Made a Decision

(19)

    Cunning, Baffling, Powerful - and - Patient.

         Newcomers to AA often say how baffled they became when they found themselves unable to stop drinking. This is especially true of those who managed on their own to stay sober for a week, month, or even years, and then picked up again.

                       "Why? Why? Why?`` ... They cry.

But the answer isn't complicated. We drank because we are alcoholics.

Every pleasure centre in our brains lights up like the dashboard of a giant Boeing aircraft when our brains get a hit of alcohol. 

Non-alcoholics don't get that kind of a hit from our drug of choice. They might get a nice buzz, but we get skyrockets in flight!

We also drank because early in our drinking days we discovered we could self-medicate with booze to block the emotions of fear, anxiety, frustration, isolation, dependence, and over-sensitivity.

And we drank to allow free rein for our impulsiveness, defiance and grandiosity.

Drinking worked for us on many levels, so naturally, we drank. 

And alcohol worked for most of us on all these levels for years and years. 

And then, it didn't. 

That's because ours is a progressive terminal illness that over time goes relentlessly from bad to worse. For anyone interested in the science behind this, there is a ton of it available in books and online.

 But it mainly boils down to our alcoholic brains being wired differently, the mental illness part of our physical, mental and spiritual illness described in the Big Book.

Early in my own recovery I read that there are three stages of alcoholic  progression. The first takes roughly 20 years, unless we boost the booze with other mind-altering chemicals. (Then it can take far less.) During those 20 years we look pretty much like most heavy drinkers, but toward the end of that time it all starts getting - and looking - a lot worse. 

The second stage is shorter, usually no more than five or six years. That's when our livers start giving up the fight and can't easily process our intake any more. In this stage we no longer get hangovers, we suffer bouts of alcoholic poisoning. 

But I still called mine hangovers when the poisoning hit, because I didn't have another word for what was going on with my body ... other than terror.

The final stage of our disease is when our liver, or brain, or both (along with other important inner bits) can't take the abuse we've been giving it and finally pack it in. 

When it's the brain that gives up we can experience delirium tremens, imaginary situations as if they are real. These can often be horrific visions, but one of my best friends and one-time drinking buddy became terrified when she saw tiny muppet-like demons. 

(She would!) 

What follows the DTs can be total loss of our mental facilities and permanent residency in a little rubber room (wearing adult nappies), all down to a neurological condition commonly known as "wet brain."

Other joys in the final phase include (but are not limited to), agitation, anxiety, screaming headaches, shaking, nausea, vomiting, disorientation, seizures, insomnia, high blood pressure, tactile, auditory, and visual hallucinations (more delirium tremens), fever, excessive sweating,

and finally, isolation and loneliness lived in a skeletal body beneath a swollen gut followed by the relief of a very, very ugly death. 

I've witnessed final stage alcoholism during 12-step calls made to both gated communities and in the ghetto. Alcohol is an equal opportunity destroyer. 

The DRUG ethanol, found in all our alcoholic "beverages" - from beer to those pretty fruity rum drinks - is a killer. It's found in wine, from rot-gut cheap to the most expensive Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. It's really a good idea for anyone in recovery to never forget that.

Hollywood has given us many scenes of addicts climbing the walls and pulling their hair out during withdrawal. Alcoholics, thrown into the "drug tanks" (jail cells) used during AA's formative years, often died there. 

Our disease wants to kill us in the ways described, but it isn't fussy. When we're drunk we feel invincible, so our disease can take us out in a variety of ways . Here are just a few: It will use automobile accidents, car crashes, falls from balconies, domestic violence, drowning, suicide, and even staggering falls causing our spleens to bleed out.

 (One of my friends who drank again after ten years of recovery died that way.)

          But now - the good news:

 While the elevator of our disease descends faster and faster toward the end, we don't have to reach the stage where the bottom drops out to hurtle us downward to our death. We can get off at any floor - and then go upward again via the staircase. Twelve steps up will get us to safety.

If we drank and drugged for years it will take time to build back a better life for ourselves, but we will find companionship, encouragement, love, and a blueprint for living a sober life at our very first AA meeting. It's all there for us if we want it. It's our way out. It's two fingers up at our disease.

Daily working the steps of recovery, prayers and meditation, talking with our sponsors, studying our literature, all take us to a better quality of life and we need to embrace everything AA has to offer.

 But our meetings are our ongoing first-aid - our medicine. 

If you doubt it, start watching the faces of your friends in recovery when they arrive at a meeting wearing stressed or angry faces. Watch as their expressions change over the length of the meeting, first smiles, then even laughter. By meetings-end everyone leaves relaxed and filled with renewed hope. Medicated! 

