Okay, I'll Go First

This project is ostensibly intended to offer stories from people who have confronted their condition and began to build a new life.  So, let's get started.

At the end of 2006, I stopped drinking after having thoroughly embarrassed myself and my wife in front of all of her family.  Again.  My drunken rages had become a largely nightly event.  With this one, I knew I had to stop drinking.  I staked our marriage on staying away from booze, and my drinking came skidding to an uneasy halt.  

I thought it was a simple matter of will; failure would be a incontrovertible sign of weakness.  I would push through the struggles.

Until I didn't.  A little over a month later, the smallest slight, cultivated for days, gave me all the excuse I needed to start drinking again.  It wasn't long before the raging spectacles became routine once again, and my wife invited me to find a new place to live.

Even before I was asked to leave, I verged on despair.  I knew that I had lost my wife, and I could hardly imagine the damage I had visited upon my kids.  I hated myself, and I felt such shame about my drinking.  Naturally, my reaction was to anesthetize myself with more booze.  During the day, I tried to find some handle to help me break the cycle, but I couldn't see one.  I believed that my only choices were in-patient rehab, AA, or to keep drinking.  None of these choices had any appeal.  I leveled with a friend of mine who had dealt with similar issues, and she put me in touch with a young Catholic man who had overcome his addiction.  I confided in a few others, but I still found virtually nothing to lean on.  

Having nowhere else to go, I turned to prayer.  I asked friends to pray that I might find a way.  I prayed for reassurance that I would be loved once I admitted that I had failed, that I was weak, that I couldn't quit on my own. Having reached the edge, I needed desperately to know that there was something waiting for me when I landed.

I remained on the edge, waiting and drinking, for about a month.  One morning, my friend called to tell me about a news story about AA meetings in my area that had been taken over by a cult.  Needless to say, my interest was piqued, and I immediately found the story online.  The story had a lurid storyline, and I had no clue how the bizarre story might help--until I saw a sidebar story containing an interview with an area counselor.  

I have virtually no memory of what he said; I didn't read it closely.  Instead, I looked for information about his employer, Kolmac Clinic.  What I found was a clinic that specialized in outpatient detox and rehab.  I called the clinic immediately and set an appointment for an evaluation.

Getting to the clinic wasn't such a big step.  Answering the interview questions honestly was bigger; I had never admitted to anyone how much I was really drinking.  At the end of the evaluation, I was confronted with a question that absolutely terrified me: "We can get you in here tonight.  What do you say?"

I went to a nearby park where it occurred to me that I had had my last drink.  Stunned, I walked to a nearby chapel and prayed for help, for strength.  Then, I went back to the clinic where I sat down and introduced myself to the strangers around me, "I'm Don, and I'm an alcoholic."

Community -- Updated

So, I launched this blog, and I promptly left for two weeks of business travel.  The days and the evenings were packed.  I can't complain.  Compared to the heat and humidity here in the DC area, Minneapolis and LA were fine destinations.

Of course, you may wonder why I would begin any endeavor and walk away, my answer is simple and two-fold.  My perfectionism and my procrastination are two of my biggest character flaws.  I wanted to just start writing, even if the writing's not my best or particularly timely.  These will take care of themselves.

In any event, between Minneapolis and LA, I was able to get to Denver for Phoenix Multisport's annual fundraising gala.  The gala was held at Phoenix's new facility in downtown Denver, close to Champa and Park Avenue.  Phoenix has made huge strides to get the facility together.  Ben showed me around the place last October.  "Potential" best described the place then.  Now, it's a building that houses weight training, boxing, and yoga.  There's a coffee bar for socials.  The facilities are superb.

Of course, by themselves, facilities don't help people stay sober.  The men and women of Phoenix have created an amazing community of people dedicated to supporting one and other in sobriety.  They stay busy with a host of activities.  You don't have to be an athlete to participate; you just have to be 48 hours sober.  Of course, if you are an athlete, they may sponsor your participation in serious sporting events.

