look at this holiday with great awe and respect for the true sacrifice that people who have been to war have made. Nobody who has been to war is ever the same. And I have finally realized that my antipathy toward this holiday and to other holidays with less “holy” overtones is one that is riddled with guilt, a sort of survivor’s guilt for having the political awareness, the temerity, the opportunity and the luck to resist the Viet Nam War and in doing so, survive it where so many did not.”
And that was a confession I had not known I was going to make when I walked into the room this morning. And I thought, “Wow, now that was TMI (too much information)!”
But apparently it was not, because it sparked a lively discussion of what many of the older men in the room needed to unburden themselves of on this day. The few who were of “a certain age” seemed eager to speak about their deferments and why they “resisted” the war but also how previous wars’ experiences had ill treated the men in their families and led them to turn to drink after their wars, to fight their “shell shock” (PTSD) from after WWII or the Korean Conflict. And how these were dirty little secrets that Tom Brokaw did not heavily advertise about his “Greatest Generation”, (as perhaps he should not have), not that we should be ashamed of those people. No doubt more soldiers than we know of suffered the devastating effects of PTSD from those wars.
Some prefaced their guilt by stating that they “married into” the war trauma as one widow stated about her husband who died of the effects of agent orange. And another who’s cousin came back from Afghanistan “different”, all because he signed up to get a college education, never ever thinking that he would have to actually go to war.
And another of us “of a certain age” had to preface his demurring circumstances by a family recitation of war heroes going back to the First World War in order to prove his family bone fides before “outing” his own behavior of having avoided the draft during his drugging years. And today he is one of the fiercest most patriotic citizens I know. Nobody doubts him and I would not hesitate to say that anyone should doubt me.
Now or ever.
But then there is the issue of personal guilt, not patriotism. We can be equally patriotic marching to the beat of uniformity or by resisting wrong-headedness. But our consciences must be our guides as well. And mine does not regret the political stands that I took, but that I did not understand the difference between political action and kindness, generosity and goodness, led me to pompous self righteousness. And that left too many people out of the support loop, forgotten, uncared for and lost.
And that left them almost “unforgiven” and wondering just what they were “unforgiven” for. They did nothing but follow orders in the noblest sense of the word and they had nothing for which to be forgiven.
Being a drunk does not excuse anything. And becoming sober requires that you acquire sober thinking . And had I not finally awakened to this, I would have been the victim of Marley’s wrath just as surely as had I been an unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge.
© res 5/29/2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
PAYING ATTENTION
PAYING ATTENTION
There was a death in the family today. It was, as these things go rather sudden. And as it is in our group, always considered an undeserved and unwarranted blow to an otherwise deserving and rehabilitated person.
The meeting did not start out with any particular portent, it was a discussion I lead on the 12th step “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs”. In the “12 and 12”, the chapter is substantial and a discussion of it in any meeting seems a bit daunting since it can be taken in so many directions. We can talk about how we may have treated our families poorly in our trek to reach our spiritual goal. We can delve into the mysteries of having developed a “God sense” a real feeling for the presence of God in our lives, or conversely how we still struggle with the concept and worry if we have indeed achieved the rightness of the program as Bill W. had envisioned it.
We may even want to just maintain that we are just fine where we are. And regardless of where Bill W thought everyone should have been by this step, our spirituality was not predicated on a sense of the God of his, (Bill’s), understanding , but of our own, as was initially stated in the Big Book, written 14 years earlier. But we certainly could all agree that the calling of the twelfth step to help other alcoholics in need was a goal upon which we could all concur.
But I chose to step back and reconsider how little recognition I gave my family during my drinking days and specifically of the achievements of my daughter. That I had been disconnected enough during her high school years, and if not completely absent, certainly AWOL much of the time.
And whereas I was sober during most of her college years and even helped her with some of her college assignments, I did so as a dutiful father helps a “struggling” child, never really stopping to think just how much she actually needed me.
At her graduation I noticed that by her name in the program was a little cross that indicated that she had graduated with honors, magna cum laude in fact. Who knew? My wife didn’t. The daughter never let on. The wife expressed as much surprise as I did and when we drove back from the ceremony we were discussing, in some perplexed wonderment why and how we came to think that we should not once worry that she would have any difficulties in doing well at school. Parental genetic hubris was all that I could muster as an excuse.
But I was not going to let this stand silently as I had let all her past achievements. When she finally got home I told her at least three times how proud I was of her, and that although I had expected her to do well, it was equally gratifying to have seen her actually perform as well as my expectations.
Arthur Miller said it most poignantly, “Attention must be paid”! People must be recognized for their lives; no doubt for their accomplishments but certainly for their lives. And on this occasion, I was recognizing her for who she was, at this instant, through the lens of this honor to be sure, but also for the person she was and how proud that made me feel to be her father. And that needed to be said sooner rather than later and more often than not.
And for today and for now, that was what the essence of what the 12th Step meant to me for the meeting.
This topic seemed to strike a chord with the rest of the group because Al felt that he needed to tell his son (who was about ten years older than my daughter), now that I had brought up the subject, that maybe he had been too subtle in his “appreciation” of his son. Perhaps he needed to be more demonstrable and actually say it out loud and to say it directly.
“There can be no mistaking directly”, Al mused.
And as the theme jumped from one section of the group to the next, first this person then that took up the theme with similar eager remonstrations to either perform these duties or to renew these acknowledgements since it was a long time since these “attentions” had, indeed, been paid.
But Emma, whom I did not know, had died and a very upset Wendy announced it, barely getting the news out before breaking down into wails of tears. She had died rather suddenly, of a stroke, from a blood clot. And as I understand it she was about ten years my junior which certainly gave me pause.
Rather young by my estimation since I do not consider myself more than middle age. Twelve years sober. And Wendy wondering about the injustice of it all maybe, even, about the fairness of a God, that could wreak the havoc that was the life that Wendy had. How could she have deserved this?
Of course, there is no explanation. One’s faith in the goodness of people and the basic fairness that having lived a life worth living, does not protect you from the prior abuse of the body that God gave you (even the one that you believed so deeply in) and the ravages that time takes its toll on. It was not divine retribution, just a fact of her existence.
But she did have 12 sober, and from all appearances, happy, healthy and productive, years. What then is the complaint about?
Attention should be paid; on all the good that came out of that life, on the fact of that life at all, and that she should have had so many people to whom she could leave a legacy of sobriety.
And after all, what else defines a life worth living, and a life having been lived worthily?
Attention has been paid.
© res 5/25/2011
There was a death in the family today. It was, as these things go rather sudden. And as it is in our group, always considered an undeserved and unwarranted blow to an otherwise deserving and rehabilitated person.
The meeting did not start out with any particular portent, it was a discussion I lead on the 12th step “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs”. In the “12 and 12”, the chapter is substantial and a discussion of it in any meeting seems a bit daunting since it can be taken in so many directions. We can talk about how we may have treated our families poorly in our trek to reach our spiritual goal. We can delve into the mysteries of having developed a “God sense” a real feeling for the presence of God in our lives, or conversely how we still struggle with the concept and worry if we have indeed achieved the rightness of the program as Bill W. had envisioned it.
We may even want to just maintain that we are just fine where we are. And regardless of where Bill W thought everyone should have been by this step, our spirituality was not predicated on a sense of the God of his, (Bill’s), understanding , but of our own, as was initially stated in the Big Book, written 14 years earlier. But we certainly could all agree that the calling of the twelfth step to help other alcoholics in need was a goal upon which we could all concur.
But I chose to step back and reconsider how little recognition I gave my family during my drinking days and specifically of the achievements of my daughter. That I had been disconnected enough during her high school years, and if not completely absent, certainly AWOL much of the time.
