Yes this is a follow up on yesterday’s post but it is also a way to frame the results of my meeting my sponsee today. We both agree he is good at pushing away things that might be helpful. In this case he has a real reluctance to meet with me regularly. Since this is something I explained to him from the start is what I need to have happen, it is a problem. My being his sponsor is contingent on my being able to meet up with him. He was free from the start to say no, this was not something he wants.

I must say I was happy to say he did agree to meet with me again next week. Of his own volition he also offered up that not showing up then would be a clear statement on his part. His absence would demonstrate he was not willing to committ to our working together in a way that I felt had to happen.

I really hope he shows up. I want to help him and meeting with someone is the way I have found works best for me. I simply cannot effectively sponsor someone without regular face to face contact. Just one of the many, many limitations I have come to understand about myself since I have become sober.

I do believe that people can have a sponsor-sponsee relationship without regular meetings too, so this is not a case of my way is the only way this can work for everyone. I have also learned in sobriety that there are very few absolutes.

This is a jumbled post but there you have it.

All the best in your sobriety,

AA blogger

I am meeting with a sponsee tomorrow that I have not seen in months. He does some things real well, like going to meetings and calling me most days. Yet he is really balking at working the steps. He has had a lot of challenges. Things like operations are in fact fairly big deals for most people. Even with all this I still feel like he should be moving along into his fourth step. The important thing is I realize this is simply what I think.

I truly don’t know what is best for anyone. The best thing I can do is to try to do what seems to be the right thing. Hence I pray, and sometimes fret, over what I should or should not do. I am getting a growing sense that anything I can do to try to push this fellow into doing the steps would be just that. Me pushing. It is his decision to do or not do the things that are laid out in the big book as the necessary steps to recovery. His choice. I need to at least make that clear to him tomorrow.

My gut is telling me I also need to tell him to stop calling me every day. I feel my job as his sponsor is to guide him through the steps. The rest is whistling dixie. I am sure he enjoys the regular contact but unless he is moving forward with his step work, our daily conversations are just shooting the breeze. Even if a lot of the talking is about his meeting attendance and things around that topic. In some sense it is like talking about the weather. Its fun, and easy to talk about, but its not really substantive.

It may seem a bit harsh to be so stuck on the step work but for me, this is largely what my role as a sponsor is about. I even told him that from the start so this is not a surprise to anyone I am blessed to work with.

Tomorrow should be an interesting meeting. I wonder what I will be shown, both in terms of what to do and also what this meeting will end up meaning for both of us.

All the best,

AA Blogger

Just checking in as I haven’t written in awhile.

My wife is pregnant and I am now on track to become a father for the first time. My biggest surprise so far has been my almost complete lack of fear or worry regarding what is one of the biggest life changing events you can have (or so I have been told!). I really thought when I was faced with this gift I would have found plenty of ways to worry. I will take as much of this as I can get. Maybe it will change.

On a different but something similar line, I have been focusing a lot more lately on faith. Being more conscious of God, praying more, turning things over as the day develops. This to is a nice thing to have going on and like my lack of worry, I will take all of it I can get. My goal is to build upon this while it is going strong. For the moment, which is all that matters, I am pleased with my spiritual progress these days.

The next few weeks will be building a bridge to what I think will be some other big change in my life. My hope is that I will be getting a job that I would love to have. The process of this decision being made has left me hung out to dry, so to speak, for over a year. One of the things that did was get me into fear and out of what I was just talking about in the last paragraph. For now I feel the path is the right one and that the change is coming. It will be big, in terms of turning me in a new direction for my work and what I will be spending a good bit of time doing.

Better things are coming. I need to live in that truth, not turn it away by getting into fear and enjoy each day that will serve as a bridge between now and what is coming up ahead.

I have a new sponsee as of yesterday. I find this to be a momentous occasion, as it marks me as being back to where I need to be. I have been going to a few meetings a week again. It was a struggle to get back to that point! Now I am familiar with people around the place I now live.

I even went to a different meeting this Saturday morning (in part due to my new pigeon). I was surprised and happy to see many of my new found regulars at my noon meeting at this place. It was also a lot easier to hang out and talk after the meeting, as it emptied out into a large parking lot in back of a church. My noon group empties out into a busy street.

I also can just tell things are way different in where I am at today with my AA community than I was just a few months ago. I am starting to hug people again. I hadn’t noticed I wasn’t until I was doing more of this. I guess that was part of being and feeling like I was outside rather than in the middle of things.

