The Whole Program...

I have been in recovery a long time.  I didn’t get here by virtue, in fact, if I am honest, I am still here because I have had a lot of work to do on myself.  I keep coming back because, well, I need this whole deal now as much as I ever have.  I am still fucked up.  I still mess things up.  I still have addiction issues.  I just don’t use drugs and alcohol, no matter what.

Sometimes my brain starts writing the day’s post before I am really awake.  That happened today.  I woke up with the following words running through my mind:

“The whole program is about learning to help yourself so that you can use what you learned to help another...”

There are many other ways to say it also:

Unfuck you, so you hav the skills to help someone else unfuck themselves.

Heal yourself so you can participate in another’s healing.

Stop killing yourself so you can help someone else not kill themselves.

People ask me all the time:

"Don’t you have to believe in God?  Isn’t the program about God?"

No, no it is not.  It is about faith and hope and trust.  If you want to place those things in some deity, ok.  If you do not want to do that, ok.  For most people I know, whether they were religious or not, the first “higher power”they came to believe in was the other people sitting in the rooms with them who had also done a stellar and spectacular job of fucking up their lives.

I know it was this way for me.  I was one of those non-believers, one of the defiant ones, one that said, “I will NOT believe, and you can’t make me!”  And I didn’t, for a long time.  But what I did believe in, starting at my very first meeting was the Group Of Drunks, sitting in the rooms with me, drinking coffee and sharing their experience, strength and hope.  I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that very first night that I believe in them, but I mean, if I didn’t, why did I go back the next day? And all those days after?

I didn’t feel or see God in that first room.  But I did see recovery in action and I saw a lot of people from my very judgy standpoint who seemed like they belonged where they ended up.  I didn’t see a lot of things that I wanted for myself (mind you I got sober in Florida and most of the people in that first meeting were ancient) but I did see how they showed up for each other, cared about each other.  And I really needed to believe that perhaps, just maybe, they could teach me how to care about, well, anything.

So this whole deal is about being taught to care about yourself.  Not in the arrogant, ego inflaming ways that are all over social media.  But using spiritual tools, a little CBT and good old fashion inventory to really assess where you went astray.  And then some more of those same tools to help you clean up all the shame, remorse, broken promises, stolen cash, broken hearts and the like so that you don’t relapse over all of that shit.  I will tell you the people I see have the hardest times in recovery are the people who did some really awful shit to their children.  Mothers and fathers whose addiction caused their children to be injured, maimed, abandoned and harmed.  Those people have a level of shame and guilt that is hard to erode.  So their commitment to self annihilation is a hard vow to break. And if they don’t come in and get fucking busy, they will drink or use again, over and over again until they are dead or locked up.

Then when you have worked through your shit and made right what you could, and committed yourself to cleaning up the new stuff you fuck up, the whole point is to give away what you learned and practiced to help another person save themselves.  God and religion do not have to be involved at all.  But hey, if you want to believe and practice, go right ahead!  You will find many like minded other people, regardless of whether you believe in God, or don’t.

The whole program is about doing some very basic things to heal yourself.  And you have to do that with the assistance of someone else.  A fellow addict or alcoholic who has been where you have been and walked the treacherous road of addiction.  And then, once you have begun to untangle yourself, you are slated with the responsibility to use what you learned to help others.  That is it.

We say often:

Trust God

Clean House

Help Others.

And that has been true for me, but this morning I woke up, and not to take credit away from God, I realized that it is really

Trust the group

Clean House

Help Others

God doesn’t need to be involved at all.  And from my perspective, only God could devise a program that would rely heavily on spiritual principles and then work to remove God from the whole process.  You don’t have to believe.  You do not have to believe in anything other than the people who are in that room with you have walked through some absolutely horrific things.  They have childhoods that are horror stories.  They have had wreckage and they cleaned it up and repaired what was repairable.  And they work, daily, to give away all they learned so that some other hopeless drunk or addict can help themselves, so that another soul can begin the cycle of recovery.

We heal ourselves in the program with the sole purpose being to help another person heal themselves so there are more people to help others.  That is the whole point.  Me getting sober wasn’t really about me leading a great life.  The great life is the byproduct of good living.  I am not out there doing shady ass shit, burning down my life and wrecking my relationships running game and fucking up. That in and of itself clears up a lot of hard living.  But then, progressing through the decades, seeing who and where I am still broken, scratched, dented, and working to bang those things out too, only makes me better qualified to help another do the exact same thing with their life. There is a ripple effect that is powerful, that is life altering, that is life sustaining and life saving.

The whole program is about me learning to stop destroying myself, heal so that I can use what I learned to help others.  It has nothing to do with me getting a good life.  It isn’t about me getting all the things I want. In some ways, recovery is kind of like being picked up for service in an army, and that army has one mission:  to help others who are similarly afflicted.

The cash and prizes is the byproduct of good living. Not just for us, it is just how life works.  You do good things, good things proliferate.  You do bad things and consequences and problems proliferate.  Of course, none of us in life, addicted or not, are immune to life being lifey.  We are all human first and subjected to all it means to be human.  We are going to get angry, hurt, lost, injured, fearful, happy, elated, overjoyed, and bored.  Most often all of those things inside of a day.  The program is there to help us ride those waves of life instead of drowning ourselves in them.  Everyone suffers but only addicts and alcoholics decide to kill themselves on an installment plan because life is often hard, challenging, unfair or brutal.  Self sabotage is not an effective living strategy...but, then again, here we are.

So if you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, you don’t have to believe in God.  You don’t have to do much of anything except be desperate enough to walk into one of our many, many rooms, sit all the way down and listen.  I bet, if you stay a little while, you too shall find what so many of us have found:  a way out and a fellowship of people who are just exactly like us who are more than willing to share exactly what they did to heal, so you can heal too.  

Again, still, over and over again...

If you need and want help, reach out.  I owe you everything I have learned.  And the only way I get to keep any of this amazing life I have today, is to give it to anyone and everyone who asks me...

Again, still. Thankfully.