perserverance

Preparing for the Holidays

/ Tim / 1 Comment

The upcoming holidays are often a difficult time for anyone.  Add being in recovery and it becomes more difficult.  If it’s your first time around, it can be overwhelming: parties, holidays, friends and plenty of temptations. And, of course, there’s nothing that can push our buttons more often than our own family. How can I have a  good time if I’m in recovery?

First of all, especially for someone who is new in the program, look for the book Living Sober. It is published by AA Services, but the advice is easily applicable to anyone in recovery from any addiction. The book has several chapters on how to stay clean and sober during the holidays and other events where we may find ourselves tempted.  If not this book, then there are others available that your homegroup can recommend to help you through those difficult first months.  The holidays are especially fraught with times where liquor is flowing in large quantities and when people step outside for a smoke, it may not be just tobacco that is burning.

Be prepared.  Drugs and alcohol permeate our society.  You can’t nor are you expected to hide yourself away forever from the world. If this is your first time going through a holiday season clean and sober, talk to your sponsor or a trusted friend in your program. Ask them how they made it through that first holiday season, ask them for suggestions and recommendations.  My sponsor does a lot of role playing so that his sponsees can get used to the language of sobriety as well as to the possible scenarios that may occur.

Perhaps we only go to part of a gathering and not stay until the end like we were likely to do in the past. Some fiestas we may want to miss all together because we know who will be attending and we know they may be a trigger for us. Bring along a friend you trust who knows your are in recovery. Have an escape plan to fall back upon if it is getting too difficult. It’s okay to admit there are times when we are weak. There is no shame is stepping back from the action. None of us is made of stone; in early sobriety we might not yet know our limits so we need not lead ourselves into temptation.

Like everything else in recovery, these events become easier to handle as time goes on. But everyone still has to maintain their guard. Keep an eye on your glass. Just recently I refused a soda at a party because it smelled a bit “off”. I’m sure it was fine, but I am not willing to take the chance. It was easy just to sent it down on a table and then talk with folks and casually leave it behind as I joined another circle of friends. My recovery is my number one priority. I won’t risk it to please a host. Fortunately, a good host won’t care if a guest doesn’t imbibe. You may even make new friends by becoming the designated driver.

Be careful during this season. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Peer pressure and family pressure may seem like a lot at the time, but it will alway lessen. If you don’t go to the company Christmas party, there’s always one next year when you will have more experience at living sober in party world. January will arrive and things will get back to normal again.

Enjoy the holidays clean and sober.christmas-2890410_960_720

Sharing Solutions

/ Tim / 1 Comment

I was talking to a friend yesterday who is in recovery. She mentioned that she goes to very few meetings. Why? Because her home group meetings tend to focus on the using stories, you know, the war stories, the drunk-a-logs, the remember whens. It’s often a negative experience for her. Unfortunately there aren’t many options for her in her town and not having a vehicle, it’s difficult to get to other places where meetings aren’t always looking at the problem.

I am grateful that my home group has good recovery. We read that we don’t need to regret the past or shut the door on it, but rather, learn from it and apply it to our lives today. And yes, there are days when there seems to be a table full of members complaining about their problems with relationships, neighbours or finances, but the sharing somehow always comes back to living in the solution.

How does the group achieve this? I believe that it is taught by continued good sponsorship. When I was young in the program, I think I had maybe three or four months of being clean and sober, I became very aware. Now that substances weren’t clouding my judgement, I could see my defects and deficiencies. As they say, a horse thief who isn’t drinking is still a horse thief. I was beginning to see who I really was. I used a meeting to complain about the program, the pace of my recovery, my fears and worries. I can see now that I was focusing in on my problems at the meeting.

Fortunately for me, after the meeting, an old-timer asked me, “Do you have a sponsor?” I was rather taken aback by his directness, but replied that I did. “Then I suggest you use him,” he advised. Fortunately I was willing to listen to this advice and learned a valuable lesson: Bring your problems to your sponsor and your solutions to the meetings.