I recently heard someone say in a meeting, "Sometimes my Higher Power needs to have skin on it." Mine does, too. While I have many lovely moments of silent communion with the God of my understanding, I only actually hear God's direct messages to me when they are spoken by other AA members in meetings.  

Ours is a chronic, terminal illness. Many cancers are, too. Likewise kidney disease, diabetes, and so many others. But we don't have to have painful chemotherapy, or dialysis, or daily jabs of insulin. All we have to do is get our ass to a meeting for our medicine to kick in and get us through another sober day. 

It doesn't matter if you don't feel like it, if you don't want to go, if you don't like some other members of your group, if you're depressed, if meetings have become boring, if you can't be bothered ... stop giving yourself excuses and just go!

When recovering alcoholics drift away from meetings they risk drinking again. That's a fact. 

And for us, to drink means to court a fate worse than death - or death itself.

 

Made a Decision - early days!

(18) 

                       Here You Are - SOBER!

       

Sober and happy. You've made it over all those early-days hurdles and are feeling fantastic.

You've learned that miracles happen and that you're one of them.

Marvelous! 

You are enjoying living every single sober day ...

And then ...

(music from the movie "Jaws" here).

Complacency can set in. 

And then - gasp - even a bit of boredom. 

We start to wonder, "Is that all there is?" 

The answer is "No." That is NOT all there is. 

As it says in our Big Book:  "... he has struck something better than gold. For a time he may try to hug the new treasure to himself. He may not see at once that he has barely scratched a limitless lode which will pay dividends only if he mines it for the rest of his life and insists on giving away the entire product."  

So what does that mean? 

 It means we don't hoard the treasures for living a good life that we find in AA, we share them far and wide. 

We do it through service work in AA. 

We do it by always showing up for our home group. 

We share our experience, strength and hope when asked.

We encourage our friends when they hit a rough patch. 

We study our literature, either in AA study groups, with AA friends, or on our own.

 We pray and we meditate (in prayer we talk with God, in meditation we listen). 

We work the steps by doing them as thoroughly as possible the first time and then by continuing to always apply them to our life situations.

Daily Doing-the-Doing means not only that we keep our own sobriety, it means we continue to add to it in ways we can't begin to fathom in the early days of our recovery. 

The more we dig to find that golden "Mother Lode," the more treasures we will find. It just keeps on getting better!

We really will become able to "intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us." 

We will laugh more and worry less. 

We will discover that all our needs are always met. (Not always our "wants," but definitely our needs!) 

We will start viewing people through God's eyes and not through our own limited vision. 

We ultimately become the people our Higher Power actually designed us to be before we got derailed by alcohol.

But to discover more on how to have an expanded life we need to do more than just read AA literature. We must study it and there are Big Book and 12&12 study groups now available online in Zoom meetings across the world. Take advantage of them!  In them we learn how to apply AA's teachings to our own lives - and how to reap ALL the benefits.

After all, "we don't know what we don't know," but our program offers us the opportunity to learn, to go beyond our limited life view all the way to infinity - and beyond. I urge you to grab everything it offers with both hands and hold on to it tightly. Living a life of full recovery is a magic carpet ride for those willing to hop on!

Just don't ever forget our Big Book also warns us alcohol is "cunning, baffling and powerful." 

It's also "patient." 

The disease that wants us dead is still alive and well inside our brains. It still has our name on its list as a "possible candidate for relapse." 

Here are some warning signs to watch our for that indicate sobriety may be at risk:  

1. Watch out when complacency lowers your guard and allows anger and resentment to reappear in your life.

2. Watch out when you find yourself being dishonest with your friends, your family, your doctor, your sponsor, or most importantly, with yourself.

3. Watch out when you start to feel cocky about your sobriety.

4. Watch out when you cut back on your meetings because you feel like you don't need them anymore.

5. Watch out when you seek praise for staying sober.

6. Watch out when you become bored in meetings. 

(Change it up a bit if you need to by getting to some different meetings and then tune in and really listen.)

7. Watch out when thoughts about drinking remind you only of the fun you once had and don't point out the horror of the end game.

8.  Watch out when any part of your life takes priority over your recovery. Nothing - absolutely nothing - is more important than staying sober. Without it, we stand to lose everything. 

9.  Watch out when you stop identifying with fellow AA members and start thinking "that never happened to me when I was drinking. I didn't lose my job/family/friends/home/car/etc." 

(All our "yets" are still out there waiting for us if we pick up a drink.)

10. Watch out when you start avoiding your sponsor. 

Watch Out, period! Stay alert for any threats to your sobriety. 

