Step 1 Honesty with Self and Others....About What?

Tonight I went to a literature meeting where we read and share on topical selections from As Bill Sees It. Someone volunteers a topic and then people are free to select readings from the Table of Contents listed for that topic. Tonight's topic was Honesty. While people we reading various readings and sharing their experience, I began browsing through all of the readings for Honesty, looking for a selection which talked about what I consider one of the most important paragraphs in the Big Book related to the topic of Honesty: the first paragraph of How It Works. It wasn't included anywhere in the readings on the topic of Honesty!

I was surprised to find that the editors of As Bill Sees It didn't seem to pull any of the three great Honesty lines from that paragraph. I did find one reading that did talk about the importance of honesty with ourselves, as well as honesty with others. So I voluteered to read that passage and then shared with the group "As Mike Sees It" -- and how the first paragraph of How It Works gives me great insight into how honesty played a critical role in my own moment of clarity, the morning when I woke up sober for the first time.

The first reference to honesty in that paragraph talks about how rarely we've seen folks fail in this process who have thoroughly followed these steps.... Those that do fail seem to be "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves." Not honest with others. Honest with themselves. The second reference follows: "They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty." Here the scope of honest seems to extend to more than just ourselves, but also to our whole manner of living. This new manner of living seems to require some sort of high level honesty, to be sure. The third reference to honesty comes in the last sentence of the paragraph where it refers to those who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders: they too can recover "if they have the capacity to be honest."

All of the other readings tonight seemed to talk about honesty in the context of the 4th/5th steps and in the context of our relationships with others, both before and after we got sober. I don't have any particular issue with any of that, but given that I'm focusing on the 1st Step this month of January, I'm more attentive to how honesty played a key role in my getting sober and continues to play a key role in my staying sober.

For me, especially in the context of the first step, honesty is important almost entirely in terms of how I am willing and able to be honest about who I am as a human being who happens to be an alcoholic. My own moment of clarity involved my "waking up" to who and what I was: an alcoholic. A man who couldn't and can't "stop" drinking. On that particular morning, I thought the same thought I'd woken up to for almost a year: "I just can't stop drinking!". What was unique about that morning was that, unlike in prior experiences, the fact that I couldn't stop drinking was not a problem or something to be ashamed of.... It was just a biological fact. My body was different in terms of how it processed alcohol (and whatever form that might take...).

But I didn't lose the obsession to drink with this awareness of who I was. That didn't come until seconds later, I saw myself sitting in a circle of folks at the Kaiser "multi-family group" which met on Thursday nights and included about six kids who were trying to get clean and sober, as well as their parents and siblings. The morning I woke up sober, I saw myself sitting in that circle of people and when it came time to "check-in" (we parents would check in by saying, "Mike name is Mike. I'm here for my son, Pat. We did (or didn't, if Pat had a relapse that week...) have a sober household. And I do or don't have something to talk about." That's how I had been dishonestly checking in with those folks for the last ten months or so. Never did I tell the real, rigorous truth to them in that group, or anywhere else for that matter.

But that morning of October 20, 2001, I saw myself raising my hand in front of those imaginary people and say, "My name is Mike and I am an alcoholic." When I made that disclosure, even though it was to imaginary people to be sure, I had a clear and dramatic removal of the obsession to drink. An obsession that had been with me since my first drink almost 30 years prior.

I was free. And this freedom from the obsession to drink came about, I believe with all my heart, because I was finally honest with myself and with others about who I am as an alcoholic. I am convinced that this freedom has remained constant, in large part, because I've developed a new way of living which includes the critical component of being honest about that reality on a daily basis.

I was on my way....

Take care!

Mike L.

AA Didn't Teach Me How To Stop Drinking---It Taught Me How to Stop Stopping!

Anytime I hear another recovering alcoholic say something to the effect that they "stopped drinking" when they got sober, I cringe inside. Why? Well, it's because for 30 years or so, I defined an alcoholic as someone who couldn't stop drinking. The definition has flesh and bones and I called him "Dad."

