12 Steps

I said goodbye to an old friend today and laid to rest my cat, companion, and confidant of thirteen years. He is survived by his brother/littermate and a host of fond memories that will keep him forever in my thoughts. I thought about posting a recent picture but decided he would have appreciated it more if I showed him off in one of his favorite poses, with exposed belly and splayed legs viewing the world through the slitted eyes of lazy contentment. This often displayed, blatantly immodest mode of sleep never failed to make my wife and I smile and I can think of no better way to remember my old friend.

But this is a recovery blog, and as a sober cat he would have expected a relevant tribute. So in honor of Thing 2, I would like to tell you about what he has taught me about the second step.

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I am an ardent supporter of the twelve steps and especially admire AA, but I rarely attend these types of meetings even though they have greatly influenced my personal recovery program. There is not a conflicting interest or cloaked animosity, just a recovering alcoholic that has found his own way, “and works it because it works.”

So it is rare that I will post a “step” topic, but I ran across a piece that I really liked over at Sober Mojo on the first step, particularly the definition of powerless. Now for me, this is the one step that leads little open for interpretation.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

It takes very little effort for me to recall how helpless and ineffectual I had become while consumed by alcoholism. Totally dominated, I needed to drink to live and every waking moment was spent in pursuit of sustenance. In complete servitude, I had been beaten down physically so that I shook and bled internally yet still I worshipped my master. My addiction to alcohol taught me what true and complete power really was… and I knew without a doubt that I had absolutely none.

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Inevitably I have someone come up after a recovery meeting to ask me what is the secret to long term sobriety and recovery. It is usually someone new to the program, that has attended meetings routinely on the weekends for a while, and has decided that now they are “really serious” about recovery. I know I did the same thing many years ago, asking my temporary sponsor as he explained his thoughts on the twelve steps, “but how do you do it for the rest of your life?” Apparently I didn’t get an exactly inspirational answer since I can’t remember his response. Neither did I stay in AA after I had finished my ninety meetings in ninety days after rehab, but I still credit much of my successful recovery program to the things I learned in those meetings.

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Being more by becoming less would be a good way to explain my definition of spirituality. Helping others without any ulterior motive other than the fact it makes one feel good, yeah its sounds easy but for the diseased selfish mind of an alcoholic or addict it is a very foreign concept.

Even after years of sobriety and good deeds, the “becoming less” part of the equation can be elusive. By this I mean taking oneself out of the picture totally, becoming the disappearing alcoholic. Doing something without looking for a reward from the person helped or those that notice- instead generating that reward, good feeling from within. That’s spirituality… something I had replaced many years ago with alcohol. It’s a huge part of my recovery process now, but still something that for me comes less than naturally.

Those who work the twelve steps would consider it the last, “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts and alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” For me it’s less about carrying the message (even though my name tag reads Discovering Alcoholic) as it is following through with the practice of selfless service. I know selfless service may sound like an awful lofty goal, but for those of us who battle addictions it should be considered one of the benchmarks for recovery. It’s evolution, moving from the quest of seeking reward from external substances and sources to enjoying a spirituality that we personally create through our thoughts and actions.

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It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of time and energy some people will expend attacking Alcoholics Anonymous and similar 12 step programs. It’s kind of like picking a fight with Gandhi since the anonymity issue guarantees you don’t have to worry about any spirited public rebuttal. Some of the attacks are from alcoholics themselves rationalizing the tall boy in their hand and others are transparent in their self serving motives (Rational Recovery’s founder calls his program the "antithesis and irreconcilable arch-rival of Alcoholics Anonymous."). What brought this topic on was a post today by someone who commented that AA’s program shut down the critical thinking portion of his brain. In this post he cited a recent article in the Canadian Reader’s Digest that bluntly states that AA is “useless”.

The article is entitled 12 Steps to Nowhere and is written by J. Timothy Hunt. Near the end of his harangue of carefully picked statistics and off-topic shots at AA’s founders the author describes himself as a “highly functional drunk”. Immediately the warning bells sounded and just got louder as I read the following passages including “I made it a point never to drink when I was on duty” and when referring to his motivation to quit drinking as a funny look from his doctor he states “then one day, I stopped… It took one step, not twelve.” Now whatever credibility this guy supposedly had was eradicated with me with these two statements.

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It may feel like the laws of the universe have ceased to exist once you have a month or two of sobriety under your belt after a lifetime of drinking. Be warned though, although it may seem like a brave new world to you, the rest of the world goes on as if nothing has changed.

A forty-one year old Las Vegas resident working through AA's Step 9 recently found this out the hard way. Click here to read the whole story in the Las Vegas Weekly. William Nottingham Beebe found sobriety "sobering" when he learned that just because he's ready to make amends doesn't mean the victim he allegedly raped in college is as ready to forgive him!

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