Step 1

Living the Program

/ Tim / Leave a comment

I am an addict.  It doesn’t matter what substance I used, how often or how long I used it, or how long it’s been since I’ve used it.  I am and always will be an addict. I am grateful that I have some time in my program, but I must always be aware that I am just a couple of bad decisions away from a crash and burn.  I know from hearing others in meeting rooms how easy it is to slip up and what can happen if I do go out again, and it won’t be pretty.  I have never heard of someone who came back to their program talk about how wonderful it was while out there using or drinking again.  “The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.”(Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 30) This idea must be crushed and obliterated from my mind.  My ego tells me I can be different from everyone else.  Experience, my own and others, warns me that I am not.

It’s not sobriety that has brought about the changes in my life. It’s the spiritual awakening that is the result of working and living the 12 steps. Not drinking and not using may mean that I am sober and clean.  But they don’t give me sobriety. In my early thirties I stopped on my own once for about five years. But I wasn’t really sober: I was fighting against my desires to escape life.  I really wanted to have a beer with friends, a glass of wine with dinner or share a joint, but I knew I shouldn’t.  And I wasn’t the nicest person to be around because I still had all of the ego charged character traits that I always did, only now they weren’t being softened by that gentility of the first pipeful or shot. My recovery was missing something.

That something, I believe, was the spiritual experience, or awakening.  A psychological shift in thinking that has allowed me to surrender, stop trying to control everything, and realize that I was the greatest threat to my existence.  I was drowning in the river of life and still trying to swim upstream.  If I wanted to really live, I had to understand that when it came to certain things, I was completely powerless.  If I just stopped thrashing about, I could at least float with the current.

Surrender on this existential level wasn’t that hard. There really wasn’t much left to give up. I had lost my dignity and self respect.  I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.  My liver was enlarged and who knows what other physical problems I was on the verge of encountering. I had alienated most of the people around me and was finding comfort in gloomy establishments with people who were living much like I was. My life was circling the bottom of the toilet bowl. Somehow I still had enough sense to see that I was on the path of losing myself. So in spite of my misgivings and preconceptions of what recovery was all about, I showed up at a local meeting and took my place at the table.

I understand that I was ready to surrender, to try something else because my way wasn’t working.  A friend of mine calls it his Gift Of Desperation.  I was powerless and I couldn’t manage my own life.  That was my first baby step into the program.  The eleven remaining steps helped me to recover and slowly brought me about to a more awakened state of being and opened me to a relationship to a Higher Power.

My life today is changed from what it was before.  My sobriety today is of a different quality than I had when I quit solo for five years. It is different because I work at living a twelve step program. I know that this is a lifelong process, and it is one I do willingly because I like the changes in my life and my being.  Today I like who I am and I can look at my reflection in the mirror without cringing.  The changes in my life are not because I am put down the bottle or the pipe. They are a result of working all twelve steps of the program and awakening to the spirit.   I am finally enjoying the trip down the river.

♥  ♥  ♥

Please like and share this blog, not to stroke my ego, but for those who need the courage, strength and hope to start and continue their journey down Recovery River. I would appreciate it if you would sign up and follow the blog as well.  My intention is to post Mondays and Thursdays.   Please comment.  I’d love to hear from you.

Peace

 

Connecting with Spirit

/ Tim / Leave a comment

Reconnecting with my Higher Power is the most important part of my recovery.  When I came to the meeting rooms it was to get rid of my addiction, not to be prostletized.  In fact I stayed away from twelve step groups for more than two years because I wanted nothing to do with God, religion, or Christianity.  I tried counseling, meditation, acupuncture and even my own willpower to get clean and sober but nothing worked.  Not for long anyway.  I knew I had to do something to make a change. I was desperate enough that even though I feared I might end up under the thumb of some bible thumping, born-again fundamentalist, I went to that first meeting. That’s how beaten down I was.

I found, very soon, was that my preconceptions were unfounded. I didn’t have to believe any set of rules or dogmas,  bow to any statues or light candles while chanting. I was given suggestions.  In the second step I “…came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.”  It was a gradual thing, this opening up to something other than myself.  I heard others in the room speak about their experiences with their higher power.  It didn’t have to be the God I grew up with.  It could be anything that had a power greater than me.  And, at that point, there were a lot of things that had plenty of power over me including my addiction, alcohol and drugs.  I learned that I could choose my own my higher power, a ‘God of my understanding’.

Gradually I changed my focus to some sort of a spiritually based power.  Gradually I began to form a connection with something greater than me.  I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but I was told to do and I was beaten down enough by that irrepressible demoralization I have spoken of before, that I did what I was told.  I was told to ‘act as if’.  Act as if I were happy, act as if I were sober, act as if I liked who I was, act as if I was connected to my higher power.  At first, I felt like a fraud.  I felt I was pretending to be something or someone I wasn’t.  But it was explained to me that we all do that when we start anything new.  When we begin a new job, we act as if we know what we are doing.  When we go to a new social situation we act as if we are cool, suave and in control even though we have no idea of the dynamics of the people around us. And, gradually we do learn and we can stop ‘acting as if’, because we finally know.

