“God Luck”

I have a confession to make: I really do not understand people who work the program without believing in a higher power. I actually have a lot of thoughts about spirituality, about religion, faith, belief, etc. But since this blog is specifically in reference to Recovery from addiction, I’ll limit myself to just that subject.

There was a ‘Just For Today’ this week that talked a lot about realizing how those of us who get clean and sober aren’t just lucky. Our very lives are miracles. Our Recovery is not something that comes from within, but a gift we have been given from our Higher Power. However much time we have free of substances, it is not so much because of something we did, but because of what we allowed to happen. As the saying goes, we do our part and leave the rest up to God. Considering all the changes we go through by working the program, all the benefits we receive, the things we are asked to do are pretty insignificant. It is a small price to pay for the all that we are given in return.

I’ve known some addict/alcoholics in my time that maintain their militant atheism for years after they come into the program. I’ve known some who came in as militant atheists who soften their attitudes somewhat, but are still unable (or unwilling) to allow themselves a belief in a higher power. And you what I’ve observed? They have the damnedest time with the program.

Don’t get me wrong—everybody has the damnedest time with the program. This shit is hard. It’s a complete change of lifestyle. It essentially amounts to changing everything about the way you live your life. And all those things about the way we used to live our lives, we didn’t learn to live that way on a whim. The way we used to live was how we learned to live in order to survive in the environments we were in. Learning to work the program, to live according to the spiritual principles it teaches us to live by, means changing deeply ingrained patterns of thinking and behavior that our instincts tell us we need to follow in order to survive.

Looking into the history of 12-steps though, it doesn’t take long to discover how the program came about. It was deliberately constructed so that those who worked it would experience a spiritual awakening. That was the advice the early alcoholics received—that their condition was a hopeless, incurable, lost cause. The only way anyone had ever heard of for someone being able to permanently give up their old way of life and be ‘cured’ of the Disease (as it came to be called) was by having a major spiritual awakening. Christians refer to these types of experiences as ‘road to Damascus’ conversions, referencing the conversion of Paul. It was this fact that helped early members of AA to clue in to the nature of the Disease as a spiritual malady.

The 12-steps were designed to bring someone back to God. The influence of early members who were atheists were how the program settled on the importance of a God of one’s own understanding. That, in my mind, is where the genius of the program truly kicks. It’s not about finding the Christian ‘God’, it’s about recognizing that there is a spiritual element to our reality and to ourselves, and what’s important is not to do what ‘God says’, but that we seek further communion with that spiritual force—however it reveals itself to us.

Working the program while denying the spiritual aspect of it strikes me as a lot like driving a car without wheels. It may look cool, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Cars were designed to move people from place to place. The 12-step program was designed to help us to find deeper communion with the spiritual. Working the program without that spiritual component? I just don’t understand it.

There are atheist groups out there. There are even whole Recovery fellowships dedicated to 12-step Recovery without the ‘God’ aspect. I don’t get that. For the most part, I can let go of it. There’s always a little voice in my head, though, that says, “So how does that work? You let go and let… what, exactly?” I don’t know. But I do know it’s not my place to tell others how to work the program or what to believe.

The freedom I have to believe is the same freedom that allows others to not believe. I don’t tell them how to live, how to work the program, or what to believe. And they don’t get to tell me how to live, or how to work the program, or what I can or can’t believe.

“A Disease of the Mind, Body, and Spirit”

I had coffee with one of my sponsees last night. He’s coming up on a sobriety/cleandate birthday and has been having a rough time of it. We talked about how all us in Recovery tend to get squirrelly around our birthdays. Mine’s coming up in August and I fully expect to have a few crazy-in-the-brain days. He’s also had some difficult news on the personal health front, the short of which is that he really needs to start taking care himself. As in, or else he could die. 

Now there’s a familiar phrase: get off the drugs, stop the drinking; if you don’t, you will die. 

The Disease never stops trying to kill us. Some in Recovery understand this better than others, like those for whom their moment of clarity is the moment they fully realized this fact. I’ve heard many a speaker talk about all the times they were told they needed to quit, but refused to listen. I’ve seen many people come into the rooms, who keep coming back, but who develop other bad habits. They struggle with cross-addictions to sex, food, gambling, etc. And that’s to say nothing of the alcoholics and addicts out there who think it’s okay to still smoke marijuana. Just a little to take the edge off, right folks? Wrong. But I digress. 