Phoenix hosted 250 team members, volunteers, and friends last Saturday--completely sold out.  The room was full of wonderful people, from all walks of life.  You could find guys with neck tattoos; you could find men and women in uniform, decorated for their valor and service to country.  There was a lot of emotion on display: sadness for those who still suffer, maybe just a little pride for how far so many have come.  Most of all there was a lot of joy and warmth and love.  It was a privilege to attend.

When I was drinking, I had only a passing familiarity with joy that grew more distant with every day of drinking.  I had no idea how to react to the love that was offered to me.  Every drink simply put me farther away from the work that I needed to do.  Only by leaving behind the alienation that my addiction fed and getting the work underway could I begin to understand what I saw and felt last Saturday night.  I had to take that first giant step.

If you're in Denver, Boulder, or Colorado Springs, see what Phoenix Multisport has going on.  Check out their calendar.  Get to a social.

UPDATE: Saturday, I came across this passage from Ezekiel--Chapter 36, for those who want to follow along:

I will give you a new heart,
and place a new spirit within you,
taking from your bodies your stony hearts
and giving you natural hearts.

That's what I'm talking about.

Where we're heading

Against the fear of taking the initial steps away from a life of addiction, we place the hope of a better life.  It's not enough to merely break free from the addiction.  A life without addiction is good, but we want to replace addiction with something good, something positive, even something beautiful.

While I'm not going to tell you that AA is the only way to recovery, AA was an important factor in my early recovery.  In particular, there is a passage in the Big Book that was extremely encouraging.  The passage is known as "The Promises".  As I progressed in my recovery, I saw that it was absolutely true.  If you do the work of recovery--spiritual, emotional, and physical work--you too will see that these promises come true:

"If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.  Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them."  (The Big Book, pages 83-84)

This spring, I heard a gentle reminder of these promises at Mass one Sunday morning.  The second reading that morning was from Paul's Letter to the Romans.  Its expression of the joy with which we can deal with our infirmities is breathtaking:

"...we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Hope, forged by endurance, does not disappoint.

Anonymity

...is a time-honored facet of recovery programs.  I completely respect the desire of any and all who wish to remain anonymous as they struggle with addiction, as they help friends or family with addiction-related problems, etc.  So, I was chagrined to find that your humble administrator had failed to enable the posting of comments from anonymous sources.  Chalk it up to operator error.

So, I'm sorry that my error served as to inhibit comments.  It has been remedied.  Thanks, Julie!

Getting Started

In August 2010, a friend asked me a pointed question.  We were a little more than a week into an 11-day backpacking expedition.  I had hurt my knee, and, that particular day, the trip was no fun at all.  In my self-pity, I asserted that hiking out with the bad knee was the hardest thing I had ever done.  My friend's question: "What about getting sober?"

Self-pity deflated, I knew that getting sober should be the toughest thing I had done.  I wanted it to be right.  It was really close.  It wasn't quite.  And I began to think.

Ten months later, in a very quiet moment, the right answer made its appearance.  The hardest thing I had ever done was to begin the process: to go from knowledge--from understanding that I had to stop drinking-- to execution.

Of course, what was holding me back was knowing that getting sober meant that everything would change, and I had absolutely no idea what that meant.  I could imagine what an alcohol-free life would look like.  I saw no friends.  I saw loneliness.  Mostly, I saw a huge emptiness and felt the fear.


Honestly, the web was no help.  I saw lots of links to AA-influenced sites, but they offered little insight as to how someone like me could manage, let alone thrive, in the early struggle to stay sober.  I found nothing that would give me any idea of what I could expect to feel, to experience.


So, I'm trying to fill a void here, a perceived need.  But just like getting sober, I'm not going to be doing this alone.  I'll describe my experiences, and I'll be posting the stories of others, as well.  There will be posts from ex-drunks, addicts, people with sex addiction issues.  


The stories will reflect the perspectives of those from different faiths, as well.  In my experience, faith has a critical factor in my recovery.  I am a Catholic, and that should be clear in some of my posts.  Even so, I recognize that your mileage may vary.  I hope to post stories from people with widely varying perspectives.


Nonetheless, I believe that faith, expressed as it may be, is the key.  A writer, an "ex-drunk" as she describes herself, recently posted on her blog something she had overheard: "Faith isn't leaping from Point A to Point B. It's leaping from Point A."


Amen.