by David M
It was all right at my fingertips. These men and women had faced the same demons I had, and had found a better life. It was possible. I was not destined to die from alcoholism. I could be treated as these people had, and I could have a better life. Now I had my anchor; I just needed a plan of action.
I only had about a week left in the rehab and knew I had to come up with a plan quick, but there was so much psycho-babble going around the room that I didn’t know where to start. The worst part is that most of the advice that was handed out was coming from the other patients.
I remember one recently-homeless patient explaining what he had learned in his nineteen trips through rehab. He took on the air of a well-educated professor of sobriety during his dissertation, and seemed to know every bumper-sticker slogan by heart.
I calmly asked him why he was on his nineteenth trip through rehab if he had learned so much, and suggested that if he didn’t want to make a twentieth appearance he should shut the fuck up and listen. The principal and I were getting very familiar at this point.
As my countdown to graduation went from days to hours; I was getting desperate. My counselor wanted me to attend aftercare, but I strongly felt that recovery was in the outside world, not in an institution. I wanted to put my life on track, not on hold.
Finally one morning I heard something that was so simple even I could grasp it. It wasn’t a day at a time or twelve steps; it was the five essentials.
Twenty four hours was still too big a chunk for me. Sometimes it was hard coping from hour to hour. I couldn’t sit down in the morning and think about being sober that night. That was still too much. I needed something smaller.
I knew the twelve steps were important, but I didn’t know why. I just knew that people rarely lived a happy sober life without working the steps. I knew the time would come when I would have to work the steps, I just didn’t know when or how. I needed something simpler for now.
This is why I clung to the five essentials. It was simple. It was easy to remember. I could count them on one hand. Most importantly, they didn’t require any thought. Thinking had never done me any good. My best ideas had landed me in rehab, and would eventually be the death of me. I had to surrender myself to a program I didn’t understand, and rely on others to show me the way.
This is what I clung to like a life raft: Go to meetings, join a home group, get a sponsor, work the steps and don’t pick up. These five essentials saved my life. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not done in a day and there are many layers to the onion, but it’s a good start.
Go to meetings
Join a home group
Get a sponsor
Work the steps
Don’t pick up
If you are anything like I was, and are desperate to stop drinking, then I would strongly recommend you take these first three steps without delay.
Chapter 21:
The first of the five essentials was to go to meetings, so that’s exactly what I did. I took the word meetings to mean several different meetings, not the same one every day.
I had been told in rehab that there is no such thing as a bad meeting; I couldn’t have disagreed more. I believed there were bad meetings, especially in early sobriety and without the guidance of a sponsor and support group. That’s not to say that I should just stay home and stew in my own shit if the meeting I hated the most is the only one going at the time. Any meeting is better than picking up.
What I am saying is that there are different meetings for different people, and then there are meetings that I felt, and to a degree still feel, should be shut down at all cost. There is a line in How It works that says “if you want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to get it; then you are ready to take certain steps”.
I’ve been to a few meetings where not a single person in the room had a thing I wanted. In a case like this, I would avoid coming back. Some people like these meetings because it makes them feel better about where they are in the recovery process. It just depresses me.
I’ve been to several meetings where people consistently play the “I was a bigger alcoholic than you” game. This pisses me off more than anything. I go to meetings to learn about recovery, not to hear drunk-stories. If you’re still reading, you’re probably sick of drunk-stories anyway.
Before I entered rehab I thought I should go to meetings in the town I grew up in because it would be familiar territory, but soon found these meetings depressed me. There were very few people with any real sober time at many of these meetings, and many of them seemed as annoyed as I was by the time the meetings came to an end.
I always like to wait around until the end of these meetings to see how many people raise their hands when asked who has a year or more of recovery. It’s usually only a few. If you’re a member of one of these groups, I would strongly recommend offering, or asking for, solutions rather than allowing a bitching contest to continue.
It was actually in rehab that I found my home group. Twice a week we would all load up in a van, which I later found out was referred to as the druggy-buggy by old timers in the program, and we would go to one of several meetings in the area. I noticed that we never went to any of the meetings in the town I grew up in, but I could never get the counselors to admit it was because they were bad meetings.
I had been told that we would get to a meeting which was very close to the town in which I now lived, and that it was a “good meeting.” The first night I walked into the room I could feel the difference. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. People were standing around outside smoking, which was nothing new at an AA meeting, but they were laughing and joking. That was new to me.
The chair person was dressed casually, but dressed well all the same. He looked like the type of person I used to envy because of his appearance of success and happiness. In other words, he didn’t look like an alcoholic, at least what I had always assumed an alcoholic should look like. He certainly didn’t look like I did, which is to say a strung out, malnourished fucking mess.
