Unthink.

“It was a beautiful day when I awoke but then I started thinking.” A great line uttered by a strange man. Dave is ex-military, ex-cop and now drives a canary yellow VW Bug. He still pines for his mother’s affection, though she’s been dead for decades. Dave is 80 years old. He has become a fixture at one of your meetings and not a beloved one. You see the others roll their eyes when Dave shares. At first, you did too. Dave’s a slow learner. He repeats himself. At his age moping about his momma is weird. Now you listen to the coot, searching for gemstones in the mud:   … But then I started thinking.

Nearly 60 years old, the last 17 of them sober, you’d like to think you’re past the point of criticizing organized religion. Hating on the church is a cliché, though it seldom feels that way at first. Disavowing the sacred, calling it profane. It’s empowering. Then you start sounding like that snob who derides TV as a vast wasteland, or the Internet. Best to just get it out of your system. The man who keeps harping on the religion of his youth becomes no less tiring than Dave crying for his mother. Let it be. Popular religion is an opiate for the masses… the Budweiser of Higher Powers. Nothing wrong with it on Sunday. Most people in the program prefer a craft-brewed Higher Power. Spirituality is different from religion. Better than. Have they forgotten how outsiders view AA: a musty cult of chain smokers and book thumpers…Twelve Steps versus Ten Commandments?

Addicts All

Everyone, you think, is some kind of addict. Be they active, recovering, or on the brink. Passions which are good become obsessions which are bad. People are self-seeking. This is the human condition, the result of Original Sin. Yearning. Craving. Lusting. Demanding. Wanting. Needing. Soothing. The seeds of addiction are there, have always been there. Many are able to temper these urges, denying the seeds what they need to flourish. But they’re still there. Waiting for a deluge, a perfect storm of misery or even joy… or just another shitty day. Then boom! Out comes the Hagen Das. The lonely housewife turns on the TV and never turns it off. An old man retreats to the garage for a smoke. Some concede to only a few addictions. Maybe they are harmless ones – a gardening obsession, collecting figurines. Or weird: like hoarding. Hidden from the world. In others the seeds erupt as soon as they touch a nerve, like weeds in a vacant lot. Out of control. You’ve met no one who has not succumbed to something. Drugs and alcohol are the poster children for addiction. But plenty else is out there.

Most of the jobs people do are motivated by addiction. The salesman would like nothing more than for everyone to be addicted to his wares. Many are called dealers. They give out samples. The chef wants you to crave his cooking, the barista her coffee. And so on. If one deconstructs any vocation creating and/or satisfying needs and wants were at its core. Your job in particular was culpable. In more than a poetic sense advertising worked every one of the seven deadly sins. The theme for your advertising blog: We make you want what you don’t need. Indeed. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a litany of demands that must be met.

You suppose teaching is not inherently linked to a type of addiction. Considered noble and selfless, teaching gets a pass. Undoubtedly, there are other clean human activities. But you are not trying to win an argument; you are merely making an observation. As an addict of many things you are wont to rationalize your behavior. This theory of yours is likely an example.

Stray Cat Blues

Lying in bed you wait for the Seroquel and Gabapentin to kick in, drugs that were prescribed 15 years ago by the head of addiction therapy at Rush Hospital in Chicago. He’d said they were non-habit forming. Yet you cannot sleep without them. Go figure.

Despite being agnostic/atheist, you say a brief and scattered prayer, thanking a “Higher Power” (AA‘s euphemism for God) for keeping you clean and sober and forgiving you your defects of character. When you awake you will ask God to help you with these same things… Asking for help. Giving thanks. Prayer at its simplest. The least you can do. Taught early in recovery to fake it ‘till you make it isa strategy you still employ.

