“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” – Step 12
The road of the alcoholic man and woman in 12-step recovery is first swept clean of guilt, a battered self-esteem, shattered lives and broken dreams, and then cleared of the frustration and drinking setbacks he might suffer on the journey to the 12th step, the one that sends us out into the world with the marching orders to “carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” But those commands are prefaced with the qualification that we in recovery must first experience a “spiritual awakening” from working and actively practicing the principles embodied in the previous 11 steps.
If the recovering alcoholic expects a spiritual awakening to be a religious experience or a lightning bolt that knocks him to his knees, he is more often humbled to experience it as a seemingly innocuous realization of a long- and deeply-buried truth about how and why he came to be the person he became in active alcoholism and how not to become that person again. Or his awakening may be the release from the agony of a haunting past that has finally been laid to rest by working the first 11 steps. For some, a spiritual awakening is a thunderbolt in the form of realizing his alcoholism is his own doing that and no longer can be “blamed” on someone or something else – and that he and he alone is responsible for both his alcoholism and his recovery.
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…physically weak by the hangover that I awoke to literally every day and after sponging up the puke that I had upchucked in my bed overnight, I struggled into a downstairs bathroom…
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Nearly six months to the date had passed one late Wednesday afternoon in July those many years ago since a cold Thursday morning the previous January. That morning, physically weak by the hangover that I awoke to literally every day and after sponging up the puke that I had upchucked in my bed overnight, I struggled into a downstairs bathroom with shaking hands to dispense the anti-depressants and other psychotropic medications that had been another part of my morning ritual for nearly five years. If seeing ourselves for the first time as drinking alcoholics constitutes a spiritual experience, my first awakening was seeing myself for what I was and not what I thought I was or wanted to be.
In a microsecond, the reflection of the man in the mirror shamed and disgusted me. At the same time, I told myself that I could not and would not accept that this is how every day of the rest of my life would be. It was time to die. In a manic compulsion, I emptied the pills of five bottles into my hand and carried them into the kitchen where I poured a glass of Canadian Club whiskey. I remember only gagging after I crammed all the pills into my mouth and washed them down with the booze I had poured.
There were no more memories for three days, when I woke up in a hospital ICU ward. An older man in another bed in the room jolted me into consciousness when he yelled, “You’re awake!” and bolted out of the room to get a nurse. Confused and not knowing where I was and why, I asked the nurse after she arrived where I was and what happened. Checking my pulse and heartbeat, the nurse said only that I was in a hospital and that my doctor would be in shortly.
He showed up in short order and, after conducting some short rituals to measure my cognition, he asked why I tried to kill myself. My psychiatrist wanted to know, he told me. “What?” I answered, still not remembering that morning three days earlier. The doctor at my bedside then explained police confiscated five empty bill bottles from my bathroom floor while ER technicians scuttled me into the ambulance that raced me to the hospital. A doctor working the emergency room pumped my stomach and estimated I had swallowed between 40 and 60 pills, an amount the doctor quantified as “a serious suicide attempt.”
I returned home with an anger that bordered on hate at God because He didn’t let me die.
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The doctor at my bedside told me I had been “saved” by an older sister who had dropped by to check on me, something she had never before done – and by some guy in the ambulance who hit me three times with a chest paddle when I went into cardiac arrest.
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It would be nice to say that I was discharged from the hospital two days later with gratitude to the divine that I had botched my suicide attempt, that I had been given a second chance to get my act together. But it would be a lie. I returned home with an anger that bordered on hate at God because He didn’t let me die. I was really, really pi**ed that God had sent me back to the hell that He – He! – had let my life become.
But I did not drink, not because I thought I had to quit drinking or because I was grateful to be alive but for the unlikeliest of motives. In my alcohol-soaked brain and convoluted logic that had been demented by nearly a decade of alcoholic drinking, I figured there was no reason for me to keep drinking if I couldn’t die right.
I filled my nights that I usually reserved for drinking with meetings of the 12-step group that I had been going to for months and which would become my “home” group. I didn’t go to the meetings with the illusion of “recovery” or that my life would be any better without booze like I had heard so many sober and self-righteous drunks promise by “working the program.” I went to the meetings because I had no place else to go and nothing else to do. As for the program, “F**k that,” I told myself.
“This is bulls**t,” I remember thinking to myself as I drank yet another cup of coffee; bulls**t because I wasn’t inside my apartment behind a locked and dead-bolted door and curtains drawn…
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Such was my attitude for six months and always with a ponderous chip on my shoulder that was securely anchored by anger at God. After six months without booze, I was by no means sober but had dried out enough that a co-worker who had argued with our bosses to fire me commented that I was “getting better” and that I was almost back up to my typing speed of 93 wpm. More than a couple of other colleagues said it was good to see that I had traded alcohol for coffee but cracked the caffeine would keep me up till Christmas.
I had not “worked” any kind of recovery program – or so I thought – and did not expect or even want the “spiritual awakening” that I heard about at every meeting as I sat outside on the stoop of my apartment that Wednesday afternoon in July nearly six months to the day when I tried to kill myself. “This is bulls**t,” I remember thinking to myself as I drank yet another cup of coffee; bulls**t because I wasn’t inside my apartment behind a locked and dead-bolted door and curtains drawn and drinking one of the countless whiskey sours or CC and Coke’s that just a few months ago sent me every night into that quiet and painless oblivion where nothing mattered.