Funny thing my new pigeon is feeling isolated. It was what caused me to reach out to him. I spent a few hours with him and the next day he asked me to sponsor him. He has been sober for a few years, which is nice. I will call him Don on this blog. He is a real talker and he does listen too, but it is tough for him to listen for long. At least this is what it seems so far.

I need to make an appointment with him to tell him my story. This is something I like to do as a way of getting introduced to someone that wants my help. They need to understand I’m hardcore. Serious. And am responsible.

A quote from Alice in Wonderland

“There is no use trying,” Alice said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice, ” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Getting sober opens up a new realm of possibilities. The impossible becomes the what if, and maybe or, even, reality. Time for a (long) story…..

When I was about a year sober I traveled out west with a friend that I has met in the program. We had been fishing in the North Georgia mountains together a few times before. Our trip to Montana was like a dream come true. Trout streams filled with native (not stocked) fish. The Rocky Mountains, not the comparatively small Appalachians. And just the fact that we were going to do something we wanted to do that was good, and good for us, was a novel thing. To say we were excited was an understatement.

A whole other story, which I won’t get into now, is that I had discovered as I was getting sober that I really loved being outdoors.  It felt right to me and made me feel better spiritually. Hence Montana was a really cool idea of a place to get to go. So that too was working on me as our time to leave approached.  I built up a lot of positive expectations of what this trip was going to be like.

It turned out our trip was far, far better than we could have possibly imagined. The fishing was better. The scenery was way better. All that we saw while we were there just boggled our minds. Things like moose, elk and an eagle catching a trout right out of the water. We also did things I would never have imagined. One day we hired someone to take us miles into the mountains, on horseback, to some high elevation lakes.

The place we stayed for most of the trip out west was fairly remote. We did though fly into a larger city and we had to return there to fly home. I decided to stop at the local university there and check it out. I had drank my way out of college when I was 19. With my life starting to get somewhat back in order in sobriety, I had been thinking I might want to go back to school. This was the first time I visited an actual school, and most of what I did was just walk around a bit and go pick up a catalog and application. Really I just did it on a whim.

As we were boarding the plane later that day, I had a quick series of thoughts pass through my mind that changed my life. The first part was that I thought how cool it would be to live in Montana and go to school at the place I just visited. My next thought was that I couldn’t do that, followed by “why not?”

Why these thoughts? What else was behind them?

The first thought, moving to Montana, was something that had been building in me during my visit. I realized if I was able to live in a place like I just experienced that it could really help me to develop spiritually. There is a lot to this (another story to tell at another time) but I knew it would do me a lot of good to be able to live in a place that was not so busy and full of so many people. It was more peaceful, less disturbing somehow, and I surely was learning that I felt a lot closer to God when I was out in nature.

My second thought, about how I couldn’t move to Montana, was just a reflex. Drinking had taught me that I could dream all I wanted but I couldn’t accomplish much. At just 23 I had largely been beaten down enough that I had pretty much given up on thinking things could or would work out for me. Good stuff was just beyond my ability to have happen. So this thought of “no way” was just a natural thought pattern of mine whenever I would think of something good I wanted for my life.

The next thought was a direct result of living sober and doing what I was told to do to recover – Why not? What would stop me from moving to Montana? I did want to go back to school and there was what seemed like a fine school there. And why shouldn’t I have the opportunity to nurture my soul by living in a place that would support my spiritual growth?

Why not. Those two words rang through my head on the plane trip home and for days to come. It was like something had been altered in my pysche. A new part of being sober had tripped on inside me. Instead of slowly dying by giving up on so many things I was awakening to living. The idea of moving to Montana at first blush seemed like an impossible thing. Being sober and having good reasons for wanting to go, well that made it somehow begin to seem like it might be an alright thing to do.

That simple series of thoughts I had as I was leaving Montana set me on a path that took me on an amazing journey in sobriety. I did eventually move to Montana and I stayed for six years.  The journey was not entirely smooth or easy. I had to leave my home group and all that I got sober with behind. I had to try to understand if I was supposed to go, and how to make it happen and pull a lot of things together once it was clear I could and should head west. I was happy – and scared – when I moved.

So much of that time in Montana was just magical. I earned a degree. I held a number of exciting and fun jobs. I stayed sober. I made friends there, over twenty years ago, that were in my wedding party last year. My spiritual life expanded and grew tremendously. And I grew up.

I remember literally sitting on a mountain side one day about a month before I was set to move from there (yet another story, my leaving there and why). I was thinking about life. Why it was right to leave, even though in so many ways I did not want to go.

