Helping Yourself or a Colleague / Success Stories
Story
#1: About
being connected
Dr. Alan (07/13/02)
There is no way I could have understood what I have written here without first experiencing the pain of addiction and then the wonder of recovery. I do so hope it helps someone else choose the latter.
I came to accept recovery long after recovery had accepted me. When I first came around, brought down by drugs and brought in by the DEA, the last thing I wanted was to sit around with a bunch of drunks and other addicts. Especially doctors who, I incorrectly assumed, had much better lifestyles than mine. My approach to life until then was based on a "me versus the world" mentality. I had never fit in well, especially without drugs in my system. No way would I fit with this crowd, whether under influence or not!
But in time, I began to relate to what others were saying. It took a long while before I felt comfortable. I eventually began to feel a connection to people that was lacking from all the rest of my relationships. I found that I had ended up exactly where I belonged, with other professionals suffering through and healing from the repercussions of addiction, trying to find a better way of life.
CDAD has become a steppingstone for me. In giving up bravado, I gained courage. In letting go of trying to control people and situations, I gained self-control. I was once a self-proclaimed loner. Somehow I've gone from attending 12-Step meetings to enjoying meeting people in all different setttings. My experience has given me the strength to join the human race and accept, even welcome, life's challenges.
Story
#2: A
story of a kind of spirituality
Dr. John
(09/09/02)
When I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), taken by a man who was not himself in recovery but who knew a great deal about A.A. because of his mother's illness, I was too sick to care where I was. It was just another segment of a particularly distressing day. I had come to, become conscious that is, suicidal, depressed and guilty in the early a.m. Nothing really new there. I had been on a four-day bender, most of it in Boston's Combat Zone that included alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. George had showed up later and spent most of the day with me ending up at what I later learned was a Sunday afternoon speaker discussion meeting on Boylston St. in Boston at a church. We arrived late, it was a big meeting, urban, crowded, hot and I was shivering and sweating from withdrawal. On one side of the room were mental patients doing the Thorazine shuffle. On the other side of the room were some loud, old, street drunks in for coffee and sandwich. In the middle was everybody else, seated in semicircle of old wooden chairs, listening to a woman speaker with blue rinsed hair and an appearance that suggested comfortable maturity. Obviously she'd never been drunk in her life. The only think I heard was her puzzling, repetitious response, “You don't have to drink even if your ass is on fire.” to inaudible comments from the group. Then everybody stood up and started the Lord's Prayer and I joined in because of George's ”What do you got to loose?” comment. And at the end a guy gave me the book of Alcoholics Anonymous with his first name and phone number in it and we left.
It's 24 plus years later and it took me two years to get truly sober, slipping and sliding through A.A. meetings in Alston and Brighton neighborhood where I was living and the whole rest of Metro Boston A.A. circles so I've been sober a little more than 22 years. It's important to know it can happen. No alcohol, no marijuana, no cocaine, no hallucinogens, not today anyway. I didn't use today; I'm sober. I want to relate my spiritual journey. It will help me and that's what matters to me, maybe it will help you and that would be good too.
Those first few days, weeks even, I didn't care much except about returning to some normal state of consciousness. I had a lot of “outside problems”. My wife wanted a divorce, I hadn't paid my taxes, I needed to sell a house to payoff my debts, my first wife was moving to Florida, I wasn't working, etc. But I just hung in there with A.A. people, went to tons of meetings and just listened. I realized that the people in A.A. could stay sober and clean and I couldn't, I was slipping and sliding, and I had to learn how they did that. There was a lot of talk about God, I was agnostic but it didn't bother me. I had suspended my disbelief. I was feeling better, staying sober, that's all I cared about. People told me to focus on that and everything else would work out and I believed that, because I realized very quickly that people around me in A.A. as different as they might be were just like me inside, where it counted, emotionally. I looked for a way in not a way out and I found it.
