My Sunday night home group is a step-study meeting, and this week we covered Step 12, which reads:

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.

Step 12 is most often associated with working with others, the “twelfth step call.” But our talk focused on the “spiritual awakening” part of the step.

That is such an esoteric and abstract concept that it bears investigating. Several members, with long sobriety between them, said they couldn’t even be sure if they’d had a spiritual awakening. Or, if they had, it was not in the form of a bolt of lightning from above, but was instead of the “educational variety.” We had a newcomer in the room that night, and I know that I, at least, was very conscious of the difficulties that the God-related parts of this program can pose to someone just getting started in sobriety. I shared that my awakening was a practical one, and came only after I had done the work of the eleven steps that come before the 12th. My awakening had this simple progressive form:

• Take the steps
• Start to feel better
• Pray for relief
• Eventually get relief
• Realize that prayer is working
• Do it again
• Realize that “Holy crap, this stuff works!

Another guy summarized it well, reading from the appendices of the Fourth Edition of the Big Book (p. 567): A spiritual experience is characterized by a “…personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism.” That’s it. By doing the steps, trusting in your higher power, and experiencing success it’s possible to achieve a “vast change in feeling and outlook.” That’s exactly what this alcoholic needed. And I get to experience more and more of that change every day I stay grounded in the program of AA, and stay in contact with the God of my choosing.

I’m just short of three years sober. Unquestionably, my life is dramatically better than it was before I began recovery. My problems are mostly pretty classy ones now. I don’t wake up sick, full of fear and regret, hating myself for what I’ve become. Hell, most of the time I get up looking forward to the day. That is nothing short of a miracle for me.

But despite my life being so much better than it was, I still find ways to be pissed off, resentful, irritable, and discontent. Most of the time it’s money, driving, and work that get me upset. I know all of these things are out of my control. I can’t change the fact that my company is suffering financially. I sure as hell can’t make people drive the way I want them to. When I look closely at issues like these, they all have their origins in fear.

When I’m angry at other drivers, I’m reacting out of fear that they are putting me in danger. But, I’m also acting out of the fear of appearing weak and letting people take advantage of me. Somehow, my alcoholic brain still believes that I have to protect my imagined status, even in a totally anonymous situation like being inside my car on the highway! Nearly without fail, when I am feeling anger, discomfort, and powerlessness, I am really experiencing fear. So what works for me to escape the traps that fear sets for me?

Stated most simply, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous works for me. In more specific terms, it’s “pause and pray” that brings me out of that fear state and keeps my butt off of the bar stool. Thanks to having a little sober time and a few hundred meetings’ worth of education on my side, I’m much better at recognizing when my fear machinery starts turning. Once I recognize the fear, I can consciously choose to refuse to let my emotions go further down the path of negativity. Having halted the progress of fear, I can then reach out to my Higher Power through the simple mantra of our Serenity Prayer. I know this works. I have used this method effectively, and can speak from experience that “pause and pray” breaks the machinery of fear for me.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Try it. Don’t let fear own your emotions.

It’s easy for me to go to my regular meetings at home. I know everybody, it’s a familiar, comfortable thing. But when I’m traveling it’s not so easy to get motivated to get to a meeting. I think it’s common for us alcoholics to feel uncomfortable meeting new people–it is certainly true for me.

Planning ahead can help ease the anxiety. I came out to Virginia to be with my family for Christmas this year, and knowing that I’d want to get to a meeting or two while I was out, I looked online for meetings in the area. I found a couple of meetings close by, and was able to decide where and when I could go to get my AA fix without having to scramble for information once I arrived.

How can you find meetings when you’re traveling?

• The official AA website: Start here if you’re looking for general AA information, or if you aren’t sure about what local Intergroup you should search for. An Intergroup is an umbrella organization that coordinates the different meetings and AA services for  a given area.
• Google: I like using Google to find the Intergroup website for the area to which I’m traveling.
• Online Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous: This site features all kinds of links to AA meetings held online in chatrooms (instant message-style chat), via audio (voice chat), and through email.

Why go to meetings while traveling? The obvious answer is because that’s we we do to stay sober. But there’s more to it than that for me. Going to meetings in different parts of the country reinforces my sense of belonging to AA. I feel like I have a home wherever I go, and that the people I find in a meeting of AA are my people. Plus, it’s just good for me to break out of the familiar, and to hear different people share their experience, strength, and hope.

I encourage you to get out there and experience the fellowship of our program when you travel. Take your recovery on the road, and find friends in the halls of AA.

