Sober is Not Well

(The following is a personal post from one of our group members.)

Recently in our local meeting we read through the chapter on Step Ten and shared our own experience with that Step. After taking us through the first nine Steps, the book's explanation of Step 10 takes us back to the reminder that sobriety is not the end goal. Here's what it says:

Sober Is Not Well

....
It is possible that, once relieved of the compulsion to act out our habit, we may feel cured and start coasting along with our tank on EMPTY. But the same personality defects that energized our addiction are still with us and, unattended, will take their toll again, sooner or later. Why are they still with us? Because they are us. Progressive victory over these defects, not their eradication, is the power of God at work in us. What we really do battle against is not other people but our old natures, the negative force within us we can obey anytime we wish, the force that is always willing and able to wrong another. This is why our program must come to fruition in our daily living or there is no recovery. (p. 130-131; final emph. mine)

I started off in SA by going to local meetings and "fellowshipping" with a group of guys after the meeting (hanging out, drinking coffee and eating pie). That was pretty much all I did for what I called "my program". I did read the SA book, and I did have some vague notion that working the Steps was what people who were serious about recovery did, but I was looking for sobriety in the easiest way I could get it, and those 12 Steps looked like really serious work, something I typically avoided. (And no kidding, they are serious work!)

Some people like to say "Step 4 separates the women from the girls and the men from the boys." There's something to that, but stopping short of working all of the Steps all of the way through to the "spiritual awakening" we are promised in Step 12 meant relapse was an inevitability for me. That's because I stopped short of the intended life-changing experience of connecting rightly with God, the Power that would keep me sober by continuing to change my attitudes and my whole life.

The problem for me early on was that any "success" in staying sober was evidence to me that I was getting it right and doing enough. I was under the delusion that I was gaining some level of control back from my powerlessness and unmanageability, and I was "measuring" that by my length of physical sobriety. I was thinking like a child, playing a child's game. ("Hey, look at that; I'm staying sober more days than I'm acting out!") That did not work.

"Sober is not well." And until I committed to working all of the Steps under the direction of a sponsor, I had not even taken Step 3! (My sponsor explained to me that Step 3 was a commitment to working the rest of the Steps.) That did eventually happen, but that was many years later after the "child's game" wasn't any fun anymore, and I was sick of myself and completely defeated in my efforts to do things my way and get "sober" without addressing the wrongs I had done to others and the character defects that kept me doing those wrongs over and over again.

The program of SA is designed to be a life-changing experience. It is in daily actions of living a new life of surrender of my whole self to God that I can be assured of his power over lust and over my character defects that so easily can drag me back down. This statement is so very true: "If I don't change, my sobriety date will."

Conscious Contact with God

(The following is a post from one our our group members.)

Recently in our local in-person meeting we read the Step Eleven chapter in the AA book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Step 11 is all about prayer and meditation: "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out."

The following quote is from what we read in that chapter (p. 97-98). This was a section that really stood out to me. 

...We liked [S.A.] all right, and were quick to say that it had done miracles. But we recoiled from meditation and prayer as obstinately as the scientist who refused to perform a certain experiment lest it prove his pet theory wrong. Of course we finally did experiment, and when unexpected results followed, we felt different; in fact we knew different; and so we were sold on meditation and prayer. And that, we have found, can happen to anybody who tries. It has been well said that “almost the only scoffers at prayer are those who never tried it enough.”

Those of us who have come to make regular use of prayer would no more do without it than we would refuse air, food, or sunshine. And for the same reason. When we refuse air, light, or food, the body suffers. And when we turn away from meditation and prayer, we likewise deprive our minds, our emotions, and our intuitions of vitally needed support. As the body can fail its purpose for lack of nourishment, so can the soul. We all need the light of God’s reality, the nourishment of His strength, and the atmosphere of His grace. To an amazing extent the facts of A.A. life confirm this ageless truth.

When I started to work the Steps of the program, I was practicing a minimal form of "conscious contact with God". That was pretty much limited to my panicked prayers of surrender of lust to God. I'm not saying that was terribly bad. On the contrary, for me that was absolutely necessary if I was going actually to stay sober. And I'd say that God was very gracious to me through those early days when my prayers were quite utilitarian, begging God to handle my lust, but not really interested in "an unshakable foundation for life." (p. 98) I was still trying to limit what I would let God control, preferring in so many situations to hold onto the control, no matter that my control was an illusion and often resulted in a bad outcome.

I am always encouraged when I remember that other AA literature reminds me that "we claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection." Growth in my conscious contact with God is being made. I now enjoy spending more and more time in conscious contact with God in prayer and meditation. I have found that what starts out as something I feel I should do can become something I want to do if I simply make a commitment and then stick with it. Seems those old-timers in AA actually did know a thing or two.