Liner Notes for Episode 19

Breakfast with Tommy

I thought my Breakfast with Tommy was really great. Of course, he’s my sponsor and I feel pretty indebted to him, but I think you’ll agree that he has a way of putting things that just makes sense. He’s the person who taught me the Big Book, so I always pay attention when he talks about it.¹

Breakfast with an Alcoholic: Episode 19

Tommy’s favorite passage in the Big Book is this²:

If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.

Big Book, p. 552³

Praying for one’s enemies seems like another slightly bizarre prescription for an addiction treatment program.⁴ But it works. I once heard a woman qualify at a meeting in DC. She was recounting how she drew a line in the sand when her sponsor suggested she pray for her enemies. Her sponsor said she might need to get a new sponsor in that case, so she relented and came up with this prayer for her enemies:

Dear God:

Please make all these MF’ers stop bothering me before I have to do something to them that’s going to make you unhappy.

This was not deemed a satisfactory effort.

How does this work? I haven’t a clue. This is the sentence that jumps out at me:

Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway.

That makes me think about the gratitude lists. One of the things I’ve realized about myself is that there is a river of anger flowing through me. Determining the source of that is something of a work in progress, but I at least know it’s there and have an understanding of some of the things that trigger floods. You probably would not have guessed that I was an alcoholic during even my heaviest phases—I was very, very good at concealing it. Drinking was what let me ignore that river, even when it was lapping at my ankles. Alcohol helped me say “f*** it” whenever I needed to, which was usually several times a day.

But alcohol is tricky. It did usually work to help keep the peace between the various warring factions in my head, but every once in a while it would ignite the trash floating on top of the river or the alcohol-operated levees would fail and there would be a big, big flood.

Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking. He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk. His disposition while drinking resembles his normal nature but little. He may be one of the finest fellows in the world. Yet let him drink for day, and he frequently becomes disgustingly, and even dangerously anti-social.

Big Book, p. 21

Yes, this reminds me of someone.⁵ When the levees failed and the river overflowed the banks, well, that’s when the chaos started. That’s when I would say and do the things to people I loved and who loved me that I still regret and always will. To me, this is why it is so, so critical to view all of this through the lens of disease. I think shame and stigma were big drivers of my drinking and they are pretty poisonous feelings for most alcoholics. Steps Four through Nine are designed to root out the resentments, the anger and most importantly, the shame and regret. It’s not a process of wrapping a bow around the past and moving on. It is a process of coming to terms with what happened, identifying the people who were hurt and understanding precisely how.

The Gratitude Lists help me re-frame my experience every morning; they help keep me from dipping my toe in that river. Shaggy the yoga instructor often says that we can’t choose our outcomes, but we can choose how we experience those outcomes.⁶ That’s where the gratitude lists came in. When I started writing them, my life was pretty empty. There weren’t many people who were interested in talking to me, it was the pandemic and I had just moved to NY. I was pretty angry, too. Angry at everyone in my life, but mostly angry at myself for letting this all happen. For doing this. For ending up here. I can remember doing the first gratitude list in my living room early on a November morning, it was a gray, cloudy, bleak day and I wrote this:

I’m grateful for my children and the prospect of seeing them soon. I’m grateful to have so many friends in the program and to be able to get support at meetings. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be starting over and grateful to be able to do it here in New York. I’m grateful for the courage to sit through days like this. Grateful to have you as a sponsor and a friend.⁷

A few days later, I wrote this, right before my birthday:

Today I have a lot to be grateful for: I'm grateful for AA, for sobriety and all of the amazing friends I have in the program. I'm grateful that it's a beautiful morning. I'm grateful that my son will be visiting. I'm grateful for the chance to rebuild my relationship with my daughter. I'm grateful to have a great sponsor to help me grow in the program and for his friendship. I'm grateful to be healthy and to have so many opportunities in life.

I took that picture when my son visited and reading the list, I can already sense the difference in my attitude. The lists forced me to put the positive things in my life first and recognize their importance. They helped me see the beauty and the love that had been there all along. A couple of weeks later, this one came out one morning:

I'm grateful this morning to have a warm apartment and a very comfortable bed. I'm grateful for books. I'm grateful for the Wednesday Step Study Group and NOLB. I'm grateful for coffee. I'm grateful for the pennies I find in the street—to remind me of all that I have to be grateful for. I'm grateful to be able to turn my life and my will over to the care of God and to not have to suffer anymore at the hands of my own self-will. I'm grateful to see people getting ready for Xmas and to remember how much love and kindness in the world. I'm grateful that my friends and family are healthy and that I am too.