I’ve been avoiding this blog. Sure, I’ve been busy, but I’ve also felt like I didn’t have much to say. Nothing major has been going in my sobriety. I also didn’t like feeling like I had to say something profound or meaningful. I guess that’s a common dillemma for a writer–what if I have nothing worth saying? I see now, though, that it’s not about trying to be wise or important. The important thing is that I share about my experiences in sobriety.

Anxiety has been a common theme for me lately. I work at a software company, and the down economy has hurt us. We laid off half of our 100 person staff in October. We have contracts with American car companies, and if they go belly up, I may lose MY job. Add romantic anxiety to economic insecurity. I’ve kept up a great friendship with my last girlfriend (who left me in the depths of my drinking and using). A couple of days ago I told her that I have strong feelings for her, and she said she’d been thinking about possibly resuming our romantic relationship, too. But there are negatives here, too. She lives in the city, I live in a suburb 30 minutes away. She is a normie with many musician friends who love to go out to clubs for drinks. There’s also another guy she’s been dating, but it’s “not serious.” So even though we both agree that there’s something there for us, there are obstacles. I’m practicing patience.

The only thing that keeps me going in the face of these things, and the rest of life I can’t control, is my program. I get to meetings. I talk to other alcoholics. And I maintain my spiritual condition by staying in contact with God. I pray for patience, love, and tolerance in all my dealings with other people. This keeps me going.

I have two meetings I attend regularly, and I’ve grown really comfortable with the regulars I see every week. These groups are particularly chummy, and the talk tends to return to fellowship a lot. It’s a regular love-fest, in fact. And that’s one of the great things about AA. If you find good meetings with people you can feel comfortable with it can help you to keep coming back.

I think that feeling of comfort and understanding comes from the shared struggle, and the shared feeling of survival that AAs have. It’s the bond that forms among survivors in the lifeboat, as the Big Book parable goes. For two years of sobriety, fellowship has been enough for me. It made meetings more than just tolerable, and it helped me to feel like I had landed in the place that was right for me. Fellowship told me I wasn’t alone anymore.

Now I’m finding that fellowship isn’t qute enough. The warm-but-superficial relationships I’ve established are a blessing, but a guy needs actual FRIENDS. Making friends has never been easy for me. One of the reasons that I took to alcohol and drugs was that it was easier for me to talk to people when I had a buzz on. In sobriety I’ve had to learn how to open up to people, even when I wasn’t feeling comfortable. This has been of the best things I’ve gained from sobriety and my experience in AA. I’m still kind of quiet, and engaging others does not come easily to me, but I’ve learned that if I make the move to say hello or shake somebody’s hand, something good will nearly always come of it.

That much was enough for me for a while. Now I’m starting to form real friendships with some of the guys. We’ve had mountain biking days, and gone to drag races.  I had people over to watch the UFC pay-per-view a couple of weeks ago. That was a blast. I NEVER have people to my place, and it was great to play the host to some great sober guys. A few weeks ago some of us played in a golf tournament run by our good friend Kenny F. Kenny is one of those guys who everybody likes, and who just seems to gather people around him. Last night after our regular Friday meeting Kenny stopped me as I was leaving and told me that he was glad to see me spending more time with the guys. He knows that I have a hard time being social sometimes, and wanted me to know that I was a welcome addition to the group. This really touched me. For a guy who always felt like he had to put on some show for people to convince them he was worth knowing, it’s a real gift to feel loved and appreciated when I’m just being myself.

 

Self-pity is one of those things I thought I’d mostly done away with. Today I got an unpleasant reminder that I’m not even close to being beyond that shit. The familiar old feeling came back so quickly, so easily that I was bummed about how bummed I felt. The start of this whole pity-party came with a phone call from my probation officer. She told me that I will probably have to get AA attendance slips signed for another three years. Three fucking years! It’s been two already. As I talked about in a recent post, I thought I was done with this crap. I go to AA because I WANT to. Having to get these slips signed is such a negative thing. If you slip up on this paperwork BS somehow, it can ruin everything. They’ll throw the book at you. And it creates a barrier between you and the people who are at meetings “voluntarily.” You’re a “slip-signer.” It’s also a huge pain in the ass if you ever want to move out of the area. You have this fucking leash tied around your neck. God dammit, I felt so GOOD thinking I was done with this.  

