“Terminally Unique”

I’ll admit it: I’ve 13th-stepped a newcomer. It’s a much longer story that I won’t share in this entry, but I mention it for a reason. While it’s true that I was given the ‘no new relationships for a year’ advice, it was a suggestion I chose not to follow. I dated several people during that first year of my Recovery, and each time I did the results were disastrous. I’m not overstating things, here. I created a whole new trail of wreckage (which I later had to clean up), caused a whole lot of hurt to those I supposedly cared about. And I especially caused myself some very intense pain and anguish that I really could have done without. I’m thinking of one relationship in particular, because my memory from it and why I thought it was okay for me to pursue is especially clear: I thought I was special.

I thought I was special, unique, that the so-called rules didn’t apply to me or to her or to us. What we had was so intense, so powerful, by god it was love, don’t you understand?! What I didn’t understand, what it took me a long time to accept, was that I am not unique (and that it wasn’t love at all, but again, that’s for another entry). The rules really do apply to me. Why? Because I am addict just like every other addict out there.

From the stockbroker who hides his drinking from his wife, kids, coworkers and boss, to the homeless heroin junkie strung out in the gutter, we are all the same. No one of us is really so different from the other when we have the Disease. We like to think we are, we like to think we’re unique, or that we’re not like ‘those people’, but we are. For those of us who suffer, we are all far more alike than we are different.

It’s a huge danger, this thinking that we’re unique. We think no one could possibly understand how it feels to be us—that is, until we start hearing other people in meetings describe the exact same feelings we’ve had. We think no one has been through what we have in life, done the things we’ve done—that is, until we start working steps and hear our sponsor’s stories about doing the exact same things, or about how the exact same things have happened to them.

We have a phrase in the rooms: ‘terminally unique’. The healing power of Recovery comes from becoming part of a community, from realizing that we aren’t alone. Those of us who aren’t able to accept that we aren’t special, those of us who continue to insist that we are different, it is those of us who continue to suffer. Sometimes, until we die. Ask anyone who has been close to suicide (such as myself) and we can tell you what a deep, dark, lonely hole that place is. As long as we insist on being alone, on being different, we will stay that way.

Coming to understand that we aren’t unique is one of the joys of Recovery. It’s one of the challenges, too. We need to learn to get over ourselves. It’s ego-bruising, but that itself is the whole problem—our egos. We come from a way of living where we were the center of the universe. Through living the spiritual life, we come to realize that everything isn’t all about us. We walk into the rooms thinking we’re solo singers, and many of us like it that way! What we learn is that each of us is merely one voice in a vast chorus.

The beauty of the sound we make together is staggering to behold.

“Lies”

Honesty. It’s where it all begins.

I think honesty is a tricky thing for everybody, not just us addicts but the normies too. And I’ll sidetrack just a little to soapbox about this culture I live in. It is indeed a bizarre world. As children we’re taught not to lie, yet we see adults do it all the time. We are told to tell the truth, and yet I remember all-too-well that it was the liars and the cheats who got ahead. The real lesson, (or so it seems to me now, having lived a few years) is not so much not to lie, but not to get caught.

That may work for some people, but it doesn’t for me. And it’s not what the program teaches us. The program is pretty damn clear on this point, in fact. A life of lying is where we come from; Recovery is about learning to live differently. There is a part of us that is always looking for the loophole that will allow us to do what we want, live life our way according to our own rules. The idea that we can, that is an illusion, my friends. Living according to our own designs? That’s how we ended up in Recovery to begin with! And yet, the Disease is always there, always in the back of our minds telling us to look for the shortcuts, find the quick and easy path.

The literature talks a lot about Honesty (the spiritual principle behind Step One). I think the best example is still the ‘how it works’ section from out of AA’s big book. It’s a full 7-course meal of truth wrapped up and crammed into just a few short pages. There is no easier, softer way. We do Recover—if we have the capacity to be honest. The results of all our efforts will be zilch until we entirely let go. I remember working the steps out of NA’s workbook and doing a long section on reservations; those can be a problem, too.

We’re so good at hiding things. From other people. From ourselves. Denial is an old leather jacket so familiar we don’t even realize we’re wearing it. But intentional deceit is a trickier thing for us. Our culture tells us little white lies are okay. It tells us too that it’s okay to hide the truth to avoid hurting someone. That, my friends, is some bullshit right there. It’s not okay to lie by omission. We are as sick as our secrets.

