I’m grateful for a beautiful Fall morning. I’m grateful for all of the rain. I’m grateful to remember what’s really important. I’m grateful for realizations, reminders and coincidences. I’m grateful for seeing what I couldn’t before. I’m grateful for the Reese’s Miniature Cups in the Freezer. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I had a very funny day and, naturally, it started right here. First, the new installment of Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition went out yesterday and it’s really great:
The day before last, I sat down here to write the gratitude list and associated musings and I saw this statistic about how many of us actually ever seek treatment (7%) and it got me going and I wrote this:
Like any good alcoholic, I love the feeling of self-righteous anger. But when I think about how few of us make it even to eight months of sobriety, I get angry the bad way.1
That night was my Big Book Study Group led by none other than “Your Sponsor,” and we were reading from the “12 and 12” about Step 10 and the “hangover created by negative emotions.” This was the passage that got me riled up:
It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also. But are there exceptions to this rule? What about “justifiable” anger?…For us of AA these are dangerous exceptions. We have found that justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 90
That pissed me off and I said something like, “I’m sorry, I think this is bullshit,” and then went on to deliver some rant about feeling my feelings and the promises telling me I can go wherever I want, so why can’t I feel whatever I want. Blah, blah, blah. Your Sponsor was quite gracious and semi-apologized for bringing the 12 and 12 into things and then mentioned something about the real trick being not acting on negative emotions, that I kind of brushed off, but it kept popping into my head while I was eating candy late that night and watching Hogan’s Heroes.2
The next morning when I began again to write, well, it all came together and that was yesterday’s Gratitude List. I was laughing out loud as I was writing it, it is the perfect example of how reading the Big Book and working with a Sponsor fundamentally alter the experience of recovery and I had to hand it to the Big Guy—it was a great way to learn that lesson.3 Between the words in the book and the wisdom of someone who has been reading it for 13 years, you tend to get to the right place--or at least it worked for me.
I was passing all of this along to one of my sponsees yesterday (this is how it works) and I started going on about how remarkable Bill’s insights were and how crazy the story is. I mean, he’s literally still wearing a hospital gown when he announces that he thinks he’s figured out alcoholism and how to treat it and would it be ok if he started talking to some of the other patients. And they said yes. That’s remarkable when you think about it. A serial relapser, the guy who kept drinking after the most dire realizations and consequences, the guy who the doctors thought was completely hopeless. That guy says, “I think I have it,” and for some reason, people listened and said “ok, go ahead.”
The Big Book was written when Bill had about three years of sobriety and even though he had no professional pedigree, no formal training in psychology or anything like that, people listened to him. It’s because when you read it, particularly as an alcoholic, you realize that Bill’s experience was pretty similar and as you start to deploy some of the learning in your own life, you see that it works. When you get down to it, all of those commonalities of experience and thinking and destructive actions, I think those ought to be called “symptoms,” and Bill definitely had the right idea about how to treat them.
For this alcoholic, I again learned the lesson that most of the things I need to know about how to live my life and how to stay sober are right there in the Big Book and I can get the version distilled with life experience when I talk to my sponsor or anyone else in our Program.
I spent a lot of yesterday laughing, much of it in public, as I thought about all of this and how things keep coming together for me.4 The Big Guy has a funny way of teaching lessons sometimes and I kind of appreciate the subtle ironies. All I have to do is keep my eyes open, be willing to listen, stop judging and reacting to things and trust that the things that are supposed to happen generally will happen. This is not how I expected sobriety to be. This is not how I expected my life to be. But, I have to say, The Big Guy seems to be holding up his end of the bargain and things kind of are working out for me, so I think we'll keep things rolling.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
It’s not all opera and elevated thoughts over here.
You know how I am with the nicknames and from here on out, when I mention “The Big Guy,” that’s a reference to God/My Higher Power. And yes, I do like to include “The” in some nicknames.
I know how this sounds and worse, how it looks.
"...justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it." Oh man, what a slippery slope. ALL of my anger is justified, of course, and there is never anything wrong with me! 😉 (I hope it's obvious I'm being vehemently sarcastic.)
I think anger is recovery is a fascinating topic. In Al-Anon, we're angry about different things, usually -- but not always -- for different reasons, but the same applies: the real trick is not acting on negative emotions. Well, shit. That takes even more work. The problem -- or miracle, depending on my mood -- is that it's one of the most important things that actually leads to an improvement in my spiritual condition, not to mention better relationships with everyone in my life: myself, my qualifier, my children, my Higher Power, everyone.
(I can get pretty angry about all of this sometimes and then I end up laughing. Thank god I found a program that works. Thank god I'm not on my own anymore. Thank god I don't know everything and am FREQUENTLY wrong 😊)
7%.... wOOF. I've been having a lot of feelings, reflecting on my past with sober eyes. Seeing others who need/could use recovery more than me. So, that number hit me HARD today. Lucky to be in that 7%. WOOF.