The Long Good Friday

No one could call him an alcoholic.

He stopped drinking every year, for Lent.

No Windsor; no Schmidts. No ice cubes clinking in the glass in the kitchen after he got home from work. No snap and hiss of a pop-top.

From Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.

Dry.

Not a drop.

Although the house was quieter, the woman and the boy found it hard to relax. There was a tension that never found a voice.

He smoked more.

He ate a lot of peppermints. Sometimes at night the boy would hear him walking down the hallway to the stairs, and down the stairs to the kitchen. He could picture him sitting at the kitchen table, smoking.

On the weekends, watching sports, he would make the boy sit with him. He drank soda. He would hold it under the boy's nose.

Smell it, he would say. See? No booze. Tell your mother. Tell her no booze.

He would tell her when she came in from the store. The woman would say, that's good.

But she didn't smile.

The man said, I gave it up. For Lent.

The woman would say under her breath, for Lent.

Good Friday, they would go to church and do the Stations of the Cross. The man would seem distracted. When they got home, his mood would change. He would laugh loudly, and sometimes suddenly clap his hands together, and say boy, oh boy. The woman would busy herself in the kitchen. The boy wasn't allowed to go out to play on Good Friday, so he would go to his room. He could hear the man talking loudly to the woman.

Lent was almost over. No one could call him an alcoholic. 

New Years Revolutions!

That's right, Revolutions.

Not a Typo.

2011 is the year when pursuit of maintaining the status quo faded into oblivion because the status just ain't so quo anymore. Treading water is not enough.

We're sinking. We've spent way too much time and energy "accepting the things we cannot change" and not nearly enough showing "the courage to change the things we can." The climate for recovery from addiction in our society sucks. Despite state-of-the-art research yielding incredible results, damn little of it finds its way into actual treatment.

And when it does, it's not the best and the brightest, it's the quickest and the cheapest.

Unless, of course, you have an extra $25,000-$100,000 laying around to pay for one of the "Rolls-Royce" programs where they actually utilize the latest research in their treatment techniques. If you have public insurance, the story is different. You barely see a counselor and you're lucky if your roommate isn't dealing Oxycontin.

And there is only one reason why. Because we allow it to be.

How many people in this country are in recovery right now? Recovering addicts? Alcoholics? Family members? Gamblers? Etc., etc.? Who knows, it's a tough statistic to ascertain. When many people recover in fellowships that stress anonymity as a spiritual foundation, it's safe to say that a statistical researcher is going to be about as welcome as a census-taker at some Red-State outpost of the local militia.

Add to this the real danger for many people of arrest or incarceration if they admit to a drug history, due to our outrageously primitive narcotics laws, and guess what?

You aren't going to come away with any numbers except the ones that identify the individuals most spectacularly unsuccessful at recovery.

So, call for Revolution number one is for recovering people to begin to recognize that if things are going to get any better for the many, many, recovering people in our society, as well as those struggling with addictions, it's up to us to make it to.

We need to start a revolution in how we are defined, identified, treated and regarded by the rest of our society.

And then we demand a place at the table.

Happy New Year!

SUNDAY SOAPBOX: The 13th Step, Sexual Abuse in 12 Step Programs

"Same shit, verbatim" my friend Miranda says, and it's the truth.

It's one of those ongoing problems that just doesn't seem to want to go away. There are a lot of descriptions for it: sexual harassment, predatory behavior, sex addiction, etc., etc. It's nothing new, and never pretty, but there is something particularly despicable about it when it goes on in places we associate with safety. like churches and schools.

And 12th Step programs, where it's known as the 13th Step.

There are a million bad recovery jokes about it, but sadly, the issue itself is not funny. This week I have heard from three females, two adults and one 16 year old girl, all of whom had been subjected to sexual harassment at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

I have heard about a male who asks for phone numbers, then takes a list intended for females and begins to mass text the women, saying he needs someone to talk to. He doesn't even have the imagination to vary the message.

As my friend says, "Same shit, verbatim."

Invariably someone says that it isn't just a male-harasses-female issue, but to be honest, I could count the number of female-harassing-males incidents I have encountered on one hand and have fingers left over.

So let's be clear: issues of sexual trauma and abuse abound in 12 Step programs. Predatory behavior is always destructive, in this setting, it downright lethal. Everyone deserves a chance to recover from addiction, and not to be driven away from a source of help and comfort by sexual harassment and abuse.

I took the Roman Catholic Church, of which I used to be a devout member, sternly to task for ignoring, aiding and abetting sexual abuse.

I will do the same to the 12 Step programs, which I love with all my heart. I refuse to be part of covering up sexually predatory behavior because of "anonymity" any more that I would condone it under the guise of "the greater good" in the church. If you engage in predatory behaviors in N.A. and A.A or any other 12 Step program, as far as I am concerned, you have forfeited your right to anonymity, and I will deal with you as I would any other sexual predator.