I can see now how much I was trying to work out in those early gratitude lists. This was in January of 2021:

I woke up today sober and I'm grateful for that. I remember how it was to wake up, drenched with sweat, hands shaking and anxiety coursing through me. I'm grateful to not have to wake up that way anymore. I remember how my days were consumed finding the next drink, running from feelings and fears, working desperately to hide my drinking from friends, family, colleagues—everyone. I'm grateful to not have to live that way anymore. I remember how my life was filled with lies and chaos and I remember how many people I hurt. I'm grateful to be able to start rebuilding relationships and making amends to those I hurt. I'm grateful that an unmanageable, chaotic, desperate life is behind me and grateful to AA for showing me how to live the life that God intends for me.

I used gratitude to help me through difficult days, days when I had to come to terms with loss and regret, and kind of an uncertain future. It was really important then to be able to find a couple of nuggets that I could be grateful for, things I could hang on to throughout the day. Here was one from last September:

I’m grateful for a sunny morning. I’m grateful for people who nudge me in the right direction. I’m grateful for new opportunities and the chance to rebuild my life. I’m grateful to be able to look back at the wreckage from my drinking and learn what I can. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Instead of lamenting over the ruins of what had come before and what I had lost, I had to find a way to be grateful for the chance to rebuild. Since the old system had failed pretty spectacularly, I was grateful for “new opportunities.” I’m alway grateful for the moments of grace when we can come to terms with a little bit more of the past and ourselves. The gratitude lists are my effort to shape how I experience the world and whatever the Universe has coming my way. I do think that the things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen, even when those are things that I really don’t want to happen. Finding something to be grateful for, something to learn from in those circumstances can be pretty challenging, but exactly what I think the Universe is trying to accomplish.⁸

Praying for your enemies works in a similar fashion, I think. The anger I feel towards my “enemies,” and I could probably include myself in that group, is a function of my own fear and resentments. My resentments were carefully nursed and curated. They were critical pieces of evidence to show just what I had endured at the hands of other people and exactly why it was necessary for me to be, as the book says, “always more or less insanely drunk.” Asking God to give my enemies what I want for myself does not seem like a logical prescription to stop drinking. To be candid, it feels a lot more like the kind of thing I might agree to do but then would definitely need to drink for quite a while afterward to get the taste out of my mouth.

Like everything else, there is something tricky about all of this. The person I’m still angriest at is me. Maybe, part of the way this works is that by forgiving other people for their trespasses, I can finally start to forgive myself a little for my own. If my worst enemies are still entitled to some nice things, maybe I am too. Maybe we all are. That is pretty sneaky.

I think that praying for one’s enemies also divorces us from their outcomes and lets us focus on the feelings that are driving us. For me, the act of praying for someone or something that I don’t really like that much is an extreme act of humility. It also forces me to feel empathy, or will after a certain amount of repetition. The gratitude lists work because they help me reframe my view of the world through the lens of gratitude, praying for enemies reframes my view of others through the lens of empathy. Like the man said:

Where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.

As is the case with so much else in the Big Book, it works if you work it. Praying for others probably doesn’t result in them getting their wishes granted,⁹ but it has definitely gotten some granted in my life and helped me get something that I wanted pretty badly. It has substantially reduced the flow of the river Anger, and it seems to work pretty well to prevent those pesky trash fires, too. Mostly it gives me peace and balance and maybe the chance to stay sober for another day. And, that is not so shabby!

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. Is that a nice way of saying, you should, too?

2. I don’t know if you noticed, but of course, he picked a very long passage…

3. The other night at our Big Book Study Group, there was an animated discussion about things that are said at meetings and someone, I think, said something like, “The entire program of Alcoholics Anonymous is laid out in the first 164 pages of the Big Book.” Maybe I’m the only one who thinks that is funny.

4. Love note to the medical establishment: I was up late watching “Law and Order” the other night and saw the good news about curing Gout! That’s great! I’m guessing now you’ll have time to start working on alcoholism! Keep me posted!

5. The rest of the description is worth reading and goes on to page 22, where it concludes with this ominous prediction for our Jekyll/Hyde friend: “Then he begins to appear at hospitals and sanitariums.”

6. If you want to know when I’m at peak profundity, it’s usually Wednesday morning after Shaggy’s class.

7. The first gratitude list had an audience of one.

8. I wrote that and immediately thought it sounded maybe a touch too confident.

9. It’s probably wrong to say that makes me feel better about the whole exercise.