Working With Others

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I don’t want to make this about religion . . .

May 5, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 12 comments

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?
Hedwig: No, but I… I love his work.

John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I don’t want to make this about religion because it isn’t about religion. It’s about the same thing everything else here is about. Me. It’s what it was like, what happened (and what’s happening), and what it’s like now. For me. It is my experience, my strength and my hope. It is also a place where I can sit down, slow down, cool down and give the loving Creator of my own understanding room to go to work. It is part inventory, part meditation, all reaching out.

My story is not unique by any stretch. Young men from my home town have gone down similar, almost identical paths. I don’t know all the specifics of Troy’s story but I know he grew up in a similar environment, one fought with pressure to conform to the dominant culture. I can only hope that there was more tollerance in 2006 than in the 70′s and 80′s, when I was his age. In my own case, by the time I was 14 years old I had developed a concrete intellectual bias against every system of thinking which claimed to be the only truth. I carried that bias into every part of my life, judging things which I had never examined.

In my own experience, gaining hope in the second step that a “Power greater than myself” could restore me to sanity, and then gaining enough faith to turn my will and life over to the care of that power, as I understood it, was only possible because the message was delivered to me in a way that I could hear. The men who guided me left the specifics of their own conception of a Higher Power at the door, and instead shared what happened that made them willing to seek that relationship and what that relationship had done for them. At no point did they ever tell me that they had the one truth. They carried the message by strictly adhering to the instructions on page 93 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which says, among other things, that I could choose any conception of a Higher Power I liked, as long as it made sense to me, and that there was no use arousing any prejudice I may have against theological terms. I was willing to believe in something, so long as you didn’t tell me what to believe.

The meetings I attend most regularly have now been completely invaded by a group of not very Christlike Jesus people who call on themselves to share at meeting level to watch out in the rooms of AA. “There are forces of darkness in these rooms that are marking Christians and taking them out of here.” If you point out to them that there is a way we do things in AA and a reason that we do it they just say, “Then we’ll disagree.” If you call attention to the fact that when they share the way they share, that newcomers and young people get up and leave the meeting, visibly upset; that the way they are sharing does not help to carry the message, they say that they are merely sharing the truth as they understand it.

The program, however, has nothing to do with looking at them, with judging them, and everything to do with looking at me. What part of me is so prideful that I need to be ‘right’ on this point? What within me makes me refuse to accept these people as they are? What is the origin of the blind spot in my faith that makes me think that as a group, the 2nd Tradition won’t see us through this or that the people being driven from the rooms won’t find their way back when the time is right? What am I so afraid of that I cannot seem to find it within myself to treat these people with the same pity, patience and tolerance with which I treat people who can’t stay sober or people to only identify as addicts or people who talk about taking steps they have never taken. Why do I only see that they are not helping the program rather than seeing that the program could help them?

In my 5th step my sponsor pointed out that he though I had a lot more work to do in the area of God and religion. I actually blew him off. “No. Really. I’m so completely OK with all that,” I told him.

No. Really I’m not.

It’s Good to be Sober. It’s Good to be Alive.

September 3, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | No comments

Neither is really a condition I thought would persist for much longer as recently as last December. I am, quite frankly, astonished; both by how bad things had become and by how much better it’s gotten. If you show up in a 12 step program (like I did) and grab on to it with “the desperation of a drowning man” (like I did), a number of things become clear, not immediately, but pretty quickly, provided of course that you do the work. For me, one of the things that I noticed by about my 3rd month clean and sober was that some of the people who made sense to me when I walked in the door no longer made any sense at all. Others make more and more sense over time.

One of the men who falls into the latter group tells a story about coming to a place where life had become so painful that he decided to bring things to an end; he overdosed hoping to die. The very next thing he did was call 911. He realized that he didn’t really want to die. He just didn’t know how to live. That is a story I really identify with; not wanting to die but not knowing how to go on.

At one point, near the end of my use, I was sitting at the front door of a ‘friend’. The IFX was there. He was supposed to have come by my place three hours earlier, one of the times when I actually needed his help with something and one of the astonishing number of times he let me down. I tried calling from the security phone. No one would answer. I managed to get in and knocked on the door. No one answered. I sat in front of the door and waited. I could hear them talking inside. I knocked again. Silence. IFX was kind of a knife obsessed kind of thug and for some reason I happened to have one of his knives on me at the time. So there I sat, at my ‘friend’s’ front door, listening to the object of my affection, who’s neglectful actions were at that very moment mounting harm on me, and my ‘friend’ talk about how crazy I was (and I’m sure I was, obviously). I took out IFX’s knife, which he sharpened obsessively, and figured this was as good a place and as good a time as any to bring the pain I was in to an end. But, pressing the edge of that blade into my wrist, I realized how easy it would be to go that way; how a truely sharp instrument really wouldn’t hurt at all. That wasn’t what I wanted, after all. I wanted him to hurt the way he had hurt me and I wanted to stop hurting. I kicked my ‘friend’s’ door and screamed some obscenities, left the building, walked to the parking lot in the strip mall next door where the IFX626 was parked and there, in broad daylight, in full view of several onlookers, took his knife and slashed his tires.

In all honesty I felt some relief; enough to face a few more days, but not much more. Yet that was my condition when I reached out for help. I was afraid to die but I didn’t know how to live. I couldn’t continue on, yet I couldn’t stop. After the knife story I had just enough left in me to propel myself in the direction of someone who could show me the way out of the mess my life had become. It took several months, though, to discern who in ‘the rooms’ had a solution. If you’re new to recovery and you’re doing the 12 step thing the way I am, give yourself some time there. Don’t feel compelled to talk at each and every meeting. Be present. Be still. See who only shares when they’re called on and among those see who reaches out to new people. Listen for them to talk about hopelessness and about finding a solution. Find one of the people that does those things and who you think you might be able to trust, introduce yourself to them and demand that they show you how they did it. They will. They’ll be more than glad too.

It’s good to be sober, today. It’s good to be alive. By the grace of God I haven’t had to imbibe, ingest, inhale or inject anything to change who I am today and for a guy like me that’s a miracle.

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