Courage

By Dede H. Courage calls me to be better than I am To channel moral and mental strength To face my fears, to persevere and withstand I must face my ordeals going to any length I am so glad I have you all to hold my hand Courage may you be my Higher Power today Carrying me through trials and tribulations I see them on the horizon coming my way I need not call upon ghosts and apparitions Mighty Courage you are here to save the day I carry you in my pocket and in my head Round my neck in the emblem on my necklace Courage, I think of you to avoid the purloin I’ve achieved Courage with a smile on my face Ask and I’ll show you my sobriety coin!  

NOW ABOUT SEX

By Christine. R “Now about sex.” This single sentence from page 68 of our Big Book pulls the covers for a world of room to talk all we want about sex.  The sex discussion continues on 69, proving “there are no mistakes in God’s world.” “We all have sex problems.” Underlined and highlighted several times over in my book.   Sex is one third of our Fourth Step. Yet, bring up sex as a topic and you’d think we AA’s were a bunch of monks and nuns - never had an intimate relationship anywhere, anytime. Nope!  Nope!  Nope!  If the topic is resentment, all hands rise. If the topic is sex, it’s crickets. Mum’s the word. In our 12 x 12, p.56 the reference is to secrets so shameful, “we hope they will go to the grave with us.” Such were the topics of men and sex for me.  While whining and complaining about this man or that, my good sponsor would “bring me up sharply” to say, “They might have been jerks, but you chose them. Your picker is broken. You need a new picker. Why not let God choose for you next time?”   “Are you out of your mind? Why in the world would I do that?” was my internal dialogue.  Page 70 continues with: “Pray for the right ideal, for guidance, for sanity and for strength to do the right thing.” Turns out God can be a part of our sex conduct. Whoa!   Indeed, I was picking Mr. Dick instead of Mr. Right. Not looking into the long haul of any relationship, if Bob was busy, there was always Steve. If Steve wasn’t available, there was always Joe. Rather like going from drink to drink, I went from man to man. Men were drinks with legs. Eventually, I had to reveal to my home group I was addicted to men, things got so out of hand, so to speak. Alcoholism is like whack-a-mole. If it’s not drinking, it’s spending. If it’s not spending, it’s eating. If it's not eating, it’s sexing. One way or another, we seek escape.  I didn’t know how to be faithful. With no self-control, I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it to arrive by yesterday.   Some of our oral traditions are not written down; they are not memorialized. One of those traditions is to keep away from relationships for the first year of sobriety. Another crock, I thought. Yet, after taking a year off, I learned more about men by not dating than I did by dating them. The carrot my sponsor put forth was to attend women’s meetings. Learn how to be a woman among women. Learn how to be in relation with women, not in competition. What clinched it was my sponsor saying, “Once you learn to be a friend with women, you can learn to be a friend to men.” Oh boy! Let’s go to the meetings. Sure enough. Not only did I learn to be a friend to women, I learned to be a friend to men. I’d never had male friends before. Through our Program, I learned to be myself, not what someone else wanted or who I thought I should be.  No longer a steak dinner for sex. A doormat no more, I moved from the floor under one’s feet to a wall hanging to be appreciated and enjoyed.   Through esteem-able acts, came self-esteem.  One of the best suggestions is “if sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others.” When lonely, lustful or the thought of texting that ex-boyfriend seems like a good idea, a call to a newcomer saves the day. The privilege of listening to someone else. They call them “Exes” for a reason. Because it’s over and time to move on.  Letting go and moving on - sometimes the hardest thing in recovery.  “It quiets the imperious urge when to yield would mean heartache.” The heartache is for other people as well as ourselves when we pursue this “imperious urge.” After taking a year out and pulling down the blinds on relationships with men, I began dating a guy in our Program. Supportive to have someone who speaks our language of the heart, who doesn’t let me get away with things and who champions me when times are tough. We’ve been together for 18 years and recently married.   The woman who never could stay faithful, found faith. The woman who never knew lasting love, found love at last. While it took time and time takes time, it was worth every minute to find Mr. Right, Now.