I also remember as I sat outside that July afternoon hearing the yells and screams of delight of a group of kids playing in the park in the apartment complex. My next memory of that afternoon remains forever indelible. I remember it as my first spiritual experience, my “waking up.” Hearing the kids playing, I wished “those little bastards would shut the hell up” while at the same time I noticed a full orange setting sun nestled above a towering oak tree in the park.
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And – I woke up. “Oh, my God! What have I done?” I asked myself aloud, word for word. I felt the track of a single teardrop trickle down my cheek as I awakened to the reality that all this – a strong giant tree, a setting sun, the sounds of kids playing – all this had always been here. But I had never noticed them before – because I had been too drunk to notice them.
The bumper of the car hit my forehead and sent my head into the asphalt. The driver stopped before his car rolled over me, and I got off with nothing more than a fractured skull.
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A flood of memories and emotions overwhelmed me simultaneously. I remembered I could count on one hand the number of times that I left my apartment to drink and drive home drunk. With little exception, I always got drunk and passed out at home. I remembered going to a bar for the first time, an upper-crest reputable nightclub that threw me out because I was “vulgar.” Stumbling across the parking lot, I tripped and fell, landing behind a car that was backing out of a parking space. The bumper of the car hit my forehead and sent my head into the asphalt. The driver stopped before his car rolled over me, and I got off with nothing more than a fractured skull.
As I remembered that episode, I eased myself to my feet from the porch stoop and felt my coffee cup in my hand trembling, and I again saw the image in my bathroom mirror of the person I had become the morning I attempted suicide. And he was still here! Now I pleaded, begged the God who I hated just seconds earlier, “Please, help me!”
As I fumbled to open the door to get to my phone inside, my face was fully damp. But the tears were from the realization that I and I alone and no one and nothing else had done to me what I had done, that no one but myself made me what I had become. That heavy weight of the chip on my shoulder was gone, and my anger at God for screwing up my dying was replaced by a “thank you,” gratitude for too many things to get into then. I did not know then why or what I had been spared for, but I knew it was time or me to work for the answer.
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My awakening. I saw myself, probably for the first time, as I was and not how I thought I was or wanted to be. And I claimed ownership, responsibility for what I was. And I was ready, willing and strong enough to face the consequences. I was ready to change.
I threw myself into my recovery, wanting to be a sponge soaking up all that I could to sober up and become more than a dried-out drunk.
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Inside my apartment and on the phone, I called a man who later would become my first program sponsor. I told him I needed a meeting that night but that I didn’t think I could drive. Could he give me a ride? “You drinking?” he asked. “No, and I don’t want to,” I answered. “Great!” he bellowed. “Pick ya’ up at 7:30.”
At the meeting that night, and for the next several meetings, I passed when it came my turn to talk about whatever the topic of discussion was. I thought – knew – I needed to listen more and talk less.
I threw myself into my recovery, wanting to be a sponge soaking up all that I could to sober up and become more than a dried-out drunk. When it was time to take on the intimidating Fourth Step of a “moral inventory” of myself, to weed the bad from the good inside me, the man who became my first sponsor reminded me often that my inventory is a moral and not an immoral one. I made a list of as many people I could remember I injured with my drinking and made “amends” as best I could, as Step Nine suggests.
And I gained a healthy respect for Step 10 as the “maintenance” of the Fourth Step and “continued to take personal inventory” and, when I am wrong, “promptly admitted it.”
Unlike many other alcoholics in recovery, I did not wrestle with what some contend is the religiosity of 12-step philosophy. Terms like “higher power” and “God of our understanding” seem to intimidate non-religious addicts in recovery. That was never a problem for me. I never struggled with believing in a god. Until I sobered up, I knew God as a vengeful and punitive unseen force. My relationship with God had never been religious in nature, and He existed solely for the purpose to give me what I wanted or needed and to be cursed when He didn’t deliver.
Since that day of revelation – my first spiritual awakening that July afternoon those many years ago – my recovery program as changed as I have changed.
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Perhaps ironically, it was my spiritual higher power of accepting personal responsibility and consequences for my life, my alcoholism and my recovery that led me to my God of a religious faith. For whatever reason, I needed to supplement my spiritual identity with a personal relationship with God of some religion. I found that personal relationship in the Catholic Church, and that relationship is not challenged by my disagreements with some of the Church’s doctrines and canons.
Since that day of revelation – my first spiritual awakening that July afternoon those many years ago – my recovery program as changed as I have changed. After all, life is an ever-evolving and changing process, as it should be, and the program that worked for me three years ago does not work for me now just as my program today hopefully will not work three years from now. By then, hopefully, I will have grown even more.
Just as recovery is not a one-time process, neither is a spiritual experience. We can expect more “awakenings” the longer we stay sober and the more we grow as human beings seeking to put our own desires and wants aside to conduct our lives as we think our individual higher power wants for us.
One personal realization years ago has remained constant in my recovery program. To drink or not to drink is a choice and those “contributing factors” that we hear about in meetings are, for me, nothing more than excuses or justifications to pick up the bottle again. But with our choice comes consequences as there are with all other choices. And, in the end, with consequences comes responsibility. If, for example, we go back to drinking and get nailed for DUI, a judge may be sympathetic to the reason we drink but, in the end, the judge is required by law to hold us responsible to the consequences of our choice to drink.
The simple question for us in recovery, then, is if we want to risk or don’t want to be responsible to the consequences of our choices. For some of us, the consequences of a choice to drink but not wanting to be responsible to the consequences make the choice obvious: Don’t drink!
“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
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Photo Credit: Imagens Evangélicas/flickr
Beautiful! Thanks for the courage to be vulnerable and share!