I’m going to try to blog some of my recovery process. I’m doing it for two reasons. One is that there’s value to me in writing it down, and hearing from others about the process. The other is that there’s precious little out there in the way of personal stories of recovery, outside of the meetings themselves.
(I know that I don’t owe this to anyone—I’m doing it because I want to, not because I feel obligated. But Anil’s right that people in a semi-anonymous medium can sometimes turn nasty. I’ll delete comments that I consider to be destructive or meanspirited, and I will close comments on all the recovery entries if that happens regularly.)
Last night I went to my third Al-Anon meeting; each has been in a different location, and each has had a very different overall “personality.” Rochester isn’t an enormous city, but it’s large enough to support more than 60 different meetings each week, and I decided I wanted to try several of them before deciding which one I’d make my “home” group. (Unlike AA, which typically has many groups that meet daily, the Al-Anon groups all seem to meet weekly.)
I liked the meeting I went to last night, for a couple of reasons. In part, it was the size and layout of the meeting room. (User experience matters even when you’re not sitting in front of a screen.) The first two meetings I went to were on the large side (20-25 people), with chairs set in a large circle. Last night was a smaller meeting—more like a dozen people—sitting around tables that formed a square. Another factor was that there was someone at the meeting I already knew—someone I’d become friends with online in another context, and who had told me that this particular meeting was reasonably accepting of people with non-traditional religious beliefs. It helped me a bit to have a familiar face in the room, even the face itself was only familiar from Orkut photos.
The part about the religious beliefs was important, because a critical component of all twelve-step programs is the acknowledgment of a “higher power.” While many (if not most) participants in these programs seem to conceptualize their higher power as a traditional judeo-christian “god,” often with sentient characteristics (“my higher power won’t give me anything that I’m not able to handle,” “my higher power is a compassionate power who loves me and supports me,” etc), the literature emphasizes that each person can have their own sense of what that higher power is.
I spent a little time after the meeting talking with the person I knew from online about these “higher power issues.” I had fully expected that this would be the most difficult part of a twelve-step program for me, because—like this friend—I don’t subscribe to a standard theological model. I don’t believe in a “god,” not in any traditional sense. I do, however, believe that the universe is not random, and I believe that I am not the center of it. I believe that there are flows of positive energy, that there are patterns, and that there are ways to fight against those natural patterns and ways to flow with them. I can feel when I’m out of balance, and when I’m not. And it turns out that it hasn’t been difficult for me to use this sense of natural order and energy in the context of “higher power” in most of the 12-step literature.
I’m planning to buy a couple of books from Amazon soon—The Zen of Recovery, and A Skeptic’s Guide to the 12 Steps (which Amazon thoughtfully bundles together).
The meeting yesterday was the first one where I actually talked—at the previous meetings I’d only listened to other people. But the daily reading from one of the Al-Anon books had hit home for me that day:
The First Step tells me that I am powerless over alcohol, which is admittedly stronger than I am, since there was no way for me to keep the drinker away from the bottle. It also suggests that the confusion resulting from this helplessness has done things to my life that are not easy to endure. Then, going on to Step Two, I find that the Twelve Steps are a closely-linked chain that will give me a clear understanding of my situation.
It says “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” This means that although we cannot help ourselves, there is help at hand. I am required to admit, also, that my own behavior was not sane. This is an invitation to humility, without which there can be no progress.
Hard stuff for a self-professed control freak to swallow. But it’s becoming clear to me how important it is for me to let go of my long-held belief (or need to believe) that I can protect the people around me from the consequences of their own actions.
It’s also important for me to admit my own confusion and irrationality. There’s a lot of denial that goes into supporting an alcoholic’s choices, and a lot of guilt. For me, the guilt is that I didn’t keep the alcoholic from drinking. I worked hard at denying that the problem existed, and my first reaction during the past few weeks was to beat myself up about that—why didn’t I realize how bad the problem was? How could I have been so blind? Someone who cared would certainly have recognized and addressed the problem! But a close friend said to me recently “You didn’t know because s/he didn’t want you to know, that’s all.” She was right. For me to have known would have meant sacrificing trust—checking up on details, assuming the worst. That would have been far more destructive in the long run.
So yes, I was powerless over alcohol…no amount of love or support or concern or intervention on my part could have kept an active alcoholic away from the bottle. I’m clearly not the boss of them. There’s a lot of relief and room for healing just in that acknowledgment. As to the higher power restoring my sanity…that’s not hard to acknowledge, either. I think about the healing effects of sitting on a beach watching the waves, or hiking up a mountain trail, or just sitting on my front porch watching a thunderstorm roll past. It’s when I pay attention to the natural powers in the world around me—the ones I can’t control, but that I can acknowledge and connect to—that I start to feel peaceful and strong again.
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