grateful for the inner peace which God has given me through AA.
M. B.
Cardiff by the Sea, California
Sunlight and Air
MAY 1999
I came to Alcoholics Anonymous young in years but sick of soul and full of secrets. Now, in my middle age, I no longer harbor secrets, and my soul is in better health than ever. It’s freer, more generous, and able as it never was in my drinking days to receive love and joy and wonder as well as the darker emotions. While all of AA’s twelve suggested Steps are crucial to my ongoing recovery, the Fifth Step more than any other has helped me get free of those soul-crippling secrets.
I attended my first AA meetings with my then-partner. She was older than I, and her alcoholism was more visible. When our physician prescribed AA for her, I went along because, except for our jobs and her occasional disappearing acts during binges, we did everything as a unit. I realize now that I didn’t trust her to go on her own. I didn’t trust AA either, and knew next to nothing about it. How could those people understand her the way I did?
The first meeting we stumbled (!) into was open to all. I hastened to explain to the group members who greeted us that my partner was the one with the problem; I was just there for moral support. They told me about Al-Anon but said I was welcome at open AA meetings, too. Much as I did need Al-Anon, it was open AA meetings that saved my life.
My partner and I went together to several open meetings a week. We still drank, though, and I still flew into rages and battered her insensible during our drunken arguments, sometimes so badly that we ended the night in a hospital emergency room. These outbursts, I told myself, were caused by her drunkenness. Who wouldn’t lose patience with such obnoxious behavior?
At AA meetings, I listened only for what might get my partner sober, but after hearing scores of alcoholics tell their stories, I couldn’t help but look at my own drinking. I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic—after all, I wasn’t as bad off as her—but it did come through to me that normal social drinking did not result in blackouts or fits of violence or the need to drive with one eye closed to keep from seeing two sets of lines in the middle of the road.
At that time, I was a newspaper reporter. My beat was a rural county that voted with paper ballots, and on election nights all the reporters who covered the county brought food and soft drinks to the county clerk’s office to share while we waited out the vote tally and then wrote our stories. I had my last drink on an election night when I had decided that my contribution would be a case of beer. No one else ever brought alcohol, nor had anyone suggested that I bring it. Every time I helped myself to one of the beers, I urged others to join me, but they all declined, saying they needed their wits about them while there was work to be done. I defiantly drank several more beers, somehow wrote my stories, and drove myself home without incident—hardly high drama compared to the drunken domestic battles. The next day nevertheless found me face-to-face with the realization that while my colleagues had focused on their work, I had been obsessed with the beer. AA had ruined my drinking! I still couldn’t admit that I was an alcoholic, but I doubt now that I could have stopped drinking or stayed stopped without the support I got secretly from attending AA meetings as a spectator.
My partner and I eventually separated, and I no longer had a reason to attend AA meetings—or so I thought. I moved to the city, where I was heartsick and achingly lonely—although I kept that a secret even from myself—but also painfully self-conscious and fearful of meeting people. A few drinks would make all this easier, I thought, and maybe I could drink moderately now that I knew the danger signs. Fortunately, my closest friend was a sober alcoholic I had met at one of those open meetings. Before I resumed drinking, she gently guided me back to AA, suggesting that if I listened for myself this time I just might discover that I belonged here. She told me that the only requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking, and that I was entitled to the help that AA provides for living without alcohol.
Almost immediately, I accepted the First Step and declared myself an alcoholic, which brought a great sense of relief. I set about working the rest of the Steps, too, but I secretly edited them because I didn’t believe in God. People who did, I thought, were just too weak-minded to face hard reality. I would use AA to restore myself to sanity. I would turn my life over to the care of … well, AA would do as a Higher Power. My first attempt at a Fourth Step produced a list of my drunken misdeeds, and for my Fifth Step, I recited this list to the sponsor I rarely saw or called, tossing in an amusing detail added here and there to keep her attention. And so on. I went to lots of meetings, but I barely skimmed the surface of the Steps, and above all I avoided close examination of my own soul and any mention of God. My secrets stayed secret, and I stayed sick.
Eventually, meetings began to irritate me. I looked around the rooms and focused on the few sober alcoholics whose lives seemed marginal to me and decided it was crazy to depend on them for guidance. Besides, I had a new partner, who was not an alcoholic, and my life was manageable now. Maybe it was a mistake, I thought, to define myself in terms of a disease. Coping without alcohol no longer seemed difficult. I concluded that I could stop attending meetings and stay sober with the other tools AA had given me.
In truth, I had little real practice with most of those other tools. My moral inventory had been neither fearless nor searching. I had never admitted my most serious shortcomings to myself, let alone to another person or to the God I didn’t believe in. The self-centered fears and resentments I had carried through my drinking and into sobriety were still with me, because I could not remove them myself and was far from ready for God to remove them. Now, without meetings and fellowship with other recovering alcoholics to subdue them, my character defects took on new strength.
Any veneer of emotional sobriety I might have developed quickly wore away once I stopped going to meetings. I didn’t beat my new partner—at least I hadn’t hit anyone since I’d stopped drinking—but I did try to control her every breath and showed no respect for her feelings. My frequent outbursts of obsessive jealousy left me humiliated and ashamed, and so did the romantic obsession I developed with another woman that led me to betray my partner. When my escalating emotional turmoil kept me from concentrating on my work, I made serious mistakes that cost me a job and increased my sense of shame. I had not picked up a drink yet, but emotionally I was worse off than ever. Finally, when I hit what I now know was a spiritual bottom, I went back to the one place that I knew would still welcome me—AA meetings.
This time I was ready to open my mind and my heart to the program in its entirety, to seek serenity and emotional sobriety and not just the quick fix. Now when I looked around the rooms, I focused on people who had what I wanted. I saw that they were the ones who worked at improving their conscious contact with God as they understood Him—or Her, or It. I still couldn’t claim even the slightest knowledge of God, but it was clear to me at last that I needed to depend on something much bigger than me. Even AA couldn’t fill that bill, because it was made up of people like me. My understanding of a Higher Power is still subject to shifts. Sometimes, I think of it as The Unknowable, or as The Great What Is. Often, I envision it as an indifferent force, something like an electrical current, that is available to all living things and from which human beings can derive strength and generosity and acceptance. The one thing I feel sure of is that it’s more powerful than my will or any mere human or collection of humans, even AA as a whole; that’s what makes it higher.
Having acknowledged a Higher Power, regardless of how little I understood of its nature, I was ready at last to take the Steps of AA as they are and not as I wished them to be. For starters, I saw that I had not restored myself to sanity, and that I never could. All the Steps seemed different now, including those that don’t specifically mention a Higher Power.
The Fourth Step, to me, is like a tour of a haunted house. My first time around, when I heard the scuttling in the walls, I raced alone through the hallways and out the back door. This time, the acceptance of a Higher Power gave me the courage to open the closet doors and even venture into the cellar. I found long-hidden stores of fear and resentment. I found a few hidden treasures, too.
Having uncovered my character defects,