Powerlessness and Waiting for the Right Pitch to Hit
daily gratitude list 6.16.23
I’m grateful for Friday morning. I’m grateful for mostly-recharged batteries. I’m grateful for seeing what I needed to learn. I’m grateful for the people who taught me. I’m grateful for appropriate amounts of swagger. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Happy Friday. From my particular vantage point, things are, in fact, pretty happy. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that without sounding so fatuous or, frankly, so incredibly annoying. In my olden days, there was nothing that provoked quite as much of a reaction as having to listen to someone who had gotten sober talk about how mystically fantastic it all was, the glorious feelings of connection and the warm sunny glow of transformation arriving via mindful yoga breaths. I’m sorry, I really hated hearing from those people.
I’m sorry, today, I’m going to be one of those people. You know by now, my ontological, not so logical view of the universe is that it is animated by some kind of a Higher Power that often chooses to communicate with me via ridiculous things like the placement of cast-off pennies or the order in which songs play or whether certain shots go in. For sure, this requires a pretty idiosyncratic decoder ring and perhaps I could say it was the search for such a decoder ring that leads me to consume box after box of Cap’n Crunch with the Crunchberries.1 That would be a lie.
All I know is that things are bouncing my way these days and the signs from the Big Guy are pretty unambiguous. First, I’ve been on a penny-finding bonanza. I found four in one day in separate locations. Second, this literally appeared out my window:
I have never been that close to an actual rainbow. Last, yesterday morning as I was celebrating the fact that
would be sharing her secret diary entries with you by heading to the basketball court, here’s the song that played. And, it’s also perfect for the whole Friday song thing:This particular song has gone through these grizzled ear canals about a million times. Back before there were things like airpods, I’d play this song at high volume in my room and then head out to shoot baskets in the driveway while it was still fresh in my head. So, this song playing randomly as I’m exiting my building, coincidentally, with a basketball under my arm. Do you really need more proof than that?
I know, that is so annoying. I think “olden days me” would have some pretty snarky things to say about actual, connected-to-the-universe me. I completely understand why. That defensiveness, the out-of-hand rejection despite the horrible consequences, the resistance that people who are trying to help us just can’t understand, I think that comes from fear and shame.
I knew my drinking was a shameful secret from the very first instance. The reason I was so completely resistant, the reason I kept relapsing and couldn’t stay sober, wasn’t because I loved the drinking so much. I mean I did. I loved the veil it placed over the world, I loved the way it lubricated the hamster wheel, I loved the way it let me disappear. But I didn’t keep drinking out of love, I kept drinking out of fear and shame. I just couldn’t imagine living without it.
I think that much of the fear and shame that we alcoholics and addicts feel is generated by the same plainly erroneous thinking pattern that got us here:
That we can control our drinking
The Big Book describes this thinking in pretty stark terms:
The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.
Big Book, p. 30
This passage is often cited to support the idea that a true alcoholic has no defense against the first drink. Meaning, once we drink, we are unable to control our drinking. The nature of our malady makes us powerless over alcohol. That’s a really important concept. I think it goes a little bit further. I think that myth of control is also what produces a fair amount of the shame that drives the drinking. It’s the kind of lying that Marty Mann identified as one of the primary symptoms of alcoholism, making excuses for our drinking: “I’ll do better next time.” “I won’t let that happen again.” I know it needs to stop and it eventually will.”
I think the concept of “powerlessness” in the First Step is pretty tough to wrap one’s head around. It’s one of the philosophical objections people express, “how is it a good thing to be powerless, how do you get better if you’re powerless?” First, the “powerlessness” language of the First Step is not a character indictment, it’s simply a summary of the nature of the disease. That, for the alcoholic, the cluster of genetic, emotional, environmental, behavioral factors produce an inability to control drinking.
People often ascribe alcoholism and addiction to a sheer lack of willpower. When I say “often,”I mean, frankly, most of the time. That’s still true today. That’s because the peculiar nature of this very under-researched and not understood disease has as it’s chief symptom just that:
An inability to control our drinking
It’s often suggested to people that if they think they might have an issue, they should try stopping and see if they can. I think that’s a bad test. For a heavy drinking, maybe not quite alcoholic person, there may not be enough incentive on the table to make it worth while to go through the unpleasant and joyless exercise of temporarily ceasing drinking. Marty Mann proposed a much better test.
Her idea was that for someone asking themselves that question, the test should be committing to not drinking more than x number of drinks per day for the next two weeks or 30 days or whatever. The point is, you can have those two drinks a day, but you can never have number three. No matter what. Her point is that while a heavy drinker could pull this feat off, a primary alcoholic never could.2
The Big Book’s notion of powerlessness just seems like an over-the-top forfeiture for a lot of people, “olden days me” included. And it gets conflated with the language of Step Three, wherein we make a decision to turn our “will and our lives” over to a Higher Power, to suggest the life of a recovered alcoholic is akin to a robot awaiting instruction. That’s not how I see it. Operationalizing Step Three in my own life wasn’t an an abdication of control or ceding responsibility for the conduct of my life. For me, it meant recognizing that:
I was powerless over alcohol
My attempts to control my drinking had been completely unsuccessful and would probably always be;
There was a power in the Universe that could help me find the path back to myself
But my sobriety wasn’t simply fairy dust being magically sprinkled as I counted days and floated on my back, leaf-on-a-stream style. No, I had to figure out how the Steps could work in my life. I had to plow through the old buried stuff to figure out how I had gotten so lost. Not to hold anyone accountable, but to figure out how to get back. I’m sober by the grace of my Higher Power, but that is contingent on me taking this view:
I have all the power I need, to do what I’m supposed to be doing.
That’s a pretty liberating place to be and I will tell you it is a place where even the thought of drinking is noticeably absent. I’m not wild about the word “surrender,” I’m way more comfortable with “acceptance,” as a way to frame my place in the world. But I also know that the Big Guy has a bias to action, likes to get shit done and moves in some pretty mysterious ways. So when that big, fat slow-to-break, for-sure-higher-power-engineered pitch comes floating in, I’m not sure I’m the only one thinking, “let’s swing hard and head for third.”
Powerlessness means only once I start drinking, all bets are off. Two of the central realizations that propelled my sobriety were that I was powerless over drinking and that the life I was directing and controlling wasn’t making me happy. I’m only giving up the idea that I can ever control my drinking and if you want to call that “surrender,” that’s groovy. For me, sobriety didn’t take the bat out of my hands. I’ve been working that pitch-count pretty assiduously. I’ve got a feeling I’m about to get one I can definitely hit.
This is not an offer that is advertised on the box. How could it be?
See also: The Sinclair Method.
People that haven’t lived it don’t understand. It’s about our relationship to things. Everyone...everyone has something in their life that they’re powerless over if they examine their own behavior. Everyone. Ours happened to be booze.
The last piece about surrendering reminded me of the Castaway (Tom Hanks). I'd love to write you a letter about why I think it's awesome - I think you'll appreciate it and I'd love to get your response as well.