Category: source

 By Chad Minteer

I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness and stayed until I was almost 30, about the time I started on my recovery path.  I was a good little boy and young adult, studious and well spoken, and I quickly made progress as I reached out for privileges and responsibilities. I had no idea then that so many of those behaviors of people pleasing, finding worth in accomplishments and external accolades, perfectionism, and workaholism were due to growing up in alcoholic dysfunction. My Dad was an alcoholic who left us and the religion when I was little. (He has now been sober for more than 25 years and we have a great relationship.)

My parents divorced when I was 6. My Mom was a single parent until she married another alcoholic when I was 11. He was a belligerent domineering drunk. When I was a teenager and young adult, it was my religion that saved me from that. Being a “spiritual” person formed a core part of my identity. But by the time I came into AA, overloaded with commitments, no idea what self-care meant, in a broken marriage I felt I couldn’t leave, and in the early stages of serious alcoholism myself, I was completely disillusioned with my own religious belief system and my experiences within that religious community, especially when it came to dealing with my family and relationship problems.

When I started AA, I was neck-deep in comparative religion, Eastern and Western philosophy, and all kinds of academic pursuits related to theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology – all the things I wasn’t allowed to explore growing up. I was in the process of deconstructing all of my former beliefs, trying to get behind and beyond the intense feelings of guilt and shame that I was experiencing as I found myself unable to believe, trying to detach from all the things I used to do as a believer and not realizing how much loss I was experiencing, and finally embracing the dissonance and the questioning and discarding certainty.

I became a heretic, an apostate, according to my former religion. I wore the label proudly, in the mood of Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary: “Apostate: a leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.” I didn’t want a fresh turtle, I wanted to know what turtles were made of and whether there was anything real beyond more dead turtles. When I left my former religion, I never seriously considered joining some other religion, and I didn’t gravitate towards any “anti” group of former members of the one I had left. I also didn’t feel like a joiner with secular humanist groups or the more committed anti-religion atheists. I found AA plenty tolerant and open, though a few individuals could get a tad preachy for my liking. I mostly ignored them, recognizing in them much that seemed familiar from the thought world I had just left.

I brought a flippant, judgmental, but also intensely curious and serious energy into my AA recovery journey. I wasn’t even aware yet of the grief and loss I was about to go through leaving the worldview and community that I was raised in. The religious family trauma that happened then and continues to happen now is a mainstay of why I need recovery and the recovery community. It’s the ground I walk on, the air I breathe. So keeping AA open, welcoming, tolerant, and loving to all believers and unbelievers is important to me.

At the time I was coming into AA, words like “spiritual” were just… fraught. Loaded. There was a valence on them, a charge. Today they might be called “trigger” words. They were slippery. They meant too many different things. So, when I thought, and when I talked, I avoided them. I had heard a quote around that time by Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I took that to mean that if I wanted to think beyond the boundaries of the little world I had been raised in, I needed to expand my language, and use different words than I was used to using to say what I meant. (I didn’t know that Wittgenstein might have meant that if you can’t say anything about something because it’s beyond language, then say nothing, because saying anything might just be nonsense.)

I needed to say what was worth saying in such a way that the completely uninitiated unbeliever and the devout believer would understand me. I didn’t realize then that I wasn’t actually doing that for other people, I was doing that for me. I needed to get to the heart of the matter with why AA worked for some people and not for others, because clearly (to me) that couldn’t be “God” in any conventional sense, unless I accepted that God was arbitrary and inconsistent and almost passive-aggressive and opaque. I didn’t accept that.

If there was some reality out there that some people referred to as “God” in the practice of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I wanted to be able to describe it and think about it in specific ways that didn’t need the extra ingredient “God”. I still had plenty of awe and wonder even so. It was at this time I discovered the book The Spirituality of Imperfection, by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, and that book made it possible for me to work the 12 Steps, including the ones with “God” in them, with a sponsor, and that changed my life.

