Three Stories About Hopelessness

For some time now, I've been a firm believer in the synchronisticy of life events.  Some people refer to them as coincidences.  This last week, I knew that I was going to be chairing a meeting on Friday and during the week, I was on the lookout for a topic or a direction for that chair to take.  By the time I was sitting in the chair at noon on Friday, I knew that the topic had to be hopelessness.

On the previous Wednesday, I been in San Francisco for the day and was able to go to an afternoon meeting at Old St. Mary's Church.  The meeting format was for a woman who had just reached her 6 month sobriety milestone to tell her story for the first time, for her to pick a topic and then for people to share.  The chair would pick one person to begin the sharing and then it would just go around the room until everyone got a chance to share briefly on that topic.

The woman was so relieved by the time she finished her chair that she couldn't think of any topic, so she made the topic, whatever you'd like to talk about.  I didn't really have anything going on, so I just listened to each person share about what was going on with them.  After each person shared, I felt a connection with each one of them and I also came up with something relevant to that person's comment and that relieved me of the temptation to think about what I was going to share and thereby not listen to the next person who shared.  Anyway, that happened each time that someone shared.  I identified with them and I remembered a story from my own life that related to what each person was struggling with in their lives.

By the time it was almost my time to talk, I had no idea which of my stories I wanted to share.  So many stories, so little time.  I'm not a short story sorta guy.  In fact, I'm realizing now, that I wanted to tell three stories about Hopelessness and I'm not even done with the first story and I've gone on too long already for one blog.  Oh, well.

Anyway, the time came for the woman two seats to my right to share and I could tell she was very troubled.  She'd come into the meeting a little late, shortly after the time had come and gone for newcomers to raise their hands so that we could begin to get to know them and be of help.  She shared with us her name and said that this was her first day back in meetings.  She'd relapsed and it was horrible.  She cried.  She couldn't say anything more.  She looked around the room quickly and then shrugged her shoulders and said, "I'm hopeless!".

Well, now I had a story to tell.  I didn't even try to listen to the man's share next to me.  I just began trying to piece together my own hopelessness story in the hope I could tell it well enough to be helpful to the woman to my right.  I knew instinctively that she believed that her hopelessness was bad and a clear sign for all of us to see of her failed attempts at life and sobriety.  I wanted to gently let her know that things were not so bad, in fact, she was experiencing the most important event of her life.  A new beginning possible only from a moment of hopelessness.

I shared my moment of hopelessness which came after ten months of being unable to stop drinking.  The ten months had begun when my 15 year old son reached his own moment of hopelessness and began his own journey of recovery from addiction.  My moment of hopelessness came the morning of October 21, 2001 --- the night before my son had almost caught me drinking.  I'd successfully lied my way out of his discovery, but I'd gone to bed the night before feeling like shit.  Pat was 5 months and 10 days sober: how come I couldn't stop drinking and support him in his recovery?

Anyway, my moment of hopelessness occurred the following morning.  I woke up at 6am with the clearest of ideas greeting me:  "I just can't stop drinking!"  It was a thought that I had had most mornings for the last couple of years of my life.  What was different that morning though was that this first thought of hopelessness was followed by a second thought: "Not being able to stop drinking is called alcoholism and alcoholism is a disease."  For the first time in my life, it was perfectly OK to be an alcoholic.

I then looked at the woman to my right and said that some years ago I heard the greatest line I'd ever heard.  It was at a meeting when the chair shared what she considered her favorite line -- she'd stolen it from her sponsor years ago.  Her sponsor had said that she'd gotten sober "at the corner of Grace and Willingness."  I loved that line from the get go.  I went up to the chair woman after the meeting, thanked her and let her know that I too was going to steal her sponsor's line about the corner of Grace and Willingness.  She laughed.  I asked her to chair a meeting for me in two weeks at the Lafayette Hut and she graciously accepted.