At Six Years Old, The Die Was Cast

I Did Not Fit In

By Rick R. When I look back on my experience, after going through my pre drinking years, my drinking years, and my sober years, in the AA program, it is not hard to see what a troubled individual I had become. In my days from birth to the day I entered grammar school, I was unaware of the dysfunction in my immediate environment. With the absence of supervision, discipline, and role models, I did anything I wanted to do, and my behavior became dishonest, selfish, and shameful, as I later learned. On my first day of parochial school the world came apart for me when I looked around the classroom and realized I did not fit in. All the other kids were having fun and enjoying the experience and I was terrified knowing I could never live up to what was expected of me at that time. As a result, I developed fears and inhibitions those other kids did not seem to have. I learned right from wrong in church but was much too insecure to do what was right. I learned to cut corners, to lie, and cheat, since I had no confidence I could ever keep up with my peers. I began to overcompensate and to act out to make up for my short falls, but it never worked for me. Fist fighting became a regular event.  This all went on till I turned thirteen and found the answer to all my problems. I had access to alcohol. I did not recognize it at first, but it immediately removed all those fears and inhibitions. For the first time in my life I felt normal and I was as good as anyone and better than most, so I thought. I continued to drink to feel good but when I awoke in the morning, I was more terrified than before. All I had to do was  take that first drink and everything was right with the world again. I continued this pattern until I was twenty-eight years old when I woke up one morning to face The Hideous Four Horsemen, Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration Despair (Big Book pg. 151) and I had a moment of clarity.  I knew that I had to do something about my drinking, or I would die a horrible death at the hands of others or by my own hand. I called AA, struggled to find the location of the meeting place, arrived there two hours later, and was greeted by three members who were compassionate and understanding. As they listened, my sense of isolation slowly went away, as did the desire to drink. I have never wanted a drink from that moment: October 15,  1969 to the present. I have never had to struggle with the AA program and have embraced it to the best of my understanding. I came to understand the things that I did as a child and as a practicing alcoholic were the ingredients of the disease of Alcoholism. The die was cast at the age of six. All the ingredients were there long before I ever took a drink and all I had to do was add the alcohol.  Once I removed the alcohol, all the ingredients were still there and that is what the program helped me to set right. I was not responsible for becoming an Alcoholic. I am, however, accountable for my behavior while I was drinking. If I am willing to make restitution and clean up the wreckage of the past, I can free myself from all the guilt and shame and walk away with my dignity and self respect. Today my life is better than it ever could have been, had I never become an Alcoholic in the first place. Of that, I am convinced.

The Principle of Courage

  By John W. Long before I became a Grateful Alcoholic - no, I never thought I would describe myself in that way - in another dimension of life I had heard the gift of courage described as fortitude. I had an intellectual sense of what “fox-hole courage” was intended to mean, but having never been in the military, much less in battle, I had no literal reality in which to frame the term. When I began losing, with increased intensity and consequences, my battle with the disease of alcoholism, my fruitless, solitary struggle, my Bottom, led me to the AA program and there I experienced the miracle which allowed me to achieve a daily reprieve from my disease. In that awakening, with the help of others, I worked the 12 Steps, sought to live the 12 Traditions and even learned of the 12 Concepts. But as I trudged and strove to practice these principles in all of my affairs, I had to ask myself: what on earth did that really mean? Dearest Maggie, a darling octogenarian with over half of that time sober, occasionally would drive my home group to tears of laughter, when sharing about how she thought at first that compliance with this suggestion meant she needed to increase her liaisons with different members of the male gender. But when the laughter subsided, she would put the joke aside and burn into your consciousness, as only she could, what it had been like when she drank, how she had come to AA, and what her life was like now because of AA. She would put flesh on the bones of the skeleton of the Principles, but never a name to them. Although he had pointed to no particular location in the literature, as if only by virtue of the oral tradition of AA, my sponsor had conveyed to me the Principles: Honesty, Hope, Faith, Courage, Integrity, Willingness, Humility, Brotherly Love, Justice, Perseverance, Spirituality and Service. As I had then worked the Steps and continued to do so in the many days that have followed, each Principle had become so easily recognizable in each Step, yet their collection in one place was as elusive as a finger of fog ‘neath the bridge on a blossoming October morning in the city. They were like a good friend who timely arrives with help when trouble is afoot, always there to shed light on the problem at hand or to guide to the next right thing when doubt or fear permeates the senses. So it is no surprise to me now, as I Zoom from one virtual meeting to the next in these shuttered times, in a March that had come in like one lion and was exiting into April as a pride of them, with not a lamb to be seen, that the Principle of courage is on the nearing horizon. Born from a Faith which embodies the awareness, to paraphrase FDR that “The only thing to Fear is Fear itself,” fortitude needs now to be summoned to carry this alcoholic through these troubled times. This too is the Principle of courage: the knowledge and belief that no difficulty need be so great as to preclude the ability to confront it with Integrity. I was hearing the Principle of courage expressed by those sharing their experience, strength and hope in my Zoom rooms and I needed to hear it. Whether I attended a Zoom in my home town to strike back at the feeling of loneliness that the shelter-in-place mandates had fostered or tuned-in elsewhere just for a change of pace, the response in the end was always the same – have courage, you are not alone in this battle.  I saw in my Zooms how vital and necessary it was to have been searching and fearless when I had taken that inventory. That tool in my spiritual kit, that fourth principle, courage, was now being put to use in ways I had never confronted, contemplated, or not a mere few weeks before even imagined possible. Courage, the Principle of step four, honed so many days passed in the inventory’s making, was today confronting the fears of the pandemic, and this was in real time for me Practicing These Principles in All My Affairs.  This was me in real time practicing the principles in all my affairs to build “the arch through which we passed to freedom” (Big Book, p. 62).