To sum up:

AA offers us three important ongoing benefits: fellowship, faith and service. And while the fellowship we find in AA is lovely, the delight we first feel in finding it only lasts until - being human - we allow a bit of disillusionment, gossip, and finally boredom to creep in. We then become dismayed to discover fear and worry have returned to our lives, too.

The good news is - that is the exact moment when we learn that AA fellowship - lovely as it can be - isn't our solution. Faith is our solution.

Whenever we find ourselves feeling alone, misunderstood, troubled, fearful, anxious or bewildered, our Higher Power is standing by to help. He's got our back. That's when we hit our knees. That's when our relationship with God will ratchet up a notch.

                     Because that's when we learn to say, "Thy will be done" - and mean it. 

 

 

Made A Decision (17) More about the God Thing The authors of our Big Book knew a bit about the innate cynicism of Alcoholics, especially so when it came to spiritual beliefs. The evidence of that is found in such passages as the following: "We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.  "Instead, we looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves ... ...  We never gave the spiritual side of life a fair hearing." 2001 AAWS, Inc. Fourth Edition  Alcoholics Anonymous, pgs. 49-50 That certainly was a good description of me when I arrived in the rooms of AA.  Maybe you, too? But I didn't know then as I do now - and stated in the previous blog:  "Churches are hospitals for sick souls. AA is the hospital for sick alcoholics." All an alcoholic really needs to know about walking the spiritual path to a full and satisfying life is contained in the AA program of recovery.  Recovery is laid out for us in our literature and through our "learning by hearing" in meetings. We just have to follow the directions and not to give up before our miracles happen. We learn over time lived in AA that the spiritual path is worth every effort to explore.    And when we get off track - as we all often do - we can remember the Sat-Nav (GPS) directive to: "Please return to the highlighted route."               We can then find our way back with a call to our sponsor or by getting ourselves to a meeting.  But we also need to follow the old advice to "Stick with the winners," because, while AA is a perfect program, it is filled with some very sick people.  Most of them, however, will also (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) eventually get spiritually, mentally and physically well if they continue to follow AA's blueprint for recovery. I once heard in a meeting, "God has no grandchildren."  In other words, we each have to discover a God of our understanding for ourselves.  We might wish for our children (or someone equally dear) to find that joy, too, but we can't make it happen - because God has no puppets, either. At the start of our spiritual walk in AA our thoughts about our Higher Power might be vague, but isn't the same true of every relationship?   We meet someone interesting, we want to get to know them better, we make that effort, and so the relationship grows. But it takes time.  We'll be on that journey of spiritual discovery for the rest of our lives.  The fullness of any relationship doesn't develop overnight (although we often gave that a shot during our drinking days).  At no time in our spiritual journey do we get a diploma and handshake ushering us out of AA. Instead we get wonderful learning experiences and many adventures along the way. And we take our lessons learned and store them up to call on in the future when needed, just as we try alway to save money for future emergencies.  We all know people who seem to have ready cash available when it's suddenly needed. What we don't see are the small amounts of hard-earned money they've set aside bit by bit over time. It's exactly the same thing at the spiritual "bank," where people with a strong Higher Power connection always seem able to get through any situation with both humour and courage. What others don't see is that person has put in the work, doing small good deeds steadily over time, staying filled with gratitude in all situations, spends time every day in prayer and meditation, reaches out daily to others, and so much more.   I've known and learned from many such people over my time in AA and I'm grateful for every single one of them.  And if I have gathered any wisdom about any of this God stuff during my own AA journey it's this:  It Takes Time!!!   Or as I heard it perfectly described recently          in a meeting:     "We get there with SLOW-briety."

 

Made a Decision 

(16)

              Religion vs AA

             Churches are hospitals for sick souls. 

                        AA is the hospital for sick alcoholics. 

In our Big Book it clearly states that during a Twelve Step call on an AA prospect we should not push the God idea too much. 

And why is that?

Because we drunks arrive in AA with all kinds of baggage; religious beliefs (or none at all) often being the biggest suitcase in the pile. 

For starters, many wet drunks were brought up to believe in a God of Judgment and Doom. They sure as Hell don't want to think about their own score sheet with that kind of God. They've spent years trying to drink those thoughts away.

Others grew up believing in a Santa Claus God. When He didn't deliver all the things they had hoped for, they tossed that baby right out with the bathwater. 

"There is no God," they cried. 

Or even, "God is dead."

Secular Jewish friends of mine on arrival into AA found the whole idea of a personal God as nonsensical as believing in Faerie Tales. 