Before your eyes adjust to the dark you roll over, gathering the pillows to your chest as a child might a stuffed animal. In fact, you sucked your thumb until you were almost a teen-ager. Even now, during times of stress, you still chew your pinkie finger, gnawing on it the way your dog does his chewy. At work, you often caught yourself with a finger in your mouth. While no one ever said anything they surely must have noticed. You imagine it was one of the unsaid reasons they had to let you go. Firing The Man Who Chewed His fingers. It’s not normal. You pick at the callous, thinking, knowing, it will be there forever. The medication begins lowering its shroud, like the fog rolling over Mt. Tam. Soon you will be asleep.

Outside a cat yowls, piercing the night. At a skunk, raccoon or possibly coyote. Such were the consequences of straying. Or, maybe it found another cat and is fucking it silly. That could easily be it, too, another consequence of straying- a better one.

You fall asleep.

Waking Up a ‘7’ / An Agnostic’s View on Serenity & Sobriety

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It’s easier to love the mystery than be smitten by a prophecy.

I used to wake up fearful, painfully wondering how I might endure the day, inevitably turning to drugs and alcohol to relieve my stress, thus beginning the vicious cycle of addiction another 24 hours. That was my reality. It is one every addict and alcoholic knows sadly and deeply. I was in the grip of a Higher Power that punished me and then saved me, over and over again. Evil spirits brought me to my knees, in a hideous caricature of prayer.

Is it any wonder Bill Wilson deduced that something stronger than spirits was required to relieve us from their bondage? He chose a spirit that was holy. God. Recovery is really just a grand replacement strategy (fellowship in place of barrooms, service before self, and so on), so I totally get the idea that only a supreme power can usurp another.

Only one problem: What if there isn’t a God?

In AA meetings, I joke that on good days I’m agnostic. Yet, measuring my serenity on a scale of 1 to 10, most days I wake up a 7. All days I wake up sober. How is that possible? Being reasonably happy and sober while being reasonably uncertain about God. Without question AA saved my life. With many questions did not God.

“God Is or He Isn’t.”

It’s one of several lines in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous I bristle at. There aren’t many mind you. But this statement has always felt religious, not spiritual. Dogmatic. God didn’t make such a claim. He, She or It wouldn’t. A person did. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Almost every thought, if not word, in Step 2 belies the absolutism of God is or He isn’t. “Came to” and “could” seldom precede demands.

God, like truth and love, is a big idea – the biggest. But they are all concepts, human constructs open to interpretation and gradations of meaning. In 12-Step Recovery, we are beseeched to make amends to people we have harmed “wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” The truth, therefore, ought to be parsed. A homicide may be murder or manslaughter, voluntary or involuntary. Which is truer becomes a matter of opinion. Conditional love is still love, is it not? Maybe not pure love but better than no love at all.  Big ideas are not absolute; they are flexible. As is God and the belief in God.

The ultimate leap of faith, God remains improvable. “Coming to believe in a power greater than yourself” is a process, not an outcome. Many people have gotten sober without subscribing to an all or nothing God, including me. Scores have achieved long-term sobriety without God at all. They too wake up a 7.

Well before creating AA (let alone putting God into it), Bill W and Dr. Bob sat down to discuss their crippling malady. These intimate and honest conversations were crucial. However inadvertently, they had latched on to what is, in my opinion, the greatest tool in all of recovery: the power of one alcoholic talking to another. Kindred spirits. Fellow sufferers. Rubbing antennas. Call it whatever you want. But this, not God, was the wellspring of Alcoholics Anonymous. From here came the fellowship and sponsorship and a thousand million quiet conversations in Starbucks that has saved more addicts and alcoholics than God ever has. That’s what I believe.

For newcomers, skeptical of the “God thing,” even Bill W’s famously italicized line “God as we understood him” is still not enough to assuage doubt and cynicism. To them, I say replace the line with “God as we don’t understand Him (Her or It).” The pronoun bit goes without saying but it’s the “don’t understand” piece that changes minds. How can anyone understand something they cannot see or hear, let alone know? We knew what getting high felt like. We do not understand what getting God feels like. Why bother trying? That puzzle has been agonizing scholars for eons. What chance has a withdrawing addict? For me it is easier to fall in love with the mystery than be smitten by a prophecy. Love is abstract, too. Whether one has love or not few people doubt that it exists. In many a church basement I’ve seen written: GOD IS LOVE. One need not understand either of them.

