I’m grateful for challenging days. I’m grateful for chances to be less afraid. I’m grateful for seeing that things are ok even when they don’t seem like they’re ok. I’m grateful to see what it is I can do. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Welcome. It’s not quite the apocalypse over here, but it’s early. You may or may not have gathered that I am something of a creature of habit. It is fortunate for all of us that the exact number and nature of all of those habits is not well known. But seriously, my “routines” are pretty important to me and events that disrupt them, well, I find them disruptive.
But here’s something that helped tremendously.
put together this super helpful listing of the recovery related Substack newsletters. This is truly fantastic!Even with that, it is possible that we are starting from a semi-cranky position this morning, but as they used to say in law school, “you take your plaintiffs as you find them.” Today, I wanted to talk about lines and line-drawing. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I write a lot here about the difference between the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous and AA Meetings. The content of the first two is Conference-Approved. The content at the latter may require a filter from time-to-time.
One of the silly debates that still thrives in AA is the fight between the “recovered” vs. the “recovering.” OMG, if you were interested in the physics of splitting hairs, this would be a good place to start. This plays out online all the time, with someone loudly suggesting that anyone who claims to have “recovered,” doesn’t recognize that we are all given only a daily reprieve…One day at a time… First, shouldn’t the real First Commandment of AA be something like “Don’t criticize other people’s recovery?” Second, wouldn’t it be great if this were addressed somewhere early on in the Big Book? Like in the very first paragraph?
We of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.
Big Book, Foreword to First Edition (p. xiii of the 4th Edition)
The thing we aim to recover from? It’s alcoholism. Alcoholism’s main symptom is an inability to control one’s drinking. It is easy to think that the cure for this would be to simply stop drinking. Except that’s not possible because of the fact that the main symptom is an inability to “stop drinking.”1 This is where the Steps come in. Now, if you wanted to be really freaky about things, you might point out that there is roughly nothing in the Steps about not drinking, other than the initial recognition that
“Yeah, I am powerless over alcohol. I can’t control my drinking.”
Please note: This does not require an admission that you lack “power” in all areas of your life. Neither does the process of Steps Two and Three turn the alcoholic into a divine marionette. If the cure you’re suggesting necessarily results in me being an older, less perky Pinocchio? I think I’m going to try that Sinclair Method for a little bit longer.
Obviously, I’m not trying to promote drinking. I guess what I’m wondering, and I say this as a serial relapser:2
Should we stop working with people if they start drinking again, using again?
In “Working with Others,” this question isn’t really addressed, except that when someone says they’re not interested in working the Program, the advice is to move on and find someone who is. That makes perfect sense, because the thing that helps keep my head from spinning towards the necessary pre-conditions for that first drink—against which I have no defense— is deepening my spiritual life and experience. That requires me to place myself where I can be of “maximum service” and someone who is not interested in the Program is probably not where I should invest my energies. That is for my sake, my sobriety. Working with alcoholics or addicts who want to get sober is what helped keep Bill sober and it works on pretty much the same principle for the rest of us. I know from lots and lots and lots of personal experience that when my head is tuned to the alcoholic frequencies, me looking at the relapse prevention card in my wallet or “playing the tape forward” is nothing more than a pretty small speed bump. It has been cultivating a spiritual life that helps keep me sober.
So here’s kind of how I think things work. My problem was alcoholism and that means I can’t stop drinking. The Steps are not a direct antidote to alcoholism, they work more on a bank shot principle. I think what happens is that we alcoholics have or produce these thinking patterns that in turn transform the events of our daily lives into those alcoholic storms in our head.3 This is a really important function of AA meetings—that sense of belonging and being comfortable, finding your tribe, that stems from the realization that we suffer from the same disease, that we have these same insane thinking patterns. For other people, civilians, non-alcoholics, the swirling components are never enough to turn into an actual storm. For alcoholics, it’s just a question of how big the storm is going to be.
The thing that reliably keeps those conditions from coalescing into that very destructive and impossible to control storm is working the steps and working with other addicts. So that brings us back to the question. What about the person who can’t stop drinking but wants to keep trying? Or what if they take prescription meds, or what if they have other addictions or compulsive behaviors that they are not yet ready or willing to address? But they really want to stop drinking. What should we do about them? It would be great if they addressed questions like that with a pithy sentence or something:
[Tradition] Three—The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.
A snarky aside: There is only one level of AA Membership. There’s no Centurion Lounge available.
The long form of the Third Tradition is much more explicit:
Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. hence, we may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought AA membership ever depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an AA group.
And it connects quite nicely with the Fifth Tradition [OG long form]:
Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity have but one primary purpose—that of carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
As I read those together, I think my primary obligation is to be willing to try and help alcoholics and addicts who aren’t sober yet. Period. Their sobriety is not my job nor my responsibility. My role is to carry the message to the still sick and suffering. This is really important to recognize, because it’s kind of impossible for me to think of pre-conditions that would need to be met before I was willing to share the Good News of the Big Book with someone who was actually asking for that.
I don’t mean that to sound impersonal, it’s anything but. The bonds that develop between people in the Program can be very very deep. My sponsees and I regularly profess our love for one another pretty unapologetically. But, I am not responsible for their sobriety. Of course, relapses are devastating and the feelings of failure are very real. But my job is to bounce back and keep finding ways to share what helped me.
One of my sponsees relapsed about a year ago and it was and is a baffling, very, very sad thing:
He called me after a few months and we even went to a meeting together, but the ground was still too rocky and months have passed again. If he called me later today and asked if we could work together, the answer would be “yes.”4 If we started and he kept relapsing, do I draw a line, turn him away, stop “enabling” him, decide that this won’t work? I guess we all get to answer that question ourselves, and I am mindful of the need to not only place myself where I can be of maximum service and but also where I don’t place myself or my own sobriety at needless risk. Note: That is a boundary I set for my own benefit and ought not be expressed as a dictate of the Program.
But yeah, call me and I’m going to say “Yes.” Probably every time. Somehow, I think questions about how other people recover, or what sobriety means to them, are beyond my pay grade. I think that may have been one of things I put on the Big Guy’s side of the Org Chart when I did Step Three. I know my position.5 The Parable of the Sower is not about calculating the probabilities of growing Mustard plants in different terrain and saving seeds for only the fertile ground. I think the Sower is directed, obligated, to sow those seeds in the rocky, inhospitable ground, where it seems highly unlikely anything could grow.
Every time we draw a line, we put someone further away from the Program. Willingness isn’t limited to believing in our own hopeless cases. And he was called Johnny Appleseed, not Johnny Appletree. It’s the act of planting the seed, again and again and again, that ultimately sets us free and keeps us that way.
And having successfully created an infinite loop, I shall repair to my beloved barstool and await divine resolution.
You’d like me to compare my serial relapses to a serial killer? No, even I wouldn’t go that far.
The ones that civilians address on “life’s terms.”
I know you read this sometimes….
As I liked to point out in a different context, it is called “shooting guard.”
Thank you for the shout out, T.B.D.! I didn't go the AA route in sobriety and recovery (although I did binge online meetings In The Rooms for a month last year and really appreciated them). So intriguing to get this window into such conversations and "line drawing." Thank you!
If you were interested in the physics of splitting hairs.......
Great post today, thanks
SusanB