As a sober drunk I am also – just human – and as such have many other issues. One of these is not being able to sleep well. This has been a lifelong problem, starting before I even began drinking. And I had my first drink at 13.
Tonight I am sitting in a hotel room in Cape Cod at 3:30 AM. My wife is sleeping soundly. I like to say she is a professional sleeper and I am just a wanna be.
I subscribe to an RSS feed about sleep problems and when I fired up the computer tonight low and behold one of the articles led me to a new web resource I had never seen before. A list of things to do if you can’t sleep. One was to list your blessings. Gee, what an interesting idea.
Tonight my wife and I watched the sun set at the northernmost part of Cape Cod. As we were standing at the edge of the sea, I saw something pop up out of the water in front of me. It took me a little bit to realize it was a seal’s head. Then just like that it was gone. It turned out there were a few of them there and in a few minutes time you could see one or two pop up somewhere in the vicinity of where we were standing. At one point I tried to take a picture of the beautiful scene in front of us but it turned out the batteries in the camera were dead. I had a moment of rising frustration. Then I realized how blessed I was to be standing right where I was. I love my wife and I love to be on the beach. I also got a sunset and some seals thrown in for good measure. The camera was just not an issue.
I am blessed too today to be sober. One of the great gifts I have been given in learning to live sober is that any initial ideas I have about what might be a problem can often be turned around, just like that. I am lying in bed, not sleeping, eventually have to get up, and feel a little defeated. Five minutes later I read about counting my blessings and feel better. I try to get upset that I can’t take a picture of a scene I want to preserve and quickly realize perhaps I just need to focus on enjoying a really good moment. This skill I was taught has also come in handy during some really serious and relatively weighty issues that have arisen in my sobriety. Most of these things are now just a part of my staying alive rather than it all being alcoholism related stuff. Health issues, people dying, or whatever. Yet I can tell that my ability to weather the storms, large and small, seems to improve with practice.
So that is my report from the cape this early morning. I hope you are all sleeping soberly, and well.
AA is an organisation that seeks to enable total abstinence from alcohol for those for whom drink has become a destructive force. I tried it and rejected it, not simply because it didn’t help me stop drinking but because I concluded I didn’t need to stop drinking. It also jarred with my Catholicism.
At first AA seemed like the solution: it revealed to me how drink had turned from friend to enemy; it opened my eyes to the fact that to avoid getting burnt, you must walk away from the fire; it understood that this was easier-said-than-done, especially alone, but pledged to help me IF I helped myself by obeying its rules.
I thought I was receptive to this contract, ready to resign my ego to it if this meant liberating me from disorderliness. It seemed a no-brainer that drink was responsible for most of my problems and my life would improve without it.
As an AA novice it’s easy to become intoxicated by it as a secret member’s club for People Like You, a support network with strange brainwashing language, rules and rituals that will bring light into your darkness.
Its “shares” about “rock bottoms” and lives “beyond wildest dreams” ultimately failed to win me over though, and its 12 Steps programme soon became unpalatable.
I accept any man-made institution is flawed, I didn’t so much judge AA on its student success rate but on its quasi-religious syllabus. What it taught may achieve the desired result of long-term sobriety for some, but it also turns out warped and unctuous busy bodies too – people who replace a drink obsession with an equally blind fanaticism with evangelizing universal sobriety; people whose joylessness and self-importance make them counter-productive models for discerning newcomers.
I had no time for these Stepford automatons and hypnotized cult followers, or for the Cry Wolfers, the liars who fake tragedy because of their relentless need for attention, and because Britney does rehab too.
AA meetings were not devoid of social interest, however. I’ve always been enamoured by the Beautiful and the Damned, and if you take the bad and dangerous out of the Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, you’re left with a less interesting form of insanity. The members I empathized with most were those who seemed like mildly sedated lunatics, their former reprobate selves threatening to burst through their sober veneers at any moment. It was somehow therapeutic to view dryness as a self-imposed but, for today, necessary sentence rather delude ourselves it was la dolce vita.
It was the Steps that really turned me off. I remember first reading them and thinking, ‘is that it?’ As a Catholic, I unconsciously strove to apply them to every aspect of life anyway, and found it deeply annoying that AA should get any credit for stealing Church teaching, re-packaging it for its one-dimensional agenda, and then get lauded by the spiritually gullible masses for its profundity and enlightenment.
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable (Fair enough but ‘powerless’ is too strong a word, ‘weak-willed is more appropriate).
2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (of course, God provides).
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him (yes, we strive for this, but leave out the ‘as we understood him’ bit please).
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (nothing new there either).
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs (again an ongoing, ingrained Catholic trait)
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character (stating the obvious makes even the profound seem mundane)
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings (it’s called prayer and we pray for others as well as ourselves as too much naval gazing is dangerous).
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all (see 4, 5 and 6 brackets).
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others (see 8 brackets).
10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it (tick).
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out (tick, next!).
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs (sorry, I can’t carry this message in the name of AA, but I’d advise anyone to open their heart to God within His One, True, Apostolic Church).
It was nauseating to hear people share their struggles with the Steps in hushed reverential tones, not to mention to endure moronic drips explain their concept of “Higher Power” (‘for me it’s Mother Nature because I like flowers, yada, yada yada’).
I revere Church authority but found the arrogance and delusion of fascistic, self-important, power-tripping AA “sponsors” laughable as they tried to present an intellectual brick wall against dissent, as if they were somehow infallible and indefectible. ‘You’re not getting it because you’re sick’, they coo gleefully. ‘Submit or sink, my stubborn friend’. Bollocks, the phrase is ‘sink or SWIM’ and swimming requires your own muscle-power, and brain-power for the co-ordination bit.
Any Catholic is familiar with the guidance that ‘to avoid sin, you must avoid causes of near sin’. The only pertinent advice I received from AA was ‘to not pick up a drink one day at a time’. Meetings occasionally had social merit and were a way of filling in the time formerly spent drinking. In this respect they offered replacement therapy, rather like chewing nicotein gum.
But that’s it!
I can appreciate your experiences with AA and that fact that it was not, in the end, something that provided the answer you needed for your drinking problem.
I really can’t say whether it is unfortunate (why can’t more people be helped) or fortunate (we are all individuals and nothing is a one size fits all proposition when it comes to what is best for any individual) that AA is not the answer to every person with a drinking problem’s answer.
I cannot agree though that AA
There are many people in AA, as there is in any organization (say, like the Catholic church), and not everyone has our best interests in mind nor can be just right in helping us on our path in life. It is also true that many, many other organizations have norms and rituals that can be seen by some as being a dominant and potentially overbearing part of their existence. I do not kneel and face Mecca numerous times a day. That seems a bit strange to me. I don’t belong to a Catholic church and participate in the rituals that surround confession. Some of that also seems a bit strange to me. Yet despite that fact that there are terrorists in the world that worship Alla I do not believe that Islam has become a destructive force.
Regardless, I appreciate your opinion and hope that my comments can also be regarded as mine. I neither speak for AA nor represent it in a way that gives me any special status to speak for anyone one else that is a member.
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