As soon as I left the meeting, I realized that while it was a great line, it didn't describe where I'd gotten sober.  I had surely gotten sober as a result of Grace: my sober moment was not the result of my effort or thought process.  My sober moment was a gift from something or someone outside of myself.  It took me about two weeks of chewing on this question.  Eventually it came to me two weeks later, just as the chair woman walked into the Lafayette Hut.  She sat down next to me at the head of the table and I leaned over to thank her for coming out to chair this meeting.  And then I reminded her about her line about getting sober at the corner of Grace and Willingness.  She smiled and then I told her that while I loved the line, it was not where I got sober.   She smiled and asked, "Well, then, where did you get sober?"  "I got sober at the corner of Grace and Hopelessness!  It's about a half block down from the corner of Grace and Willingness!"

I then looked over at woman to my right in her first day of sobriety --- she was laughing and I think things were now becoming "right" in her world.

Thank God for Hopelessness!  It gives us the ability to accept things as they are without any need to change or pretend to be someone we're not. My problem wasn't that I was an alcoholic.  My problem was that I was an alcoholic who was trying (hopelessly!) to be a non-alcoholic!

Take care!  I will tell you my third story about hopelessness in a day or so.  My wife and I are getting on a cruise ship later today for a two week cruise to Alaska.  I'll try to get that blog published before she throws me overboard.

Mike L.

The Pre-Requisites of Willingness

I've been going through something of writer's block recently.  Felt that I had sort of said everything I had to say.  That everytime I sat down to write, there was an eery feeling that I'd already told that story.  I took a break I suppose so that I could come up with some new stories.

The other night the speaker asked us to talk about willingness because she was at a point in her life where she was unwilling to be willing.  And that frightened her.

Whenever willingness is the topic, I always remember a woman who was new to the area and had just been asked to chair a meeting at the last moment.  I was probably two years sober at the time.  During her chair, she said that her favorite quote in recovery was a line that she had stolen from her sponsor in Santa Cruz.  The sponsor had often said that "she got sober at the corner of Grace and Willingness."  I was immediately struck at how beautiful that line was.  I went up to her after the meeting and asked her to chair a meeting for me in several weeks.  She was glad to.  She was trying to get to as many different meetings as possible now that she was in this new area with no friends or connections.

Between that night and the day she was to chair for me, I kept going back over the line she'd stolen from her sponsor and while I really understood the beauty of that description of where her sponsor had gotten sober, I knew that I hadn't gotten sober on that same corner.  Grace was right on: when I got sober, it was pure gift.  I'd done nothing at all to achieve the sobriety I achieved the morning of October 20th in the year 2001.  The night before, I'd taken my son to one of his 12 Step meetings (he was 15 and had 5 months and 10 days sober...) and then hid myself away in a local bar to have what became, to date, my last two drinks.  Two goblet sized gin martinis.  When I left the bar, I didn't feel drunk but was probably over the legal limit.  I went to pickup my son after his meeting.  He smelled the liquor and asked me if I'd been drinking.  I lied.  He let it go.

I'd wanted to tell him the truth.  But had I done that, I would have had to stop drinking.  Or at least go through the public motions of trying to stop drinking, while knowing in my heart of hearts that it simply wasn't possible.  So I lied.  We went home.  Chatted about what the meeting had been like.  I went in the house, told my wife that I was very tired and was going straight to bed.  I was very tired.  I'd been hiding my drinking for over 10 months and it was horrible.  I was lonely, isolated.  Controlling my drinking was very draining!  Around people all day---but connecting with no one.

The following morning, I woke up at 6am with the clearest of all true thoughts: "I can't stop drinking."  A thought I'd woken up to many, many times before over the previous 30 years.  More and more frequently as the years and the disease progressed.  And then the miracle happened with another thought, "Not being able to stop drinking is called Alcoholism--and alcoholism is a disease that I just happened to have."  Within a nanosecond, a third thought followed: "That's OK -- I can do what Pat (my son) had been doing."  And then I saw myself sitting in a circle of folks and when my turn came to check-in (it was one of the weekly multi-family group sessions at my son's recovery treatment center), I saw myself raise my hand and say, "My name is Mike and I'm an alcoholic."  The obsession I'd been living under for years left me with that disclosure to non-existent people.

