Go with Your Strengths but Balance Them

The other night a few people from my homegroup went on a commitment. When it was my turn to speak I found myself talking about how I worked my program immediately after I got sober.  For years I had pursued a number of 'get-sane-quick' schemes centering around things like meditation and spiritual reading.  Now, there's nothing wrong with meditation or spiritual reading; what made them get-sane-quick schemes was the way I was trying to use them to feel better about my life without really changing anything -- like stopping drinking, for example.  When you have a glass of vodka before every meditation session just to make sure you're nice and mellow you have a strong clue that there's a problem somewhere.

The Dark Night of the 12 Year Itch

I have written before about the '12 Year Itch', that dry spot people tend to hit when they reach double digit sobriety, often leading to a relapse.  I firmly believe that this is a sign that we are reaching a new stage in our spiritual growth, in facing ourselves and seeing what and who we are.  


My observation (admittedly of the limited sample of AAs I know)  is that this itch can take two forms, depending on the AA's program. (I'm generalizing here.  There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern.)  For those who have spent 10 or so years 'just going to meetings and not drinking' it is a spiritual depression that almost always leads to a relapse, usually lasting years.  For those who have been seriously working the steps it leads to a deeply felt spiritual crisis that often includes a short but nonetheless extremely painful relapse, sometimes lasting as little as a few days.  This crisis is characterized by a feeling of confusion and loss and the experience that the program just isn't working. The AA is resolved to renew their spiritual journey but is usually at a loss as to how.  (Hint: You're REALLY ready for very hard, temporarily unsatisfying Step 11 work and a Step 12 that organically grows out of 11.)


As I have said before, this type of crisis is a known stage in the spiritual path, one that has been written about in popular literature (for example, Willam Styron's Darkness Visible) as well as in all of the great spiritual traditions.  In the Christian mystical traditions is often referred to as the Dark Night of the Sense and of the Soul.

The dangers of sponsorship

Over the last 6 months or so a friend and I have grown into a 'co-sponsorship' relationship.  He had decided to go through the Steps again and wanted a fresh perspective on them and I need someone to slap me around a little when I let unemployment get me depressed.  It's funny, because we both have sponsors, but this sort of arrangement on these particular issues just seems to work.
This morning I sent my friend some comments on his working of the 3rd Step and it got me thinking about just how careful we have to be when sponsoring.

The 12 Year Itch and the Dark Night of the Soul

Last Monday I gave a friend his 1 Year medallion.  He had been 2 months short of 10 years when he drank for 2 weeks.  In the months leading up to his relapse he did everything he could think of: he attended meetings daily, he spoke with his sponsor and warned of his increasingly dangerous condition, he prayed more and more desperately -- yet he relapsed.

As he described his feelings and behavior in those last few months before his relapse I was intrigued by the fact that what he was saying sounded exactly like classic descriptions of The Dark Night of the Soul, that stage in the spiritual path when one feels alone, abandoned, hopeless, with nothing working as it once did.

Some thoughts on the concept of a Higher Power

The following are some 'thoughts in progress' on the question of a Higher Power.  They are not fully developed by any means.  In fact, they are not even completely consistent.  But they represent a direction my thoughts are going these days and as such I would love to hear people's reactions.

The Steps in Later Sobriety

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am troubled by my lack of Gratitude.  The simple fact is that all life is a gift and I just have trouble seeing it that way.  Having a spiritual problem, I turned to the 12 Steps for help and looking at them with a problem like this in mind got me to thinking.  It strikes me that the Steps as outlined in the Big Book are fantastic tools identifying the presence of defects of character but they are less helpful in identifying the lack of character assets.  So I can assemble a pretty good list of my resentments, but not of my gratitudes.

This blog was started with a posting by Dave about how sponsorship changes in later sobriety.  I'm wondering if a discussion of how the steps might change in later sobriety would be useful.

Check Your Motivations

When I was in early sobriety I went through times, like most people, where I was full of confusion and indecision. I was unsure of about how to act in certain situations, where I could safely go, and which of my old friends I could spend time with without being in danger. I was given a pretty standard prescription from some old timers: "Dave, just check your motivations. You'll know pretty quickly whether or not you should go there." It seemed simple enough to do, except I couldn't quite get the hang of it. After years of Step work I now know why.

Love and the Fourth Step

There is a fascinating article, The Rigor of Love, by Simon Critchley in the August 9 New York Times. The essay is about the question of whether non-believers in a transcendent God can have faith. I will probably deal with his central concern in a later post but for today I'd like to think about one of the stepping stones he uses to get to his conclusion: Soren Kierkegaard's (Danish philosopher, 1813 - 1855) concept of Christian Love.

Being restored to sanity

When I was in early sobriety and trying to worrk the Steps for the first time in my life, I came face to face with Step 2. It took me months to navigate this mine field. In my mind there was no way I go on until I was willing to believe there even was a God.

Now mind you, everyone in AA was telling me I was trying to take off a much bigger bite than this Step requires. But nothing doing, I was going to "do it right dammit!". My problems were obviously bigger than my God at that time.

The 'innate violence' of modern life and the Third Step

A friend was telling me yesterday about how she felt overwhelmed by various forces in her life pulling her in a hundred different directions. She had so many things she had to do that she couldn't do anything. The resulting feeling of what I guess you could call besieged impotence had her parking in front of a liquor store, trying to decide whether to go in or to call another alkie. Luckily, she made the right decision. (Anyone wondering what the right decision was really needs to go to a meeting.)
One of the methods of execution used in medieval England was to tie the limbs of the victim to four horses and have them tear him apart. Our lives, or at least my life, can feel that way and it certainly seems like a good metaphor for what my friend was going through. I think I'm safe in saying that it's one of the worst feelings we regularly experience in today's world.

Two Spiritualities

In Finding God in All Things William Barry quotes John MacMurray as follows:

All religion...is concerned to overcome fear. We can distinguish real religion from unreal by contrasting their formulae for dealing with negative motivation. The maxim of illusory religion runs: "Fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you"; that of real religion, on the contrary, is "Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of."

I think this is a brilliant distinction and one that applies to some of the types of spiritualities we hear people express in meetings.

Approaching the Fourth Step

The Fourth Step is one of the two that really scare newcomers looking at the Steps. The other is, of course, the Ninth. In both cases it strikes me that the fear stems from pride, from a failure to see my place in things. Probably the best way to test whether we have done Steps 1, 2 and 3 well is to check whether we are still afraid of 4.
I am reading William A Barry's Finding God in All Things, a Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He points out that saints consistently say that they feel more and more sinful the closer they come to God, but that far from finding that depressing, they find joy in it. What gives?