It is possible to be rigorously honest. That right there is the key. Not brutally honest, but rigorously honest. We do our best to live our lives in a ways that we don’t have to lie. And when we have a truth that needs told, we look for a way to speak it in love. A therapist of mine would talk, too, about emotional honesty. It’s about being real with people and giving them the full truth. We can’t let fear dictate our actions (or inactions). That is not the way.

Lying, whether by commission or omission, is anathema for people like us. We may think we’re doing the ‘right’ thing by being selectively honesty. We’re not. It feeds our Disease, takes us backwards on the path of Recovery, and leads us back to relapse. Step 6 in the NA workbook has a really good section on this and it spends considerable time talking about how shades of dishonesty is poison to our souls. We need to be fully honest with ourselves and with the other people in our lives. If we aren’t, our spiritual growth suffers.

“Giving Recovery Your All”

I was fortunate when I walked into the rooms of Recovery. Damn lucky, in fact. And by that, what I mean is that when I first stepped into a 12-step meeting, I was a broken, miserable soul who was desperate beyond words. Out of that misery and desperation is where my willingness came. My willingness to find a sponsor and work the steps. My willingness to attend 90 meetings in 90 days. I remember talking to someone about it who was completely taken aback. “That’s a lot of meetings!” he exclaimed.

It is a lot of meetings. And a lot of newcomers balk at the idea. ‘Fuck that shit!’ they think or say. If they say it to me, I just smile at them and repeat the question I was asked: “Oh yeah? So how often did you get loaded?” “Shit, everyday. Mulitple times a day.” “Well then, why can’t you go to a meeting every day? Or multiple meetings every day for that matter?” There is no answer to that reasoning, only recalcitrant excuses.

Personally, I don’t like how the courts send people to 12-step meetings. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about second chances and rehabilitation. But my experience has been that Recovery isn’t for people who need it, only for people who want it. Now I know there are old-timers among us who did not go willingly into the rooms. My sponsor is one of them. So, obviously, it works. And the statistics are pretty grim—it doesn’t seem to matter who you are or what brought you into the rooms; chances are you won’t stay. But it just seems to me that those who are desperate for change, who are desperately seeking a new way of life, those are the folks who are more likely to succeed at this Recovery thing. Who knows, maybe all that is just my own confirmation bias (meaning, it was like that for me so it seems to me like it has to be like that. Wow. Us addicts never stop being self-centered!)

One thing that does seem to be true is that we have to give Recovery our all. However much we hold back from the program, that is the amount less that the program can do for us and change our lives. If we only go to meetings occasionally, when we feel like it; if we only work steps a little bit and just assume that we’ll get back to them ‘someday’, then the program is not going to change our lives very much.

90-in-90 is a great suggestion, and for a whole host of reasons. If we’re used to using every day, we need to find a different behavior to replace that habit. More than that, there is something about those very early days, the days of new sobriety. Our brains are trying to figure out how to work without the substances we’ve been putting in our bodies for god-knows how long. Our brains are literally reprogramming themselves. The more Recovery we can inject in those early days, the better off we’ll be in the long-term. The sooner we can establish a good habit of working the program, the more likely we are to keep it up.

What’s the measure? How hard should we work the program? My long-time readers know that I’m not big on the ‘should’ word. But as a general guide, however much you used, that’s how hard you should work the program. Did you use every day? Then go to a meeting every day. Did you live your life loaded every second of the day? Learn how to live your life so that you’re working the program every second of the day.

Give everything you have to your Recovery, and allow yourself to be amazed at where it takes you.

“Fixing Our Lives”

When addicts in Recovery take on the momentous challenge of choosing a sponsor and beginning to work steps, we are hit by some powerful knowledge from the get-go. Almost immediately, we begin to see how pervasive the Disease really is. Ideally, part of working Step One includes multiple admissions to our innermost being. We admit that we have a problem and that we need help. Hopefully we realize as well that our problems don’t go away once we stop getting loaded. Our lives don’t magically improve the instant we stop picking up. It’s one of the things I point to as a prime example of how addiction isn’t really about substances at all.

Even if we do the work to complete all 12 steps—and it’s hard, arduous work—we still aren’t finished. Working the 12 steps gives us a foundation for how to live our lives differently. Working the steps does not solve all our problems. It helps, of course. Working the steps helps a lot and goes a long way towards a new beginning on life. But just as ceasing our use doesn’t make life magically better, working the steps doesn’t make everything better either.

The steps are a guide, a way of dealing with our lives. They give us a way to practice living a spiritual life, one of honesty, courage, and integrity. None of us live this life perfectly—we are all human, and addicts at that! But if we adhere to the program, do our best to work it, to practice the principles laid out in it in every aspect of our daily lives, then things do get better. Much better. Beyond our wildest dreams better.