My sponsee’s cross-addiction is now threating his life. During our talk, I tried to really impress upon him the pervasiveness of the Disease. It really doesn’t ever quit. The worst of it is that we can never win against it. The topic of ‘surrender’ came up for discussion recently, and I talked for a good while about how we need to keep on surrendering. I need to keep on surrendering. The moment I think that I’ve got this thing licked, that’s the moment it starts to take back over my life. If I think—even for a second—that I’ve beaten the Disease, that’s all the opening it needs to grab hold of my life’s steering wheel and drive it into a tree. Or another car. Or off a cliff. 

I got some advice early on about how important it is for me to keep on fighting the Disease in all areas of my life. One bit of advice that really helped me was to hear about how addiction/alcoholism is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. We treat the spirit by working the program--going to meetings, working the steps with a sponsor, being of service, and helping others. How we treat our disease in the other two areas, the mind and the body, is up to us. 

The way I handle the body aspect is through my diet and exercise. I do my best to eat healthy, and to not eat too much. My day job is for a nutrition program, so I’m pretty lucky there because I’m plugged in to a lot of current research on food, eating habits, etc. For exercise, I’ve developed a healthy running habit for myself. Currently, I’m running a mile just about every day. These are not changes that happened overnight, they are things I planned and worked hard to achieve. I've done my best to remember, too, that as an addict my tendency is to obsess and take something to the extreme. I built things up slowly. These days, regardless of the other benefits I gain from taking care of my body, I also get a whole lot of pleasure from saying ‘fuck you’ to the Disease. 

The same work needs to be done for our minds. One of the members in my homegroup is retired. He takes classes at the local community college. Not to get a degree, not to work towards starting a second career, but just because they are subjects he’s interested in and because he knows he has to fight against the Disease in all aspects of his life.  

We can never win the war against addiction; we are addicts. We will always be addicts. But we can achieve a truce with the Disease which allows us to live our lives in ways beyond our wildest dreams. If we put Recovery first, if we work the program, we give ourselves a solid foundation. On that foundation, we can then build after miracle. Getting clean is only the first of many.

“Cause Less Harm”

There’s a saying in 12-step rooms—expectations are premeditated resentments.

It’s a good saying, and I’ve written about it before. Mainly, how so many people misinterpret it to mean they shouldn’t have any expectations, and how that isn’t possible. We are going to have expectations. Sometimes we’ll have them without even realizing it. The catch is learning how to deal with the feelings of anger and resentment that come up when our expectations aren’t met—which is, of course, what the program teaches us how to do through the fourth and tenth steps. We can however work on having fewer expectations, and we can work to have expectations that are more reasonable.

Thinking about all that got me thinking about the idea of causing harm. I have similar thoughts about that subject. The program gives us a way to deal with the harm we’ve caused, mainly through steps eight and nine. And, ideally, we should be causing a lot less harm if we are working to practice the principles of the program. We work to remedy the mistakes of our past; we ask for help from our higher power to not act on our character defects; we stay in touch with ourselves and what our motivations are.

Still, I think it’s important to remember how unreasonable it is to expect (ha!) ourselves to stop causing harm altogether. We are going to cause harm in our lives, sometimes entirely by accident, or without even realizing we had done so. Life doesn’t always give us the option of not causing harm. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where, no matter what we do, someone is going to get hurt. Our choice then becomes about how do we cause the least amount of harm.

Personally, I really hate the saying about ‘choosing between the lesser of two evils’. I don’t like the idea that, no matter what I do, I can still find myself in situations where others might be hurt. (By the way, ladies, this is one reason why a lot of men are commitment-shy; we know that most relationships end and we’re not eager to be a source of pain to someone we care about.) If life were easy, situations like these wouldn’t happen. But life isn’t easy. Life isn’t all neat and tidy, wrapped up with all problems solved at the end of the half-hour. A lot of life consists of making hard choices.

Those of us with the Disease come into the rooms being used to living our lives to serve our own selfish ends. Through working the program, we learn how to start balancing our own needs, wants, and desires against those of others. And make no mistake, my friends, this shit is HARD. It’s hard for normies. It’s hard for everyone. There do indeed come times in our lives where we simply gotta do what we gotta do, even though it means others will be hurt. Sometimes it’s because we let ourselves get into a situation we could have avoided; sometimes it’s because we had the best of intentions and it all went south through no fault of our own. Sometimes, we make a choice that hurts someone, but we make that choice because we know they’ll only be hurt more later if we don’t.