When I was in my early 20s and my dad was in his late 40s, I pleaded with him to stop drinking --- because if he didn't, it was my strong belief that he was going to lose custody of my youngest sister (she was 3 years old and my parents had just divorced; my dad had been granted custody of my two younger sisters). Among other things...

I'll never forget that he reacted to that request of mine as though I had demanded that he stopped breathing air. "How dare I" ask him to give up the one source of relief that he had in his life. He worked hard, cared for his two daughters, "didn't run around with loose women!" --- and the only thing that he had left to give him any sense of relief from the stress in his life was to drink "some". How dare I indeed.

Sure, he could stop... He just didn't need to stop. I remember well that he could routinely make a point to stop drinking "for Lent" every year. He would also sometimes go on a "diet" and restrict his drinking to Miller Lite!!! Lots of Miller Lite!!! Yes, he could stop. Stopping wasn't his (or my!) problem. Starting was.

So it makes me nervous when recovering alcoholics refer to their getting sober as "stopping." You see, whenever I "stopped" in order to prove to myself or to others that I certainly wasn't an alcoholic, I would stop. And then when I was stopped, I would always become convinced at some point that I had "really, really, really" stopped and then once I was fully convinced that I had in fact really really really stopped, then the inevitable idea would float to the surface of my brain: "Well, if I've stopped, then I must not be an alcoholic! Alcoholics can't stop!"

For any of you who are struggling with this issue of "am I or am I not an alcoholic" --- trust me, if you're struggling with this issue and you're proving to yourself that you're not an alcoholic by the fact that you "can" stop drinking. Great! Just remember though that when you get to the point of being really convinced that you're not an alcoholic AND (!!!) the first thing you are going to do now IS DRINK (!!!) then, my friend, you can rest assured, you've passed the ultimate test. You are, sorry to say, an alcoholic. Non-alcoholics celebrate their not being alcoholics by drinking water, soda or milk....if they are thirsty. Actually, truth be told, non-alcoholics don't celebrate not being alcoholics. You see, it's not an issue for them. Period.

What happened for me (although I wasn't really aware of this after several years of sobriety) that morning that I woke up after my last drink (to date), is that I didn't stop drinking. No. Quite the opposite.

What I did was wake up and realize that "I can't stop drinking!". The same thought, to be sure, that I had been having for over 10 months. But this morning, it was different. This thought was followed by another: "This inability to stop drinking....is called 'alcoholism'."

And that thought was immediately followed by another, "And this alcoholism is just a disease that I happen to have, and that's perfectly all right!" Ahhhh. Everything I had done to that point in my life now made perfect sense. All the shame and guilt for doing all that I had done, especially my not stopping drinking when my son began his own recovery, all made perfect sense to me. The last thought that morning was that all was not hopeless. I could do what Pat had been doing and I was going to be o.k. --- I could go into those meetings that he had been going into for over ten months and I could get better, one day at a time, just like he had been getting better.

So what happened with me beginning the morning of October 20, 2001 is I began accepting the truth about my drinking: I can't stop drinking. That's intentionally phrased in the "past tense" by me because I still perceive myself as someone who can't stop drinking.

You see, I found freedom from that "self constructed prison" by accepting that truth about Me and sifting my attention to a new thought: while I can't stop drinking, I can stay sober one day at a time. I can't do it for a longer period than that, but I can stay sober today. Tomorrow? Well, as Dr. Paul (author of the "Acceptance is the Answer" story in the Big Book) once said, "If things just become unbearable some day and you just have to drink to deal with all the pain and stress, as a last resort, give yourself permission to drink....tomorrow." AA only asks that you try your best not to drink "today."

AA has no official position on drinking tomorrow. We've drawn the line at "just for today." As a result, he told folks who found themselves in these "worst case scenarios" to go ahead and give themselves permission to drink.... tomorrow.

His only caveat was that when "tomorrow" came and in the unlikely event that they still wanted to drink (he said that most people woke up either forgetting that they'd made this agreement to drink or woke up forgetting why it was that things were all that bad that a drink was going to make it better...), that he only encouraged them to ask one last question before actually taking the drink and that question is, of course, "What day is it?" If it's "today" ---- well, you know the AA story.