Well, that moment was certainly one of Grace.  Grace was surely one of the streets which intersected my moment of recovery.  But was that a moment of Willingness?  Not really.  It was something else and I just couldn't think of what else other than grace brought about my sobriety.  What was the other street.  I thought about that for several weeks and it didn't get resolved until the morning I woke up to go secretary the Sunday Step meeting at the Lafayette Hut, the meeting where the line thieving sponsee was going chair for me.  That morning I realized where I got sober and I was feeling like I was going to explode inside until I could share my truth with the woman chairing for me that morning.

When she walked into the meeting, she walked over to sit in what I sometimes call the most uncomfortable chair in an AA meeting.  When she sat down, I welcomed her to the Hut -- and then leaned over to tell her that for several weeks I had been trying to figure out "where" had I had gotten sober.  She looked puzzled (as people often do when I'm talking to them!) and I reminded her about her favorite line and told her that while I loved the line as much as she did, I knew that that was not where I got sober.  I didn't get sober at Grace and Willingness.  She smiled and asked me, "Well, where did you get sober?"

I got sober at the corner of Grace and Hopelessness, about a half block down from Grace and Willingness.  What happened that morning for me was a moment of grace which occurred only because I had reached a point of utter hopelessness in terms of my ability to stop drinking.  What happened that morning is I gave up on "my" attempt to stop drinking.  And I began a new approach at life.  I began trying to stay sober that day.  That is what I had seen my son do for over ten months --- and he'd done it "poorly" at first, not being able to stay clean for more than 5 to 10 days for several months.  But then, something clicked for him in May 2001 --- not sure what streets intersected at his moment of clarity -- and he's been clean for almost nine years now.  That morning I knew that the solution was in doing what he had been doing: going to meetings, raising my hand, steps, talking/listening with other addicts/alcoholics, getting up when we fell down, telling the truth.

So what then are the pre-requisites of Willingness?  There are at least three:

First, willingness only comes into play when we are confronted by something that we really don't want to do.  Willingness isn't necessary for me to eat a piece of chocolate cake!  Willingness is only required when there is unwillingness.

Second, willingness presents itself only when one is experiencing a certain level of pain or suffering.  Unwillingness is a pleasant place to be: pain is the only thing that pushes us out of that state of unwillingness.

Third, willingness --- at least for me --- came only when I came to believe that the Impossible was in fact Possible.  That morning, I discovered that sobriety, one day at a time, was possible.  No guarantees for life, but at least sobriety was possible for me that day.  Tomorrow?  I'd deal with that when it came.  That morning, I realized that Pat had done what I had considered impossible.  He'd gotten sober and his life was changing.  Since then, I have seen many others who were like me: people who simply couldn't get sober.  People who couldn't stop drinking.  That morning, I accepted that I couldn't stop---but I could stay sober.

A moment of Hopelessness transformed by Grace into Willingness.

Take care!

Mike L.

Willingness: Not an Action

Willingness is not an action.  It's a state of mind that precedes certain types of actions that are called "intentional acts".  Willingness does not precede some action that is accidental.  Willingness can also precede non-action.  For example, I can be willing to make a particular amends but choose not to make that amends because I realize that it might very well harm that person (or someone else) more than help them.

The amount of willingness that is required to perform a particular action will increase in proportion to the level of unwillingness that I have toward doing the contemplated action.  This imbalance is probably the reason behind my not finishing my 4th/5th step process until I was almost two years sober.  I have no regrets about that, it's just they way it happened....and it worked.  This imbalance, with the amount of unwillingness being far greater than the amount of willingness, also was behind my inability to get sober back when I was able to stop drinking for significant periods of time, even though I had strong reasons to suspect that I, like my father before me, was an alcoholic.  The willingness "to stop forever" was never there for me because I could hold on to the belief, supported by the facts it seemed, that I could stop...if I really wanted to.  My "problem" was that I never really wanted to stop!  That is, until the day came when I simply couldn't stop. 

And when the day came that I really, really wanted to stop: I couldn't.  My willingness was far exceeding my unwillingness I believe ---- but was keeping me stuck was the firmly held belief, also supported by the facts as I understood them, that I could not "not drink".  I couldn't imagine me "not drinking" for any significant period of time.  It seemed impossible to me.  So, in a growing state of desperation and despair, I continued to drink for the next ten months.  At the beginning, most of me wanted not to get caught drinking: I didn't want to get caught because then other people would begin expecting me to do what I knew to be impossible: stop drinking!  But at then end, probably for the last month or so, I gradually began to sense a growing hope that someone would catch me in my deceit and confront me on my actions. 

