One Day at a Time

One famous phrase that sprung out of AA is “one day at at time”; this is incredibly hard advice to accept.  When my friend got outed for her adulterous ways, she wanted to hurry up and get on with it.  

She grew impatient with her husband’s “unwillingness to forgive and forget since he’s a Christian” - her words exactly.  I was more amazed that he stayed quiet and didn’t retort, “Well, I’m a little surprised that you, being a Christian and all, forgot to not cheat on me with every Tom, Dick and Harry within the city and four surrounding counties.”  

Transformation is no small thing and it is more like a marathon than a sprint.  This is no excuse for complacency, but there needs to be room for rest (as opposed to relapse) as we work.  

My friend had the nerve to suggest that maybe I wasn’t trusting her enough to suggest more “assignments” so that she could move forward in her recovery a rate that was more fitting to her drive to succeed.  But I heard all this as true signs that her journey back to wellness had barely begun.

Rest.  Figure out how to do so.  It’s important.

Here are a few suggestions:  workout but not like a maniac, take walks without worrying about if you get in 10,000 steps, draw, color in a coloring book, read fiction, clean out your garage, mow your lawn, keep a puzzle going, if it’s winter build a fire in the fireplace and enjoy it, use good mugs for your coffee,  go to the movies….what else?  See - this recovery work isn’t all work and no play!!

Emotional Sobriety

There is a temptation, I suspect, in any work of self-reflection, to get to a moment when we believe we must overcome our inclination and push forward.  I think of this as courage, and certainly it is a necessary tool for transformation.

But we can mess this up terribly when we push aside our feelings simply because we are afraid they will lead us astray.  Our feelings count.  They aren’t the ONLY thing we count, but to repress them, suppress them or try to deny them is futile work and we can end up sick as a result.

Where do feelings come into play in our work?  We start with recognizing and owning them.  This allows us to start the journey of handling our feelings in ways that are healthy and appropriate.  

In my family of origin, anxious people expressed anxiety and fear as anger.  This was the norm.  I was a grown up with children of my own before I was able to recognize that what I had called rage and anger and frustration all my life were thin veils for a ton of anxiety and fear.  

Much of our work, if we want to grow and change, will require us to come to grips with our own unawareness of our true feelings, learn how to develop healthy and appropriate emotions, and deal responsibly with those that are destructive in ourselves or others.

I hear people in meetings talk about emotional sobriety.  This is no small thing.  

How have your own emotions hindered your relationships?  Have others ever given you feedback about yourself that startled you as it relates to your emotional expressiveness?

Dealing with our emotions may require a supportive team.  Perhaps finding one will be part of many of our “to do” lists as well….

Living independently of God

I’m not a big fan of the word “sin” - maybe it is my weak spiritual stomach or perhaps it is because I have seen so many instances when someone is willing to use the word as a weapon but utterly incapable of applying it personally.  Somewhere along the line I was encouraged to think of sin as “living independently of God” and this simple way of seeing has helped me stomach the “s” word.  One of the things I love about this definition is that it frees us from unhealthy arguments over things Christian people have argued about - quite unattractively - for centuries.  Pair that with the work of the 12 steps, which is all about focusing on our side of the street and “doing” things in response to what we find clogging up our gutters and we have a combination that I think really helps us make progress in terms of meaningful change.  

This doesn’t make sin irrelevant.  This too is reflective in mutual aid societies like AA, where we learn that our “ism” may be a disease but that doesn’t let us off the hook.  Disease is not an excuse, merely part of the story.

A part of any transformational story requires us to think about sin.  I thought I’d list some words that pop up in conversations about living independently of God - infidelity in all its forms, arrogance, pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, laziness, selfishness, disrespect towards self and others, hate, stealing, cheating, and perhaps overarching all of this suffering - failure to live, truly live, our one precious, wild life (paraphrasing Mary Oliver).  

I go to all sorts of lengths to NOT deal with my ways of living independently of God in thought, word and deed.  It shows up in defensiveness, justifications, blaming others, and more.  One way I avoid seeing “sin” is by dodging my own emotions.  So if you’re digging around in the foundation of your soul, maybe you could set aside time to consider how you do - or do not - handle your own emotions.  I tend to set mine aside, but I have friends who go the opposite direction with almost identical results.  They marinate in their emotions, and some tell me that it has been helpful to them to realize that just because they feel something intensely, it doesn’t mean that the intense feeling is the only data point in choosing what comes next.  Things to look for?  Self-pity, anger, negativity, resentment, depression, controlling behaviors.  

Also, look for fear.  In our community we often refer to that as operating by the law of scarcity.  What we mean by that is living independently of the core beliefs that include:  God wants to bless us, there is enough to go around.  In AA they say “self-centered fear of not getting what we want or of losing what we have.”  

All these possibilities are tricky to recognize in ourselves, which is why we suggest that transformation is a journey not a destination.  This work will be something we commit to even as we eventually realize that how we do the work my shift and morph over time.  What might be part of your transformational work?  Who or what do you need to help you make progress?

It gets worse before it gets better

When I was a young girl visiting my grandmother, my friends took me to the local pool.  While there I managed to step on a big shard to glass.  Once I got back to my grandmother’s, she was unwilling to look at it seeing as how she had a weak stomach.  I knew that glass needed to come out, but being her granddaughter, I too suffer from that same weak stomach.  No way was I able to pull it out.  So I hobbled next door to my friend with tweezers in hand and her mom went to work on my foot.

“Teresa, this is going to hurt worse before I can make it better,”  Dot explained.  I nodded.  What else could I do?  I was a girl out of options.  So she dug it out, cleaned the wound, bandaged me up and I eventually headed back to my grandmother’s weak-kneed but grateful.

I need to say something terribly difficult so let’s all take a deep breath for a moment.  Here’s the hard truth:  we are a people who have not bothered to acquire the skill sets necessary to pull shards of glass out of bleeding people AND we have lost the stomach for the work in the process.

This is a terrible thing.  Because it leaves us with few good options when those days arrive when it is essential for someone to help us see the deeply wounded parts of us that need to be dug out and disinfected to avoid infection.

In the AA literature “The Twelve and Twelve” someone with a stomach for telling hard truths wrote “that most of the alcoholics under investigation were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose.”  Ouch.  And let me hasten to add that this malady is certainly NOT limited to folks with a substance use disorder.  This is true for all of us some of the time.

How do you think your own childishness, emotional sensitivity and grandiose thinking has hindered your own ability to live the life of your dreams?

A prayer for your recovery journey

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than

To be comforted –

To understand, than to be understood –

To love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

Amen

May you find a way to comfort, understand, love, set ego aside, and forgive today.  In so doing, may God grant you mercy.