That is how it was with me and that new Higher Power I found through the program. Gradually I started to want serenity, courage and wisdom.  Gradually I wanted to talk to that Higher Power, though it was more of  a one sided chat at first, I continued.  And gradually I began to see results; the main one being that I was sober for the first time in years. I wasn’t made to believe, I came to believe. Gradually that connection to my Higher Power was made.  And finally, I came the realization that my Higher Power always has been connected to me, is with me now and will always be with me.  It’s a knowing that I have in my head and feel in my chest.

Oh, I still have times of doubt.  I sometimes wonder if I am talking to a wall.  I still feel lonely at times.  I bristle when people want to say the Our Father at the end of the meeting or I hear some say how Jesus is their higher power.  But I have gradually come to realize that while we walk the same path, we can focus on different things along that path.  Who am I to say that my way is the only way? As long as I don’t think of the guy who stares back at me in the mirror is my higher power, then I have a good chance of staying sober.

It is only in step one that alcohol and drugs are mentioned.  Where as a higher power, God,  a power greater than oneself is mentioned in six of the steps.  So I find it ironic that people talk about the ‘spiritual part’ of the program.  For those who forged the original twelve steps there was no doubt, this is a spiritual program period.  This program is restoring my connection to my Higher Power.  In fact, the twelfth step tells us that if we have worked the previous eleven steps, it will result in a ‘spiritual awakening’: a realization of the connection with something greater than myself that has helped to break that cycle of addiction. We will have exchanged bottled spirits for a spirit that cannot be contained.  I am grateful.

 

 

Thoroughly Followed Our Path

/ Tim / Leave a comment

These words are in the first sentence of the chapter, “How it Works” in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the grand daddy of all twelve step programs.  The author originally wrote: “Never have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”  Those around him convinced him to change to ‘rarely‘, to soften the statement a bit.  However, the longer I have been on this path, my River of Recovery, the more I understand the truth in the original statement.  I have yet to hear a person who has relapsed claim that it happened while they were ‘thoroughly’ following the program.

The twelve steps are a recipe for recovery.  Each part is integral to the result.  If you don’t follow the recipe to bake a cake, you won’t get the cake you want.  It’s a matter of following the instructions, adding the ingredients in the manner described and baking, waiting patiently for the result.  Each ingredient is necessary.  Each action is necessary.  Whenever I say to myself, ‘Oh, I don’t need to find a higher power,’ I am not following the recipe.  If I tell myself, ‘I don’t need to look at myself in step four; it’s everyone around me that is the problem,’ then I won’t find the sobriety that has been found in twelve step programs since it began more than 82 years ago.  If I want the results that other have gotten,  I have to follow the recipe to the letter.

Discovering sobriety is not easy.  Those twelve steps seem simple enough, but their application takes time, practice, failure and success.  Like anything else in life, there is no short cut.  There is no ‘worm-hole’ that I can travel through to get sobriety.  I have to do the work.  No one ever got sober with a drink in their hand or half an eight ball up their nose.  It just won’t work.  I have to put down whatever I’m addicted to and make the change.

This is hard work.  Going through withdrawal, D.T.’s and all the other immediate consequences of no longer putting this substance into one’s body is damned hard. Fortunately, I don’t have to do it alone.  I have others in the program that I can lean on.  I may need professional help.  I may need to be in a detox or rehab centre for this process.  My disease doesn’t want me to change.  It likes having the booze or drugs in my body.  Addiction tells me that if I don’t have it, I will die; I know that if I do have it, I will die.  I make a change to survive.  This is change and for whatever reason, we resist change.  We want everything to stay the same.  But without change, everything will stay the same: an addict who is still using is still an addict.

I have to stick with it.  And yes, at first, it may be hard, and I may fall and I may struggle to quit again and again.  Through all of this I must remember I am not the first person who has struggled with this.  Other’s made it, I can to.  Giving into temptation is not an option this time.  I am following the recipe of the program.  I will not take a short cut.  I will do the work.  Over and over I tell myself this.  This is my mantra.  Others have done it, I can too!  Even if I fall, knowing that I had two weeks or two months of clean time before, means that I can do it again and maybe achieve more;  I get back up again.

The miracle of the program is that, very soon, thing do change and get better.  Soon I get over the physical effects of withdrawal.  Very soon I can see changes in how I feel when I wake up in the morning, how my health is improving and how it becomes easier to say no. The emotional, mental and spiritual effects of withdrawal still need a pile of work, but at least my head is clear enough to make a start on those changes.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  In order to take the journey, I have to take the journey.  Thoroughly following the path of my twelve step program is the recipe that has worked for me.  I am grateful for where I am today: and my journey continues.  I am grateful that the program will continue to work for me as I continue to “…trudge the Road of Happy Destiny.”