I’m grateful for a pretty good night of sleep. I’m grateful for the piano concerto in the background. I’m grateful for the coffee on my desk. I’m grateful for the view from my window. I’m grateful for seeing there isn’t much I’m not grateful for. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I often scout out potential pick-up games, I need to be very choosy about how I expend my limited orthopedic action points. Also, I tend to look for games where there isn’t a ton of defensive, loose-ball-chasing hustling stuff going on. Anyway, this court is a likely prospect and I very much like the fact that there is a super-enthusiastic, canine cheering section.
This has nothing to do with today’s topic, which is the Fourth and Fifth Steps:
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
When I first came to AA and read the Steps, it seemed like Four was designed to lead directly into Five and I saw the “Moral Inventory” thing as pretty ominous. I first did the Fourth and Fifth Step pretty early on in my sobriety campaign, I think it was 2012. I had an interim sponsor who had whisked me through the first three steps and proposed that we got to a Monastery outside of Dubuque, Iowa to do my 4th and 5th Step.
I just want to be clear here, I very much understand that the 4th Step comes before the 5th Step, and that makes a lot of sense to me. However, I’m going to do it in reverse order and talk about the 5th Step today and the 4th Step tomorrow. I’m doing that because I think my first 5th Step experience illuminated what eventually worked for me with the 4th Step. Whew, on with the story.
So I flew to Dubuque, well, actually, Madison, WI and then I drove to Dubuque. The Monastery was set on a pretty large tract of land, lots of timber and they leased out some of the acreage for corn and beans. The Monastery aspired to be self-supporting and you could buy a variety of lovely handcrafted items, like walking sticks, cutting boards, even caskets. They also rented out dorm-style rooms to people seeking meditative retreats, and to a lot of alcoholics.
There was a fairly robust worship schedule, the Brothers gathered in the chapel every few hours, even doing the vigils at night and super-early in the morning. If you rented a room, you were invited to the chapel services and you could also eat in the cafeteria in the basement. A lot of the brothers were alcoholics and addicts and they actually had their own AA meeting on the premises, which we attended on our first night.1 I went to a the late night and early morning vespers in the chapel, there was something really beautiful about chanting Psalms responsively in a dark church in the middle of the night.2
I had gone over my 4th Step work with my Sponsor and the next afternoon, I was scheduled to do my 5th Step with Brother Xavier. He ushered me into a nicely furnished (in church basement style) room and we got acquainted a bit. His first question,
What brought you to AA?
I dove right into the devastated mess of a life I had created, the pain and misery I had caused to the people I loved most in the world, all of the terrible betrayals, the dishonesty, the lack of regard or respect for anything but what I wanted and, of course, my drinking. I had pages and pages of confession written in my journal and he sat there nodding as I went through the exact nature of my wrongs.
By the end, I was crying, those twelve-year old convulsive sobs blurting out. It went on for a little bit. Then Brother Xavier asked his second question:
What is the secret of your childhood?
At first, this caught me by surprise, did I have a secret in my childhood? We moved around a lot when I was little, and starting a new school every year got a little rough, but that hardly seemed like a root cause of my alcoholism or even that much of a secret. I’m not sure what I said back then exactly, but I know that I began to understand that the secret of my childhood was me.
Somewhere, I got the idea very early on that the real me, the person inside, was subject to ridicule if they expressed themselves. I was so sensitive, assumed potential rejection and contempt was in every interaction with other people. Very early on, I came to the conclusion I was not enough. Being a practical, pretty organized, do-er, I got to work and built a bright shiny me for people to admire and respect and even love. The problem with my strategy: It doomed me to a life of not being me.
I’m not sure when I started conflating the way I hid my real self with some kind of spy-game, but that idea sure took hold in my head. I had a secret to keep, I was afraid to reveal my true self, so the disguised spy version was the one I presented to the world.
This is a tough way to live for an adult, by the time I was 15, I was already pretty exhausted of maintaining the whole charade, keeping all of the plates spinning. Then I had a real drink and then maybe another and another, and I realized this was exactly the thing I needed. It was the perfect acouterment for my impersonation of myself.