 I had my own huge problem with Christian terminology. All that wine turned to blood (then DRINKING it), bread becoming flesh (then EATING it), getting washed in "the blood of the lamb" - it was a bloody bloodbath, and I wanted no part of it! 

And the very word Jesus (often pronounced in three syllables back home, as in: "Jaw-ease-us") made me want to stick my fingers in my ears and chant "lalalalala" to drown it out.

(My favorite bumper sticker remains, "Jesus, please protect me from your followers.")

Had I attended my first AA meeting where a member started praising Jesus (which I have actually heard in meetings and - trust me - I call them out on it, too) I'd have left and never returned. 

Finding Jaw-ease-us in AA would have killed me.

Part of all the great wisdom found in AA is in letting new members develop their own concept of God. They can rely on an AA group itself for their Higher Power, return to the church of their Childhood for spiritual teachings along with the spiritual guidance found in AA - and to just about everything in between. 

What we don't do inside AA is proselytize about our religious or spiritual activities outside of AA. That's our personal journey. In AA we share our experience, strength and hope in remaining sober, as built upon the strength we receive from "the God of our understanding."

Period.

Our Founders were members of the Christian faith and some of the terminology in the literature reflects it, but they emphasized over and over again the importance of having "a God of our own understanding." They supported making use of what all the religions had to offer, but gave us perhaps the broadest spiritual concept of them all. 

In a letter written in 1954 by Bill Wilson, he said: 

 

"While A.A. has restored thousands of poor Christians to their churches, and has made believers out of atheists and agnostics, it has also made good AA's out of those belonging to the Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish faiths. "For example, we question very much whether our Buddhist members in Japan would ever have joined this Society had A.A. officially stamped itself a strictly Christian movement. "You can easily convince yourself of this by imagining that A.A. started among the Buddhists and that they then told you you couldn't join them unless you became a Buddhist, too. If you were a Christian alcoholic under these circumstances, you might well turn your face to the wall and die." And in the book "Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age" you'll find more of Wilson's thoughts in a footnote on page 232: "Speaking for Dr. Bob and myself I would like to say that there has never been the slightest intent, on his part of mine, in trying to found a new religious denomination. Dr. Bob held certain religious convictions and so do I. This is, of course, the personal privilege of every AA member. Nothing, however, could be so unfortunate for AA's future as an attempt to incorporate any of our personal theological views into AA teaching, practice or tradition. Were Dr. Bob still with us, I am positive he would agree that we could never be too emphatic about this matter." We in AA put no pressure on members about God. If they stick around long enough they'll find their own concept of a Higher Power to reply upon. There's no timetable on this, no demands, no "shoulds" to achieve. We don't should-on-ourselves, or others, in AA. Even our all-important steps are but suggestions only. I've noticed that God - by whatever name we choose to call God - will show up for each and every one of us when the time is right, as long as we "keep coming back." In my favorite AA book, "The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" (the12&12), there's a lovely bit about a newcomer's struggle to find God. He's sharing with his sponsor about it and is reassured with the following: "Take it easy. The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider than you think. At least I've found it so. So did a friend of mine who was a one-time vice-president of the American Atheist Society, but he got through with room to spare." Finding God was a problem for me in early recovery, too. My sponsor finally (and probably in exasperation) asked me to write out a list of all the qualities I'd want to see in a good friend. My list included "a sense of humour, intelligence, empathy, compassion, courage, a sense of fairness, love for our planet, and much more." She studied the list and then said, "OK, there's your God for now. Your Higher Power has every one of the traits on your list. Rely on that God." I did as I was told for once. I relied on that list to design my own personal trustworthy God, and I'll always be grateful for her wisdom in suggesting it. We all have our own needs for a Higher Power, after all. Those who are weak, need His strength; stronger people need God's tenderness; Self-righteous people need a view of others through God's eyes and not their own; lonely people just need a Divine friend; those who fight for justice need God to lead them ... feel free to supply your own needs here. God delivers. By remaining on a spiritual path our wants are not always supplied per our desires, but our every genuine need is met. That's something I've learned along the way in my own journey and now know for sure. In AA we get to design our own God. But it takes time, as it does in any relationship, to build trust in a Higher Power, to learn He's always got out back. Patience, and continuing to do-the-doing in AA, is called for. We must not be too hard on ourselves while learning to find our way along the spiritual path. It can get confusing out there sometimes, but our Higher Power is always available with the suggestion: "Please return to the highlighted route." And, when I hit my own bumps in the road, I remember these words from a fellow AA member who also happens to be a Catholic priest: "The shortest prayer," he once told me, "is 'Fuck it, because that's when we're truly ready to turn it over."