Moving does of course make you reflective in helpful ways. I thought about  all I had accomplished while I was living there. And I suddenly had the realization I was no longer the scared boy that had arrived in Montana. I had arrived two years sober, unsure of myself in so many ways, but willing to be adventuresome and full of faith that all would be fine.

Everything had changed in the six year adventure that had just unfolded. I had succeeded in school and earned a degree. I had also literally fought forest fires in the mountains. I held that job for five summers  and the last few years I was in charge of the fires I was sent on. That meant I had to get the job done and keep the people that were with me safe. People had given me responsibility, relied on me and respected me. I had learned to honor such trust and to respond well by doing what was expected of me.

I also knew I had grown spiritually in ways I never would have imagined. I was also coming to realize my time in Montana was a period of necessary introspection. I did live with and around people but I also spent a lot of time by myself, and by myself outdoors. Many damaged places inside my soul had been healed by the time I spent in the mountains. An intense period of going inward is fine and can be productive but it proved to not be what I, nor most people, need for the long term. So this time was over and it was time to go.

I had believed that the impossible was possible, six years earlier, and it changed everything.

I guess I want to end by reiterating that last point. If you are sober and can’t seem to believe that things can’t get better for you, that is it just impossible, I would say that you need to believe in the impossible. I did, way back in 1988, and I know it to be true today. This shift in my thinking changed my life and it can change yours.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

I really need to start a post page where I can add those great little one liners folks in the program share with me. Here is one I heard today:

If you want to raise your self-esteem, do esteemable acts.

Pretty simple really. Yet I found that to be a pretty profound statement. I also went to the dictionary:

esteemable – is just something worthy of esteem, so we have to go and check that out….

esteem:

v. to regard with respect, prize

to have great respect or high regard for (someone)

n. Favorable regard

admiration and respect

I hope this simple statement “If you want to raise your self-esteem, do esteemable acts” will stick in my head for a little while. I like the idea of thinking that I should work a little harder at doing the right thing in order to make me feel better about myself. This is not a difficult concept and surely I do know this is true. Yet somehow, and this is why I keep telling myself I should collect these things in a written form, this little phrase motivates me when I hear or read it. It brings clarity, and makes me want to keep me on the right track.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hope you are all well and staying sober.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,

AA Blogger

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. – Buddha

How many gifts are we be blessed with in our sobriety? One of the many I enjoy is finding little gems of insight as I trudge the road to happy destiny. They are right in the middle of the road I am traveling. I never saw these things before. I was to busy, to distracted, to drunk, to depressed….

When I was drinking I did not find gems. Instead I found the crap that lined the ditch. After veering off my path and ending up there I would get up, brush myself off, and discover turds sticking to me.

Go out for a drink to the bar? End up arrested for drunk driving 10 hours later.

Afraid to face a situation I need to deal with? Go get drunk, end up not taking care of business; lose respect, friends, etc.

You know the deal. There was a never ending supply of “surprises” in store for me as I kept off the straight and narrow. And then there is today. The here and now. It has been a long time since I have ended up in a jackpot. Instead I get to experience many good and positive things.

The other day I spoke to a friend that is having to take care of his ailing mother. His mother’s newly diagnosed cancer is well developed. Her lack of going for tests she should have gotten could have made her current prognosis much better. Through all of what is going on, one of the lessons my friend has taken from this situation is that maybe he should be a little more proactive about his own health. He says he realizes that taking care of himself is more important than ever. My friend is happily married and he has a grandchild that he adores. He figures that giving himself the best chance he can to stay healthy will allow him the greatest opportunity to both enjoy his life and to let those who love him have him in their lives as long as possible.

These are things coming from a man I once new as someone who could not stand to use or not to use. His anger was landing him in jail, keeping him from having any kind of loving relationship, and causing him endless grief. He has worked hard at his sobriety for a long time. It was amazing to hear about the fruit of his labor – he has loving people around him and is thinking from the mindset of a loving person. He is quite broken up about his mother’s condition but is walking through the situation with love, compassion, and dignity. The emotions he feels and is trying to deal with are not deterring him from being there to care, as best he can, for his Mom. I am amazed by his strength and the example of caring he presents.

Why did I get to see and experience this person’s transformation and how powerful we can be in practicing love? I think one important element was my showing up at meetings regularly – staying in the middle of my path. In doing this I was there when this fellow was looking for a sponsor. I gave him an opportunity to invite me into his life.

Another gem along the road. Another joy in my life.