And then the night came when my son almost caught me: he came out of a meeting and walked over to the car where I was waiting to pick him up and take him home.  He asked me if he could go get something to eat with his friends and I told him that it was OK with me....   He started to walk away and then I think he was confronted with something he didn't really want to do either: confront his father after smelling alcohol on his breath just then.  I can't imagine that the prospect of confronting your dad, with only 5 months and 10 days clean time and a history of screwups, relapses and run-ins with the police: and accusing him of drinking...how that would be something done lightly.  My son became willing though and his willingness saved my life.

He walked back to my car and asked if he could ask me a question.  I said yes.  So he asked, "Have you been drinking?".  My life came to a standstill.  I wanted to tell him the truth so badly!  I knew that he wouldn't get mad at me, yell at me or condemn me.  I'd seen him handle other situations like this with his friend's dads who'd been doing what I'd been doing (except for the not-getting caught part): he was always kind and gentle.  He accepted them as fellow addicts and asked them if they wanted help.  No strings attached.  No expectations.

But I couldn't tell him the truth.  What kept me from doing that was the idea, "if I tell him that I've been drinking, he'll then begin expecting me to stop!"  ---- and I can't fucking stop!!!  That's impossible.  Looking back, it seemed like I had a lot of willingness/desire at that time: but it was blocked by the certainty of the desired action being impossible. 

What happened then was I did lie to my son.  I answered, "No, I haven't been drinking."  I said it as defenselessly as I could.   My lying skills have always one of my strong points: he accepted what I said without question.  He just said that he had to ask because he smelled alcohol around my car and he couldn't not ask me this question.  He then let it go and went to have something to eat with his friends.

Me?  I sat there all alone.  Alone.  Isolated.  In my own personal hell.  I'd missed my golden opportunity to escape that hell and I was doomed.  After about an hour later, my son returned and we headed home.  We had our usual back and forth conversation that would follow me asking him "How did the meeting go?".  Just like always, he'd tell me stories without betraying confidences.  I'd listen --- feeling a growing sense of shame for my inability to face this problem with the kind of courage and persistence that my 15 year old son and these other young people were demonstrating on a daily basis.  We got home and I just walked by my wife and said that I was going to bed: I was very very tired.  It was a Friday and I'd had a very long week.  If only she knew how true that was.

I went right to sleep and then next thing I knew it was 6am the next morning and I was completely awake.  The first thought that came to my head was "I just can't stop drinking!"  It was the same thought that I had been waking up to for the last ten months, if not the last 30 years.  Then, a millisecond later, I had a second thought and that was, "Not being able to stop drinking is called "alcoholisim" and alcoholism is just a disease and I just happen to have it!"  Wow!  I just have a disease!  My body is different than those who are non-alcoholics!  In an instant, it seemed like my whole past life flashed before me and I understood everything that I had done over the years in terms of drinking and not being able to stop.  But this morning, another though followed and replaced the "hopelessness" that I had always felt in regards to the idea of "stopping" and that idea was I could do what my son had been doing: instead of "trying to stop" I could do what he had been doing, "trying to stay sober/clean one day at a time!".  In an instant my whole worldview changed.

What then happened, not that I knew it at the time, is that I became willing to try and stay sober one day at a time.  I stopped trying to stop.  As someone later told me, "I stopped stopping!".  Willingness only became effective for me after I came to a complete state of hopelessness: another state of mind.  Hopelessness is the state of mind that precedes giving up on something you want to do, but something you believe to be impossible.  I reached a state of hopelessness in terms of my belief that I could continue to drink and not be an alcoholic.  Once I was convinced to my core of the hopelessness of that, then all it took was a very small amount of willingness to try and stay sober one day, to try and do what my son had been doing successfully for over 5 months.  With willingness, I then took my first step.

Take care!

Mike L.

What's so Good about Hope; What's so Bad about Hopelessness?