And whereas I was sober during most of her college years and even helped her with some of her college assignments, I did so as a dutiful father helps a “struggling” child, never really stopping to think just how much she actually needed me.
At her graduation I noticed that by her name in the program was a little cross that indicated that she had graduated with honors, magna cum laude in fact. Who knew? My wife didn’t. The daughter never let on. The wife expressed as much surprise as I did and when we drove back from the ceremony we were discussing, in some perplexed wonderment why and how we came to think that we should not once worry that she would have any difficulties in doing well at school. Parental genetic hubris was all that I could muster as an excuse.
But I was not going to let this stand silently as I had let all her past achievements. When she finally got home I told her at least three times how proud I was of her, and that although I had expected her to do well, it was equally gratifying to have seen her actually perform as well as my expectations.
Arthur Miller said it most poignantly, “Attention must be paid”! People must be recognized for their lives; no doubt for their accomplishments but certainly for their lives. And on this occasion, I was recognizing her for who she was, at this instant, through the lens of this honor to be sure, but also for the person she was and how proud that made me feel to be her father. And that needed to be said sooner rather than later and more often than not.
And for today and for now, that was what the essence of what the 12th Step meant to me for the meeting.
This topic seemed to strike a chord with the rest of the group because Al felt that he needed to tell his son (who was about ten years older than my daughter), now that I had brought up the subject, that maybe he had been too subtle in his “appreciation” of his son. Perhaps he needed to be more demonstrable and actually say it out loud and to say it directly.
“There can be no mistaking directly”, Al mused.
And as the theme jumped from one section of the group to the next, first this person then that took up the theme with similar eager remonstrations to either perform these duties or to renew these acknowledgements since it was a long time since these “attentions” had, indeed, been paid.
But Emma, whom I did not know, had died and a very upset Wendy announced it, barely getting the news out before breaking down into wails of tears. She had died rather suddenly, of a stroke, from a blood clot. And as I understand it she was about ten years my junior which certainly gave me pause.
Rather young by my estimation since I do not consider myself more than middle age. Twelve years sober. And Wendy wondering about the injustice of it all maybe, even, about the fairness of a God, that could wreak the havoc that was the life that Wendy had. How could she have deserved this?
Of course, there is no explanation. One’s faith in the goodness of people and the basic fairness that having lived a life worth living, does not protect you from the prior abuse of the body that God gave you (even the one that you believed so deeply in) and the ravages that time takes its toll on. It was not divine retribution, just a fact of her existence.
But she did have 12 sober, and from all appearances, happy, healthy and productive, years. What then is the complaint about?
Attention should be paid; on all the good that came out of that life, on the fact of that life at all, and that she should have had so many people to whom she could leave a legacy of sobriety.
And after all, what else defines a life worth living, and a life having been lived worthily?
Attention has been paid.
© res 5/25/2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
MORE THAN WILL
MORE THAN WILL
When considering the treatment of alcoholism, the idea of willpower comes up repeatedly. And more often than not the distinction must be drawn between the application of willpower and the manipulation of the power of the will when engaging alcoholics in their desire to achieve some control over their relationship with alcohol.
It is certainly not difficult for me to remember when I was younger that as alcoholics and addicts, we were considered to be weak minded and weak willed; we may have been hooked by our drug of choice but also got there by some moral failing and the failure to get off of the drug was equally the fault of some moral turpitude on our part. Attitudes like this certainly pre-date my youth and were au courant at the time that Bill Wilson was in the throes of his disease trying to wrestle the tiger off his back.
Even today and certainly in the interval between the time that “Alcoholics Anonymous” was written and now, lay and professional attitudes have waxed both orthodox and liberal about whether addictions and in particular alcoholism, were to be considered a disease or a social/ethical/moral defect. Presumably the former might permit the sufferer “off the hook” for his suffering while the latter perchance stationed him to be eternally damned by society, his religious peers and himself.
It is instructive to go back to the early chapters of the Big Book and observe Bill W. argue the disease model of alcoholism. It seemed incomprehensible that a man could apparently make conscious choices to drink, and then drink some more and then even more until either conscious thought was obliterated or so impaired as to make him useless. Surely somewhere in this cycle one could apply principles of self restraint and control; and if a person could not apply one’s will toward this end, clearly that person lacked the character of a good and moral person!
But Bill W. states…
“The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink”[1]
Even today I read that paragraph and I find that there still are many audiences that do not understand that idea without a sense of perplexed wonderment. How can people be so self unaware? And when the disease model is used both in the rooms and out, the one that is used to best illustrate it is often the model of an allergy.
This model is used in the context of trying to help recovering alcoholics explain to normal drinkers why they cannot drink alcohol; that it reacts poorly with their physiologic systems, like any allergy to their body. So it is often compared to shell fish allergy which if consumed will cause anaphylaxis, (mucosal swelling of the airways and eyes, hives and generalized cardiovascular collapse). And if one is allergic in this manner, one does not eat shell fish anymore. So people truly understand that comparison as to why you would not drink if that is what alcohol did to you.
But that is not truly a valid illustration otherwise we would not find so many people asking why so many “allergic” people continue drinking alcohol despite their obvious inability to handle the substance.
The better comparison, and Bill W. does get this right, is that alcoholics do not think like other people so that when he considers this condition a disease, he thinks of it as a mental disorder (or as I like to refer to it as a disease of disordered thinking). Because, no matter what the actual danger, the alcoholic, after that first drink, cannot stop, has no control over his drinking and his thinking is so distorted that he will consider all kinds of machinations to seek out and find, store, hide and sneak drinks at any time, day or night, inclement weather or sunshine, under any type of social circumstance through the threat of and after divorce and bankruptcy and loss of job and position.
This is the true morbid illustration that sheer will power is often not enough to overcome. It might be like asking a schizophrenic to willfully stop hearing the voices in his head. What one can do is to have the alcoholic learn to ignore or put aside the cravings for alcohol as a means of coping with the disease urges. Just as Nobel Laureate (and schizophrenic), John Nash learned to “ignore” the voices he heard in his head, AA purports to ask us to ignore our urges for alcohol and replace them with other thoughts. John Nash replaced his thoughts with theoretical thinking as we replace ours with a development of a new spiritual self realization.
In this model, it then becomes clear, and AA acknowledges this, that the disease never goes away. It is present always, at best it lays dormant.
“While I’m in here getting spiritually fit, my disease is out in the parking lot doing pushups”, goes the common AA adage.
So after Bill W. successfully argues the case for the disease model for alcoholism, (with the full backing of the medical establishment for support), it is notable to see where he takes a peculiar twist in the steps program in order to help bring the sufferer the much needed relief of the burden of the disease.
What most of us consider to be an organic disease then, is not really what Bill W. is concerned about as he gets into the twelve steps. He is concerned about spiritual illness, soul sickness, character defects and how we can rid ourselves of these spiritual drag stones so that we will not be drowned in a sea of spiritual depravity and darkness.
In step four we made a fearless and searching moral inventory to discover our deepest and darkest secrets, our moral and character defects so that we can confess them to another human being and to God. In step five we admit to God, ourselves and another human the exact nature of our wrongs. In step six we became ready to have God remove these character defects and in step seven we ask God to remove these character defects (“our short comings”).
I go through this process to demonstrate Bill’s cure for the “disease” of alcoholism as he defines this disease state. And alcoholism by this definition then is a “moral” disease. And its cure can only be effectuated by the re-establishment of a moral center which only an acceptance of a higher power (which Bill W. in fact demands that we call God) can consummate.