When I listened to others, I did a lot of translating. That made me work harder to find meaning for myself, to pay attention to and honor the person’s experience as they shared, or to relate the deeper meaning or intent or principle that was being expressed to some other concept that made more sense for me. It became more and more clear to me that much of the religious language that people use is just shorthand for our shared, lived, human experience. It can be a way for people to express themselves in a way they think others will understand. I was healed from some of my loss and religious pain by getting other believers’ perspectives, because it showed me that many paths and many options were available, both within a given belief system, and outside of it.

I love the word spiritual, even though it’s a term I had to redefine for myself, and it’s a term that some of my friends in humanist circles dislike. Here’s what spiritual currently means to me as a mystical atheist, or whatever I am.

• Connection with others based on honesty, openness, vulnerability, and mutual respect. To me, this is the heart of recovery. All the actions, all the friendships, all the community, everything works better when it’s coming from a place of openness and honesty. Getting real. Going deeper. This reminds me, constantly, that there’s something beyond me, whether that means beyond my ego and the stories I tell myself, somewhere deeper within my own consciousness and my own being; beyond my own individual understanding and resources and wisdom; or beyond my own denial, wishful thinking, or skewed picture of reality towards something more real, more whole, more accurate, more objective out there. That feeling of connectedness, and the results of actions that come from practicing it in my life, I will gladly call that spiritual.

• Perennial cultural wisdom and the truth of experience. Recovery samples ‘the wisdom of the ages’ and sages right next to the wisdom of John, and Cathy, and Judy, and Dennis – or whoever happens to be there. The cultural wisdom of lived experience keeps recycling itself in settings where people famously use the word ‘God’ in one sentence and the word ‘fuck’ in the next. My experience in recovery constantly reinforces to me that this wisdom is not found exclusively in religious texts or movements, as I was taught growing up – but neither is it found exclusively outside of these sources, as I thought when I was leaving mine. Religion and religious beliefs work for some people. They just don’t work for me anymore, not in the same way. But hearing the truth of my life out of someone else’s mouth, that deep recognition and identification, and becoming aware of options and context and perspectives that I wasn’t able to get to all on my own – that I will gladly call spiritual, even if it’s purely psychological, purely social. Man is a social animal, and it turns out that wisdom can be found around other people, even a group of drunks.

• Awareness of finiteness, limitation, temporality, and mortality. “Life on life’s terms” seems to me the best brief encapsulation of this. Hearing thousands of shares at hundreds of recovery meetings reminds me of the shared human condition. I am not helpless or hopeless, nor am I unique. I am like other people. And I am not in control of everything. Some people call this state of mind “humility” but that is also a loaded word for me. Sometimes this kind of awareness is a cause of childlike wonder and curiosity, openness, gentleness. Sometimes it’s terrifying, like when someone learns they have cancer. Sometimes it’s frustrating, annoying, disappointing. Sometimes it brings fear and anger and the desire to escape. But at the end of the day, this is what makes us human, this is what makes us more like each other than not, and this is the basis for compassion as well as an appreciation for beauty, for good, for joy, for serenity.

• Human qualities of the heart, such as honesty, hope, courage, integrity, willingness, forgiveness, perseverance, and compassion. All of the best of human nature can be found in the human stories in the rooms, right alongside the worst. Our best and highest selves are always available, always something to reach for, to aspire to. To me they’re actually nearer the surface in a real place with real people having real struggles. As Leonard Cohen sang it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

That’s mostly what I mean by spiritual experience or spiritual energy. I’ve also come to appreciate that all the “profane” ordinary things count too – nature, exercise, sports, nutrition, and so many other things that keep us relatively healthy and whole.

Once, after a particularly dark period in my life, in sobriety, I heard a voice say clearly and distinctly “you are stronger than you think.” I’m not one for hearing voices. It wasn’t God. It was my own inner resources, the ‘god within’, a part of my psyche. But it was still a spiritual experience. Recovery and everything that has come into my life since starting it have helped me become more and more aware of my own precious worth, and my own abilities and responsibilities. It’s up to me to apply what I’ve learned, ask for help, and do my best to create the life and world that I want to have for myself. It’s up to me. But I’m not alone. Recovery has helped me know that I can do it, that I am doing it. That’s a spiritual awakening, a coming into the fullness of life that I didn’t think was possible when I got here.

