None of us liked the leveling of pride

Another comment about this paragraph. No matter how attractive the AA message may be to the new person, it is common knowledge that many if not most reject it out of hand.

As I noted in an earlier post, when I began drinking I liked the effect "produced" by alcohol. It never occurred to me that a similar state of happiness was achievable by hard work. It is not surprising that when confronted by a way out that required effort on my part I wanted nothing to do with it.
That's why it's so critical to notice that Bill starts with this assumption then says "But we saw that it worked on others..." New people need to see the undeniable reality that it works in others. We have an obligation to show that.

Plowing the soil

There is a solution. Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation. But we saw that it really worked in others, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we had been living it. When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.  - Alcoholics Anonymous, p.25

They that are whole have no need of a physician. - Matthew 9:12

There is no need for a solution when there's no problem. From the very beginning, when I inwardly knew that my drinking was far from normal, I would comfort myself in the knowledge that alcohol wasn't causing me any problems. And I harbored the delusion that if it ever did become a problem I would start drinking "normally." But it never did. Not that alcohol wasn't creating havoc and hurting everyone around me. I just made the definition of "problem" a moving target that was always conveniently worse than what happened to be going on at the moment.

In his Guest House talk, Bill talks of the soil, the climate and the light. And by the soil, I believe he refers to the receptiveness of the alcoholic mind. The image is like that in the parable of the sower and the seed. The seed only takes root in soil that has been prepared by being broken. (I guess you could say that we actually were getting "plowed".) But it's a brokenness that is of no value unrecognized. The alcoholic has to finally come to the realization that he has passed beyond the point of human aid, that all the resources he can bring to bear on the problem fail utterly. And it is in that state where the soil can receive the seed.

Bill spends most of the chapter up to this point doing precisely that. It's a sweeping survey of the utter hopelessness of the alcoholic condition. And it is a strategy that he and the other early AAs utilized in approaching a new prospect. They made certain that any hope the new man might have of solving the problem on his own was thoroughly destroyed as they recounted their own futile attempts to pull off the impossible. Bill recounts that, when Roland returned to Karl Jung after his horrible relapse, Jung's admission that he had nothing further to offer him added "agony to despair."

But then, suddenly, a sliver of light penetrates this intolerable darkness There is a solution!  Bill recounts that it swept through him like a mighty wind. But those "moments of clarity" we have experienced are no less valid and by no means less profound.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. - Isaiah 9:2

You must excuse me for getting so biblical on you, but I only do so to point out that we alcoholics are not experiencing something new. God's been doing this from the beginning. If I were more conversant in other religions, I might be inclined to cite examples from those traditions. I'm sure there are many.

We saw that it worked in others. There is the source of the light. My friend Bruce M. would paint this picture. A ship sinks and I am struggling to stay afloat. And around me people are clinging to big hunks of concrete but I refuse to do so because logic tells me that concrete doesn't float. Yet it works for them. So I think to myself "to hell with reason, I'm finding me a piece of concrete."

I remember vividly the moment in Sacred Heart when the idea entered my mind that this might work for me. And the feeling that I got was that it was going to be OK. And it was.




 

A show of hands

There are times when the absence of comments leads me to believe that no one is reading this. I got an email that assured me that at least two other people were reading it.

If you are reading this, please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at sclarkaz@gmail.com. An audience if two is okay with me, but I would like to know who else is out there.

Thanks.

My head is out to get my ass

These observations would be academic and pointless if our friend never took the first drink, thereby setting the terrible cycle in motion. Therefore, the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body.. - Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 23

 AA can't get you sober. That's a medical issue for which we have no resources.

AA can help you stay sober under the right circumstances.

The most insane thing I can do is to start drinking, and I must be sober to do it. In other words, every AA that has gone back out did it while sober. This may seem obvious, but there is a crucial fact emerging from that: AA is here to protect the minds of sober alcoholics from themselves.

 As Bill found out all too well, the tremendous self-knowledge he had acquired from his time with Dr. Silkworth was useless because this self-knowledge was operating from within an insane mind.