In two different meetings this week, the chairperson has come up with the topic of "Hope" and while I've enjoyed hearing everyone's shares about how much hope they've come to have in their lives since getting sober, I was reminded by an article I read once written by Thich Nat Hahn, the Buddhist monk from Vietnam.  It was called, "The Danger of Hope" or something along those lines. 

His main point in the article while there's much good to be said about "hope" -- there's a somewhat hidden danger in placing too much stock in hope.  The danger, according to this wonderful Buddhist monk,  comes about when one's hope is based on a belief that there is something unacceptable about the present moment or our present condition or circumstance.  Thich Nat Hahn would have loved my grandsponsor Earle (and vice versa) because Earle was always saying that "everything is just perfect, just the way it is" -- and, as was often the case, Earle was talking more about "emotional" conditions and reality than he was about anything else. 

To be honest, I thought Earle was off his rocker when he would chant this philosphy of his to me in his persistent manner.  He'd sit next to me (or, more often, I would sit next to him) and ask me how things were going.  At first, I'd lie by answering "Fine..." -- but he would smile and look deeper into my eyes and chuckle/ask "You wouldn't lie to an old man like me, would you?".  Caught again, I'd laugh, "Well, I guess I would!".  But he wouldn't let me off the hook, he'd follow up and repeat the initial question: "Really, how are things going?  How do you feel?"  And then the dance would begin, I would give him a high level view of what I was feeling by saying, "Oh, I guess I'm feeling a little tired or worn out...."  And then he would answer that answer with, "And what's wrong with that?"  Now, I hadn't really said there was anything wrong with that, but there was I suppose and that's why I had so wisely answered his initial question with "Fine" and why I really wanted the meeting to start soon! 

But I'd made the mistake of getting there early and it would have been rude of me to get up and find a less annoying person to sit next to...  So I answered him with a little less high level perspective on what was going on inside of me and I'd disclose that "Well, when I get like this, I start to feel kinda depressed."  He'd look at me like he was really listening but the truth would come out when he'd ask me again, as though time was going in reverse, "And what's wrong with that?"  And that's how the dance would go, back and forth, me getting a little deeper and closer to the real truth of the matter, him remaining in the comfort of his mantra of "Well, what's wrong with that?".  It could go on forever it seemed, so ultimately, I'd want to skip all the preliminarys and jump to the heart of the matter in terms of what I was feeling and why, goddammit, these feelings were so goddammed wrong: "Earle, if I keep feeling this saddness or anger, I'm going to start wanting to drink again!" 

He'd laugh deeply and kindly, then pause, and then ask with all sincereity: "Well, Mike, what's wrong with that?"  I didn't have the heart or the time to follow that up with my ace in the hole, "Well, Earle, if I keep feeling like this, I might very well get to the point where I actually do drink!   Take that!"

Now, almost 8 years after getting sober and 7 years after Earle's death, I still feel like I'm just starting to assimilate this truth about hope and hopelessness.  And just as there can be a danger in assuming "hope" is all good, there's an equal danger, it seems to me, in portraying "hopelessness" as all bad.

When I hear people talking about hopelessness, oftentimes when they are referring to the hours, days and weeks before they got sober, they seem to portray this hopelessness as this horrible state of being that made even the horrible thought of life with alcohol as more attractive than the hell they were experiencing after alcohol seemed to stop working for them.  While that's true of course, Earle used to talk about how much he cherished those moments of despair and hopelessness in his life---particularly after he got sober!---because were it not for the fact of these moments (short- or long-termed) of despair and hopelessness, we would have never had the following experiences of enlightenment, of waking up!  He even wrote an article for the AA Grapevine called, Thank God for Despair along these same lines.  What he would do during those moments of despair, would be to remind himself that in every prior experience of despair, there was always an end to the despair (eventually) and that following the despair (always) came a moment of enlightenment.  A moment where things made sense.  A moment of clarity.  An "aha!" moment.

I try, as best I can to remember these strange truths about both hope and hopelessness.  Nothing intrinsically good or bad about either one of them.  Hope seems healthy and beneficial when it's for something that's possible and loving.  Hope seems unhealthy and harmful, for me and others, when it's for something that's not possible (e.g., an alcoholic like me trying to be a non-alcoholic) or harmful for me or others.  Hopelessness, on the otherhand, seems bad when I feel unable to do/be someone I am not.  And seems good when I let go of trying to be someone I'm not.