So we come full circle to the Victorian notion that alcoholism and by extension, addictive disorders, is a disease of moral and character failure. (And this from the founder of the society that tried to promote the idea that drunks were not primarily moral failures. )
But, to come to the defense of the program, if not Bill Wilson himself, it should be recalled that a brain suffering from being soaked in a sea of ethyl alcohol for as long as most alcoholics have been soaking their brains, probably has leached out most moral and ethical imprinting, like the ink print would naturally dissolve off the printed page of a bible. And it is only after drying that brain out, reestablishing a conscious contact with moral and ethical principles again can one learn to live, once again, a moral and ethical life. Like reprinting the golden rule on once leached print paper.
One cannot be spiritually fit if one hasn’t been fit at all. And until fitness has been achieved, no body building, mentally, physically or spiritually can take place. In this case, the AA program seeks to first bring the alcoholic back physically, then mentally and then spiritually as one would hear almost daily in any meeting.
And while this may be an intellectually satisfying discussion, the true goal is to satisfy the need to remain sober by making sure that we all understand how we stay sober. Do we understand that we have a disease and are treated in some medical fashion and achieve some new medical equilibrium of recovery? Or, do we achieve a new spiritual reality that keeps us morally fit?
In the long run, AA is pretty laissez faire about the whole thing. Nobody except the most extreme dogmatists really cares about this, and most will defer to the slogan “live and let live. It works, if you work it”.
[1] P. 24, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Ed. 2001
© res 5/22/2011
When considering the treatment of alcoholism, the idea of willpower comes up repeatedly. And more often than not the distinction must be drawn between the application of willpower and the manipulation of the power of the will when engaging alcoholics in their desire to achieve some control over their relationship with alcohol.
It is certainly not difficult for me to remember when I was younger that as alcoholics and addicts, we were considered to be weak minded and weak willed; we may have been hooked by our drug of choice but also got there by some moral failing and the failure to get off of the drug was equally the fault of some moral turpitude on our part. Attitudes like this certainly pre-date my youth and were au courant at the time that Bill Wilson was in the throes of his disease trying to wrestle the tiger off his back.
Even today and certainly in the interval between the time that “Alcoholics Anonymous” was written and now, lay and professional attitudes have waxed both orthodox and liberal about whether addictions and in particular alcoholism, were to be considered a disease or a social/ethical/moral defect. Presumably the former might permit the sufferer “off the hook” for his suffering while the latter perchance stationed him to be eternally damned by society, his religious peers and himself.
It is instructive to go back to the early chapters of the Big Book and observe Bill W. argue the disease model of alcoholism. It seemed incomprehensible that a man could apparently make conscious choices to drink, and then drink some more and then even more until either conscious thought was obliterated or so impaired as to make him useless. Surely somewhere in this cycle one could apply principles of self restraint and control; and if a person could not apply one’s will toward this end, clearly that person lacked the character of a good and moral person!
But Bill W. states…
“The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink”[1]
Even today I read that paragraph and I find that there still are many audiences that do not understand that idea without a sense of perplexed wonderment. How can people be so self unaware? And when the disease model is used both in the rooms and out, the one that is used to best illustrate it is often the model of an allergy.
This model is used in the context of trying to help recovering alcoholics explain to normal drinkers why they cannot drink alcohol; that it reacts poorly with their physiologic systems, like any allergy to their body. So it is often compared to shell fish allergy which if consumed will cause anaphylaxis, (mucosal swelling of the airways and eyes, hives and generalized cardiovascular collapse). And if one is allergic in this manner, one does not eat shell fish anymore. So people truly understand that comparison as to why you would not drink if that is what alcohol did to you.
But that is not truly a valid illustration otherwise we would not find so many people asking why so many “allergic” people continue drinking alcohol despite their obvious inability to handle the substance.
The better comparison, and Bill W. does get this right, is that alcoholics do not think like other people so that when he considers this condition a disease, he thinks of it as a mental disorder (or as I like to refer to it as a disease of disordered thinking). Because, no matter what the actual danger, the alcoholic, after that first drink, cannot stop, has no control over his drinking and his thinking is so distorted that he will consider all kinds of machinations to seek out and find, store, hide and sneak drinks at any time, day or night, inclement weather or sunshine, under any type of social circumstance through the threat of and after divorce and bankruptcy and loss of job and position.
This is the true morbid illustration that sheer will power is often not enough to overcome. It might be like asking a schizophrenic to willfully stop hearing the voices in his head. What one can do is to have the alcoholic learn to ignore or put aside the cravings for alcohol as a means of coping with the disease urges. Just as Nobel Laureate (and schizophrenic), John Nash learned to “ignore” the voices he heard in his head, AA purports to ask us to ignore our urges for alcohol and replace them with other thoughts. John Nash replaced his thoughts with theoretical thinking as we replace ours with a development of a new spiritual self realization.
In this model, it then becomes clear, and AA acknowledges this, that the disease never goes away. It is present always, at best it lays dormant.
“While I’m in here getting spiritually fit, my disease is out in the parking lot doing pushups”, goes the common AA adage.
So after Bill W. successfully argues the case for the disease model for alcoholism, (with the full backing of the medical establishment for support), it is notable to see where he takes a peculiar twist in the steps program in order to help bring the sufferer the much needed relief of the burden of the disease.
What most of us consider to be an organic disease then, is not really what Bill W. is concerned about as he gets into the twelve steps. He is concerned about spiritual illness, soul sickness, character defects and how we can rid ourselves of these spiritual drag stones so that we will not be drowned in a sea of spiritual depravity and darkness.
In step four we made a fearless and searching moral inventory to discover our deepest and darkest secrets, our moral and character defects so that we can confess them to another human being and to God. In step five we admit to God, ourselves and another human the exact nature of our wrongs. In step six we became ready to have God remove these character defects and in step seven we ask God to remove these character defects (“our short comings”).
I go through this process to demonstrate Bill’s cure for the “disease” of alcoholism as he defines this disease state. And alcoholism by this definition then is a “moral” disease. And its cure can only be effectuated by the re-establishment of a moral center which only an acceptance of a higher power (which Bill W. in fact demands that we call God) can consummate.
So we come full circle to the Victorian notion that alcoholism and by extension, addictive disorders, is a disease of moral and character failure. (And this from the founder of the society that tried to promote the idea that drunks were not primarily moral failures. )
But, to come to the defense of the program, if not Bill Wilson himself, it should be recalled that a brain suffering from being soaked in a sea of ethyl alcohol for as long as most alcoholics have been soaking their brains, probably has leached out most moral and ethical imprinting, like the ink print would naturally dissolve off the printed page of a bible. And it is only after drying that brain out, reestablishing a conscious contact with moral and ethical principles again can one learn to live, once again, a moral and ethical life. Like reprinting the golden rule on once leached print paper.
One cannot be spiritually fit if one hasn’t been fit at all. And until fitness has been achieved, no body building, mentally, physically or spiritually can take place. In this case, the AA program seeks to first bring the alcoholic back physically, then mentally and then spiritually as one would hear almost daily in any meeting.
And while this may be an intellectually satisfying discussion, the true goal is to satisfy the need to remain sober by making sure that we all understand how we stay sober. Do we understand that we have a disease and are treated in some medical fashion and achieve some new medical equilibrium of recovery? Or, do we achieve a new spiritual reality that keeps us morally fit?
In the long run, AA is pretty laissez faire about the whole thing. Nobody except the most extreme dogmatists really cares about this, and most will defer to the slogan “live and let live. It works, if you work it”.
[1] P. 24, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Ed. 2001
© res 5/22/2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD
IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD
Sometimes, I forget how familiar the stories in the Big Book have become, to the point where I am blasé about their lessons or messages. I have heard them so many times and their truths are so ingrained that I have forgotten the time when I thought that they did not apply to me, that they must be speaking about some folks who were really far gone, way down the road to self destruction, way beyond the pale and pretty much unsalvageable souls. They were not my stories; I could not see myself in them nor did I know anyone like them.