Thank god. Or as George Carlin used to say, “Thank Joe.”

---

Chad Minteer got sober in Twin Falls and Jerome, Idaho. He’s an aspiring writer and part-time blogger, when he’s not doing his day job managing mobile GIS software development for mosquito control field operations. He identifies as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but also is at home in Al-Anon, Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA), and Codependents Anonymous (CODA).

Chad writes a recovery and travel blog at www.recoveringallofme.com, covering unpopular emotions like shame and anger, heterodox recovery, and any book, event, group, or program that supports free thought and emotional freedom connected with recovery. You can contact him through his website or at [email protected]. He’d be happy to consider covering your event or reviewing your book and writing about it or publishing your blog article on similar topics.

---

The featured image for today’s article is a photo taken by Robin J Ramage in Port Dover, Ontario.

---

 

The post Finding Humanist Spirituality in AA first appeared on AA Agnostica.

By David Bohl
Originally Posted on the author’s website on August 22, 2020

Today I celebrate an anniversary of 15 years of sobriety from alcohol. I cannot state any revelations at this milestone, except to say that I’ve diligently worked over the 15 years to increase the protective factors in my life that combat a chronic brain disease. I’ve never ceased to see what I have as something that I will be cured from because I know it’s a progressive and fatal disease – as an addiction specialist I’ve seen first-hand that addiction kills and not just its victims. It kills families, it robs children of parents and parents of children. It’s as deadly as any virus – if not more deadly.

Over all these years in recovery, I’ve seen attitudes about addiction change very little and that perhaps pains me the most as I celebrate sober years. There’s still so much shame surrounding addiction and there’s even shame surrounding recovery. It’s interesting because as much as I want to celebrate it, I want to also rebel against having to consider myself “recovered” from something that the society tells me was somehow my fault. Because that’s how we still think of addiction – at least majority of us. As something that you bring on to yourself because of a flaw in your character or lack of solid moral values.

To me that kind of thinking is nonsense, but I can’t get angry about it any more because that’s not productive. I can only work towards society changing those attitudes by sharing my story and showing you that, yes, you too can recover and lead a successful, happy life.

My story isn’t that shocking for those of us who struggled with addiction. I got sober in my 40s, after a medical incident, started with acute detoxification, residential treatment to stabilize, IOP for 24 sessions, then continued through connecting and staying connected with like-minded individuals who I trusted shared my wellness goals and helped to hold me accountable – all the while investigating causes and conditions, most notably environmental/ cognitive ones (including stopping smoking tobacco 11 years ago) of addiction.

I didn’t find god or that spiritual Higher Power as I was instructed to do in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that searching was one of the darker sides of my recovery. Feeling less-than, and even ashamed of my lack of spiritual connection made me doubt my recovery more times that I care to count, until I finally realized that I did have a Higher Power all along and it was not the one suggested by Big Book advocates or old-timers in meetings.

My Higher Power is simply Reality.

For me, Reality meant that I was honest about my diseases and that I understood that it would kill me if I didn’t take it seriously and diligently pursued recovery. I like to say that I pursue Reality relentlessly – with more fervour and energy that I’ve ever given my addiction. This is the only way to do it – my obsession with recovery has to always be stronger than my obsession to numb Reality used to be.

Is Reality always pleasant? Of course not. Of course there are times when I’m exhausted and feeling like I just need a break – but a break from what? I used to take breaks all the time and then it got so confusing that I could no longer function. I couldn’t live a day without taking a drink, couldn’t be social without it, couldn’t relax without it, couldn’t think about it not being in my life. It was everything to me and it was destroying me.

Fifteen years later, I know that I was just running away from what was in front of me all along, which is my own life and my own Reality. I will not stop chasing it, believing in it. And I think I can do all that for the duration of my chronic brain disease – for the rest of my life that is.