The primary addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment. From the outset it is for him a magical substance. Only through the use of intoxicants can he achieve a state of psychological harmony—a very deceptive harmony it is, and a very transitory one.
Alcoholism: It’s Scope, Cause and Treatment (Ruth Fox 1955)
I was the secret of my childhood.
At this point, Brother Xavier let the snuffling subside, then he suggested we move to a different set of chairs in the room. We moved and I got settled in the new chair, Brother Xavier asked, “Look over at the chair where you were sitting, what do you see?” I saw me, slumped in that chair, tears streaming down my face, beaten, grief-stricken and lost. He gently repeated the question and I told him exactly who I saw in that chair—it was the guy who had ruined my life, who had grabbed the steering wheel and driven us off the cliff. I knew he wasn’t actually me, but he had been driving the car for a long, f***ing time by then.3
Then Brother Xavier asked his last question.
Who could love that person? Is there anyone who could still love you?
Of course, there were plenty of people who still loved that terribly flawed person, but there was one that stood out—it was my grandfather. He always let me be me. When a highly-dangerous go-kart wasn’t enough, he let me fantasize about adding some kind of rocket-based weapons to the side, diplomatically and carefully pointing out the difficulty of igniting the rockets while driving a highly uncontrollable rig with a lawnmower engine and an improbably large steering wheel from a junked Chrysler Imperial.4 I never felt out-of-place or judged or criticized or wrong or dumb , when I was with him. I’ve written about him before:
I went back to my room eventually and napped and then wrote about what had just happened in my journal. I ate a mostly silent meal with my sponsor, went to the vespers and collapsed back in my room, completely spent. I remember just feeling empty.The next morning I got up and drove back to Madison to fly home. My grandparents, and a lot of other relatives, are buried in a small, mostly Norwegian cemetery about 30 miles outside Madison. I decided to drive there before going to the airport.
It was Fall and pretty chilly and windy. I stood there and looked at their graves and thought about how much love had been there—love for me. Somehow, that was what I had lost sight of. That was why I just felt so empty. No matter how much I got people to love the other guy, the problem was I realized they didn’t love me. They couldn’t. They didn’t really know him.
I’m not sure how long I stayed sober after that. I don’t think it was very long. That experience is definitely one of the most important events of my sobriety, the things I realized that day at the Monastery are some of the firmest underpinnings of my sobriety. But it wasn’t enough by itself to keep me sober. That’s the thing, all of the consequences, the losses, the devastating, gut churning realizations were never enough to keep me from drinking.
There are plenty of cathartic, emotional upheavals and re-adjustments in sobriety. Those powerful emotional experiences can be misleading and they must be supplemented with the careful, incremental work required by the other steps. That work is what strips the old facade off and clears the way for the triumphal return of the prodigal. I drank after that weekend, not because the experience wasn’t valuable, but because I hadn’t really started the work that would make real sense of Brother Xavier’s question about who could love that guy?
The point is not to determine that other people could love me or the other guy. The point is for me to see how I can love him, how I can bring him back home, and how I can make peace with him. Then we can get after what we’re supposed to be doing: Living a happy, sustainable life filled with love and purpose.5
One takeaway: The Brothers are a cranky lot.
Radio signals are also stronger and clearer at night.
No one else saw two people in the car.
I’m pretty sure this was not the use Estes intended for their “X-Ray” model rocket.
Tomorrow, you’ll see that I propose a humble spreadsheet as a way to get this enviable life.
This was especially lovely, T.B.D. I live in a small, mostly Norwegian town about 30 miles outside Madison so maybe that's part of it 😉 but also, I find the image of you moving chairs and looking back at yourself and wondering who could love that person almost unbearably beautiful. I'm glad you've worked -- and keep working -- on loving him, because he deserves it, and so do you.
Hahaha!! I attended the University of Wisconsin—and made the drive to Iowa City on 151 many, many, many times. There was an amazing bakery in Mt Horeb where I’d stop for donuts.