But that was denial on the road sign up ahead of me telling me that what these stories represented were about someone else. And it took me years to knock down those signs; they were surely leading me in the wrong direction. But those stories were telling me the truth, they were actually mirrors of my true daily existence and it was only my darker self that did not want to shine a light so that I could actually see my reflection in them.
These simple stories, and I forget at times just how cleverly simple they are, plainly tell us alcoholics just how we are alike. And conversely, for those who believe that they are not alcoholic, they make clear where they stand apart from those afflicted by the disease. The true alcoholic, once he has read these stories a few times cannot fail to see the congruence of them with his own experience. Which is one of the main ways we come to understand how we are in fact alcoholic. We feel it, we have lived it and we see it in those who have admitted it in themselves and who have found a treatment, and thus we must have the disease ourselves.
Could we be wrong? Yes, and the suggestion found in the stories is if we are wrong and want to test that, try going out and doing some controlled drinking or stop drinking all together and see if that works for a specified period of time. See if you can do it. Can you just take one drink? Or, can you stay away from alcohol altogether? We try not to make these suggestions dangerous but to make them dramatic enough to prove that in the true drunk these are typically impossible tasks.
In trying to explain this behavior to people who are not afflicted with this painful disease or who have not had the horrible experience of having a family member with it, it is practically impossible to tell a believable story about this problem. It’s intractability sounds too fantastical. When telling the experiences of people who cannot stop drinking it almost sounds as if people are being willful about not being able to put down a drink.
So there are oft repeated stories of people who are baffled by their inability to stop drinking once having started, swearing off the drink only to find that at some crucial point in their sobriety being challenged with some irritation, anxiety or emotional situation. That reason can be anxiety about a birth, a death, the purchase of a house, a car, a marriage. We can want to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, a new job, having had a great day or feeling bad about a trying day.
You name the emotion, the trigger is there, the solution so to speak is to reach for some alcohol to quell the jitters. But you will only have one, so you say to yourself. Just to smooth over the anxiety of the fear, or the fear of the anxiety; or the celebratory mood, the happy feeling or … you name it but one drink is never enough and all that time that you had sworn off that drink has gone for naught because the next thing you know is that you don’t know anything, since you have been in a blackout for four days. How does one make sense of a senseless act? And you desperately hope that if anyone has been hurt, that it only involved you! But often enough, and to our extreme mortification and horror, it involves too many others without us getting a damnable scratch! Try to explain that to a civilian.
It’s hard to do but the Big Book does a masterful job of presenting this absolutely senseless situation by the parable of the jaywalker who is a young guy who just gets a kick out of crossing the street in the middle of the block. And for a while he gets away with it with no consequences but one day he gets hit by a bicycle and sprains his arm. He is treated by the doctor and warned to stop that behavior, and although he says he will, he steps out of the office right into traffic and is knocked over by a passing car and hurts his back.
Looking up at the doctor a half hour later he sheepishly says that this time he won’t be so foolish. And he is wheeled out of the office in a wheelchair. But after recuperating and no longer bound to the wheel chair he resumes his risky behavior and starts to dash across the street and is struck by a car and breaks his arm. This time in a cast he promises he will not walk in traffic anymore and for the next six months lives a model existence. And he goes back to his doctor and finally gets the cast taken off and tells the doctor that he is finished running in traffic.
But when he leaves the office something attracts him on the other side of the street and he dashes into the street and he is struck by a truck and his back is broken. He can no longer walk and is confined to bed for the rest of his life.
I have paraphrased this story from the Big Book but it is masterful in its absurd simplicity how it describes the absolute compulsion that drives a human being to do what an ordinary human would consider to be crazy behavior. The amazing thing about reading this parable is that if you are a drunk you immediately understand the story in your gut. You see yourself running into the traffic, day in day out except all we have to do is substitute running into traffic for running into a liquor store and drinking liquor or alcohol, and getting struck by a vehicle for getting drunk, and winding up in a hospital or at the doctors for waking up from a blackout or with a hangover, and our remorse and pledge never to do it again for the remorse to never to do it again the way we always do that never to drink. This is us, this is our lives. And we see ourselves ever so clearly that we cannot run away from its simple truth.
And I go on at length about this because I would like to use these stories as examples, absurd and silly as they may seem, for civilians to try to understand the boring repetitively dangerous behavior that precedes our ultimate hells if we do not die first. These are not willful descents into purgatory. We are not testing our collective manhoods or womanhoods. These are programmed behaviors keyed in by drink like butterflies attracted to fire. There is a compulsion to seek more alcohol and until that is satisfied that seeking behavior will not stop.
The stories are stunning in their simplicity. And if I appear to have become casual about these stories, it is that they are so familiar that I have forgotten just how true they are and how in full recognition of their truth we alcoholics come to understand our affliction in these “Campbellian myths”. I use that term advisedly since they are really histories rather than myths that take on mythic proportions in the context of the “group” as a living entity that exists through time and as an historical organism. And as a totality they are the group’s Talmud, the history, constitution, moral and ethical codification and parables of the AA program.
There are times when I feel foolish and pretentious to even think that I can explain alcoholism any better than it already has been by those preeminent “barefoot philosophers” Bill W. and the original Dr. Bob. But the truth of it is that if the disease were that easy to talk about and understand, I probably would not find myself with a need to be writing about it at this point in time at all. As good as they were, the public remains as ignorant about alcoholism now as they were seventy years ago when “Alcoholics Anonymous” was first published. And with every iteration of re-explication, perhaps we will asymptotically approach an understanding of the subject.
So I humbly submit one more piece of information about alcoholism to the tome that has gone before this , maybe approaching it more as a Golden Book version level of difficulty this time. Not everyone gets this stuff the first time around, and it is hard enough a subject for the willing to get, let alone those whose understanding must be dragged kicking and scratching from the nineteenth into the twenty first centuries.
© res 5/11/2011
Sometimes, I forget how familiar the stories in the Big Book have become, to the point where I am blasé about their lessons or messages. I have heard them so many times and their truths are so ingrained that I have forgotten the time when I thought that they did not apply to me, that they must be speaking about some folks who were really far gone, way down the road to self destruction, way beyond the pale and pretty much unsalvageable souls. They were not my stories; I could not see myself in them nor did I know anyone like them.
But that was denial on the road sign up ahead of me telling me that what these stories represented were about someone else. And it took me years to knock down those signs; they were surely leading me in the wrong direction. But those stories were telling me the truth, they were actually mirrors of my true daily existence and it was only my darker self that did not want to shine a light so that I could actually see my reflection in them.
These simple stories, and I forget at times just how cleverly simple they are, plainly tell us alcoholics just how we are alike. And conversely, for those who believe that they are not alcoholic, they make clear where they stand apart from those afflicted by the disease. The true alcoholic, once he has read these stories a few times cannot fail to see the congruence of them with his own experience. Which is one of the main ways we come to understand how we are in fact alcoholic. We feel it, we have lived it and we see it in those who have admitted it in themselves and who have found a treatment, and thus we must have the disease ourselves.
Could we be wrong? Yes, and the suggestion found in the stories is if we are wrong and want to test that, try going out and doing some controlled drinking or stop drinking all together and see if that works for a specified period of time. See if you can do it. Can you just take one drink? Or, can you stay away from alcohol altogether? We try not to make these suggestions dangerous but to make them dramatic enough to prove that in the true drunk these are typically impossible tasks.