A tale of the past………

When I was first getting sober I was full of fear. So much so that I was afraid of people and hardly ever spoke at meetings. One day someone came up to me after a meeting and asked me if I wanted to go to coffee. This question brought up two opposite reactions – one of wanting to go so badly and the other of wanting to run away. I took a chance and said of course. I followed this fellow to the Marietta Square where we went into a local restaurant and ordered some coffee. It was fun, or at least as fun as anything could be for me while I was literally shaking in my shoes.

After we were there a little while this fellow’s girlfriend showed up. She sat down with us, the conversation lasted for about another 5 minutes, and then she started crying. And not just a few tears. I mean she was sobbing uncontrollably. My friend nonchalantly said that they had to go, more or less scooped her up in his arms, and left with her sobbing away. I was bewildered. One minute I was sitting there trying my best to act normal – I was out at coffee with someone else in AA – how exciting and scary. Then before I barely knew what happened this strange woman who had just shown up had broken down uncontrollably and I was left sitting there by myself.

The fellow that I went to coffee with soon became one of my closest friends. We got sober together and were very close for over a decade. For whatever reason we were just real comfortable around one another. I tended to be kind of quiet and he loved to talk. Whenever we got together it was like walking into a meeting. I relaxed and felt at ease.

When I was thirteen years sober and living in the northeast my friend, whom I had been inexplicably drifting away from for a few years, ended up drunk. Another mutual friend of ours called me one day. We talked about how, for a number of reasons, we were not surprised this guy drank again. His path in life had diverged sharply his last year or two sober. He was not going to meetings, was studying esoteric spiritual things, and was generally pushing himself away from a lot of things that were really good in his life.

My friend was not a good drunk. His going back out was a mess. Thankfully, and in many ways surprisingly, he eventually made it back into the rooms. Yet he was changed and not for the better. He was distant, a little sharper with people, and never regained the warmth and Joie-de-vivre he had once exhibited. He bounced in and out of AA a few times but he did finally stick with sobriety again. Unfortunately we never rekindled our friendship. We did have some strange conversations and meetings together these past few years. The best I can describe it was it seemed like the old him was gone and we both new it. That pink elephant in the room made us both uncomfortable.

and the current news of my day…….

I received a call a few hours ago and was told my old friend committed suicide. He was found this morning in a seaside town in Mexico. He left a note. I do not know what he had to say. Apparently he took a hundred or so xanax. He also shopped around for his own casket a few days ago and told the salesman (undertaker?) he wanted to be buried in Mexico when he died.

This fellow was always cooking up crazy schemes. I guess this was his last big idea.

I pray that he has found the peace he was always seeking.

Goodbye my friend.

At my meeting today the discussion was about having the obsession to drink lifted from us and how, once lifted, it can remain so provided we stay on a spiritual path. It filled me with gratitude to recognize that my life has been free of the desire to want to drink for so many years. Yet this program is a day at a time and my current state, not even being able to imagine a situation where I would want to take a drink, can be replaced by the insanity that was once surely killing me. I am fairly certain I will not revert back to who I was provided I keep doing what I have been taught – trust God, clean house, and help others.

One of the benefits of continuing to go to meetings on a regular basis is seeing, hearing, and watching others demonstrate for me how seemingly simply decisions that can lead me away from my sobriety are so easy to make. It seems there is no end to the number of people that want and need to stop yet return to drinking. One common thread in so many of these cases is an inability to keep sobriety as the number one priority. I have spent countless hours with people who have gone back out and heard them describe how life was just too difficult, how they felt so much pressure, and how they just couldn’t handle life on life’s terms. They are not able to see with any clarity how their perception of life’s problems allowed them to lose sight of remaining steadfast in doing whatever they could to stay sober.

I too can find my thinking going down this path from time to time. Up until this point though I have always somehow been brought to recognize that my thinking was misguided and wrong. Relationship woes, dealing with work, physical challenges regarding my health, unwanted changes, financial worries, or whatever are just not that big a deal. Staying on the path of guarding my sobriety, regardless of how life is, must always trump everything else. If it does not, the thought of a drink and the obsession could return. My change in perspective that knocks life’s “big deals” down to size is not brought about by the same consciousness that created it (the self-centered and defeatist part of my mind that just never seems to get totally squashed). The realization that whatever my current troubles are, whether they be real or imagined, are relatively unimportant in light of staying sober is brought about within me by what I have learned in AA and by my connection with God. It can come to me as a result of prayer, going to a meeting and hearing just what I need to hear, talking to another drunk, or reading the big book. Much of what I have learned has so permeated my life that it does not even need to be an AA thing per say that changes my attitude.