As the meeting got started, I began to really listen to what was being said for the first time. I don’t know if it is because I had a few weeks without a drink under my belt, or if it was because these looked like people who had what I wanted. These people looked like sober people should look. They looked happy, joyous and free. I knew I wanted to keep coming back here. These people had what I wanted.
I wouldn’t say there were no drunk stories, there were, but they were always followed by solutions from the home group members. This was unlike any other meeting I had been to in another way; it was a beginner’s meeting. That’s not to say it was a meeting run by newcomers, like we had in rehab. It was a meeting designed to answer the questions which plagued people like me.
I heard a lot of the same slogans I had heard at other meetings, but for the first time I was hearing them put into context. So many of the things I never understood before finally began making sense to me.
One newcomer said he was having a hard time imagining a Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Eve without a drink. One of the home-group members told him he didn’t have to think about that right now. All he had to do was not pick-up a drink today. Finally, the concept of staying sober a day at a time made sense to me. I felt like I could stay sober with the help of the people in this room.
I spoke to a counselor about this, but she didn’t seem convinced. She still believed that I should stay in extended care, and she may have been right. I have heard it said that too much rehab never hurt anyone and I believe that, but I argued that rehab had shown me what I needed to do to stay sober, and it all started “out there”. I had heard one person say, “rehab is discovery, AA is recovery.” In retrospect, I think I just couldn’t take the food any more.
I truly was excited to get started though. The people at the “good meeting” had sparked something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time; hope.
I left rehab on a Wednesday morning. My home group meeting wa
s that night and I planned to be there. I had taken a phone list and talked to a few people after the meeting, so I knew who I could call for a ride. As luck would have it, the first name on the list was Al, and he picked up the phone on the second or third ring. I introduced myself, said I had just gotten out of rehab and that I wanted to go to the local meeting. He said he would be glad to give me a ride, but that I should call him a half hour before the meeting to confirm.
I thought it was a little odd that he wanted me to call him after he had already agreed to pick me up, but I did as I was told. He showed up at the time we had agreed on and we were on our way. When we got to the meeting he introduced me to several people and told me to make sure I had their phone numbers. I found it ironic that these people were so big on phone numbers, yet the first thing they did at rehab was to take my phone.
He also instructed me to put my hand up in the meeting, introduce myself and ask for help getting to meetings. Talking to the other idiots in rehab was easy. I felt as though I wasn’t expected to know anything about recovery there, and at the very least; I wasn’t the dumbest person in the room. I was among other idiots…my people.
This was different. These people had something I wanted, and I was afraid they would realize what a moron I was and not want anything to do with me. I waited until the meeting was almost over before I summoned the courage to raise my hand. I guess the fear of not doing what Al had told me to do was greater than my fear of saying something stupid in front of everyone.
I half raised my hand, just enough so Al could see I was making an attempt, and silently hoped the chairperson would call on someone else. Instead, he looked right at me and nodded. Shit.
I put my hand down, summoned all of my courage and said, “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Dave,” the group responded in unison.
“I just wanted to introduce myself,” I said. “I just got out of rehab this morning and want to make this my home group. I was hoping I could get to a few different meetings as well. I don’t have a car right now…well, I do but it’s got a telephone pole sticking out of the hood (so much for not saying anything stupid). If anyone can give me a ride, please let me know.”
The meeting ended shortly after that with the Lord’s Prayer. It only took a few seconds for a few men to approach and ask what I was doing on any given night of the week. Suddenly, I had meetings to go to on every day but Sunday.
Oddly enough, though we had all agreed on what days and what times we would get together for these meetings, everyone gave me the same instructions Al had given me. I was to call each person an hour or so before the meeting to confirm. It wasn’t until many months later that I discovered they all had the same goal in mind. They wanted to get me accustomed to picking up the telephone and asking for help.
Chapter 22:
The second of the 5 essentials was to join a home group. I honestly had no idea how this could help, and assumed it was just a formality. I already knew which meeting I wanted to be my home group, so after the meeting one night I signed my name in the home-group book. That was easy enough. I figured all I had to do at this point was show up at this meeting twice a week, and I was done. It wasn’t quite that simple.
Yes, joining a home group did mean signing the home-group book and showing up, but there was a lot more to it than just that. I needed to get into service.
There was an old timer at the group who always talked about his early days in the program, and the topic that came up more than anything else was making the coffee, or as he liked to call it, “cooking the coffee.”
He said the reason making the coffee was so important was because it got you to the meeting early. Our home group had an informal, unscheduled meeting before the meeting every night. Group members would show up early, often with coffee they had picked up at the coffee shop before the meeting, and talk about all sorts of things.