I KNOW that I’m lucky that I didn’t go to jail for my DUI in the first place. And I’m grateful that the requirements of the deferred program kept me close to AA when I might have strayed early on. It’s just demoralizing to have this shit not GO THE FUCK AWAY. I felt like I ‘d been kicked in the stomach.

There’s nothing I can do about this now. It is remotely possible that the judge will waive the three year period. Bottom line: I’m not letting this drive me crazy. I’m over feeling sorry for myself–for now. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the recurring themes I hear in meetings is that alcoholics often have a profound sense of feeling different than other people. I’ve heard many people share about how, even as little kids, they felt that they were looking in from the outside. It seemed like other people had things figured out–how to be happy, how to make friends, meet girls–where the nascent alcoholic felt clumsy, conspicuous, self-conscious, isolated. I’m sure plenty of non-alcoholics feel this way, too. But the regularity with which I hear this from people who are recovering from addiction and alcoholism tells me something more is going on with this than just garden-variety insecurity.

I can tell you that I have ALWAYS felt very, very different from other people, and it started at a very young age. I was identified at school as a “gifted” kid and was jumped up from 2nd to 3rd grade. Now I was younger than everybody in my classes. I was further singled out academically when I started taking the 8th-grade English classes as a fifth-grader. Not only was my little ego was blown all out of proportion by this, but the other kids pegged me as a “school boy” and while I was lucky and was never really abused, I was definitely not able to be just another kid.

I had my petty rebellions in junior high, but it wasn’t until high school that my desperate feelings of isolation led to increasingly drastic behavior in the attempt to be accepted. I made a conscious effort to join the groups of kids I admired. I joined the football team. I started drinking. I started using drugs. By age 15 I was using methamphetamine regularly, and hanging out with gangsters and drug dealers. I knew I wasn’t like those people, either, though. I wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, or an arch-criminal. When the cops grabbed me up in high school and questioned me about a drug dealer, I squealed like the scared kid I was.

After high-school, my drinking and drug use continued to escalate. I moved to northern California and was introduced to hippy culture and the Deadhead lifestyle. I thought I was in heaven. Here was a lifestyle that required nothing of me in terms of responsibility and which idealized intoxication in all its forms. Yet even in this world where my addictions were a social asset, I never truly fit in. After over a decade of tie-dyed oblivion, I walked out of that life with nothing more than I’d gone in with.

For the greater part of my life I had sought a place to belong. I never found it until I I got sober. I’ve learned that in order to feel a part of any external thing I need to be comfortable with who I am. Until I could be comfortable in my own skin, I would always feel out of place and off balance. I could not achieve this feeling on my own, and AA has helped bring me to a feeling of well-being and love for myself that I would never have believed possible. It’s not just going to meetings that made this possible for me, it was working the steps. I needed a course in Remedial Adulthood, and the 12 Steps give that to me.

I could go on and on about how I feel like a part of AA, and how I have finally found a loving group of folks who truly understand me. Those things are true, but I couldn’t have them without what I’ve learned about myself. Now I know who I am. I like what I see in the mirror. For the first time in my life I know what it takes for me to live in this world: go to meetings, don’t drink between meetings, work the Steps with a sponsor, keep my side of the street clean. When I follow this simple plan I know exactly who I am. I’m a recovering alcoholic who is damned grateful to be alive.

I’m finding that work is one of the biggest challenges to my recovery. It makes sense. Most of us spend the bulk of our lives in the workplace. Instead of being where we want to be with people we choose to be around, we’re at the office, or the mill, or the store with people we might not otherwise associate with. And most of these people have NO IDEA what it means to be an alcoholic, or to be in recovery. I feel a little adrift around them, a little different. Like I have a secret pair of underwear on, or I was really raised by wolves and only recently joined humanity.

Stress is always a challenge to recovery. So are the unknowing social offers people make. They’re always asking me if want to meet for happy hour. I politely decline. It’s not that I’m afraid of socializing where there’s alcohol around. The Big Book tells us we don’t have to hide from alcohol–it’s a part of life: just not our life. It just doesn’t usually sound fun to me to go sit in a noisy bar or restaurant while people get progressively more irritating to be around. I find myself thinking, “God. I can’t believe acted like that.” And of course I really acted ten times worse most of the time.