I will not let you destroy lives in a program that exists to save them.

I will not let you kill my program.

I sincerely hope I am not the only recovering person who feels this way.

(anyone who has survived 12 Step Sexual Abuse, or is being abused, contact Ken Williams in complete confidence at kenwilliamscac@gmail.com, or call or text Ken Williams' Recovery at 484 431 2931)

Keeping it simple on Independence Day

Nothing gives us blogger types a case of ego inflation like a holiday. We think deep thoughts (or think we do) and feel compelled to share them whether you like it or not. So this year, let's keep in simple.

Aside from being our National Birthday, the day on which we set standards for ourselves that continue to challenge us to this day, it is the Summer Holiday. We celebrate with parades, barbecues and fireworks. For people in active addiction, with the exception of the presence of flammable material and explosives, it's pretty much business as usual. For people in Recovery, however, it presents some challenges. As always, on holidays, the everyday rules are suspended and permissions are granted. There 's nothing wrong with that, except that for some in early recovery it presents some unique situations.

Let me break it down:

1. Your Recovery is your own responsibility. Don't assume that anyone understands addiction, especially a bunch of people involved in their own festivities. If it's hard for you to refuse an offer of a drink or a drug, maybe you would do better to go to a meeting than a barbecue.
2. Watch the temptation to tell war stories. I'm not talking Valley Forge, here, I am talking about glorifying binges and other addiction related behaviors. Euphoric Recall is dangerous for recovering people, because it allows the mind to do essentially the same thing that drugs do. Pain is dulled and pleasure is enhanced. The funny story is only funny when divorced from the painful realities surrounding it. The wild, drunken beer run isn't quite so funny once you acknowledge the kids in the back seat. So keep it real.
3. Remember the support available to you. All those numbers in your cell phone? No, not the guy with the Oxycontin connection--you were supposed to get rid of that! The numbers that you got from all those great people at the 12 Step meetings? Now's the time to use them. Phone Therapy has been one of those mainstays of the 12 Step programs from the beginning. A phone call has made the difference between disaster and relief more times than anyone can count. If you think, should I call? Call.
4. Plan B. You know what that means, right? Plan B is what you use when Plan A doesn't work. It's the strategic retreat. It's making sure that you have an open back door and a ride in case the situation turns out to be a lot more difficult than you expected. Remember that a strategic retreat has won many a war. If the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? Plan B is the way you get going alright--right out the door!

That's the short list. Talk to other clean and sober people and you will have 10 ideas for every one presented here. Independence is the freedom to choose. It's self-determination.

Let this be your Independence Day.

The Sacred And The Profane: Spirituality in Recovery

I was having a cup of coffee the other day with Grateful John. He said that he was angry with his daughter over her arrest for drunk driving, and described what options he had. It went something like this:

"I wanted to bust her blanking face in and slap some blanking sense into her but my blanking conscience kicked in and told me to call my blanking sponsor. I did, and he said to pray on it. blanking pray? I'll blank pray, I said. But I did, and I asked my Higher Power to take the whole thing over because I couldn't blanking deal with it. I had to turn it the blank# over to God as I understand Him and get out of the blanking way. I'm not ready to deal with that, I look at her and see myself, my own blanked up excuses and I get angry, not at her. At me for being a blanked up father because of this blanking illness. Thank God I called my Sponsor"

Only he didn't really say blank

I am not thinking that Grateful John is likely to be helping the Pope draft his Christmas Encyclical this year, but I do believe that his faith and trust in God, and his willingness to do God's will, are as strong and valid and true as any more pious, and less profane individual's.

This is a good example of the way that the sacred and the profane co-exist in the 12 Step Programs. As my Uncle Jerry the Bartender, sober over 30 years in AA, once said, "a lot of us aren't exactly Choirboys when we come in."

It's true. It's also true that very few addicts and alcoholics seek out the 12 Step programs because they feel a sudden need for spiritual growth. Addicted people go to meetings out of fear and desperation. Sometimes desperation for something that will work and fear that they have found it. The illness of addiction so utterly takes over an addict's life that in a pathetically perverse paradox, the thing destroying them (the addiction) feels like the only thing that makes life bearable. To threaten the addiction with recovery is like threatening life itself, and every corrupted survival mechanism kicks in. Addicts come to their first 12 Step meetings in fight or flight mode.

And yet, there they are, usually hanging right on the wall, or in case someone missed them, read out loud at the beginning of the meeting:

The Twelve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous
1. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

It doesn't leave a lot of room for doubt that this is a spiritual program with a Higher Power at the heart of it.

So, how does the world of the active addict and the world of the spirit co-exist?

Pretty Good, actually. Ask Grateful John why he's grateful?

(More to come)

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