In trying to explain this behavior to people who are not afflicted with this painful disease or who have not had the horrible experience of having a family member with it, it is practically impossible to tell a believable story about this problem. It’s intractability sounds too fantastical. When telling the experiences of people who cannot stop drinking it almost sounds as if people are being willful about not being able to put down a drink.
So there are oft repeated stories of people who are baffled by their inability to stop drinking once having started, swearing off the drink only to find that at some crucial point in their sobriety being challenged with some irritation, anxiety or emotional situation. That reason can be anxiety about a birth, a death, the purchase of a house, a car, a marriage. We can want to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, a new job, having had a great day or feeling bad about a trying day.
You name the emotion, the trigger is there, the solution so to speak is to reach for some alcohol to quell the jitters. But you will only have one, so you say to yourself. Just to smooth over the anxiety of the fear, or the fear of the anxiety; or the celebratory mood, the happy feeling or … you name it but one drink is never enough and all that time that you had sworn off that drink has gone for naught because the next thing you know is that you don’t know anything, since you have been in a blackout for four days. How does one make sense of a senseless act? And you desperately hope that if anyone has been hurt, that it only involved you! But often enough, and to our extreme mortification and horror, it involves too many others without us getting a damnable scratch! Try to explain that to a civilian.
It’s hard to do but the Big Book does a masterful job of presenting this absolutely senseless situation by the parable of the jaywalker who is a young guy who just gets a kick out of crossing the street in the middle of the block. And for a while he gets away with it with no consequences but one day he gets hit by a bicycle and sprains his arm. He is treated by the doctor and warned to stop that behavior, and although he says he will, he steps out of the office right into traffic and is knocked over by a passing car and hurts his back.
Looking up at the doctor a half hour later he sheepishly says that this time he won’t be so foolish. And he is wheeled out of the office in a wheelchair. But after recuperating and no longer bound to the wheel chair he resumes his risky behavior and starts to dash across the street and is struck by a car and breaks his arm. This time in a cast he promises he will not walk in traffic anymore and for the next six months lives a model existence. And he goes back to his doctor and finally gets the cast taken off and tells the doctor that he is finished running in traffic.
But when he leaves the office something attracts him on the other side of the street and he dashes into the street and he is struck by a truck and his back is broken. He can no longer walk and is confined to bed for the rest of his life.
I have paraphrased this story from the Big Book but it is masterful in its absurd simplicity how it describes the absolute compulsion that drives a human being to do what an ordinary human would consider to be crazy behavior. The amazing thing about reading this parable is that if you are a drunk you immediately understand the story in your gut. You see yourself running into the traffic, day in day out except all we have to do is substitute running into traffic for running into a liquor store and drinking liquor or alcohol, and getting struck by a vehicle for getting drunk, and winding up in a hospital or at the doctors for waking up from a blackout or with a hangover, and our remorse and pledge never to do it again for the remorse to never to do it again the way we always do that never to drink. This is us, this is our lives. And we see ourselves ever so clearly that we cannot run away from its simple truth.
And I go on at length about this because I would like to use these stories as examples, absurd and silly as they may seem, for civilians to try to understand the boring repetitively dangerous behavior that precedes our ultimate hells if we do not die first. These are not willful descents into purgatory. We are not testing our collective manhoods or womanhoods. These are programmed behaviors keyed in by drink like butterflies attracted to fire. There is a compulsion to seek more alcohol and until that is satisfied that seeking behavior will not stop.
The stories are stunning in their simplicity. And if I appear to have become casual about these stories, it is that they are so familiar that I have forgotten just how true they are and how in full recognition of their truth we alcoholics come to understand our affliction in these “Campbellian myths”. I use that term advisedly since they are really histories rather than myths that take on mythic proportions in the context of the “group” as a living entity that exists through time and as an historical organism. And as a totality they are the group’s Talmud, the history, constitution, moral and ethical codification and parables of the AA program.
There are times when I feel foolish and pretentious to even think that I can explain alcoholism any better than it already has been by those preeminent “barefoot philosophers” Bill W. and the original Dr. Bob. But the truth of it is that if the disease were that easy to talk about and understand, I probably would not find myself with a need to be writing about it at this point in time at all. As good as they were, the public remains as ignorant about alcoholism now as they were seventy years ago when “Alcoholics Anonymous” was first published. And with every iteration of re-explication, perhaps we will asymptotically approach an understanding of the subject.
So I humbly submit one more piece of information about alcoholism to the tome that has gone before this , maybe approaching it more as a Golden Book version level of difficulty this time. Not everyone gets this stuff the first time around, and it is hard enough a subject for the willing to get, let alone those whose understanding must be dragged kicking and scratching from the nineteenth into the twenty first centuries.
© res 5/11/2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
UPDATE ON ANONYMITY
AN UPDATE ON ANONYMITY
May 10, 2011
This past weekend there was an article in the NY Times by David Coleman titled “Challenging the Second ‘A’ in AA”. And this article takes the topic of anonymity to lengths of open discussion as there has rarely has been in the past. I cannot argue with some who say that not publicizing the good work of AA defeats the purpose of the organization by shortchanging the public on much needed information about 12 step recovery programs.
I cannot speak for AA but I hold the view that the diagnosis of alcoholism is self made and the treatment is “self-imposed”. Proselytizing in no way improves the ability of the public to know about the availability of AA these days. Nor will more public information about its availability improve anyone’s success in the program. Its ubiquity is legion. So as an organization, I don’t believe AA needs any official spokesman tooting its horn.
Personal anonymity is just that, personal and has always been that. What one does with his addictive history is his business and how one uses this depends upon how he feels this knowledge will impact those whom he contacts in his day to day life. Sadly, over the past seventy years of AA history, general knowledge of one’s sobriety has not been well received in all quarters and has not prevented wide spread and ill conceived discriminatory practices in job hiring and firing, promotion and social advancement as well as a more general social ostracism.
Knowledge is powerful and dangerous and wielding its power needs a judicious hand.
But when I wrote the following piece a year ago I was more concerned with the rather awkward and skewered concerns that new arrivals to AA had about their “anonymity” and how they often used this as an excuse not to come into the program. They would often say that they were “afraid” they would meet people they would know in the program (clients, customers, patients, professionals). Never considering for a moment the other person’s perspective that they might be meeting their grocer, barber, lawyer, doctor or dentist. We get so wrapped up in our own anonymity that we forget that what we did to get into this position was hardly a quiet affair to begin with and that when faced with all of those people “knowing you are an alcoholic” maybe you should consider that now you know that “they are alcoholics too”.
5/10/2011
ANONYMITY
We live our lives as if they were all a secret – nobody watching what we do. Why would the package store clerk not notice that every week I would buy a fifth of McAllen Scotch. Even if I chose to spread the wealth and came around every fourth week by the time I returned, wouldn’t he have noticed that I like Mrs. Jones and Mr. Malden come round regularly for the same stuff? Clockwork really. Why would the Deli man not notice that after years of ordering three beers and a cookie for lunch, that when I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coke should I not have expected anything but the query “what no beer?”
What makes us think that our behavior is so inconsequential? And again, did you think they wouldn’t notice? Did you care whether they did or not? If you didn’t then why do you behave as if you did by acting as if this were just another routine purchase?
We think we live furtive lives because we are ashamed of ourselves. That’s the plain and simple of it all. We are not hiding from others we are symbolically hiding from ourselves. Because that is why we isolate, we do not want to face painful feelings, issues, and facts. I can’t name them. They differ from individual to individual. One man’s fear is another’s fodder. One woman’s shame is another’s glory. But the arch of the act, the feeling, the drink, the shame is usually the same and we all travel that same route.