We’re none of us perfect. We’re human; we’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to cause harm. The program gives us a way to deal with the harm we cause. And it gives us guides for how to go about our lives in the meantime so that we can do our best to cause less harm.

“Using Dreams”

A subject that comes up regularly in my homegroup is using dreams. I don’t know how prevalent this is among other addicts, but I doubt it’s something that happens only to those who shared my drug of choice. (To any of my mainly alcoholic readers, email me—I’d love to know how often you have drinking dreams!) Marijuana addiction is becoming more widely recognized as an addiction in its own right. Meetings in other fellowships are becoming more accepting of it, and even in the rooms of AA I’m hearing more and more members share about the need to abstain from all mind- and mood-altering substances. It’s gradual, but there does seem to be a shift.

Attitudes in the medical community are changing as well. Legitimate symptoms of withdrawal from long-time marijuana use are coming to the fore and being agreed upon. The idea that pot is harmless and that giving it up is easy seems to be going away as the nature of long-term addiction to this particular substance is better understood. Of course, for those of us for whom marijuana was (is!) our drug of choice, we all respond to this news with a collective, “duh!”

One thing chronic marijuana use does is suppress the dream state. When we got off the weed, the dreams return—and they can be intensely vivid. This is, by the way, once we start sleeping again. For most long-time users, it takes a long time for our sleep to be anything resembling normal. For myself, it was easily two months before I slept all the way through a single night. But I digress.

Using dreams can be really intense. I’ve heard story after story about people who had using dreams, and while in the dream they went through the whole emotional rollercoaster of realizing they had relapsed, needed to resign their service commitments, tell all their sponsees to find new sponsors, etc. I’ve gone through it myself many times. Sometimes it’s taken me several hours to shake that feeling and file the dream away into the ‘not real’ category.

They can be scary, troubling, too. I knew a member who struggled with them, was so tired of them. He eventually reached out to his higher power and prayed for release. As it turned out, he never had another using dream again. How’s that for giving something over? I’ve never been bothered by using dreams to that degree, but I certainly had tons of them when I was brand new to the program. As time has gone by, I’ve had them less and less often, but I do still get them. 

Just the other night, I had one. I can’t tell you how long it had been since the last one. I was watching a movie and thinking about, “damn, people are smoking weed all OVER this thing!” Then, somehow, I was in the movie and the joint got passed to me. I decided (in the dream) that I’d been clean and sober long enough that it would be okay. And I wanted to see if I could take ‘just one’ hit. So I did, and I passed it on to the next person, momentarily proud of myself for being able to control my use.

Then it hit me (if you’ll pardon the pun) that, once again, I had been unable to say ‘no’—that it hadn’t even occurred to me to say ‘no’. I was still very much an addict and the fact that I’d just taken that hit was the ultimate proof. The dream devolved into the usual feelings of remorse at losing my clean time, having to give up my commitments, and on and on.

I can’t claim to be glad it was only a dream. Mostly I don’t feel too much about it one way or another. If anything, it was interesting to see that, yes, I do still having using dreams from time to time. I guess I’ve had enough of them now, and done enough dream analysis in general, to know if/when they’re significant of anything. This one wasn’t, so no big deal. And for that, I am grateful. 

I’m not sitting here obsessing about whether my disease is working against me—I know that it is; it always does. I’m not worried that I have a secret compulsion to go out and get fucked up again—I know I do. It’s not a secret; this is what it means to live with the disease of addiction. There will always be a part of me that wants to get loaded. But I can accept this about myself, and work the program, and when I do those things I know that I don’t HAVE to get loaded. It is possible for me to live a clean and sober life. I’ve been doing it for nearly four years now.

And I can know that a using dream is just that—a dream.

“Reaching Out”

Today’s ‘JFT’ was about how one of the ways we can make Indirect Amends for some of the harm we’ve caused is by reaching out to other addicts. It talked, too, about helping out in our community. While that second part is important and not something to be ignored, I want to focus on the first.

Amends are a tricky thing. We don’t make amends to purge ourselves of fear or guilt. People who are new to the program can find themselves wanting to rush out and apologize to anyone and everyone they’ve ever harmed. This is downright dangerous for many reasons, not the least of which is that we might put ourselves at risk of negative feelings we don’t yet have the experience to handle. There is also the simple fact that saying, “I’m sorry” is something many of us did over and over and over again, while never actually changing anything. Oftentimes the people in our lives got used to hearing us apologize and seeing us not change. The words were meaningless. Should we really be surprised that they still don’t believe an amends made too early, simply because we tack on a little, “oh, but this time I REALLY mean it!” at the end? I think not.