I read the first section of Alcoholics Anonymous right away, particularly the chapter “We Agnostics”. It was obviously written in the nineteen thirties and forties but I “got it” in some way, I heard all the arguments they posed for the existence of God, it was easy to argue, bit I knew these writers felt like me. I didn't care to argue. In A.A. I heard the expression “God doesn't make garbage.” And it meant a lot to me because for a long time I had felt like human garbage, depressed, no self-esteem, a bad person. It didn't matter whether God really made me or not, what mattered was I felt like garbage. A related bit of wisdom was “I'm not a bad person trying to get better, I'm a sick person trying to get well.” I could relate to that too. I made a lot of my life understandable and my responsibility was to take my treatment: go to meetings, follow the suggestions. I took comfort in prayer, out loud, at meetings: the Serenity Prayer and the Lord's Prayer. And I prayed ceaselessly subjectively, both the prayers I had been taught as a Catholic and just conversations with whatever I thought God was and of course I had no idea, still have no idea. Lots of time I thought it wasn't really efficacious, lots of the time I didn't believe in the God I was praying to but I did it anyway.
There were several core suggestions that I followed because they seemed to work: “Don't drink or drug. Go to meetings. Join a Group. Ask God for help in the morning on your knees, say thank you in the evening, on your knees. Help another alcoholic.” It was very clear in the circle I traveled, that it was the first suggestion, not to use, that mattered and you needed to do whatever you needed to make that happen. That was what our life was about then, that's what my life is about now. Anything else that happens after that is good, a “fringe benefit” as they say. The only thing A.A. promises is a day without a drink. I knew then and I know now that if I had received what I deserved for the consequences of my use of alcohol and other drugs I might be dead or worse. God knows all the people I hurt and betrayed, the resources I had wasted, the unethical behavior. I knew and still know that my responsibility, my restitution is to stay sober. I'll take anything else I can reasonably get in life but staying sober is the prime directive.
Now over the years my relationship with God has waxes and waned. Sometimes I pray on my knees, often I don't, although there is a peculiarly pleasant and fulfilling feeling when I do pray on my knees. I work the Steps in a gentle and flexible way, taking what I can use today leaving what I can't. I'm trying for progress not perfection and I've made a lot of progress but I see myself as just one of many people on the planet struggling to move forward. I try not to hurt people, God knows (there you go, what is God? Is God at all?). I've done more than my share in this area. I try to help when I can.
Sometimes I think that the divine principle is expressed only in other people. People who are there at a particular time, say a particular thing, help us in a particular way. Sometimes they stay around for a long time in our lives; sometimes it's just a chance encounter. Sometimes we ourselves are a piece of the higher power. The teachers appear when they are needed. Sometimes I'm able to listen. Sometimes all these ideas sound like bull shit and life is just what it is, nothing more.
I think about two themes quite a bit that relate to my spiritual musings. The first is that research has expanded our understanding of addiction dramatically framing it correctly I think as a disease of reward centers of the brain. We've come to understand the genetics, the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the reward centers. Researchers are onto the endogenous psychoactive substances, the synaptic dynamics, the receptors systems and even the long-term neural changes that seem so important to addiction. We have a cornucopia of new medicines to treat addiction, as well as, new cognitive-behavioral treatments that appear to work pretty well. Does this mean that soon we will treat addiction like hypertension, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other chronic diseases? That we'll give patients medicine and encourage them to change their life styles and help them with that medical stuff, but prayer? God? Will there really be a place for those things in fifty years?
On the other hand, sometimes I'm convinced that the intellectual capabilities are over used, over emphasized, and overrated in the contemporary world. There may be other ways of knowing that we neglect. When I was first getting sober I was living on a mattress, on the floor of the House I was selling to pay my debts. My only companions were a little dog named “Solow” and some Zen books. I had read Zen and tried unsuccessfully to understand it since college. There, on a mattress, suffering, and having involuntarily surrendered my worldly possessions, participating in A.A., I often felt things were OK. I thought I knew the answer. I thought that I'd had a little sartori . I thought I had learned that if I stayed in the moment, didn't use and continued to put one foot in front of the other, that was “it”. “It” was in the not trying, the giving up, and the giving-in.
A day at a time I'm moving toward the conclusion of this life. I'm enjoying myself, staying sober, trying to be present and helpful to others. Maybe this is the only life and God is only the computer program designer and when it's over it's over. Or maybe there is no designer other than evolution. I'll find out, hopefully sober, and end up somewhere or nowhere with anyone else. Don't drink, don't drug, let's do this together.