Daily Reprieve

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives. . . . they have turned to easier methods. . . . But they had not learned enough humility. . .  (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 72-73)

Humility sounds so much like humiliation, but it really is the ability to look at myself – and honestly accept what I find. I no longer need to be the “smartest” or “dumbest” or any other “est.” Finally, it is okay to be me. It is easier for me to accept myself if I share my whole life. If I cannot share in meetings, then I had better have a sponsor – someone with whom I can share those “certain facts” that could lead me back to a drunk, to death. I need to take all the Steps. I need the Fifth Step to learn true humility. Easier methods do not work.

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I am working on my fourth 4th step.  I think there are members of AA who have really good 10th step habits that do not need a periodic return to the moral inventory.  I still find that I am my greatest resentment.  If you are so inclined, I would appreciate your prayers today.  I want to be thorough without becoming morbid.  I would really like to be okay with me.  For those of you who are also struggling with the writing out of your moral inventory in death-ink, I pray for you.  May we find each other free of the bondage of self.

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking.  (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 72)

I certainly didn’t leap at the opportunity to face who I was, especially when the pains of my drinking days hung over me like a dark cloud. But I soon heard at the meetings about the fellow member who just didn’t want to take Step Five and kept coming back to meetings, trembling from the horrors of reliving his past. The easier, softer way is to take these Steps to freedom from our fatal disease, and to put our faith in the Fellowship and our Higher Power.

END OF QUOTE

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“Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it-then you are ready to take certain steps.

At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.”  (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 58)

I had to find an alternative to the way I had been living.  I had to find a more sane approach to life.  The steps collectively and some in particular, such as the fifth step, I found challenging and difficult.  They escorted me through the hallways of internal haunted houses.  I tried to create a hybrid creature of my old ways of providing creative and intellectual  modifications forged to the simplicity and spirituality of the steps.  I kept producing a more complicated but self-justifying version of recovery.

Yesterday I heard someone say in a meeting that if he needed an intellectual answer to his recovery, he would have just taken the Big Book home and studied.  He continued that if he was to find the heart of this program, it had to be as he connected with others in the Fellowship.  The fifth step takes the mind of the moral inventory and gives it a heart.

Today, I am in agreement with the final statement of the contributor to the reflections; “The easier, softer way is to take these Steps to freedom from our fatal disease, and to put our faith in the Fellowship and our Higher Power.”

Heard in a meeting yesterday; “When I first came into these rooms, the fellowship told me recovery was an inside job, and that they would hold the light while I started digging.”

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

A.A. experience has taught us we cannot live alone with our pressing problems and the character defects which cause or aggravate them. If . . . Step Four . . .has revealed in stark relief those experiences we’d rather not remember . . . then the need to quit living by ourselves with those tormenting ghosts of yesterday gets more urgent than ever. We have to talk to somebody about them.   (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 55)

Whatever is done is over. It cannot be changed. But my attitude about it can be changed through talking with those who have gone before and with sponsors. I can wish the past never was, but if I change my actions in regard to what I have done, my attitude will change. I won’t have to wish the past away. I can change my feelings and attitudes, but only through my actions and the help of my fellow alcoholics.

END OF QUOTE

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I was in a meeting yesterday, and someone who has watched me bounce around the rooms and struggle with the relapse rodeo told me, “You can’t do this thing alone.”

Today I understand that more than ever.  I still have to be reminded.  Sometimes my various fears present themselves as God, and pull me back to isolated self-reliance.  Then I lose ground.  This is when I have to reconnect to my actual Higher Power, and find my way back to into the fellowship of AA.  Spirituality is fed through connection.

I heard an interesting nugget from the fellowship  in my sunrise meeting this morning; “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

I have decided that my sponsor is a very good sponsor and I may not be the best of sponsees.  I am working on it.  In talking to him he said;

“Besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

Another bit of wit I heard in a meeting was; “I have been born again so many times my soul has stretch marks.”

Just thought I would share.

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

Until we had talked with complete candor of our conflicts, and had listened to someone else do the same thing, we still didn’t belong.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 57)

After four years in A.A. I was able to discover the freedom from the burden of buried emotions that had caused me so much pain. With the help of A.A., and extra counseling, the pain was released and I felt a complete sense of belonging and peace. I also felt a joy and a love of God that I had never experienced before. I am in awe of the power of Step Five.