Those who knew us in our active addiction are correct to question our sincerity. They’re right to question our motives, too. Amends come towards the end of the steps for a very good reason: we need time to practice living the spiritual lifestyle before we can be capable of truly making amends for the harm we’ve done. We need experience actually dealing with our real feelings, time to work through our own shit. We need time to clean house and take out the garbage. We need practice in compassion and empathy, in seeing things from others’ perspectives instead of being all wrapped up in our own.

Not all amends can be made directly. Whether because people have died, or making Direct Amends would cause further harm, some amends need to be made indirectly. The ‘Just For Today’ writing talked specifically about how sometimes we’ve done so MUCH harm that we can’t possibly make amends for all of it. That’s definitely one area where Indirect Amends come into play. If we were fiery balls of chaos in our active addiction, bringing insanity and harm wherever we went, then the best way to make amends for that is to do it indirectly—by living the spiritual life and helping others to do the same.

Helping other addicts does not mean telling them they have a problem and should work a program; that isn’t help, it’s taking others’ inventory. The same is true for our fellow Disease-sufferers who are already in the program; it’s not up to us to tell someone else they should be working steps or being of service (with the possible exception of a sponsor/sponsee relationship, but that’s a subject for another blog).

So what can we do to help those who suffer from the Disease? We can talk about our own experiences. That means having the courage to share in meetings about what our lives used to be like and how working the program has changed us. It means listening to those who are still active in their disease, who are looking for a way out, and talking to them about what we did to change our lives. It means continuing to work the program so that we are no longer causing harm so that we can be examples to those who suffer from the disease and those who don’t that it is possible for people like us to change.

We reach out to others because we have learned that we are not the center of the universe. We have learned that the best way for us to stay clean and sober is by helping others who are trying to do the same.

“The Meaning”

This blog is fifth in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

When I woke up, I had music in my mind--the theme from a movie a friend of mine and I had gone to see the night before. I don’t know how much of the dream was influenced by that movie, or the microwaved dinner I’d had afterwards, but it was powerful, and I still feel the emotion of being there in that dream-space, where everything seems so real.

These people were my kin; I belonged to them, with them. They were the broken part of myself, the part that feels inhuman, that something went wrong when my soul was placed into this earthly body and sent to walk this reality. They were my fears about never being accepted, or able to find love, or that the love I find won’t be interested in me.

I read once in a book that all the world around us, all of reality, is merely a dream. All the images we see, all the sensations we experience, are all an illusion. But the feelings we have from experiencing it and the beauty we see, those things are not imaginary. The image is a dream, but the beauty is real.

“The Memorials”

This blog is fourth in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

By the time the party had come to an end, the sun had risen and it was the next morning. I walked through the surrounding woods with one of the other guys, [dude]. There, among cedar and pine trees, he showed me the memorials from previous years' parties. It was a graveyard of sorts, a place of remembrance.

Laid out one right next to another in long rows were miniature, condensed versions of the previous parties. Fifteen by twenty feet in size, each was bordered by two-by-fours half-buried in the ground. Two small globes, fist-sized, were in the middle of each, spaced about six or seven feet apart. Each memorial looked like an overcrowded diorama, but with no background. Everything about the party--all the people, the buildings, places, and the events--were contained there in miniature form in that modest space. They were snapshots, three-dimensional cartoonish versions of the whole of each affair, abridged and combined into a single, captured moment. I could sense that everything that had taken place at each party had been recorded--saved like a file, if you will--by the two small globes.

As we walked slowly down the rows, I could see the people in the dioramas who’d been at the parties, their faces set with looks of joyous celebration, having the time of their lives just as we’d had. We came across one for which the memorial was blank, and I frowned. The space was there, but no figures--only pine needles and the dirt of the forest floor.

“What happened that year?” I asked [dude]. He replied simply.

“We tore it down.”

“Why?”

“Too crazy, wild; out of hand.”

He was dismissive but sad and I, too, felt the loss of the absent memory. I realized I was beginning to mourn the passing of this year’s celebration. I’d had so much fun, such a good time. I’d shared in something special.

We continued walking. Occasionally, there would be another missing diorama. I don’t know exactly how many we passed; dozens and dozens, at least. It was like walking past generations of gravestones. In time, I saw the emergence of the people I had spent my evening and night with. They appeared first as children, and then with each year their exuberant faces, smiling and laughing, got older.