Take care!

Mike L.

Hope: The Contagious Message of Recovery

I've been immersed in life the last couple of weeks, so I've been remiss in blogging. I've missed it, but I've just not had time to blog. Even now, I'm sneaking in this blog between a couple of chores left me by my wife. She's out getting her nails done with my soon to be married daughter. I deserve this blog!

At one of my favorite meetings earlier today, the chair offered "Hope" as the topic and it was a perfect fit to her story. In fact, it is a perfect fit with every one's stories in AA! It dawned on me me today that Hope is one of the essential ingredients for recovery. Every time we tell stories in AA, they are filled with all sorts of horrendous tales which include shame, hurt, guilt, failure, betrayal and pain. Strangely, when we hear these stories, we often laugh with one another and I've often thought that laughter to be odd and maybe even inappropriate. But I can't help joining in anyway! Why do we laugh (and sure, we cry too!) at these stories??

I think it's because our stories, by definition, contain hope. They contain hope for all of us because while these stories tell all sorts of hellish events from our past, we have all apparently lived to tell and share our stories. They are all stories of survival. Somehow we survived. Where life was nothing but hopelessness and isolation, we somehow survived. We got sober. Even if someone was sitting in the meeting today still with alcoholic flowing through their veins, for some reason, they were there in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even if they were there at the behest of a lover, the command of a lawyer/judge, or the pain of a swollen liver, they were there sitting amongst others who also could simply not stop drinking and/or using. And not only had these people experienced the same hell of not being able to stop, it appears that many of them had figured out a way to stay sober one day at a time for many days.

That meeting really gave me a renewed spirit of hope. Reconnected with a bunch of people I now get to honestly consider friends. And am now able to go back to my chores with a certain lightness and calm. Pretty amazing.

Take care!

Mike L.

The AA Kit of Spiritual Tools: Hey, It's Empty!!

In one of my favorite meetings the other night, one of my friends mentioned that even with double digit sobriety, he's finding himself struggling through a end-of-relationship issue that simply not going away even though he's using all of the tools he's acquired over the years in sobriety and a very active strong AA program.

He's exercising and eating well (remembering the H.A.L.T. trick...). He's meeting with his sponsor and still actively sponsoring other recovering alcoholics. He's got a service commitment. He's worked the steps, multiple times. He goes to quite a few meetings every week and participates in those meetings, both in terms of sharing what's going on in his life (at least in general, meeting-level terms) and trying to be helpful to others in the meetings, especially the newcomer. He's journaling and meditating on a regular basis.

As he was sharing, I remembered another member once passing on a story that he heard from someone else, which essentially said that when we begin our recovery process, we're all given a toolkit for spiritual tools and as we progress, we'll pickup more and more tools which can be used and/or saved for future use. The tale went that every one of us will eventually reach a point in our sobriety where something "bad" happens and we look into our AA toolkit looking for a tool and are terrified to discover that there are no tools in the kit! When that happens, according to this AA folktale, don't panic because in every AA certified toolkit is a special note taped to the bottom of the kit and it reads, "You need more tools!". Before I could share this with the group, my friend already discovered what he needed to do: start looking for more tools. He's good at reading my mind.

The tools can certainly include the principles we acquire through working the steps, but they can also be sayings or slogans (i.e., One Day at a Time, Take it Easy, etc.). H.A.L.T. can be a very useful assessment tool when feeling off the beam: Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely and/or Tired? If so, take care of those deficiencies and you'll be less "thirsty" for that first drink. Sometimes, I hear great lines in meetings and they get filed away as tools which I can either use or share with others. For instance, one old guy around here sometimes says, "Live life one whelm at a time! If you try to juggle too many whelms, you'll get overwhelmed!".

Other woman told me her favorite line was one that she stole from her sponsor and it was "I got sober at the corner of Grace and Willingness!" I love that line. I remember when I heard her share it at a meeting, that while I loved it, it wasn't where I got sober. I knew my sobriety was a gift, so I certainly did get sober somewhere on Grace Street, but it was certainly not on the corner of Grace and Willingness. "Where was it?" began percolate in my brain.