The big book was rarely brought up, and neither were the steps. The conversation was usually about what people in the group had been doing over the last week, or what they were planning on doing in the days to come. This is where I learned what sober people did with their lives, and to my surprise, they seemed to have a lot of fun.
I learned who rode motorcycles, and where they rode them. I learned who was into photography, hunting, fishing, camping and a hundred other activities. I was invited to cookouts, picnics and fishing trips. I found out where the best coffee shops where. I learned who did all of the things I loved to do, but was always either too drunk to do, or simply didn’t remember doing the next day. I made some of my best friends at the meeting before the meeting.
This is also where the group members got to know me. They learned my quirks and mannerisms. They could tell how I was feeling without even asking. They knew when I was on thin Ice, often before I did.
I began to attend the home group meetings, and to understand how the whole thing worked. Eventually, I even volunteered for a service position. I was now the person responsible for making sure there were coins for anniversaries, and books for those who wanted them. It wasn’t very long at all before I was greeting newcomers and chairing meetings.
All these things were great and made me feel like I was part of a group, but it wasn’t until I discovered what I call “the second level of service” that I began to really feel as though I was recovering. Service to the group helped keep things going, and made me keep coming back, but it was service to other alcoholics that began to rejuvenate my once blackened soul.
In the beginning, it was as simple as sharing at a meeting. I didn’t have to have any answers. In fact, sometimes the fears, frustration and anger of a newcomer are exactly what the old timers need to hear. They need to remember the pain they went through to appreciate the freedom they now enjoy.
I found it a little funny at first that every time a newcomer would have a meltdown at a meeting, several of the old timers would express their gratitude. Now I understand. They call that, “keeping it green.”
Eventually, I was able to share a bit of experience, strength and hope at meetings. Most of it wasn’t even my own experience. I just shared what I had learned from those who had been around for a while, and what had been working for me. Sometimes all a new comer needs to hear is that you know how they feel, you have been where they are, and that you are alright today.
After a while, I began going back to the meetings that once depressed me. Rather than getting frustrated at the ramblings of the people who were on their fifteenth rehab, or the person who wanted to share a better drunk story than everyone else; I would listen for the fear or desperation in the voice of a newcomer, and I would do what I could to calm their fears.
I’ll never forget a trip I took to a meeting at a veteran’s hospital. The meeting was run by the patients at the rehab, and I’m not sure they had a year of sober time between them. I listened to the rambling of several drunken minds and quietly laughed to myself. I remembered the days before the fog lifted, not well, but I remembered.
Suddenly, I heard desperation in the voice of one of my brothers. He couldn’t live the way he had been living any longer. He just wanted it to end, and he didn’t care if that meant dying. He had no faith in the doctors or the counselors, and he sure as hell didn’t have any faith in a book. He had given up as so many do, as I had done. I knew his pain well.
I raised my hand to share. I didn’t have anything profound or enlightening to share, but I told him that I understood. I told him that it had not been very long ago that I had felt the same way, but that things had gotten better. I said I remembered the constant craving he felt for a drink, and that it will eventually go away. I told him that if he could just stick with it, he would experience a freedom he had never known. I told him he would be alright.
Though I didn’t have any mystical advice, and I couldn’t offer him an easy way out of what he was feeling; I was able to offer him hope based on my own experience. That was all he needed to make it through the night.
The third level of service is to the community, and people we encounter in our every-day lives. This doesn’t mean, to me at least, what I thought it meant years ago. I thought this meant pointing the finger at every person with a beer in their hand, and dragging them kicking and screaming to an AA meeting whether they wanted to go or not.
I had encountered people like this in my younger days, and though I don’t fault them for my reluctance to join the program, they certainly didn’t help. Besides that, they really pissed me off.
Many years ago a young lady asked me if I had ever consumed enough alcohol to get drunk. Naturally, I lied. I said that I had had a few glasses of champagne at a wedding once and had become a little intoxicated. She proudly exclaimed that this made me an alcoholic, because normal people would never allow themselves to become intoxicated. Needless to say, she didn’t get a second date.
Another time I was asked how many drinks I had consumed the night prior. Again I lied, and said I had only had three beers. This time I was told that the proof of my alcoholism was not the amount I had drank the night before, but the fact that I had counted my drinks. Normal people didn’t count their drinks.
With experiences like this, is it any wonder I thought the members of Alcoholics Anonymous were nothing more than adherents to a cult of moronic zealots? I now know that nothing could be further from the truth, and that I just happened to encounter several idiots who were also members of AA, and more likely flunkies of the program.
Step one is very specific. It states that we admitted we were alcoholics, not that we were told we were alcoholics. I didn’t end up in AA because I lost an argument about how much I drank. I ended up in AA because it finally struck me…I was an alcoholic.