AA Blog

photo GiselaGiardino

Does it matter what you say? No it doesn’t, as long as you do not care about the words you use or the thoughts you express.

Not thinking about my actions is old school bullshit. And my actions include what I have to say. Living as an active alcoholic, I largely said what I thought would help me the most. The problem with this was my thoughts were based on immature, self-centered ideas that were largely devoid of any wisdom. I became good at lying to myself and others. I wouldn’t say words became cheap, but they increasingly become less concerned about anyone elses’ welfare. Words were very valuable and useful to me. I used them to help me get what I wanted. And getting what I needed was of the ultimate importance in my increasingly narcissistic world.

Getting sober it was important to learn and practice being honest. No more lying, at least all the time – I think it is extremely rare that anyone becomes totally honest and I am still no saint. I made dramatic progress in being more careful about what I said to people. I, like any sobering drunks, even took pride in my new found ability to act so righteously – I was not always lying most of the time!

This was a great achievement in light of where my actions had been when I was drinking. Yet this could not be the end of my working on how I talk to other people. Many children begin to mature by rising to the level I had now achieved. Therefore I had achieved parity in my communication skills with someone half my age.

Words have power. They can express intent, emotion, and suggest future possibilities. Being positive, loving, and optimistic is a far cry from being judgmental, angry and despairing. My state of mind and my words have real power to influence both how I feel and how people I interact with feel. If I am in a foul mood, I may talk in a gloomy manner. This in turn can make me feel depressed. I think you can also appreciate it can be unnerving to be around someone in a foul mood. The opposite is of course true too. Through prayer and practice I can work at being more positive and upbeat in my thoughts and actions. It can be inspiring to be around someone who is upbeat, full of love, and has that special spiritual gleam in their eye.

Working on what I have to say to others is an extremely important part of improving myself. The side effects are of course momentous. What I put out to the world tends to come back to me tenfold. The Prayer of St. Francis offers but one way of focusing on working towards making my actions more positive.

I’m sure most of what I have already said makes sense to a sober drunk. Lets though take this out of an abstract form of thinking about such things. Here is a story to help you focus and think about why it may matter what you say and why you should care how you interact with other people. I think this might have a bigger impact in driving home what I am trying to convey.

A young girl was on the train to Auschwitz, and yes it was during that horrible time. The train was on its way to the death camp. This teenage girl was with her eight year old brother. He sat next to her on the train. They had already been separated from their parents. She looked down and noticed her brother’s shoes were gone. Her reaction was to be upset and she scolded him. In a loud and forceful tone. “Why are you so stupid, can’t you keep your things together?”

These words turned out to be that last she ever spoke to her brother. Soon thereafter they were separated and never saw each other again. He did not survive the camp.

When she walked out of Auschwitz, a rare survivor, she made a decision. She vowed to never say anything that couldn’t stand as the last thing she ever said.

This story is from a talk given by Benjamin Zander. He is an impassioned and positive person, that feels strongly about teaching people to appreciate classical music. He is a conductor but he also gives talks, and speaks to people, all over the world. You can see one of these talks here.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

Today is the 21st anniversary of my sobriety. Amazing!

photo Jessica Driver

It is still chilling to remember this time, twenty-one years ago now, and what that was like. I so fervently hope I never have to feel and experience most of what happened, and how I felt then, ever again.

The ironic thing is in the midst of all of what happened I had a profound spiritual experience.  During the fleeting few minutes that it occurred I was more at peace than I have ever been in my life. It was a palpable ease and lightness. The best way I can describe it is that I felt like I was sitting in the palm of God’s hand – and I knew it. That explanation of what it was like though is all retrospective in that I didn’t even believe in God then. I had no idea what had happened was a spiritual experience, or what that meant, or how deeply I had been changed. The immediate benefit was a sense that I knew I could not drink or drug anymore and, as I was to discover, the obsession had been lifted from me. That was of course good.

The few minutes of intense peace I had that night were framed by strange and very opposite feelings and experiences. I had just been revived, through someone giving me CPR, and I had been gone. Dead. The three people around me were very freaked out – yet I was fully enveloped in a feeling of total peace. I could not figure out why they looked so pained and worried. I knew everything was more than all right. Why didn’t they know this too? Everything was fine now and into the future.

Then my few minutes of having my senses about me in a way I never had before, and in someways have never had since, ended. The ambulance, the hospital, a night in intensive care. Not fun. The sense of peace was long gone.

My first sober day was spent in the hospital. Horrible. I laid there and thought about how badly I had failed in life. How could I live now that I could no longer drink or drug? Like it says in the Big Book – I could not imagine life with or without it. I felt so much fear, self-loathing, guilt, and remorse. It was numbing, like a huge weight bearing down on me.