This morning parked in the municipal parking lot behind the church, I was sitting in the car smoking when I noticed Gary thundering up in his Harley, his slight figure practically enfolded by the immensity of the machine, the noise swallowing his form in a gulp. But he passed in front of the rising sun and his silhouette traced an image akin to a comic book character, chiseled jaw, German WWII troop helmet covering his head as he gently nestled the bike into the parking space. Harley’s don’t sputter when you turn them off; they ‘kachunck, kachunck’, with a percussive vibration that you feel in your toes until the deep throatiness ‘kachuncks’ to a halt. And I thought to myself how in the world could I ever have imagined myself being friends with this tattooed, motor-biking, chiseled jawed, German helmeted, comic book character, out of an Easy Rider rerun if I hadn’t been in AA. It would have been an extra ordinary circumstance to have met him otherwise. Yet he is just an ordinary guy. Sure, he’s been in jail for two felonies but what the hey, he still has artistic tendencies. And not for nothing, his 4 year old daughter is the most charming kid this side of the Connecticut River. And this guy’s greatest fear is that he will do something stupid that would keep him from seeing his little girl. There is growth in that guy that I have seen in him over these past two years, growth that has kept him sober while at the same time I have not maintained mine. He did something righter than I.
I’m trying to draw the measure of myself against the model of these men, friends that I have in the rooms. And they are friends. I don’t know them all by name but I know them by sight. And if I were to ask them for help I think they would fall into that old response “always say yes to a cry for help” or “never say no”. And we do that because we never know when we will need that response for ourselves, so, in a sense it is a call for the behavior of self preservation. “Do unto others for your own selfish ends” and you will feel good about it yourself. It always works that way you know.
There is a price for anonymity, it is called notoriety. Hide as we may from our own worst behaviors we are tattlers on ourselves in the worst possible ways. We don’t mean to be. We didn’t mean to throw up in all those taxis or fall down all those stairs. Or mean to break all those bones, or noses, or dent all those bumpers. We didn’t mean to do all those things. And if those things were done quietly nobody ever knew who the culprit was and we “got away with it”. But mostly, these were embarrassingly public acts and our wished for anonymity was really just that, a vague hope.
We try so hard to remain anonymous that we are befuddled and angered when someone suggests that we may be at fault, (rightly or wrongly), for some mishap such as this next one.
I have a friend who was used to tying one on just about every night. He had enough to drink one winter evening and on driving home he stopped for gasoline having noticed that he was low. After he filled up, he noticed that an hour had gone by since his last drink at the tavern so he decided to find a late night liquor store to cap off the night with some vodka. This added an additional hour to this evening’s sojourn and when he reached home he entered the house and his wife immediately quizzed him about his whereabouts. He gave lame this’s and that’s but the reason for her third degree turned out to be that she had been called upon by the police claiming that a car registered to that address had broken a filling station pump. The police had left a half hour prior to his arrival but he was to go down to the police station in the morning to clear up the whole thing.
Nobody notices us, hmmh? Well he had driven away from that gas station with the pump nozzle still in the car’s gas tank filling dock. And pulling out of the station pulled the hose from the pump and disrupted the whole filling mechanism. The oil company eventually billed him for $500 of damages. Strangely, though, he was not charged with any crime.
So we want to be invisible and think we are, until we aren’t; and then we wish we had been.
The point, not to put too fine of one on it, is that our drinking has led us into an isolated bubble within our own heads. And in that bubble we feel insulated and invisible; and we don’t want anyone to pay attention to us so we wishfully think their attentions away whether it is paid to us or not. Our invisibility is a figment of our imaginations and only when confronted by harsh reality, usually having to do with the law, or a restraining order, or lawsuit, do the blinders come off.
© RES May 30, 2010
rev. 5/10/2011
May 10, 2011
This past weekend there was an article in the NY Times by David Coleman titled “Challenging the Second ‘A’ in AA”. And this article takes the topic of anonymity to lengths of open discussion as there has rarely has been in the past. I cannot argue with some who say that not publicizing the good work of AA defeats the purpose of the organization by shortchanging the public on much needed information about 12 step recovery programs.
I cannot speak for AA but I hold the view that the diagnosis of alcoholism is self made and the treatment is “self-imposed”. Proselytizing in no way improves the ability of the public to know about the availability of AA these days. Nor will more public information about its availability improve anyone’s success in the program. Its ubiquity is legion. So as an organization, I don’t believe AA needs any official spokesman tooting its horn.
Personal anonymity is just that, personal and has always been that. What one does with his addictive history is his business and how one uses this depends upon how he feels this knowledge will impact those whom he contacts in his day to day life. Sadly, over the past seventy years of AA history, general knowledge of one’s sobriety has not been well received in all quarters and has not prevented wide spread and ill conceived discriminatory practices in job hiring and firing, promotion and social advancement as well as a more general social ostracism.
Knowledge is powerful and dangerous and wielding its power needs a judicious hand.
But when I wrote the following piece a year ago I was more concerned with the rather awkward and skewered concerns that new arrivals to AA had about their “anonymity” and how they often used this as an excuse not to come into the program. They would often say that they were “afraid” they would meet people they would know in the program (clients, customers, patients, professionals). Never considering for a moment the other person’s perspective that they might be meeting their grocer, barber, lawyer, doctor or dentist. We get so wrapped up in our own anonymity that we forget that what we did to get into this position was hardly a quiet affair to begin with and that when faced with all of those people “knowing you are an alcoholic” maybe you should consider that now you know that “they are alcoholics too”.
5/10/2011
ANONYMITY
We live our lives as if they were all a secret – nobody watching what we do. Why would the package store clerk not notice that every week I would buy a fifth of McAllen Scotch. Even if I chose to spread the wealth and came around every fourth week by the time I returned, wouldn’t he have noticed that I like Mrs. Jones and Mr. Malden come round regularly for the same stuff? Clockwork really. Why would the Deli man not notice that after years of ordering three beers and a cookie for lunch, that when I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coke should I not have expected anything but the query “what no beer?”
What makes us think that our behavior is so inconsequential? And again, did you think they wouldn’t notice? Did you care whether they did or not? If you didn’t then why do you behave as if you did by acting as if this were just another routine purchase?
We think we live furtive lives because we are ashamed of ourselves. That’s the plain and simple of it all. We are not hiding from others we are symbolically hiding from ourselves. Because that is why we isolate, we do not want to face painful feelings, issues, and facts. I can’t name them. They differ from individual to individual. One man’s fear is another’s fodder. One woman’s shame is another’s glory. But the arch of the act, the feeling, the drink, the shame is usually the same and we all travel that same route.
This morning parked in the municipal parking lot behind the church, I was sitting in the car smoking when I noticed Gary thundering up in his Harley, his slight figure practically enfolded by the immensity of the machine, the noise swallowing his form in a gulp. But he passed in front of the rising sun and his silhouette traced an image akin to a comic book character, chiseled jaw, German WWII troop helmet covering his head as he gently nestled the bike into the parking space. Harley’s don’t sputter when you turn them off; they ‘kachunck, kachunck’, with a percussive vibration that you feel in your toes until the deep throatiness ‘kachuncks’ to a halt. And I thought to myself how in the world could I ever have imagined myself being friends with this tattooed, motor-biking, chiseled jawed, German helmeted, comic book character, out of an Easy Rider rerun if I hadn’t been in AA. It would have been an extra ordinary circumstance to have met him otherwise. Yet he is just an ordinary guy. Sure, he’s been in jail for two felonies but what the hey, he still has artistic tendencies. And not for nothing, his 4 year old daughter is the most charming kid this side of the Connecticut River. And this guy’s greatest fear is that he will do something stupid that would keep him from seeing his little girl. There is growth in that guy that I have seen in him over these past two years, growth that has kept him sober while at the same time I have not maintained mine. He did something righter than I.