A couple of years ago, I heard an AA chair say that he came into AA with the barest of hopes that AA would teach him how to stop drinking. That morning, he told us that after many years of recovery, he was just now realizing that AA taught him no such thing. Instead, they taught him how to stop stopping.

That hit me like a brick. It was my experience too!

Take care!

Mike L.

Powerlessness Is Not a Problem, Now or Then

The 6 year anniversary of Dr. Earle's death (1/13/2003) was last week and I've been thinking about him even more than usual.... One of the things Earle told me when I was early in sobriety was that all of the Twelve Steps could be condensed or summarized into one single word: Powerlessness. While the word powerless is clearly contained within the 1st Step, he felt that it was not a temporary or limited state of being and as a result, he found it important to remember this state of powerlessness in each of the remaining 11 steps. He said all this to me during a Thursday night meeting at the Lafayette Hut and he then began reciting the remaining 11 Steps and he prefaced each step with the phrase, "Out of our powerlessness...."

Step 2: Out of our powerlessness, we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity....

Step 3: Out of our powerlessness, we made a decision to turn our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him....

etc. (FYI: I've found it very helpful and powerful to recite the Twelve Steps in this modified format!)

Between now and then, I've been struck at how many recovering alcoholics seem to portray "powerlessness" as a problem that needs to be overcome or solved. In the Big Book, when it says, "Lack of power! That was our dilemma. We needed to find a power greater than ourselves by which to live and that power had to be greater than ourselves. Obviously.

To be honest, the truth of that has never been 'obvious' to me. Seems like most people translate that claim to read, "Lack of power! That was our Problem. And to solve that problem, we needed to find a power greater than ourselves by which to live and that power had to be greater than ourselves." Personally, I don't see powerlessness as a problem or as something "wrong."

When I say that I am powerless over alcohol, I no longer look at this in terms of what I can't "do". I see it more in terms of who I am. My body is different from non-alcoholics not in terms of what I can't do, but in terms of how it processes alcohol and other mind-altering drugs. That physical condition is not something I have any power over. It's just the way I am. Although I've only been sober a little over 7 years, I've had this physical condition for many years.

Is that a problem? Not really. The "condition" isn't really the problem. My problem was that I was trying to figure out a way whereby I could "act" as though I didn't have this condition. That is, I tried to act "non-alcoholically" when I drank.

I thought that I was quite successful at this for many years, but I always experienced "incidents" where I failed miserably: I would start drinking just like every other time, but I would reach that Perfect Moment when all the stars in the universe aligned with me....and then I would forget to stop drinking. Next thing I would know, I'd wake up, sick and having vomited all over myself, not remembering what I'd done or said (no problem: my wife would remember!) and feel all sorts of guilt and shame for having done exactly what I didn't want to do. These incidents started off rather sporadic and gradual....but over the years, they seemed to increase in frequency and severity. As it says in "More About Alcoholism": I was in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period of time, it got worse.

What I'm trying to say though that my problem wasn't with these "incidents" --- my problem was that I was drinking and my body was alcoholic. When I woke up the morning of October 21, 2001 and realized for the first time ever that my inability to stop drinking was simply a disease called "alcoholism" and that I just happened to have that disease....then I was free. The solution to this problem (trying not to be who I was trying to be: a drinking non-alcoholic...) was to accept who I really was: a recovering alcoholic.

The solution was not just "not-drinking" as that would have just postponed the inevitable pain and suffering. The solution had to be a program of recovery and I found that in AA. My problem wasn't Powerlessness (if so, I'd still be screwed!). My problem was the ongoing attempts to ignore the fact of who I am as an alcoholic.

Suppose that's why I've never been all that motivated to develop definite belief/understanding of God.... It isn't really something I need to do, at least in terms of my recovery. Why create a solution for something that's not a problem?

Take care!

Mike L.

p.s. Note to Self: I need to write another blog on the topic of "God is Powerless Too! (and how that's not a problem for God either!)