Easily the most horrible day of my life, that day in the hospital. It was my nadir. I could not know it would mark the beginning of my ascent from hell back into the land of the living. Sane, spiritual, love-filled living. Something that bears no likeness to the mess that my old life was.

It is easy to imagine that my old self died when I died that night. But it didn’t. A different me was forged from that experience, along with the Grace I was given by having some powerful changes take place in my attitude and outlook. Yet the old me is only an elbow’s reach away. I have no doubt. Despite all the blessings, good people around me today, the tools I have at my disposal, God in my life, and all the rest – I could still be right back into that dark despair and fear in no time at all.

It would only take me taking a drink….one is never enough for me….and I left off at a place that when I drank I had no idea what was going to happen. Other than what did happen was more and more consistently something unpleasant, bad, and unsustainable. Stuff like dying. That is what awaits me. Any day, any year that I want to pick up again. It doesn’t matter when. My guess is that old me will only be able to give up waiting for me to drink again when I do die, and stay dead, at some point in the future.

Today I can feel especially grateful that God, AA, my friends and family, and other things have all helped me continually kick that old me into the gutter and keep him out of my way. It is so nice to live, have normal living problems, and have love be a part of my life.

So good to be sober!

Wishing you all the best in your sobriety,
AA blogger

For those not in the know, the title of this post is the name of a Frank Sinatra song. One of the many songs that were played at my wedding last month. The marriage and the celebration were a wonderful affair. I am still bowled over by so many things that were a part of this weekend. The gathering, ceremony, and celebration provided me with a lot of opportunity to reflect on my life and my current circumstances. The bottom line is am tremendously blessed.

There are so many things I want to write about that this will need to be a post of many parts.

Lets start with my bride and how getting married to her makes me reflect on relationships, attraction, and having good people in my life.

I am, quite frankly, pretty amazed at my wife’s personality and what I think of as her soul. She is a genuinely sweet and good person. I rarely see her get angry and I believe this emotional reaction is just not something she has ever cared to resort to. Her experiences in her family life and with her friends is quite unlike my own. In her immediate family there is is not any alcoholism or addiction and her parents are decent folks that have worked hard to do the best they can for their children. Most of her friends, many of which she has known for many years, are good, interesting, and bright people.

My brides life has not been sheltered and all sweetness though – she has seen others in her extended family and some of her friends go through all kinds of struggles that we in recovery find par for the course of life – mental illness, addiction, etc. My wife also had brain surgery a few years before I met her. My perception is that her experiencing some unpleasant parts of life have given her a good dose of humility and perhaps a greater appreciation for life itself.

There is more to this picture I am painting but the outlines provide an image I am trying to present – my wife has not become who she is in a way that resembles my own path. I have spent twenty years aspiring to be healthier, happier, more positive, more caring, and more of the person I should be. The change in my life has been dramatic. She, on the other hand, has had a lot of good qualities in spades and as far as I can tell is still improving in many areas that I think she already does pretty well with.

The point of all this is that for me I am just floored that my working at my sobriety has allowed me to attract such a wonderful person into my life. I have been very conscious of and learned a lot about where I am at and how I am doing by paying attention to the people I have around me. As an active drunk I neither really cared for nor seemed to seek out these kinds of people. It used to be stressful to be around decent people, for me and for them.

My first sober relationship was very interesting. I grew and learned a lot from that experience. I was also very fortunate that all the insanity it supported and fostered drove me deeper into my program rather than justifying going back to drinking. I did a lot of wrong things in that relationship. I also know enough today to see that similar situations I have seen others gone through have gone either way – many end up drinking again but a few get back into working the AA program. Anyway that first sober relationship was crazy but it simply was what it was. In part it reflected who I was and where I was at. Just as the drunken relationships I had had before were with other insane people and were a similar mirror.

Another aspect of all this is that I have become a decent person that my wife and her parents want to have in their lives. They are in fact pleased to have me become a part of their family. I have self-worth, respect, and dignity today. Years ago I would have thought this was amazing and that I was somehow reaching beyond who I was – almost as if I was just lucky to have landed where I have. This is just not true for me today.

When I was getting sober and working the steps that allowed me to “clean house,” I was led to see that my morals and actions were incongruent. There were some beliefs I had that were good ideas but they were not really guiding my behavior. I also held conflicting ideas that made no sense when placed side by side with one another. So I was taught, and practiced, and learned from experience what being decent is all about. It is really gratifying to know I do not need to act like a nut and that I really don’t want to anyway. I usually have a pretty good idea of what the right thing to do is whenever life challenges me (“we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us”)  and I can even act accordingly a lot of  the time. While I had no conception of this twenty years ago, this way of living is great and can create the very situation where I can get married to a wonderful woman with a nice family.