The Last Chance Texaco

Posts Tagged ‘12th Step’

I was just looking at a friend’s Facebook page, admiring a picture of her and someone’s baby, when I noticed a quote on the sidebar; something about love from Dostoevsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov”.  Having just come from a meeting where the topic was Love and knowing how way leads to way I followed the trail of that quote as it has been used in several sermons.

The Dostoevsky story is the story of Father Zossima, the wise, self-effacing, good-humored orthodox monk that many people come to for spiritual direction. One day, a woman comes to talk with him. She has a big problem, she says.  She has lost her faith and therefore her reason to live. If Zossima cannot give her a reason to believe again, she says, she will kill herself.

The monk tells her to go home, and every day, do something concrete to love the people around her. If she does this, he assures her, she will find, slowly but surely, that she won’t be able to help but believe.  Love in action, he says, will change the way she sees the world.

The old woman isn’t especially impressed.  Basically she says, “That’s it?  That’s all you have?  I’m supposed to love the people around me?  I already do that.”

And to this Zossima responds with a line which has become famous: “Ah”, he says, “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. It may very well kill you”

Doing what is good for another can be really hard. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what would be good for someone as distinct from what would make us feel good.  And actually doing it is often very hard.  In recovery we know that to love other people until they can love themselves requires “work and self sacrifice” – and it is a requirement.  It is the foundation stone of recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

If any feel that as psychiatrists directing a hospital for alcoholics we appear somewhat sentimental, let them stand with us a while on the firing line, see the tragedies, the despairing wives, the little children; let the solving of these problems become a part of their daily work, and even of their sleeping moments, and the most cynical will not wonder that we have accepted and encouraged this movement. We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them. -William D. Silkworth, MD

At 7 o’clock on the second Friday of every month I visit the Allumbaugh House, presumably to bring in an AA meeting.  The thing is most of the people in a county detox center have made multiple attempts at getting sober.  Most, if not all of them have been to meetings before; sometimes hundreds of them.  I went to hundreds of meetings before I ever got sober.  I had vast sections of the book memorized.  I knew what to say in meetings and I knew how to act and I knew what I was supposed to look like so that I would fit in.  I was good at doing that.  Standing on the firing line of recovery has very little to do with attending meetings.  It has to do with carrying the message.

Because these folks have been to meetings before and because they haven’t managed to stay sober in spite of it, I like to do things a little differently.  I like to go back to the very origins of the fellowship.  I like to go back to the first meeting between Bill W. and Dr. Bob.  The real power of what the program is lies in the space created between two addicts or alcoholics honestly sharing their stories with each other.  That isn’t something you can do at a meeting.  And let’s face it, who among us understood what the steps meant when we were two or three or even ten days sober?  What is the point of even reading it? Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing to save my life.  Even today, but most especially in the earliest days of my recovery the act of writing helped me maintain perspective and focus.  I wrote in a medium that was publicly accessible because I was so profoundly alone. The feedback I got really encouraged me and helped motivate me.

All I’d ever really been was fucked up, and somehow in the act of writing about trying to recover from that I attracted the attention of Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who asked if I would agree to be interviewed for a book about the moment that led me to recovery; the moment I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  I remember at the time being so flattered that I almost didn’t grant the interview. Seriously, if your fucked-upness has attracted the attention of a member of the Kennedy clan, you’ve reached your zenith. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a very busy week in terms of working with others. Friday I had the day off work and ended up going with my friend Robert on a 12th Step call. We drove from Boise to Eagle and picked this man up, drove back to Boise, and spent the rest of the day with him.  At 4 I had Dennis, the new guy I sponsor, come to where we were. We went to a 5:30 meeting, an 8 o’clock meeting, a 10 o’clock meeting. Robert took the guy home with him; he didn’t have anywhere safe to be. Read the rest of this entry »

There are parts of my experience at the end of my use and in the early part of my recovery that I have been hard pressed to imagine would ever be an asset; something I could share to help another addict recover, chief among them my relationship with Dan, the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband (IFX). Dan’s skill at using my lonliness at the end of my using days, his disappearance on my birthday, and most particularly his extrarodinary meanness when he got out of prison and started showing up in 12 step meetings places him at the center of some of the most painful moments of my life. Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever 12 step program (or programs) we come from, we are a fellowship; “an elite group of experienced people who work together as peers”*, sharing our experience, strength, and hope with each other in the pursuit of a solution to our common problem and to help others to recover.

My sponsor/mentor/adviser/friend, a man who has been sober for 38 years, told me that there have been times when he’s shared at meeting level something painful he’s going through that other people have told him that he must not share things like that at meetings because he’ll scare off newcomers.  They’ll think this thing doesn’t work.  The fact that he’s managed to go through life sober for decades won’t speak for itself.

I couldn’t disagree more.  One of the reasons that I chose Joe as my sponsor is the fact that he talks about what is really going on in his life, how difficult it is sometimes to pick up the tools, how practicing this program works, both in terms of how we practice it and in terms of the results we get.  By sharing more than just his drunk-o-logue and letting people know what’s really going on with him, I was able to see that at the level of recovery we are peers.  None of us are better or worse.  Some of us just have more experience staying sober.

I also saw the power that sharing our experience has to help others step out of our personal dungeons of despair and into the solution.

I started keeping this blog on January 9, 2007.  It was my 5th day clean.  I relapsed 6 days later, right before I got on a bus to go to treatment. Through all of that and since then I have used this blog as a means to share my experience, as a meditation, as a prayer, as an inventory, all with the secondary objective of showing others that people like me do recover, if only for today.

I don’t spout too much 12 step history here.  It’s not my history.  I haven’t found that I need to rewrite my story or to deny what I’m experiencing in life in order to show that we recover.  I share my story because I’ve learned that when I do, when I write about what’s really going on in my life, I get the support I need to make it through another day sober, I get closer to being the person my Creator intends me to become, and sometimes, someone says, “I wanted to thank you so much for posting about [that]. It’s given me the courage to finally start posting about [my] issues. And that has been good for me. Not only that, but other people have been reaching out to me [for help].”

And isn’t that our primary purpose?

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow

Remember these? High school gym shorts from the 1980′s. Wow. At the time I thought they were pretty hot, at least on certain guys. You had to have pretty great legs to pul[ this look off, but there were always a couple of guys in gym class who fit the bill. I think the poly-knit ones we had in high school were actually a bit tighter, perhaps a bit shorter which was only made possible because the slits up the side were not quite as high. The closet of my youth was filled with the hope of a ‘costume failure’.

No one would ever dream of wearing these today, except perhaps on Halloween. High school gym shorts today are perforated nylon, loose, and come to the mid-thigh. Equally hot, on the right guy of course, if you ask me, but I’ve always thought that men are the most beautiful creatures. Read the rest of this entry »