We are all familiar with the stock definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, yada yada. But that's really a definition of neurosis, a mild and very common form of unhealthy thinking. A psychotic, on the other hand, is reacting perfectly rationally to the distorted reality in which he finds himself. And most people suffering from psychoses are quite convinced of their own sanity. So which side of that wall do you think the alcoholic stands? That's why we'll find words like "delusion" in chapters to come.

I love to recount an episode in my own life. (Many of you have heard it, probably too much. Apologies.) I was in treatment back in 1981 at a place called Sacred Heart run by a recovered alcoholic priest in downtown Detroit. The center was mainly for low-bottom drunks. I did not, by the way, think I belonged there, but how I ended up in that place is a story in itself.

We received rudimentary medical workups by nurses who probably did it for nothing. As my blood was being drawn for liver enzyme tests, I mentioned that I would be interested in the results since I was worried about the condition of my liver. Her reply was simple and profound: "Your problem ain't your liver, honey. It's your thinker you need to worry about." That is exactly what that quote from the Big Book is saying.

I remember the "Forty Questions" pamphlets which I think the National Council of Alcoholism put out. I though I was doing pretty good because I only answered "yes" to half of them, until I found out that two or three "yes" responses were enough for a positive diagnosis. But some years later I heard a speaker make the following observation. If you substitute the word "think" for "drink" it is also a good barometer. Have you ever lost a job because of thinking? Does thinking interfere with your relationships? Has anyone ever told you that you should stop thinking, or that your thinking had become a problem?

Eventually we will be told that we can use our God-given minds because sanity will have returned, but a lot of work will have been done by the time we reach that happy point.

Reasons Yet Obscure

The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink. - Alcoholics Anonymous, p.24

If you've ever attended a "Joe and Charlie" Big Book study, you know that you are supposed to pay attention to the "squiggly writing."  So, even though I haven't been particularly inspired to comment on this chapter, I feel duty bound to discuss this squiggle.

To this day, with all the powers of science and medicine being brought to bear on this question, the reasons are "yet obscure." And I certainly make no claim to understanding the roots of alcoholism per se. But I can make some very specific observations about my own case.

I drank because, as Dr. Silkworth says in his "opinion," I liked the effects of alcohol. From the moment I took my first drink, I knew that this was something that was going to become a permanent part of my life. It would be inaccurate to say that I was "addicted" to alcohol at this point. I simply knew that drinking made me feel better. And who didn't want to feel better all the time?

Now what is really strange about that last paragraph is the unstated assumption that not drinking felt bad. I didn't know I felt bad until alcohol made me feel better. So it was obvious that I was born with a deficiency, one that I was not aware that I had. I was truly born with an alcohol deficiency. And drinking made me whole, made me right.

I make the analogy of someone who, from the day they are born, has a burning sensation over their entire body. They don't know they have it because they have never know anything else. Then one day they get a shot of Novocaine. Suddenly that part of their body feels indescribably better, and they make the decision that this Novocaine is some good stuff. They're going to use it every day they can.

So what kind of pain was I in before alcohol came along to relieve it? I don't know. To say that my pain was the kind that a sedative would cure simply begs the question. But I strongly suspect that most alcoholics can relate to that condition.

However, as I became more and more caught up in this obsession, those around me began to be affected, mildly at first but worse and worse each passing year. And I was a witness to this tragedy. But to acknowledge it would threaten my drinking. So I needed to become more and more selfish in order to protect the only source of happiness I knew.

For me, alcoholism was an abnormal state of mind and body coupled with an ever intensifying selfishness needed to relieve it. It would be a long time before I developed true physical dependency on booze, but I would never have gotten to that point if I hadn't started out this way.

Thus was my denial cemented into place. And when the sad day came when I could no longer hide from the miserable truth, I had no resources to cope with it. I could only imagine a life stretching dismally before me, of one binge after another with no relief in sight.

I don't know if any of that sheds light on alcoholism in general. But when enough of us get together and begin describing that inward experience of being a drunk, the mystery of "why" becomes increasingly irrelevant. We become caught up in the glorious reality that "there is a solution." 

Vocation

None of us makes a sole vocation of this work, nor do we think its effectiveness would be increased if we did. We feel that elimination of our drinking is but a beginning. A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before us in our respective homes, occupations and affairs. All of us spend much of our spare time in the sort of effort which we are going to describe. A few are fortunate enough to be so situated that they can give nearly all their time to the work. 

- Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 19

In my experience, one of the chief symptoms of early sobriety is a desire to become an alcoholism counselor. As the scales fell from our eyes, it all seemed so obvious. Forgetting our own stubborn denial and resistance, we now thought we had to power to solve everyone else's problems. Of course this is just a subtler form of "trying to run the whole show" without taking even a cursory look at ourselves. I certainly wasn't immune to this and have the apprentice counselor credential dated 1982 to prove it.

As Bill put it in his Guest House talk:

And this is the penance, and I think you theologues give us some excuse for it too, of beginning to think that, because we have these tremendous illuminations, that WE are something special. So, you begin to develop a kind of a paranoia alongside of a perfectly valid experience. And this is just what happened to me. I damned near botched up the whole works by coming out of this working furiously with drunks and, before anybody had been sobered up, I got so far off base as to loudly declare on time to an audience by no means spellbound that I was going to sober up all the god damned drunks in the world! Now THAT is pure paranoia if you ever...

 The true vocation of the recovered alcoholic is in living out the reality of our spiritual awakening through the tedious, difficult and humbling demonstration of these principles.

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience   

In my own experience, it was supremely difficult not to feel as though I had been singled out by God for some greater mission than simple recovery. To me, my "vocation" (literally a "calling") was such a personal and inward experience that it would be hard to feel otherwise. Of course, having a huge ego that had yet to undergo deflation of any kind made this sensation inevitable. But eventually I was given a clearer vision: I had been granted a glorious glimpse from the mountaintop only to be deposited back on earth and told I had to walk back to the top. We call it "trudging the road of happy destiny." Happiness is not merely our destination. Trudging is where we find the purpose in which our real happiness lies.

But we are all called, we all have a vocation. As my old friend Danny O. used to say, "There's a wrench for every nut that walks through the doors of AA." And it could be true that the purpose of our entire recovery was to be someone's wrench. It's not inconceivable that God would use our sobriety to help one person, and probably never know that we did. The one who plants a seed is not always the one who reaps the harvest. So this business of vocation is first and foremost one of humble acknowledgement that we are not the one doing the calling, nor are we the ones likely to see the fruits of our labor.

  

Making the Approach

Highly competent psychiatrists who have dealt with us have found it sometimes impossible to persuade an alcoholic to discuss his situation without reserve. Strangely enough, wives, parents and intimate friends usually find us even more unapproachable than do the psychiatrist and the doctor.

But the ex-problem drinker who has found this solution, who is properly armed with facts about himself, can generally win the entire confidence of another alcoholic in a few hours. Until such an understanding is reached, little or nothing can be accomplished.

That the man who is making the approach has had the same difficulty, that he obviously knows what he is talking about, that his whole deportment shouts at the new prospect that he is a man with a real answer, that he has no attitude of Holier Than Thou, nothing whatever except the sincere desire to be helpful; that there are no fees to pay, no axes to grind, no people to please, no lectures to be endured - these are the conditions we have found most effective. After such an approach many take up their beds and walk again.

- Alcoholics Anonymous pp. 18-19

I'm not so sure about the "no lectures to be endured" part. I've done more than my share of lecturing.

But the fact remains that it is the undeniable authenticity of our experience that wins the confidence of those whom we approach. This cannot be easily faked. Then, over time, the newcomer gradually becomes aware that we're not out to get something. That was what impressed me the most about my first meetings. These were people who seemed genuinely concerned about my well-being. I waited in vain for their hidden agenda to emerge but it never did.

One of the things that Bill always mentioned when he spoke of his first interactions with Ebby was one of Ebby's subsequent visits to him in Towns Hospital.

So, I think it was the morning of the third or the fourth day that my friend Ebby showed up in the doorway, and my feeling was ambivalent at once. So I said, "Well, this is the time he's going to pour on the evangelism." And on the other hand I was saying, "Well, he should be looking for a job. Why is he up here at eleven o'clock in the morning to see me? He does practice what he preaches."
 - Bill W. at Guest House

 It's not surprising that it was after this very visit that Bill had his spiritual experience. He did truly "take up his bed and walk again."