Something newcomers find themselves particularly challenged by (and this was definitely the case for me) is that life is HARD. Living life according to the program is HARD. As those who suffer from the Disease, we don’t like for things to be hard. We want things to be easy, so a part of us is always looking for the shortcut, the easy way out. There isn’t one. The only way out is through. The only way to get something done is to do it. I had a sponsee ask recently if I had any advice for how to get started on the eighth step. I told him, “sure: just fuckin’ do it.” It wasn’t a joke.

Even if we make it through all twelve steps, even if we do our best to live by the principles of the program, life is still going to be life. Being clean and sober doesn’t make everything all perfect. Working the program doesn’t automatically ‘fix’ our lives. We have to keep on keepin’ on. We have to keep at it, keep working it. What the program gives us is the opportunity to do so and a set of tools to do it with. And they work.

Getting clean and sober doesn’t fix our lives; it gives us the chance to fix them. Whether or not we actually do the work to fix our lives is a choice we make. And it’s a choice we have to keep on making, day after day, one day at a time.

“A Problem With Me”

One of the biggest mistakes made by those who are new to Recovery is thinking that the problem is their drug of choice. This leads to addicts and alcoholics using other drugs and thinking it is okay to do so because, hey, they kicked that other stuff! Recovering alcoholics call themselves sober even though they smoke pot. Recovering drug addicts think it’s okay for to drink.

The most common reason people give for this behavior is that they only had a problem with ‘x’, not ‘y’. But this isn’t a reason, it’s a rationalization. It’s based on a very common misconception, that drugs are the problem. They aren’t; they are a symptom of the problem. How many drug addicts end up in the rooms of AA because they thought it was okay to drink? And it doesn’t even have to be substances. The rooms of Overeaters Anonymous are filled with ‘former’ alcoholics.

This problem is only compounded by the insistence in certain rooms (not all, but far too many) that their doors aren’t open to all, only those suffering from the corresponding fellowship’s namesake. It’s unfortunate, really. Anytime someone suffering from the Disease is told they can’t get the help they need, that they have to go somewhere else. On the rare times I’ve been faced with those situations, I remind them that the 12 steps are the same for every program.

As addicts, as those who suffer from the spiritual malady, we are people who are really good at denial. We fool others, but more than anything, we fool ourselves. We can rationalize just about anything. Before entering Recovery, we insisted we didn’t have a problem. We thought others were to blame for the mistakes we had made. Our very thinking is riddled with the Disease. Why else would “my best thinking got me here” be such a common saying?

The disease isn’t about substances. Substances are what we use to get outside ourselves. It’s what we do so that we don’t have to deal with other people or with the world. It’s a quick ‘fix’ to anything we might be feeling. The disease is about behavior—compulsion, obsession. We can ‘use’ anything. The only way to Recover from the disease is to cultivate that spiritual connection.

If we’re intoxicated, we can’t make conscious contact with our higher power. I’ve known plenty of users who felt so deeply spiritual when they were loaded (it’s particularly bad for those like myself for whom marijuana was their drug of choice). What do I think about that? If you’re loaded, then your mind isn’t clear, and if your mind isn’t clear, you can’t make conscious contact. If you’re fucked up, you’re not communing with God, you’re just high. If we’re under the influence, there’s no way to make progress in Recovery. We can’t deal honestly with our thoughts, our feelings, because we aren’t present. We can't escape ourselves and commune with the spiritual, it doesn't work that way.

We don’t have a problem with drugs, we have a problem with ourselves. We don’t want to face us, all our unresolved issues, all our inadequacies, our fears. So we do anything we can to avoid the real problem. And our Diseased brains are only too happy to oblige in helping us along the way. No one substance is better or worse than others. Our drug of choice is irrelevant. Maintaining complete abstinence from any and all mind- and mood-altering substances is the only way to truly Recover.

“Seek and Find”

On the radio yesterday was a story that (among other things) talked about Catholicism in 16th century Spain. Apparently, prayer was a very specific thing at that time. Meaning, prayer wasn’t just saying whatever was on your mind. It was: do these specific actions, say these specific words, in this specific way in this specific place, etc. And if you did that perfectly, then your prayers would be answered. Very different from my own understanding of what prayer is, and the understanding of what prayer is to be for those of us who work the program.

We don’t seek the Christian God, specifically. We don’t have a set of doctrine that we follow. There aren’t rules laid out for us about how to make conscious contact with the power greater than ourselves. We aren’t told what God is like, we are encouraged to make contact and build a relationship with the spiritual ourselves. We are to develop our own understanding of what that force is and what it means to us.