After a couple of weeks, I saw her again and I ran up to her and reminded her about her favorite line and how much I like it----but that I'd been struggling over the last couple of weeks to discover "where" I got sober and I finally figured it out. It was at the corner of Grace and Hopelessness! About a half block down from Grace and Willingness. For me, the gift of sobriety came to me the morning I woke up and accepted the hopelessness and futility of trying to be someone other than who I was. And I was, for better or worse, an alcoholic. And instead of fighting that, I needed to go with the flow and start doing what my son was doing.... And there, yessireee, was Willingness. Yet another spiritual tool.

Take care!

Mike

How Do I Best Help Another Recover?

Recently, at several of the meetings I regularly attend, I've noticed a lot of people criticizing how others are conducting themselves in meetings. Some times, these criticisms are being made in the context of a group inventory. Other times, it's at the meeting before or after the meeting. A few times in not so quiet whispers during the meeting.

I've listened as well as I can to all these criticisms and it seems that underneath most of these comments is the deep desire to help others get and/or stay sober. Or a fear that someone will leave the room and get drunk.

It's serious business I agree. But I'm wondering much if sometimes we don't overdo the effort to help another person "get it". It seems to me, that it's helpful to see the disease of alcoholism itself as our greatest friend in the noble effort of helping alcoholics recover from this disease and we should, with all due respect, let the disease itself do the bulk of the heavy lifting in terms of getting someone who suffers from this disease into the recovery process. I suppose this is something I picked up in Alanon.

I remember back to when my son was getting sober and sitting back quite amazed at his courage and persistence in trying to get clean at such a young age (14-15 years old). Of course, it was mostly amazing to me because he was owning up to a problem that I as a 48 year old "man" was absolutely incapable of doing in terms of my own fairly secret battle with alcohol.

I remember that I initially took some comfort in that he actually needed to stop drinking and using: he was, after all, a minor and what he was doing was illegal. Not only that, he was doing it so badly! Not only was he unable to hide his diseased behavior from others, "like I could!" he was unable to lie about stuff that came so easily to me. I mean he could lie, he just couldn't do it as well as me. I was a little embarrassed that he was doing the lying thing so poorly. Was he really not my son?

Anyway, looking back now, I see that his recovery was motivated from within him and had little to do with all the things my wife and I did to try and support him in his efforts. Oh, we did try to help him! And I don't regret any of our efforts to help him---but ultimately, it seemed that what really worked with him was the pain and utter dispair that he felt in his life. The consequences. What worked also was the hope that he started to receive from others afflicted with the same disease of addiction. Pain and hope. That saved him.

And it saved me because about five months after things "clicked" for him, I reached my own moment of utter darkness and dispair.... And it dawned on my that things weren't quite as hopeless as I imagined: there was a solution. I could do what my son did.... Admit what was going on to others who suffered from the same affliction. Reach out for help. Stop trying to stop drinking and start trying to stay sober. Once that light went on for me, the rest of the process has actually been quite easy and simple. Sorta.

Someone once told me that she got sober at the corner of Grace and Willingness. I loved that line. She'd stolen it from her sponsor. But while I loved it, it wasn't where I got sober. I got sober about a half block down from there, at the corner of Grace and Hopelessness. From there, I saw hope and realized that while I couldn't stop drinking, I could stay sober. For one day. Today. I'm sober today I think because I've not forgotten that truth.

I personally don't think there are magical words that can be said in or outside of AA meetings that will get someone sober. That isn't to say that we take what we do and say within or without meetings "lightly" or "cavalierly" --- this is a deadly disease and a serious business.

But it's been helpful to me to take some comfort that there seems to be a basic desire within most folks to be happy and to have a meaningful life. Pain is one of our most effective teachers. Ultimately, what was most effective for me in terms of getting sober was seeing that sobriety (what I then simply thought of only as "not drinking") was possible. The impossible was possible.
That's not what I consider "magic." Nope. It's a miracle. Magic is when something that is actually impossible appears to happen. Miracle is when something that appears impossible actually happens. Huge difference. And by the way, I made those definitions up myself so use 'em if you like, but don't blame Webster if you don't.

Take care!

Mike L.