I’m trying to draw the measure of myself against the model of these men, friends that I have in the rooms. And they are friends. I don’t know them all by name but I know them by sight. And if I were to ask them for help I think they would fall into that old response “always say yes to a cry for help” or “never say no”. And we do that because we never know when we will need that response for ourselves, so, in a sense it is a call for the behavior of self preservation. “Do unto others for your own selfish ends” and you will feel good about it yourself. It always works that way you know.
There is a price for anonymity, it is called notoriety. Hide as we may from our own worst behaviors we are tattlers on ourselves in the worst possible ways. We don’t mean to be. We didn’t mean to throw up in all those taxis or fall down all those stairs. Or mean to break all those bones, or noses, or dent all those bumpers. We didn’t mean to do all those things. And if those things were done quietly nobody ever knew who the culprit was and we “got away with it”. But mostly, these were embarrassingly public acts and our wished for anonymity was really just that, a vague hope.
We try so hard to remain anonymous that we are befuddled and angered when someone suggests that we may be at fault, (rightly or wrongly), for some mishap such as this next one.
I have a friend who was used to tying one on just about every night. He had enough to drink one winter evening and on driving home he stopped for gasoline having noticed that he was low. After he filled up, he noticed that an hour had gone by since his last drink at the tavern so he decided to find a late night liquor store to cap off the night with some vodka. This added an additional hour to this evening’s sojourn and when he reached home he entered the house and his wife immediately quizzed him about his whereabouts. He gave lame this’s and that’s but the reason for her third degree turned out to be that she had been called upon by the police claiming that a car registered to that address had broken a filling station pump. The police had left a half hour prior to his arrival but he was to go down to the police station in the morning to clear up the whole thing.
Nobody notices us, hmmh? Well he had driven away from that gas station with the pump nozzle still in the car’s gas tank filling dock. And pulling out of the station pulled the hose from the pump and disrupted the whole filling mechanism. The oil company eventually billed him for $500 of damages. Strangely, though, he was not charged with any crime.
So we want to be invisible and think we are, until we aren’t; and then we wish we had been.
The point, not to put too fine of one on it, is that our drinking has led us into an isolated bubble within our own heads. And in that bubble we feel insulated and invisible; and we don’t want anyone to pay attention to us so we wishfully think their attentions away whether it is paid to us or not. Our invisibility is a figment of our imaginations and only when confronted by harsh reality, usually having to do with the law, or a restraining order, or lawsuit, do the blinders come off.
© RES May 30, 2010
rev. 5/10/2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
Higher Power or God, Who’s Program is this Anyway?
Higher Power or God, Who’s Program is this Anyway?
(Well it is not atypical of me that when I lead meetings I get very philosophical. Some people would say I get irritatingly argumentative and start to line up my arguments on the head of a pin. And what should be a zesty discussion of sharing on our feelings about how we came to believe in a higher power or not, or the power of the program, or some other permutation of unbridled enthusiasm about the greatness of AA and how it has helped and cured all, it just ain’t my style. I tend more toward Spinoza, Maimonides and St. Augustine and when I can’t do that I do a version of me, Dr. Bob. And I throw my monkey wrench into the discussion just to see if I can wake everyone up at our 7:30AM meeting.
Well talking about the existence of God at this hour of the morning at least for me is just the thing to get my juices going, so having read Step 11 in detail and deciding that it was time to challenge the orthodoxy of Bill W. I pretty much introduced the following arguments.
The result was less Sodom and Gomorrah than I would have thought and I happily got out with my skin and my life more or less intact.)
One of the reasons many people, particularly newcomers, accuse AA of being just another religious cult, is the fault of Bill Wilson’s proclivity of stressing an awareness of a God consciousness as the only way to success for the alcoholic. And in reading Step 11 any self respecting atheist or agnostic would conclude that he could not succeed in this program unless he succumbed to what he might consider the “hocus pocus” of “cultish” ideas. And Wilson does not make it easy for those folk to feel accepted in the program because by the time they get through step 11 and “divine” his true intentions, they feel entrapped by his having inveigled them into the program under the original false pretenses that AA requires no belief in God. They find out the awful truth that what Bill W. doesn’t reveal at the outset is that in order to succeed in AA , a belief in God is an absolute necessity.
Now he is not talking about organized religion for that is as anathema to him as to the atheist and agnostic. But once you read through all of the symbology that he uses to propound the steps, you get a pretty clear idea that the use of phrases like the Kingdom of God, God the Savior and God as Creator are concepts and terms straight out of the King James Bible and they scaffold his interpretation of the 12 step program.
What are we to make of these references? We feel duped having come all this way and now we feel betrayed by the prophet of AA. He becomes the apostate, the phony in our eyes? How are we to ever trust what he has said again?
Well it isn’t all that bad and even the greatest saints have had feet of clay and Bill W. while no saint had his feet stuck in a lot of mud. And although Bill W. truly believed the terminology of the King James Bible, if not conceptually, I think we can safely navigate another course that permits an easy incorporation of techniques of prayer and meditation in a concept of a higher power without succumbing to the morphia of the St James Symbology.
Step 11 exemplifies the concept that in order to maintain the equanimity that we have worked so hard to obtain by stripping away pride and adopting humility, honesty and love, we need to practice prayer and meditation as a daily exercise to maintain a conscious contact with these principles; these are principles which we accept as the principles that we think of as representative of a “higher power” ( Bill W.’s conscious contact with God).
Whether one anthropomorphizes this concept, etherealizes, philosophizes or spiritualizes it, it all boils down to practicing principles of a moral and ethical life on a daily basis, using techniques to remind us in good times, but especially in rough times, what those principles are. I like to think that this concept constitutes a “belief in belief” without the necessity of getting any more specific than that. This allows for people with all different kinds of perceptions of the universe to apply principles that we pick up to serve our needs in sobriety. As a concept I call this Possiblianism. It refers to the universe as being so complex and varied as to hold the possibility that any and all things can happen, either causally or indirectly, perhaps through prayer or thought, or good works but always with the notion that there are possibilities that things can happen if you want and need them enough to happen – such as becoming and staying sober.
So when we speak of prayer and meditation, their utility in maintaining sobriety and moral and ethical direction, in no way requires a belief in God, even though prayer and meditation may ease belief in a higher power without believing that that higher power is what might be referred to as God (of the Bible). Because one can receive the benefits of prayer and meditation, (self examination, spiritual relief, emotional release, humility) without the belief in God. Just as confession can relieve guilt and mental anguish without confessing to God or to a representative of God (psychiatrist, sponsor or friend, for instance).
One of the fundamental uses of prayer is its utility for its, anytime any place value. So an AA meeting may be good to help unburden one’ s soul and conscience on a particular day at a particular time. But what if the meeting is not convenient? Or missed? Or on Tuesday? Or what if you cannot get your sponsor on the phone, or anyone else?
These are lifeline aids to keep us sober but at the base of it AA helps us develop personal principles to live our lives day by day, month by month, year in year out so that we can bridge sobriety from one year to the next. The basic techniques here are prayer and meditation; and through them lies the success of the 12 Steps. Just so, as in the adage: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a man a net, feed him for a lifetime. And…
Teach an alcoholic to stop drinking, he stops drinking as long as he can hold out. But teach him the principles of a life worth living without the need for a drink and you have a design for living a life alcohol free. The two tools of prayer and meditation help with the concepts of forgiveness, love, anger, retribution, fear and generosity. Meditation, quiets the anxieties, quells anger and fear. Prayer has utility in that it prepares the mind to resolve problems of emotional turmoil and confusion. This is the concept that sponsors use when telling us to pray for people we dislike or whom we do not want to talk with.