---

David B. Bohl, author of the memoir Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth, is an independent addiction consultant who fully understands the challenges faced by so many who seek to escape from, or drown their pain through, external means. His story offers hope to those struggling with the reality of everyday life in today’s increasingly stressful world.

Through his private practice substance use disorder consulting business, Beacon Confidential LLC, David provides independent professional consultation, strategic planning, motivation and engagement, care coordination, recovery management and monitoring, and advocacy services to individuals, families, and organizations struggling with substance use issues and disorders.

---

The post Recognizing 15 Years of Sobriety first appeared on AA Agnostica.

By Dale K.

I’m not talking about the soul they say will never die and go to Heaven to be reunited with the dear departed.

No, I’m talking about the kind that Billy Joel sings of in his album, River of Dreams. “It’s gonna get dark, it’s gonna get cold … You gotta get tough but that ain’t enough … It’s all about soul.”

As a young man, I spent 30 months in the combat zone off the coast of Vietnam. Some of the time, it was little more than a party. Other times, the reality of war was personal and the peril was close enough to touch. For my troubles, I came home with a mostly empty seabag and PTSD. I was adrift in a world that denigrated veterans and held me to a standard that I could not reach. The PTSD seemed mild and, to a degree, quite manageable with counseling. I tended to avoid aggressive men. I preferred the company of gentle ones and women. I wasn’t exactly sure why. I recognized it as nothing more than a personal preference. It was just part of the essence that is me. It seemed to be just a part of my soul.

In the mid-seventies I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and prescribed Valium. I was happy to abuse my prescription and, after a while, the doctor refused to prescribe it any longer. Several years later, the anxiety was out of control so I sought counseling. After hearing about how much I drank (I only told her about half the truth), the therapist told me I needed to stop drinking for 60 days before I could continue the sessions. It was recommended that I go to AA.

It took many months of on and off drinking to understand that alcohol was exacerbating my anxiety. It was this realization that persuaded me to stop drinking for good. My solution had become my problem. With abstinence, my life improved considerably. By the time those 60 days of sobriety rolled around, I no longer felt the need for a therapist. There were problems to resolve, but I was learning how to face them sober. Eventually, my anxiety was replaced with serenity and that has allowed me to have a beautiful life in sobriety. I raised two wonderful daughters that have never known their dad to drink. I ran my own business for 22 years before retiring in 2011. Yes, there were a couple of divorces, but I overcame the heartache and learned from those, too.

I say all this to give you the back story. Now, I’ll fast forward a bit to the summer of 2019. Something happened that brought an old memory that I had buried for 50 years into the light. It terrified me and my PTSD went through the roof. I began to avoid others. When I did leave the house, I was hyper-vigilant, always guarding my six, agitated, staying as far away from others as possible and fleeing when the threat bested me. It seemed I was always in a state of “fight or flight.” My AA meetings were a little different. I knew these people. They weren’t as threatening, but I could still sense that I was pulling away from them. Let’s just say I was social distancing before social distancing was cool.

While at home, I found myself running the same thoughts through my mind over and over with no resolve. I was losing sleep. Usually I sleep like a rock for 7-8 hours. Now, I felt lucky to get 5-6 hours and it was always interrupted. I knew I needed help and the VA provided me with a therapist. One thing she told me early on is that my mind totally erased the memory because it was protecting me. At that time, I couldn’t cope with it. I recalled it now because I’m better equipped to manage it and I’ll be ok. They say that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Apparently, it’s also an incredible survival tool!

For the last five months, I’ve been self-isolating because of the pandemic. As much as I empathize with those who are suffering because of it, it has brought me some comfort. When I go to the grocery store others are avoiding me! What? They’re doing what I’ve been doing for months. The stress of going out in public was reduced to a very manageable level. This gave me the opportunity to relax and decompress. With that, I was able to think clearer and engage in more thoughtfulness towards myself.