There is a devout atheist at my gym. I know this because he always wears tee shirts proclaiming his atheism. I’ve counted three different shirts so far. It’s weird. Unsettling. I would feel the same way about someone wearing an overtly worshipful tee shirt. Promoting such a personal belief is off putting. That said, one of the atheist’s tee shirts made me laugh: In the beginning man created God and then all the problems started.Is it funny because it’s true? Maybe. Yet I still think wearing the joke on his sleeve is inappropriate.

Just because I’m not religious, does not mean I don’t appreciate the fables. I do. My favorite is the myth of Original Sin: the Christian belief that a state of sin has existed since Adam and Eve disobeyed God, consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Is this not a parable of addiction? You will remain content and happy as long as you don’t bite that apple. Oops. With free will we also got the baggage that came with it: pride, lust, envy and all the other character defects we addicts know too well. Since the dawn of man we have been trying to explain our impulsive natures. Maybe that’s why God was created in the first place. To teach us: “Just Say No.”

Look.

I have listened to the faithful, the agnostics and the atheists. And this is what I have come to believe: there is a fifty percent chance God exists and a fifty percent chance that he doesn’t. When all the rabbis turn to dust and the non-believers too it will still be 50 / 50. Is this a refutation of God? Or affirmation? Don’t know but this I do. If I could get those odds in the lottery I’d play it every day, twice on Sunday. Telling newcomers you might also remind yourself: Those are great freaking odds!

One can be content without drugs and alcohol, or a higher power. I am. I appreciate life’s great mystery. I cherish rubbing antennas with another addict or alcoholic. I try to replace the harmful things in my life with things that are better. One day at a time.

I wake up a 7 and can easily bump that number up. Or I can choose to be miserable. Free will is not purgatory, if used wisely. The closing lyric of U2’s anthem, City of Blinding Lights sums it up nicely: “Blessing’s not just for the ones who kneel… luckily.”

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Steffan has published two novels (available on Amazon). Having worked many years as a writer/creative director for several multi-national advertising agencies, he now serves as a Primary Counselor for the treatment of substance use disorders at Serenity Knolls in Marin County. Steffan has been clean and sober for 17 years. He usually wakes up a 7.

Play Misty for Me

Everyone experiences situational depression. Conflict. Unresolved resentments. Sometimes it really is just the humidity. Having a bad day. You either accept the situation or change it. Regardless, it always ends. It is not clinical. Professional help and medicine are seldom required. What you are experiencing is neither clinical nor situational. Sadness descends upon you like mist. By no means pleasant it isn’t debilitating either. You can see through it. You can operate heavy machinery. You probably won’t drink over it.

Many people insist on finding a culprit for their misery: someone or something to blame. The world is filled with people making this mistake. One feels like shit because of a spouse, a boss, a relative, a neighbor, the President of the United States. You know better than to assign blame for melancholy. Yes. You’d like to make the blues situational. Then you could rectify the situation or be its victim. For years, you were the blindfolded child swinging madly for a target. Creating situations to meet your depression was understandable… and also idiotic.

You now have healthy ways to mitigate woe. AA taught. Others you picked up all by yourself. Be of service. Go for a run. Pray. Basically, do anything but wallow in it. You cannot think your way out of depression. If anything, thinking caused it. In the wild, animals do not get depressed because they do not sit around thinking. Food and shelter is their constant priority, their only priority. Put a bear in a zoo and it becomes depressed, anxiously pacing back and forth, sullen and surly. Domesticated, it turns neurotic.

Your mother was (and maybe still) clinically depressed. She has spent her whole life (and so yours) dealing with this problem. You read somewhere that far more women are clinically depressed than men. Maybe that’s because historically women have been domesticated more than men, anxiously pacing back and forth in their kitchens, sullen and surly in equal measures.

To be Continued.