END OF QUOTE

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Connection.  I need it.  I suspect that we all do on some level.  The invisible barrier of self-protection that I exaggerate in my heart from fortress to prison fails to protect me from myself.  I lived locked up with an internal judge dogging my heals.  Sometimes, I drank to make those persistent condemnations shut up, because my only reprieve was an isolated oblivion.

I was recently encouraged to allow myself to become vulnerable.  I asked what she meant about being vulnerable.  “Vulnerable enough to look for help, to talk to your sponsor or someone you wish were your sponsor when that’s the next right thing to do.”

The liberating vulnerability of the fifth step is as powerful as my willingness to embrace complete candor about those internal conflicts.

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

Another great dividend we may expect from confiding our defects to another human being is humility – a word often misunderstood. . . . it amounts to a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 58)

I knew deep inside that if I were ever to be joyous, happy and free, I had to share my past life with some other individual. The joy and relief I experienced after doing so were beyond description. Almost immediately after taking the Fifth Step, I felt free from the bondage of self and the bondage of alcohol. That freedom remains after 36 years, a day at a time. I found that God could do for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

END OF QUOTE

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I was cut-off from God and man.  Alcohol was like an abusive and predatory mate that I had allowed to dominate my life.  In order to have the most effective control over my mind,  to manipulate me, it had to isolate me from my traditional support network.  It developed in me an ability to believe and speak deception.  It used my own desire for recognition and empowerment to enslave me to an “isolated me,” which is the lowest version of myself.  This was my bondage to self.  This was my bondage to alcohol.  I avoided the humiliation of this reality by learning to lie.  I thought this skill development was to protect myself or to protect others I loved.  It was actually to protect my pathological relationship to alcohol.

In step one of this program I had to come to realize the nature of my relationship with alcohol.  I had to let go of the dubious skill of self-deception and recognize the nature of this abusive and humiliating union between myself and my chemical rapist.  I was powerless to control my drinking because I had developed a need for the intoxicated state.  My life had become unmanageable because of the progressive isolation.  This does not mean that I could not function.  It simply means that I no longer believed that I could function without the aid of alcohol and that its aid trumped any other relationship so that I could maintain that illusion of lone wolf self-reliance.

This principle behind step one has been expressed both as Honesty and Surrender.  The principle behind step five has been expressed as Truth and Integrity.  Step one is an event that requires a recognition of our humiliation.  Step five is the culmination of a process that builds in us humility because we can see more clearly who we are.  That truth begins the process of my freedom from the bondage of my isolated self and my bondage to alcohol.  We know we are free when we no longer feel the need to lie about who we are.  My ability to recoil from alcohol is directly related to my ability to recoil from the deception within my head and what spills from my lips.

I am grateful to be connected to a program that allows me to humble myself in integrity rather than live in the humiliation imposed by denial.

SOURCE ON AA PRINCIPLES:  [ http://www.barefootsworld.net/aaprinciples.html ]

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

If we still cling to something we will not let go, we ask God to help us be willing.  (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 76)

When I had taken my Fifth Step, I became aware that all my defects of character stemmed from my need to feel secure and loved. To use my will alone to work on them would have been trying obsessively to solve the problem. In the Sixth Step I intensified the action I had taken in the first three Steps – meditating on the Step by saying it over and over, going to meetings, following my sponsor’s suggestions, reading and searching within myself. During the first three years of sobriety I had a fear of entering an elevator alone. One day I decided I must walk through this fear. I asked for God’s help, entered the elevator, and there in the corner was a lady crying. She said that since her husband had died she was deathly afraid of elevators. I forgot my fear and comforted her. This spiritual experience helped me to see how willingness was the key to working the rest of the Twelve Steps to recovery. God helps those who help themselves.

END OF QUOTE

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I think facing fear is one of the big ways in which the steps cause us to move against our natural desires. In many ways, my fear-meter is as broken as my guilt-a-meter.  Fear is meant to protect us from danger.  It is such a primal emotion and takes many spiritual modifications to keep our protector from being the warden of our imprisoned soul.  I think a key to overcoming fear paralysis is to be able to discern the true from the false, with a willingness to walk out whatever we discover to be our reality.  The exploration and sharing of the moral inventory starts this process of an altered perception of hopeless victim to connected empowerment.