Making a turn, we looked back at the row parallel to where we’d been walking. A blank plot was there. The two fist-sized globes at the center had started glowing, and pieces from the world around me began shrinking, being folded into this year’s headstone as the ‘file’ was created. I realized that even the forest we walked in would become part of this year’s memorial; it was merely the setting of the party, the unused basic land background for it. And it didn’t really exist any more than anything else did.

[Woman] was there; I’m not sure how long she had been. Perhaps she was following me and [dude], keeping her distance behind us, watching me as I absorbed the magnitude of the graveyard and the immensity of what it represented. The weight of her crush on me showed in her face, and she asked me what was wrong, seeing the frustration on mine.

I confided to her about how I’d met so many people, and so many women I’d been interested in, and yet unable to do anything about it. I think I was trying to talk about how the whole world around us was literally vanishing. But she could sense what I was really saying--that I had let opportunities pass me by. I had been too timid to make a play, put myself out there and go for who I wanted. As much as I had opened up during the night, enjoyed myself, let myself relax and just be, I hadn’t been able to let go of that last bit of insecurity.

I don’t recall the exact words of her reply. Maybe she tried to comfort me, maybe she tried to tell me that it was my problem, not hers, but she cut herself off in the middle and retreated away from me, wounded, unable to contain her sadness at our not being together. The pain of the hurt I’d now caused her added to my sense of loss.

“The People”

This blog is third in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

The party raged on, but stayed true to its good nature. No fights broke out. No egos clashed. I’d been watching the women there all night, and definitely noticing some more than others. It was clear that I’d caught a few eyes as well.

Some of the women were more aggressive with their affections than others. Crossing into another room, I got grabbed from behind by one. She turned me around and started kissing me. I enjoyed it until it became clear she wasn’t a woman at all, but a man in the process of becoming one--and yet there was more to it than just that, a more that I couldn’t put into words or explain just yet. And as startling as all that was, it was nothing compared to what more was to come.

Soon after, I found myself encouraging one of the other guys to make his move on a gal he fancied. He declined and then confided in me about why he couldn’t get together with her. He lifted his hand and showed me his deformed fingers--like claws, with several additional digits protruding further up his arm. He wasn’t angry with me, but bitter and embarrassed at my trying to convince him there wasn’t a problem when there so clearly was. I hadn’t even known about his deformity.

There was a gal there, [woman], who had practically never left my side all night. She was crushing on me pretty hard and why I wasn’t interested in her, I don’t recall. I made a few more attempts to hook up. Each failed for one reason or another, all of them because the other person was flawed in some way, in some way not exactly human or ‘normal’. Then the veil fell and I saw with new eyes.

Something was wrong with everyone there. Each of them was in some way inhuman. They were outcasts, freaks who weren’t accepted in life because of their differences. They weren’t human, and yet somehow were, as though they were some other kind of beings who had been forced to be humans. For whatever reason, something had gone wrong with each of them. Something had gone wrong when they were created as humans, but were nevertheless trapped in that state. They were a clan of sorts, and had been around as long as humanity had.

This was their party, the one they held once every year, where they could get together and enjoy just being without the pressure or feelings of judgment. It was the time and place for them to let go and forget about all the horrors of their lives, even though to any other human being, they were seen as the horrors. They created the place for the party themselves each year, created it outside of space and outside of time, on another plane of existence. Here, they didn’t have to hide. But, as I saw in my friend with the deformed hand, the habit of doing so stayed with them, even here.

“The Party”

This blog is second in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

I made friends quickly, and everyone there was friendly to me. They accepted me, embraced me, wanted to get to know me and have me join in and celebrate with them. This was not a party where people sulked in the shadows. Everyone was part of the joy, the fun. And it was authentic; no one there just pretended to have a good time or put on airs, fronting for the sake of appearances. Everyone belonged and everyone participated.

It was easy for me to get swept up in it. I stopped worrying about what the others thought, these strangers who had welcomed me to their very special event. I let go of my fear of what might happen if I let go. I let myself be a part of.

No matter what was going on, I joined in. Music was played and performed. It took a little prodding, but I got up and sang with the others, ultimately singing a song or two solo. Somehow there was a way for me to share my own music with them. It was embraced as well--not as some great achievement above and beyond the other music, but as a deeply cherished piece of the greater whole. I had brought my real self to the party, was sharing the deepest parts of me, and that was what was celebrated--the communion, honest and deep and true. We were Dionysian revelers, celebrating celebration with our fullest selves.