This morning for instance, riding my bike home from the meeting, I passed a few homeless fellows that were helping each other dig through a dumpster. I see these two guys just about every day and this morning I thought, there but by the grace of God go I. And with this thought I could put my life into a proper perspective. The obsession to drink, which had brought me to the very brink of death, is something I have not struggled with today. Every thing else really is gravy and knowing this is true, I can enjoy the many blessings I have rather than worrying, being fearful, or not appreciating this day.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

I needed to learn a lot about discipline and courage when I was first getting sober. It was not that I did not know anything about these two things, I just had no notion of being virtuous. The same could be said about what I knew and acted on in regards to many other things like respect, responsibility, etc.

Learning to carry out my actions in accord with what I have come to understand as being moral, or good, or righteous is one of the most important lessons the steps have taught me. To put some of what I will be writing about in context I should
start by presenting an explanation of what virtue means to some:

1. What is virtue? A virtue is the habit of doing good.
2. Why do we say virtue is a habit? It is a firm attitude. It is a way of life. It governs our actions. It guides our conduct by thinking and by faith.
3. How does virtue help us? Virtue brings joy. It helps us govern ourselves. It brings comfort and peace.
4. How do I learn virtue? I pray for the virtue. I learn about virtue. I practice virtue. I follow through and I stick with it. I am not a moral quitter.

These ideas offer an interesting counter to how I practiced, say, courage and discipline in my life before I got sober.

First in regards to courage. It is said that courage is not an absence of fear but a willingness to walk through your fear. I would do a lot of things I was really afraid to do in order to get, or to make sure I would have the means to get, alcohol and drugs. I don’t need to go into a long drunkalogue about all that other than to say that my actions included doing some things that were obviously foolish and dangerous. At times I literally risked my life to get what I so strongly desired. My actions were at times courageous but they were not virtuous. Little of what I did was carried out with any intent to help others nor would it enable me to gain anything that was truly good. I got some relief but little else.

I also became increasingly craven in facing situations that were much more important than finding another drink. These other situations were no less scary to me than those “gotta-get-that-drink” actions I courageously walked through. I would do what it took to get another drink but would run as far and fast as I could from real life. For instance I found it increasingly difficult to have honest conversations with others, let alone be proactive and take simple steps like asking someone for help with something I did not know about. The proverbial “they” might think I was dumb, or weak, or not able to take care of myself. So I would drive through a snowstorm to get to the liquor store or walk through a bad part of the South Bronx but I was afraid to let someone I knew help me with even the most trivial thing.

I could also go on about how much discipline I could sometimes muster. This was of course usually directed towards my slavish desire to be able to drink and drug like I wanted to. I could wait for hours for a dealer, would be obstinate about getting my way if it meant I could drink like I wanted, and would do all kinds of things that only made sense to a deluded fool like myself.

Things changed when they absolutely had to for me. Self preservation was a big part of this, for sure, but I finally acted out of (my normally bad) character and did something good for a change. I did not want to get over on anyone, have someone take care of things for me, or any of that when I asked for help on that first day I started on this journey of sobriety.

I learned about being less self-centered and more virtuous out of necessity. This came to me through an experience called working the 12 steps. Not that I wanted to learn these lessons….as it says in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything about a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect – unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.

I was told I should work the steps and by taking the actions they required I began to experience how my life could be different. Low and behold acting virtuously held rewards that my immoral, unrighteous mind would not have thought possible. I learned to apply some of the courage and discipline I had used to get another drink to other actions. Doing what the steps called no matter what, for instance, and instead of running from facing my life being courageous and walking through my fear.

I had no idea that I was learning to be virtous in those days but boy how things have changed. The clueless, spiritually-bereft person that I once was now only exists as a small withered part of me. That fool that I once was could become strong again if I start drinking again, I am sure, but today he is overshadowed by other parts of me that I have nurtured through practicing being virtuous.
Today I am guided by spiritual principles and understand that striving to live right can be both challenging and rewarding. I can read about virtue and want my life to be more infused with morality than to want to protect and staunchly defend some of my less noble motivations. Even so, I still have plenty of the latter, despite a lot of effort taken over the past nineteen years. Fortunately I can also see that I have come a long way in my life, in how I understand myself, in how I handle myself, in what motivates me, and in how I act. One day at a time I can work at being full of things such as hope, faith, and love, with an understanding of what these actually mean, and move closer to person I want to be.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

I should mention the numbered bullets above that I used to define virtue are borrowed from “A Brief Catechism on Virtue.” While I do not belong to the Catholic church, I find the information on this page to be profoundly helpful in working the eleventh step.