My concept of ‘higher power’ is that everyone’s understanding of it is legitimate. What some people call God, what others call Gaia, and what still others call Allah, these are all different understandings of a power greater than ourselves. All of them are valid. I take exception to those who, when they talk about their higher power, add the catchphrase, “who I call God” because they always seem to say it with a twinge of attitude. As though someone who doesn’t call their higher power ‘God’ is inferior. As though their understanding of a power greater than themselves is the ‘right’ one. Please. I don’t care what you call your higher power. It’s none of my business. Your understanding of it is yours, not mine.

The program doesn’t tell us what to believe. It doesn’t tell us how to worship a higher power, or even that we have to. The program doesn’t tell us how to pray or how to meditate. What it does do is teach us to seek the spiritual. It leaves the method up to us.

This is an enormous amount of freedom, and can be both a blessing and a curse. Some people prefer rules. Some people prefer being told what  ‘God' is. Some people thump the history of the 12-step program’s roots in Christianity and insist that it IS the Christian God we are taught to worship. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard members say that the Big Book was written to bring people to God.

Maybe, in a sense, it was. But I disagree. In fact, I take great exception to that way of thinking. Because it runs ramshod right over what makes the 12-steps so huge, why I happen to think they work. The 12-steps aren’t about believing a certain way, they are about exploring belief. Don’t get me wrong; the Christians have a number of very applicable, helpful, truthful sayings. ‘For every step we take towards God, he takes a thousand towards us’ comes first to my mind. But I would amend that statement, generalize it. As we seek the spiritual, it finds us.

Seek. That is what the program teaches us. Explore our relationship with the power out there greater than ourselves. Find our own understanding out there about it. Pray in our own fashion, in the way that is meaningful to us and that allows us to find the greatest communion with the spiritual. There is something out there. What it means to each of us, our relationship with it, is for each of us to decide.

“Resolve Conflict”

I grew up in a household where conflict happened all the time and everyone was afraid of it. Conflict was scary, even evil. It was something to be avoided at all costs. You had to play massive ‘what-if’ chess games with other people, family, everyone really. You had to think about (i.e., guess) what everyone else would do if you did x, y, or z, and alter your behavior accordingly. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make so-and-so angry. Don’t upset people. Don’t say that, someone might get offended. Do everything you possibly can to avoid conflict, and if conflict happens despite all your best efforts, then do everything you can to make it go away as quickly as possible. Apologize for everything, even if you’re not at fault. Be a peacemaker. Make everyone happy. That was what I learned growing up, the way I learned to interact with others. What a headache. Talk about unmanageable!

I think about that way of dealing with others, now, and it boggles my mind. The idea that I can know with certainty what someone else is thinking or feeling? Preposterous. That I can predict the future and somehow manipulate events, thoughts, feelings and reactions accordingly? Nonsense. Fake. Illusionary. So what if it’s done with the best of intentions? So what if I’m only ‘thinking of the other person’ or supposedly have their best interests at heart? Bullshit. I lived that way because I was afraid. Because I’m a control freak. Because I didn’t know how to deal with conflict.

Conflict used to scare me like nothing else. It brought up this intense feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. I can still remember how adrenaline would course through my veins, my body instantly in a fight-or-flight mode. Even the thought of potential conflict could put me in a panicked state. Thank God it’s not like that anymore.

Understand, I’m not saying that I enjoy conflict now. Far from it. And it’s not like I don’t still feel that rush of adrenaline when conflict does happen. What I have learned (and accepted!) is that conflict is a normal, natural part of life. I don’t run from it anymore. I do live my life in a way so as to have to deal with less conflict rather than more, but not out of fear. I do it because I don’t have the patience or the taste anymore for unmanageability.

Conflict is a normal part of life, part of the human experience. We can deal with it however we choose. Personally, I prefer not to run from conflict anymore, but instead to be someone who is able to stand up for what I believe in, what I think is right, someone who can walk through my fears with courage and integrity. I don’t believe in changing who I am or how I live my life in order to avoid conflict with others; that isn’t living with integrity. And it sure as hell isn’t honest.

When conflict arises, I can handle myself with integrity and humility in those times. I don’t have to seize on the situation as an opportunity to feed my ego or to deliberately harm others by lashing out or making personal attacks. It is possible to handle conflict honestly, without being egotistical or self-effacing. It is possible to stand up for myself and what I believe, what I think and feel, and do it in full keeping with spiritual principles.

The program teaches us action, to walk through life’s difficulties not run from them. Choosing to resolve conflict instead of avoiding it is just another step along the spiritual path.