“There is no spoon” – Neo in the Matrix

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

All of A.A.’s Twelve Steps ask us to go contrary to our natural desires . . . they all deflate our egos. When it comes to ego deflation, few Steps are harder to take than Five. But scarcely any Step is more necessary to longtime sobriety and peace of mind than this one.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 55)

After writing down my character defects, I was unwilling to talk about them, and decided it was time to stop carrying this burden alone. I needed to confess those defects to someone else. I had read – and been told – I could not stay sober unless I did. Step Five provided me with a feeling of belonging, with humility and serenity when I practiced it in my daily living. It was important to admit my defects of character in the order presented in Step Five: “to God, to ourselves and to another human being.” Admitting to God first paved the way for admission to myself and to another person. As the taking of the Step is described, a feeling of being at one with God and my fellow man brought me to a resting place where I could prepare myself for the remaining Steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety.

END OF QUOTE

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I take away the following thoughts from the today’s meditation.

“All of A.A.’s Twelve Steps ask us to go Contrary to Our Natural Desires,” and they “Deflate Our Egos.”  This is especially true of Step Five.

The long term effect of step five is to produce a “feeling of being at one with God and my fellow man,” and to find a Resting Place used to build “a Full and Meaningful Sobriety.”

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

Such parts of our story we tell to someone who will understand, yet be unaffected. The rule is we must be hard on ourself, but always considerate of others.  (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 74)

Respect for others is the lesson that I take out of this passage. I must go to any lengths to free myself if I wish to find that peace of mind that I have sought for so long. However, none of this must be done at another’s expense. Selfishness has no place in the A.A. way of life.

When I take the Fifth Step it’s wiser to choose a person with whom I share common aims because if that person does not understand me, my spiritual progress may be delayed and I could be in danger of a relapse. So I ask for divine guidance before choosing the man or woman whom I take into my confidence.

END OF QUOTE

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Must I now consider a magical element of this program?  After I have established some form of relationship with a loving Higher Power, I must ask for guidance in the choosing of a sponsor or one who I can trust with my completed moral inventory.  It must not be the product of isolating selfishness.  This cuts off vital connections.  Whoever I tell it to, must not be harmed in the telling.  In order to hear from a loving Gomu (God of my understanding), I must be loving.  Even if just long enough to hear.

I disagree that selfishness has no place in A.A., because there is a self-love, a self-preservation, that gets me into the rooms and causes me to be willing to go to any lengths for sobriety.

On page 62 of Alcoholics Anonymous, it states that “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness.”  It does not say that we are to be rid of selfishness, but THIS selfishness.  What kind of selfishness?  Prior to the statement isolating selfishness is described.  It is a good read, particularly with this in mind.

That is why you can hear that this is a “selfish program” and we must be “rid of this selfishness,” and both be absolutely true.

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

The real tests of the situation are your own willingness to confide and your full confidence in the one with whom you share your first accurate self-survey. . . .Provided you hold back nothing, your sense of relief will mount from minute to minute. The dammed-up emotions of years break out of their confinement, and miraculously vanish as soon as they are exposed. As the pain subsides, a healing tranquility takes its place.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pages 61 – 62)

A tiny kernel of locked-in feelings began to unfold when I first attended A.A. meetings and self-knowledge then became a learning task for me. This new self-understanding brought about a change in my responses to life’s situations. I realized I had the right to make choices in my life, and the inner dictatorship of habits slowly lost its grip.

I believe that if I seek God I can find a better way to live and I ask Him daily to assist me in living a sober life.

END OF QUOTE

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My sense of self relief came from finishing a difficult task.  My guilt-o-meter is broken, so that I feel guilty for things I have no control over, and no guilt for things that I hear others say sparked great remorse in them.  I do not know why this is.  Maybe the emotional tripwires of my family of origin, my mother being an adult child of an alcoholic father that she lost to this disease when she was around seventeen.  My stomach acid is composed of 78% constant anxiety knowing that on some front, somewhere, I am going to get in trouble.  This probably makes me a “double dipper,” someone who is both an alcoholic and qualifies for Al-Anon.  I have visited them before.  For now, I will stay with AA and try another time to work the fourth step, if a new sponsor thinks that is necessary.

I am intrigued by one phrase from the above contribution; “the right to make choices in my life” while “the inner dictatorship of habits slowly lost its grip.”  This seems to ring in my ears, as if it is a spiritual clue.  Or maybe an inner child’s hope.