The other day one of our VPs (whom I like and who is a pretty sharp and funny guy) came to my desk with two opened bottles of wine. He asks me, his face slightly booze-flushed, “White, or red?” I tell him neither thanks, I don’t drink. He gives me a wry look and says, “There must be a story there.” I tell him there’s always a story.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good idea to tell my coworkers I don’t drink. Some folks I know in the program go to great pains to keep their recovery private. I can see their point. Why risk negative repercussions? And who’s business is it anyway? I don’t go around telling people I’m a recovering alcoholic, but I don’t feel the need to guard the fact like a Cold War secret. I’m just kind of an open book in general. With coworkers I know well and trust, I’ve even joked about why I don’t drink. My favorite is, “I’m allergic to alcohol–it makes me break out in handcuffs.”

There’s the question of anonymity as an AA member, too. I have had one coworker whom I knew was in the program (he’s since gone back out). I would protect his anonymity at all costs. I would never make it known that another person is an AA member. That’s what the 12th tradition tells us to do.

I guess this issue of how you present yourself at work and in the world at large is a very personal one. For me, recovery is an integral part of who I am. I choose not to go to great lengths to hide it because I do not believe it is something I should be ashamed of. If others react negatively, so be it. I can’t control other people. The only danger I see for me is that I may be too eager to seem special, or to be a poster-boy for recovery. That is a wrong motive for sure. It’s not easy walking the line between being comfortable in my own skin and living openly and honestly, and being vain and seeking attention for my recovery. I’ll keep working my 7th step,  praying that my Higher Power take away the defect of pride.

The 8th and 9th steps are two keystones of the AA program. Making real amends for the harm we’ve done in our lives is a huge part of repairing our self-image and our relationships with others. These steps are arguably the most daunting of the twelve. For the first time our program emerges from the relatively safe confines of meetings, prayer, and sponsor-sponsee talks. Now we go to people outside AA: our families, friends, employers, coworkers, lovers, and enemies, and we tell them that we’re ready to repair the damage we’ve done to them.

What works for me about amends is the good feeling I get when I’ve put my recovery first. When I don’t want to make an amends (which is true pretty much every time), but I suck it up and do what the program tells me, I get a feeling of success. I feel like a grown-up. And I need that feeling, after a long career of completely failing at life. And most of the time (not EVERY time), the object of my amends reacts very favorably. Another relationship is repaired, even if we never talk again.

Right now I’m working on two of the toughest amends yet: my high school girlfriend and her parents. We had the craziest codependent relationship imaginable. We were terribly abusive to each other. The emotional and physical violence was mutual, but I was bigger, meaner, and louder than her. I shook her, pushed her, gave her a black eye, broke her ear drum, and came very close to choking the life out her. No excuses–I abused her. I drank over this nightmare for 15 years. The guilt and the shame have been terrible. I have no doubt that she bears inner scars that I can’t imagine.

I’ve started letters that I want to send. Writing these letters has already been an important experience for me. I know the next step has to be working with my sponsor to make sure that I’m approaching this right. I’ve heard many times in meetings and from my sponsor that it’s important to get input on your amends efforts before you get too far. The last thing I want is to do more damage because of a poorly thought-out amends attempt. It’s also important to remember that an amends is not just an apology. Unless I’m willing to actually DO something to make things right, then my amends is empty. But it’s not up to me to decide what, if anything, I should do. That’s up to her, and her folks.

The first time I experienced AA, I couldn’t get past all of the references to God. I looked at the twelve steps on the wall and there was God. I thumbed through the Big Book and ran into God all over the place. People sharing in meetings were constantly talking about how God or their Higher Power (I hated this pseudonym for God) was taking away this or guiding them in that.

The truth was that I wasn’t ready to get sober, and I wasn’t close to ready to make peace with the idea that God exists and is interested in my well-being. And I didn’t get sober. The booze and the drugs were still working for me. The consequences hadn’t become painful enough.

I hear a similar story from many AAs. They didn’t believe in God when they came to the program. They were too smart, too educated, or too disappointed by religion to give any credence to the existence of a loving Creator. But they were willing to do what the program of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests. As time passed, and as their experience of sobriety and growth went on, they came to believe that the strength to build a wonderful new life without alcohol was coming not from them but from a source of infinite strength and love they had come to know as God. The second step had become a reality in their lives, as it has in mine.

Don’t give up before the miracle happens. So many of us were, like you may be, agnostic, doubtful, disappointed. Read what the Big Book has to say in the chapter to the Agnostic. Your Higher Power is up to you to define. You don’t even have to define it. Simply be willing to accept the idea that a loving force of Creation can and will provide with the strength and guidance to live a life you may never have imagined possible. If it can happen for an over-educated, evolutionist, rock-and-roll-loving drunk like me, it can happen for you, too.