While about a third of people are experiencing depression and/or anxiety because of COVID-19, I’m finding an old friend … serenity. How I accomplished this was by heeding the advice that was being given to me. I attended my weekly therapy sessions with enthusiasm and undertook a lot of self-reflection in-between. I stayed connected to my AA friends and the very large family I come from via Zoom meetings. I ate well. That not only included lots of fruits and veggies, but ice cream for my soul. I forced myself to stay in bed if I woke early. I paid close attention to my feelings. I didn’t judge or deny them. I just felt and considered them. I focused on my breath when anxiety rose its ugly head. I stayed busy with renovations to my home. I checked in on my neighbor and helped her when I could. I built a bird feeder and took hikes so I can connect with a very soothing Mother Nature. I rode my motorcycle a lot because it demands that I only focus on what is in front of me. It’s like a form of meditation for me.

All of this grounding helps me stay in the present. It’s only in the present that I can look at everything objectively. I’m not that person that was traumatized 50 years ago. Today I have strengths that I honed with therapy, the rooms of AA, my intact sobriety, the classroom of life and the love of my family. I can use those strengths to defeat or, at least, minimize the effects of trauma. I was a fairly well adjusted guy (some would argue this) before that memory stole my soul. Today, that memory is just a memory. I was hoping it would fade away, but I don’t believe that will happen anymore. Fortunately, it is losing its power over my present. In my 39 years of sobriety I’ve proven to myself that I’m better and stronger than this. I’ll not only prevail, but grow from this adversity!

Sometime, in the not-too-distant future, life will evolve to some kind of new normal. The guy that will greet that future will be an even better version of the me that I’ve known in sobriety. It was dark and cold, but I was tough because I found my soul! Isn’t that what it’s all about?

---

Dale K. has lived in North Carolina since 2018. He grew up in Michigan and attended 12 years of Catholic school, but it didn’t “take.” He decided he was an atheist at the age of 13. He moved to South Florida in 1974. He first came to AA in 1980 and had his last drink in 1981. In the mid ‘80s a secular meeting was started in his home town of Boca Raton. He attended that meeting exclusively until he moved up the coast in 2010.

There he found traditional AA to be just like he had left it. In 2013 he discovered that AA had published a new edition of the Big Book in 2001. He was quick to read it and see the changes. Realizing there were none made to the “first 164 pages,” he decided it was time to make the changes himself. With that, he began writing his book, A Secular Sobriety. It was first published in June 2017 and has surpassed 1000 sales. It can be purchased on Amazon. A Secular Sobriety: Including a secular version of the first 164 pages of the Big Book.

---

The featured image for today’s article is a photo taken by Robin J Ramage in Port Dover, Ontario.

---

The post A Soul Sighting first appeared on AA Agnostica.

By Lisa M. Najavits, PhD

What is a person’s best self? There are different possible versions of you, and life experiences can bring out better or worse versions. Addiction brings out worse versions. So does trauma – painful events such as child abuse, war, natural disasters and the many other tragedies that humans are subject to. Recovery brings out your best self.

There’s a wonderful exercise that originated in school systems about 15 years ago. It asks students to imagine their “hoped for” self and their “dreaded self” one year out. Students who imagined a “hoped for” self in terms of their academic work in the next school year and had specific strategies to achieve it did better in school months later than those who had the positive vision alone (Oyserman et al., 2004). Vision plus action leads to one’s best self.

I discovered this exercise while working on a book I had long wanted to write: a self-help book for addiction and/or trauma. I’ve worked in the field of addiction and trauma since the 1990s as a professor developing new models to help improve care and conducting clinical trials, and also as a therapist. It’s been incredibly moving to see the field grow and also to directly witness the inspiring recovery of so many people and also the dedicated work of so many different supports, both professional and peer-led.

The models I’ve developed, including Finding Your Best Self, are agnostic, while also strongly supporting the value of 12-step and other self-help groups. They have strong idealism and optimism, striving to build a sense of hope, but are not religious: Seeking Safety (L. M. Najavits, 2002b), A Woman’s Path to Recovery (L. M. Najavits, 2002a), Creating Change (L. M. Najavits, in press), and Finding Your Best Self (Lisa M. Najavits, 2019). All emphasize a public health perspective, aiming to offer accessible, low-cost options that can be done by anyone regardless of training or experience. The only requirement is a desire to help those who are struggling with addiction or trauma.