And we may be baffled by this request but we comply and after a day we come back and scratching our head, we feel no differently about that person we hate and the sponsor says “pray for him for two more weeks”. At which you balk and say “I’d rather die”. And he says “Aha!” And you rather sheepishly begin to see the prideful stubbornness of your position and comply. And after a few weeks of praying you find you no long hate him, but perhaps feel sorry for him, empathize with him. Of course you don’t love him and that’s just fine. Miracles take a bit longer than that! But you don’t hate him. And actions that you might have taken in unreasoned haste two weeks before, seem neither wise nor warranted and you are glad that calmer heads prevailed.
Bill Wilson would say that God provided the answer for you and I would submit that time provided the necessary interval for appropriate reflection and emotional deflation. In either case, prayer and meditation led to appeals to a higher power. And in calling forth the application of either remedy, neither required walking into a temple of God. And if by praying for the person who you are angry at keeps you sober, when all is said and done that is the point of this exercise.
If you have done the Steps well, you have built a solid basis for a moral ethical plan for living. That plan incorporates the twelve AA principles: honesty, hope, faith, courage, integrity, humility, brotherly love, justice, perseverance, spirituality and service.
Whether you then take that next step to transmogrifying your higher power into a deity, is of course, your choice.
© res 5/2/2011
(Well it is not atypical of me that when I lead meetings I get very philosophical. Some people would say I get irritatingly argumentative and start to line up my arguments on the head of a pin. And what should be a zesty discussion of sharing on our feelings about how we came to believe in a higher power or not, or the power of the program, or some other permutation of unbridled enthusiasm about the greatness of AA and how it has helped and cured all, it just ain’t my style. I tend more toward Spinoza, Maimonides and St. Augustine and when I can’t do that I do a version of me, Dr. Bob. And I throw my monkey wrench into the discussion just to see if I can wake everyone up at our 7:30AM meeting.
Well talking about the existence of God at this hour of the morning at least for me is just the thing to get my juices going, so having read Step 11 in detail and deciding that it was time to challenge the orthodoxy of Bill W. I pretty much introduced the following arguments.
The result was less Sodom and Gomorrah than I would have thought and I happily got out with my skin and my life more or less intact.)
One of the reasons many people, particularly newcomers, accuse AA of being just another religious cult, is the fault of Bill Wilson’s proclivity of stressing an awareness of a God consciousness as the only way to success for the alcoholic. And in reading Step 11 any self respecting atheist or agnostic would conclude that he could not succeed in this program unless he succumbed to what he might consider the “hocus pocus” of “cultish” ideas. And Wilson does not make it easy for those folk to feel accepted in the program because by the time they get through step 11 and “divine” his true intentions, they feel entrapped by his having inveigled them into the program under the original false pretenses that AA requires no belief in God. They find out the awful truth that what Bill W. doesn’t reveal at the outset is that in order to succeed in AA , a belief in God is an absolute necessity.
Now he is not talking about organized religion for that is as anathema to him as to the atheist and agnostic. But once you read through all of the symbology that he uses to propound the steps, you get a pretty clear idea that the use of phrases like the Kingdom of God, God the Savior and God as Creator are concepts and terms straight out of the King James Bible and they scaffold his interpretation of the 12 step program.
What are we to make of these references? We feel duped having come all this way and now we feel betrayed by the prophet of AA. He becomes the apostate, the phony in our eyes? How are we to ever trust what he has said again?
Well it isn’t all that bad and even the greatest saints have had feet of clay and Bill W. while no saint had his feet stuck in a lot of mud. And although Bill W. truly believed the terminology of the King James Bible, if not conceptually, I think we can safely navigate another course that permits an easy incorporation of techniques of prayer and meditation in a concept of a higher power without succumbing to the morphia of the St James Symbology.
Step 11 exemplifies the concept that in order to maintain the equanimity that we have worked so hard to obtain by stripping away pride and adopting humility, honesty and love, we need to practice prayer and meditation as a daily exercise to maintain a conscious contact with these principles; these are principles which we accept as the principles that we think of as representative of a “higher power” ( Bill W.’s conscious contact with God).
Whether one anthropomorphizes this concept, etherealizes, philosophizes or spiritualizes it, it all boils down to practicing principles of a moral and ethical life on a daily basis, using techniques to remind us in good times, but especially in rough times, what those principles are. I like to think that this concept constitutes a “belief in belief” without the necessity of getting any more specific than that. This allows for people with all different kinds of perceptions of the universe to apply principles that we pick up to serve our needs in sobriety. As a concept I call this Possiblianism. It refers to the universe as being so complex and varied as to hold the possibility that any and all things can happen, either causally or indirectly, perhaps through prayer or thought, or good works but always with the notion that there are possibilities that things can happen if you want and need them enough to happen – such as becoming and staying sober.
So when we speak of prayer and meditation, their utility in maintaining sobriety and moral and ethical direction, in no way requires a belief in God, even though prayer and meditation may ease belief in a higher power without believing that that higher power is what might be referred to as God (of the Bible). Because one can receive the benefits of prayer and meditation, (self examination, spiritual relief, emotional release, humility) without the belief in God. Just as confession can relieve guilt and mental anguish without confessing to God or to a representative of God (psychiatrist, sponsor or friend, for instance).
One of the fundamental uses of prayer is its utility for its, anytime any place value. So an AA meeting may be good to help unburden one’ s soul and conscience on a particular day at a particular time. But what if the meeting is not convenient? Or missed? Or on Tuesday? Or what if you cannot get your sponsor on the phone, or anyone else?
These are lifeline aids to keep us sober but at the base of it AA helps us develop personal principles to live our lives day by day, month by month, year in year out so that we can bridge sobriety from one year to the next. The basic techniques here are prayer and meditation; and through them lies the success of the 12 Steps. Just so, as in the adage: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a man a net, feed him for a lifetime. And…
Teach an alcoholic to stop drinking, he stops drinking as long as he can hold out. But teach him the principles of a life worth living without the need for a drink and you have a design for living a life alcohol free. The two tools of prayer and meditation help with the concepts of forgiveness, love, anger, retribution, fear and generosity. Meditation, quiets the anxieties, quells anger and fear. Prayer has utility in that it prepares the mind to resolve problems of emotional turmoil and confusion. This is the concept that sponsors use when telling us to pray for people we dislike or whom we do not want to talk with.
And we may be baffled by this request but we comply and after a day we come back and scratching our head, we feel no differently about that person we hate and the sponsor says “pray for him for two more weeks”. At which you balk and say “I’d rather die”. And he says “Aha!” And you rather sheepishly begin to see the prideful stubbornness of your position and comply. And after a few weeks of praying you find you no long hate him, but perhaps feel sorry for him, empathize with him. Of course you don’t love him and that’s just fine. Miracles take a bit longer than that! But you don’t hate him. And actions that you might have taken in unreasoned haste two weeks before, seem neither wise nor warranted and you are glad that calmer heads prevailed.
Bill Wilson would say that God provided the answer for you and I would submit that time provided the necessary interval for appropriate reflection and emotional deflation. In either case, prayer and meditation led to appeals to a higher power. And in calling forth the application of either remedy, neither required walking into a temple of God. And if by praying for the person who you are angry at keeps you sober, when all is said and done that is the point of this exercise.
If you have done the Steps well, you have built a solid basis for a moral ethical plan for living. That plan incorporates the twelve AA principles: honesty, hope, faith, courage, integrity, humility, brotherly love, justice, perseverance, spirituality and service.
Whether you then take that next step to transmogrifying your higher power into a deity, is of course, your choice.
© res 5/2/2011
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