OKaysez

 

Monday, September 6, 2021

 Made a Decision

(29)

                               AA Friendships

It is often heard in AA that we stopped maturing when we started drinking, drugging, or both. That was certainly true of me.

I arrived in AA at the age of 37. My 11-year marriage had ended. I had four small children. I had an insatiable thirst for alcohol, my newspaper career was hanging by a thread due to my many hungover absences, and I had all the social skills of a befuddled and unpopular 17-year-old.

The old-timers who were around to help me in the days, months, and years of my early recovery have all now gone to that great meeting in the sky.  And many of my own age group who arrived close to the same time are also now members of that higher meeting. 

But, OH, the times we all had together in those early days. I wouldn't trade growing up in AA for any amount of worldly treasure. Together my AA peers and I learned, through our laughter, tears and fury, how to stay sober despite everything! 

Those friendships, especially with those having a sobriety date close to our own, are designed just for us. With 20/20 hindsight, I know mine offered me the purest, craziest, most wonderful friendships I've ever enjoyed in my life.

For starters, we learned how to be honest in our communication, never easy for anyone like me who learned to lie when I learned to talk.

And we learned to grow a thicker skin, to understand that everything said and done wasn't aimed at, or all about, "little old me." We found out others had feelings and opinions, too, feelings and opinions we had to learn to respect. 

It's written in AA literature that we have "a disease of perception." Every person perceives the world in their own way, but an alcoholic's world view can easily become distorted. 

 

We can hear things that weren't meant in the way we heard them, we can see things not as they are, but as we are, and we can often fear things that don't exist. 

Our AA friends help get our distorted vision back to normal when their actions show us they have a disease of perception, too. Their behavior can force us to look at our own behavior - and to learn from it.

During our early (slightly-crazed) recovery we learn to not believe everything we think. 

And we learn to not share everything we think until we have had some time for a long think about it. 

We stop having knee-jerk reactions to things said or done by others (most of the time). And we discover we can "pause when agitated," and then behave differently than we have always done before.

(Note - It works, when we work it.)

I can still remember my embarrassment when an AA friend made an awkward amend to me after he failed to show up to share for me at one of the first meetings I ever chaired. 

He'd had been in a fight with his wife and decided "I'll show her, I'll kill me," and went off to get drunk. 

As it happened, on the way to buy liquor, his sanity returned and he didn't drink that evening. But the fight and its aftermath made it too late for him to get to our group's meeting. 

My friend called a couple of days later and asked me to meet him at a local coffee shop. There he stared at the table and apologized for letting me down and I stared at the table embarrassed for him all the while he talked. It was an incredibly awkward conversation for both of us, but we got through it and came out the other side as better people. 

I'm still grateful for it.

While those wise old-timers (whom we unwisely put on pedestals) were lovely to listen to, it was our AA peer group who kept us sober over the many bumps in the road we encountered during early sobriety.

They were the ones we confided in, argued with, talked with about AA itself (and everyone in it), and they were the same people we loved best - and sometimes hated. 

We were then all still caught up in a lifestyle of high drama and they were, too. Having recently been long-time drunks that was the only kind of lifestyle we knew. 

But we wanted to be sober and we didn't want any of our AA friends to give up on sobriety and drink again. We learned to care about the struggles of people other than ourselves.

It takes time to slow down and smell the roses for high octane people like newly recovering alcoholics. Our revered old-timers don't always remember that. But our peer group remembers. They're often still struggling with it.

There are some very funny incidents in our early AA friendships:  

I had three women friends who all got to the program when I did. We would get together often to moan and groan, with one or two of us usually being bat-shit crazy and the third then becoming the voice of AA wisdom and advice. 

The sane one always managed to glue the other two back together, and any one of us might be the sanest of the three on any given day.

We three once went to an AA retreat out of town and shared the same motel room. One night, while chatting before bed, one said we should have T-shirts printed with "D.S.P." (for Designated Sane Person) on them, so we'd know which one of us was the least crazy when we all got together.

We laughed so hard over this that one of us actually fell out of bed.

 (That would be me).

But there were harsh lessons, too:  

One of our group, a man with six years sobriety to our one or two years, drank again. 

None of us knew how to handle the situation. A couple of us made tentative efforts to talk him back to AA, but mostly we just talked about him among ourselves with a lot of head shaking and tsk-tsking.

I'll never forget how I felt the morning I learned our friend, now separated from his wife and family, had fallen while drunk, ruptured his spleen, and bled to death on the floor of his low-rent apartment.

His death was the first experience in our recovery where we got to see close up and personal the deadly nature of our disease. It shook us to the core. Sadly, I've had many such experiences since. 

They don't get any easier.

Then there were the sad, bad, and sometimes even crazy-mad experiences we shared inside our group itself:

 Like the time an angry and very irrational group member shouted curses at all of us, started to cry, and reached into her purse for a tissue. 

She then looked up, startled no doubt by the noise we had all made when hitting the floor. Every one of us had thought she'd gone into her purse for a gun. 

I have seen tempers flare into fist fights in AA, have heard many angry shouting matches in the rooms, and I have actually seen guns drawn. 

(I'm an American, after all.)

 One giant of a man arrived one day into our meeting with anger to spare. He was tattooed all over, wore leather and chains, rode a Harley and packed a gun. 

That same man today - transformed by his years in the program - is a lovely old grandfather and model citizen in his community. 

He had to do a bit of hard work between the then and the now, but 

 -  it always works when we work it!

In my very first home group the person with the longest period of sobriety was my friend with the six-years who drank and died. His unstinted help to me during my first couple of years in AA is the reason I'm alive to write this today. 

He (and his Al-Anon wife) took me to meetings, shared literature and friendship, and loved me even when I was newly stark-raving sober.

From his untimely death I learned none of us is immune from drinking again. We have a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition on THAT day only ... 

one day at a time.

Most of the members of my first home group are now gone, but to the best of my knowledge they all died sober. Two who are still around remain in touch with me on email. They've now been married 40 years. When I met them I wouldn't have given odds on them lasting six months.

They got married in a blackout. Neither one of them remembered the event. When they sobered up (slightly), she panicked and left their northern state and went to stay with friends in the deep south state of Georgia. Those friends happened to be in the fellowship and she began going to meetings with them.

Meanwhile, he spent time and money tracking her down and then made the 1,000 mile (or so) trip to show up at her door. 

They got back together (as we do) and ended up living in a tent on the wildest part of the coastal barrier island where all of us lived at that time. 

She kept on going to meetings and eventually he did, too. They got sober and stayed sober, despite their fierce battles, separations and eventual get-back-togethers.

(Once she even left him and moved in with me and my kids for a time. When he came around to talk with her, my dog bit him.)

Today they are both sane, sober, senior citizens. No one meeting them would ever believe the high drama history we all lived through. But we all sobered up together and our conversations and emails today are full of laughter about those days. 

Survival! It's a beautiful thing.

That same couple, and others from our group in those early days, usually went to a local coffee shop after our meetings. 

There we drank gallons of coffee, ate desserts with a high enough sugar content to make a honey bee flinch, and trashed every single member of our group who hadn't joined us for the meeting-after-the-meeting. 

Such less-than-spiritual bonding helped us to all stay sober.  I can highly recommend it.