Finding Your Best Self was designed as self-help and can also be conducted by any peer, sponsor, counselor or professional, in group or individual format. It has 36 short chapters, each just a few pages. Examples are:

• How do people change?
• The world is your school
• Listen to your behavior
• Wish versus reality
• Possible selves
• The language of trauma and addiction
• Social pain;
• Why trauma and addiction go together
• Body and biology
• The culture of silence
• Tip the scales recovery plan
• Every child is a detective
• How to survive a relapse
• Identity– how you view yourself
• Perception– how others view you
• The decision to grow
• Dark feelings (rage, hatred, revenge, bitterness)
• Create a healing image
• How others can help—family, friends, partners, sponsors, counselors.

Chapters can be done in any order as each is independent of the others. Each chapter has  exercises, self-reflection questions, and a Recovery Voices section in which someone with lived experience writes about how the chapter topic relates to their own recovery. The people who contributed to Recovery Voices include a wide array of addictions (substance and behavioral), trauma types, and diverse gender and cultural backgrounds. One woman is quoted below, from the chapter Self-Forgiveness.

* * *

Bridget – “I was carrying a lock in my heart”

“I’m a survivor of child sexual and emotional abuse. I’ve been addicted to food, spending, relationships, and emotional chaos. Self-forgiveness has been the hardest part of my recovery. It’s also the last piece I’ve put into place. What I’d say to somebody else is, know that you can do this; it can happen. But you really have to open your heart. And it may happen in such small steps that it’s hard to feel it. One thing I like about this chapter is how it says you need to let yourself feel the forgiveness. That’s the hardest part. I got it intellectually a whole lot sooner than I got it emotionally. I could feel it toward other people – I was a great caretaker – but I couldn’t feel it for myself. I tried a lot of things – religion, affirmations, positive psychology. I tried that exercise where you imagine how you’d talk kindly to a young child. I even tried to channel myself toward social change to help others, and that was a good thing, but it didn’t get to the bottom line, which is can I sit with myself? Can I be here with me? I know that when I draw that last breath, I want to be okay with me.

My dad was vicious. He was a working-class drunk – the devaluing, beating-you-down stuff. The thing I really relate to in other trauma survivors is the self-hatred, the total venom toward myself, like I don’t have enough worth to be on the planet. And with addiction, no matter what type it is, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, or any other behavior, you feel like people can always point a finger and say, ‘Well, you’re doing it to yourself.’ There’s so much stigma and blame, and you internalize that and think, ‘Yes, I’m the problem here.’ So the starting point for me was just to be aware of the negativity I was perpetrating on myself. And what I tell other people and what I try to remember myself is that it’s never too late to get out of hell. It’s never too late. No matter what age you are, even if you’re 80 years old, you can still get to the peace that comes with self-forgiveness and that’s so enormous.”

* * *

I’ll be doing a webinar on Finding Your Best Self September 10, 2020 and also welcome questions at any time at [email protected].

---

Lisa Najavits, PhD is an adjunct professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years and a research psychologist at Veterans Affairs Boston for 12 years. Her major areas of work are addiction, trauma, co-morbidity, community-based care, development of new models, and clinical trials research. She is author of over 190 professional publications and various books. She was president of the Society of Addiction Psychology of the American Psychological Association; and is on various advisory boards including the Journal of Traumatic Stress; the Journal of Gambling Studies; the Journal of Dual Diagnosis, and Psychological Trauma. Her awards include the 1997 Young Professional Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies; the 1998 Early Career Contribution Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research; the 2004 Emerging Leadership Award of the American Psychological Association Committee on Women; and the 2009 Betty Ford Award of the Addiction Medical Education and Research Association. She is a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts and conducts a therapy practice.

---

 

The post What is a person’s best self? first appeared on AA Agnostica.