Yes, it’s important that meetings are places where one can go and vent about what is going on in ones life, but I don’t think my friend is wrong in her assessment of her local meeting. We need to hear solutions. We all know the problems but we often have difficulty, especially in early recovery, in using our program and applying solutions to those problems. That’s what I need to hear. I don’t want to hear about your problems at home, I need to hear about how I can apply the program in creating solutions. We all have an irritating coworker or someone who cuts us off on the road, but tell me how you are finding serenity in the midst of it all. I don’t need sympathy and compassion, I need to know how you managed a similar situation. My sponsor or the person beside me might share a new perspective or idea from their experience, strength and hope.

I get those solutions from working my twelve step program with my sponsor and by having these same people sharing around the table. I get the solutions because we have a policy of no cross-talk: no giving direct advice to a person. Rather than commiserating with the person or telling them what they should do, we share how we dealt with people, places, things and events that happened in our lives. I get the program because sponsorship is encouraged and promoted. That for me is the program in action, and in action in a very positive way. If you’re not hearing solutions at meetings, perhaps it’s time to look for another home group. There’s a lid for every pot; find look for one that fits you well.

 

Conscious Contact

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In the eleventh step we seek to improve our ‘conscious contact’ with our Higher Power. We can do that through prayer and medication, er, well, no, sorry. That was before. Now it’s prayer and meditation. Silly play on words, but in fact, that’s exactly what we had been doing before we came into the program. We used drugs and alcohol (also a drug that often mixes well with orange juice) to take us out of ourselves and somewhere else. Only it never quite got us there. Funny thing about conscious contact, you have to be ‘conscious’ to make that contact and the substances caused loss of consciousness and are detrimental to our body, mind and spirit.

What does ‘conscious contact’ with my Higher Power mean for me today? Let me start by saying that it doesn’t mean spending my days in the lotus positon, chanting a mantra and meditating on the meaning of life. I can’t ‘do’ the lotus position. My body doesn’t fold that way. I must have big joints in my hips and knees. My mind never seems to quiet down enough to stop wandering after five minutes and when it does, I don’t meditate, I wake up, about a half an hour later. For me, the only thing close to chanting a mantra is repeating the Serenity Prayer over and over in times of stress until I find some peace and calm. At this time, I guess my mind needs more structure than the free form meditation. Fortunately for me, there are many ways to have contact with my Higher Power.

I believe that what this step is leading us to is the change in our thinking. We learn to filter our thoughts and deeds through what we learn in our program. We seek to think before we act. We stop and ask ourselves what might happen if we were to do this or say that. We look to where it might lead us. We ask how this might affect those around us, our friends and family.  We think about how it may affect us and our program of recovery. Only then make a decision on whether or not to do it.

It starts slowly.  Like everything in our program, it is a process that takes time. At first we become conscious of something after the fact. After we say or do something that is not how we want to act, we realize it later.  Perhaps when doing a review of our day, we acknowledge that we could have done or said things differently.  Later, with more time and practice we begin to realize when we’re in the middle of it. It’s the ‘Oh shit, I shouldn’t be doing this should I,’ experience. We’re in the middle of a defect of character, perhaps anger, and we have a mini ‘aha’ moment. At first we’re so caught up in the moment that we are unable to stop, though we know we should. It part of the process we are learning. Then we will learn to stop when we see a defect and change our tack in mid-stream.

The final part of this process is when we filter our thoughts and action through our program before acting upon them. That I believe is where we begin to touch conscious contact with our Higher Power. We are aware of who and where we are. Anger, jealousy, and fear do not guide us. Our recovery program does.

All of this takes time. Usually we have to do it for every one of our defects. We have backslides and go back to our old way of thinking and doing but we recognize that it’s not the way we want to live and strive to improve. As was told to me, in order to be successful at this, all I have to do is get up one more time than I fall. It takes time and practice.  There are bound to be lots of ‘oh shit’ moments in everyone’s recovery. With time and with ‘conscious contact’ with whatever Higher Power you have, you will get better at it and those moments will occur less and less.

Recovery takes time. Don’t throw in the towel because you screwed up once. You deserve recovery: trust the process and keep plugging away. You’ll probably find that you’re already more than halfway there.

Photo Credit: Rodney Conrad