Addiction

Truth and Courage

/ Tim / 2 Comments

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future.” M. Scott Peck

Step Four asks us to make a thorough and fearless moral inventory. I took more time with this step than any other step in my recovery program. I kept telling myself I was preparing my thoughts, waiting for the right time and hoping to be inspired. What I was really doing was working on a character trait that still dogs me: procrastination. Why do today what I can put off until tomorrow? And I was afraid of what I would find. I was afraid I might find the truth of who I was. There were a lot of dark corners of my past that I had shut the door on and I was quite sure I would be opening Pandora’s Box if I looked too closely.

I had my own deadline for completing this step. I wanted to have it down and talk about it with my sponsor before I moved. As the period of time got shorter and shorter, my anxiety about the step increased. And then I started thinking that perhaps I didn’t need to do it before I moved. It could always be done later, right?

About this time I went to a meeting where the topic arose. A fellow shared that it took him two years and three days to complete his Fourth Step: two years of procrastination and three days to do the work. He talked about how his fear of what he might find froze him. When he finally sat down to write, he broke through that fear and faced himself with honesty, discovering that the task wasn’t as arduous as he thought it would be. This was the push I needed.

I got out the guide for the step that a friend suggested. I wasn’t sure what I would find but I knew that if I wanted to recover I had to trust the process. I knew it worked because I could see the results in others.  I also had examples of what happened to those who skipped this step. All it took was a couple of days of effort to work through the 59 questions  in the guide. In the end, the experience I heard at that step meeting bore true for me as well. My fear was a phantom. I knew my past. A few things I hadn’t thought about in years came up, but I realized that I never had anything to fear.

Like making that first phone call to ask for help, or walking into a meeting room for the first time, my fear diminished once I got down to doing Step Four. It wasn’t a Pandora’s Box of frightful things. Everything that was there I had placed inside. Step Four allowed me to open the box and see exactly what was in there. Now I had a better idea of who I was and what I needed to work on a better future for myself.

Attraction

/ Tim / 1 Comment

At my home group there’s a guy who gets dropped off . He comes into the room, sometimes he uses the washroom. When he’s sure the car that dropped him off has gone, he takes off up the road. Several have tried to talk to him but he’s evasive and declines all invitations to stay and listen.

There’s often one. You know who it is. The one who sits at the back of the room. He comes and goes without regard for others. He doesn’t say much if anything at all. Sometimes he comes in with eyes glazed over and slight smirk.

It’s easy to feel sorry for folks like this. It seems that they just can’t get it. Or they don’t know where to begin. Sometimes we say they just ‘aren’t ready’, or if they would only sit down for a bit, they might hear something that they could use to help them stop.

Recovery is a slow process for us. Before it begins, most of us ‘hang around’ recovery a bit to see how it might fit us. Before I came into the rooms of a Twelve Step recovery program, I tried many other options: meditation, counselling, self control, medication, even acupuncture. None of these had lasting effects. I called the local hotline to hear about meeting locations and read the announcement about local groups in the paper. And finally, one Monday morning, I arrived, entered and began the process of recovery.

We can’t sell this stuff; it can’t be promoted. It has to be desired. I remember what I used to think when someone said I should ‘slow down’. In my insanity, I would take it as an insult and use it as an excuse to get fried. An full scale intervention probably would have just given me one more excuse to really ‘show them!’  I had a lot of preconceived ideas about recovery and meetings. I didn’t want to admit that I was ‘one of them’. I wasn’t ready until I was ready, until I had the desire.

It’s kind of like buying a car. We go to the lot when we know it’s closed and walk around and look at the selection of vehicles. Maybe we’ll come back to a particular lot and test drive one or two. Some people check out the reviews for the model. Some folks rent a similar model for a weekend. Many of us take time to make the final decision. Meanwhile we are still driving around in the old one and we’re used to it’s clunks and shimmies and maybe we think the price to pay for a new one is too much.

We arrive at recovery when we arrive and some never arrive. We aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. I am grateful that when I finally arrived I was greeted with a smile. I was welcomed and I was invited back. If you’re the guy who’s sitting at the back or who doesn’t stay for a meeting that’s fine. Take your time. Check things out. Kick the tires. One day, when you have the desire, please come in and listen. We’ll share what we’ve discovered.

 

 

Do It Any Way

/ Tim / 1 Comment

There are no shortcuts in recovery. It’s not a buffet of items I can pick and choose. Rather it’s a recipe that I need to follow on a daily basis in order to get the results of happiness, joy and freedom. Initially I may not like doing a step or part of the step but leaving it out is an open invitation to return to the life I had before. Leaving out the sugar or substituting salt is going to alter the results of your mother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, regardless of how much love and care you put into their making. The same is true of a recovery program: “If you want what we have, then you do what we did.”

Is it always easy? No. There are times when I want to skip an apology to someone I had an argument with. I don’t always feel like praying. What if the meetings are boring? Why should I do it all? I’ve been in recovery a month, or a year or ten years. I’m doing fine. Right? How do you think the cookies taste without the sugar?

“Do it anyway: do it any way!”

Larry was a friend of mine in recovery who often said this. A recovery program requires trust. Even if I don’t understand what is happening, even if I don’t believe it is going to work, even when I don’t have any desire, I need to do ‘it’. And I need to find a way to do ‘it’. ‘It’ has to get done. ‘It’ is part of my recovery work.

What is ‘it’? Perhaps it’s working the next step. Perhaps it’s making amends for the argument I was in yesterday or last year. It might be sitting down to pray or meditate. It could be looking into the real reason why I’m depressed or why I avoid social situations. It’s that which gnaws and knots our stomach. We all have an ‘it’. And if we’ve been in recovery even a short time, we won’t have to dig very long to know what that ‘it’ is: the next right thing I need to do.

If you ask anyone who returns to the program after a relapse if they were ‘thoroughly following their program the answer is always ‘no’. They left something out of their program that was vital to their success in it. In going to meetings you will run into members whose recovery is much less than happy, joyous and free. They too are living without some of the ingredients of a healthy recovery program. They aren’t doing ‘it’.

I’ve learned to trust the Twelve Steps as my guide. I learn to go over and review them regularly because I don’t want to go back to where and how I was living before. I can’t guarantee that I’ll still be in recovery ten years from now, but I don’t need to. If I keep doing the next right thing, if I live my recovery today then I will be okay today. Tomorrow is another day.

Today I’ll do it anyway/any way because I want recovery.  I am grateful that Larry was a part of my recovery. RIP big fellow!