Hiatus; brief

I am dealing with some health issues that are probably going to interrupt the ongoing dialog for a little while.
Hopefully.
Talk with you soon!

Resolutions

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Remember those New Years' Resolutions?

How are you doing with them? The promise to stop smoking at midnight on New Years Eve?

The resolution to exercise every day?

The commitments to walk more, eat less, and clean all that stuff out of the hall closet?

Chances are, not a lot has happened. It's understandable, because the very behaviors we often seem to be the most eager to be rid of are the ones actuallly most diffucult to change. Why is this? Because as bright as we van be about some things, we remain downright stupid about how people change.

If it was as easy as making a resolution and setting a date, then change would be simple and easy. We'd say, here's what I want to change, and have at it. That's how we like to think about change. Every family has a story about Uncle Joe who drank for twenty years and then saw the light. That was that, never touched another drop. Or Aunt Lucille, who ran on Newports and coffee for forty years, then had that cancer scare and never touched either, just like that!

That's how we tend to think about change. And that's part of what makes change difficult. It's a process, not an event. The Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille stories are impressive, and often true. They are inspiring, but do very little to suggest a model for change. and the reason may be genetic. This link explains more.

No kidding, those pesky genes may well be playing a part in the process of change. It appears, according to some current research, that scientists have linked genetics to difficulty stopping cigarette smoking. It seems that some of us have "easy" genes and some of us have "tough" genes. If you are blessed with easy genes, then guess what? You quit smoking just like Aunt Lucille. If you have "tough" genes, though, quitting is likely not to be a walk in the park. You'll try, fail, have some success, try again, and so forth. Eventually, you'll quit.

I say that with a degree of confidence, because I quit smoking almost three years ago, and I was no Aunt Lucille smoker. I smoked in earnestr for over 40 years. My first serious attempt to stop smoking was in 1977 and I finally made it to non-smoker in 2007. None of this is delivered so that I can pat myself on the back, or eexpect you to. If anything, it indicates that I am a very slow learner with some seriously stubborn genes. But it does say something about a different way of looking at change.

• We think about change before we change. It took a lot of thinking about being a non-smoker before I was ready to try it, even for a day.
• Support counts; shame sucks. Having people in your corner who want to see you change is great. You can tell who they are because they always say, I know you can do this.  If they don't, and especially if they talk a lot about what you "should" do and "should" have done, watch out. Especially if the person telling you what you "should have done" is you!
• Perseverance usually trumps everything else. If you keep trying, you will achieve your goal. It's that simple. It's no coincidence that the greatest fellowships for helping people tto change use the motto "One Day At A Time." That's a way off keeping things very simple: just keep trying to do your best every day.

And if you do, you will change. I promise!

Kids

Image by kr4gin via Flickr

"Don't get me wrong, I love the Holidays. It's my family I hate." 

The speaker was 15 years old, and filled with adolescent angst.

"They're materialistic and stupid, and they don't want anyone to have a good time." He had a point. He had recently been caught smoking marijuana on school grounds, and the stupid, materialistic parents had spent a lot of money on fines and lawyers, had to kiss the school administration's ass during hours of meetings, and fun was not big on their minds.

I pointed out that good lawyers charge multiple hundreds of dollars per hours to keep you out of jail.

"So put me in jail! I feel like I'm there already!" Of course the closes to jail he had been was probably an episode of Prison Break. 

"Listen, " I said, "they're worried about you." He sniffed. I swear, actually sniffed. Like a character out of Remains of the Day. I was getting a little warm.Figured it was time to shift gears.

"Let me tell you a story," I said. 

"Can I smoke?"

"No."

He slumped.

"Once upon a time..."

He smirked.

"--there was a mom and dad who were very worried about their son. He was hanging with the wrong kids and getting high, and getting in more and more trouble at school."

He grinned at the word "trouble." If it was a badge he would have worn it.

"They had loved their kid and raised him and tried to instill some basic values. They weren't perfect. They made mistakes. When he became a teenager, they made some big mistakes because they had never raised a teenager before."

I checked. there was some eye-rolling, but also some minimal attention. Of course it was probably because I was doing all the work.

"He got in bigger and bigger trouble, and they worried more, and paid more lawyers, and had a hard time sleeping. They were desperate, and didn't know what to do. But I'm sure you know what happened next."

He nodded, sensing victory.

"Right. They moved. Cut their losses and ran. Threw him to the wolves."

"What?"

"Pulled up stakes and changed their names. All of a sudden he was on his own, in court with no one who loved him in sight. Funny thing about love, when it's there it's easy to take it for granted, but when it's gone, it leaves a pretty cold and empty vacuum behind it.And suddenly, instead of dealing with people who love him, he's dealing with people who look at him as a social problem to be handled."

"Oh no, I've taken mommy and daddy for granted!"

"There, there, little fella" I said.

The vibe on my cell phone interrupted my reverie.

Okay, that's not exactly how it happened. It would be nice, though. Usually it takes two sessions, right?

Right.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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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Do The Right Thing.

Image by Leonard John Matthews via Flickr

Sometimes, you just have to do what's right.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, Stacey Gill, approached me with an idea for a group for kids from families with substance abuse issues. I was skeptical at first, but eventually realized the importance of doing something to help some kids before they got into trouble.

Also, as anyone who knows Stacey would agree, she can be very persistent.

Anyway, with the help of a grant through the Healthy Communities Initiative and the County Office of Behavioral Health, we got this little group off the ground, and for over a year some kids were able to come to a safe place to talk about whatever was on their minds without fear of retribution or resentment. They laughed, cried, played games, learned meditation and stress management techniques, and got a snack. They learned about addiction, family roles, skills to help survive in an addicted family. It became a very rewarding group to do.

Until I got the news last week that because of the budget crisis in Pennsylvania, no one knew when or if the grant would be renewed.

Now, I know that there are more inportant cutbacks and shutoffs than Stacey and my little group. I have talked to out of work fathers and mothers whose unemployment has been held up, families who are waiting for some relief in the areas of health care and fearful of cuts in school programs and vital public services like fire departments and police stations.

Against that backdrop, how important can one little group for Children of Substance Abusing Families be?

Well, considering that kids from families with drug and alcohol problems are more likely to become addicts themselves, to get arrested, to have unplanned pregnancies, to contract STD's, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis and the variety of illnesses related to cigarette smoking, not to mention the fact that their kids are at higher risk of addiction and alcoholism, maybe more important than one would think.

At any rate, Stacey and I have decided that it's too important to shut down. So, we aren't shutting it down.

Grant or no grant, funding or no funding, this group is going to continue. Every Thursday, 4:00 to 5:30 PM, Stacey and I will be doing the group at Ken Williams' Recovery, 300 W. State St., Media PA 19063.

We won't charge for it, and we won't get paid. It's not that we don't care about that, neither of us are independently wealthy, but as we are faced with hard choices these days, sometimes the choice is, simply, to do the right thing. And the right thing is to stand by our words. We told these kids from families of chaos that we would be there for them, so there we will be.

And the snacks are on us.

Recovery In Action

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On September 12th, 2009, Philadelphia will be invaded by addicts and alcoholics.

They will not be hiding in alleys or committing petty crimes. They will not fill the bars, or the crack houses, or shooting galleries. They will not hide. They will be in plain sight, walking en masse down the streets and boulevards of Philadelphia.

And they will bring their parents, their children, their spouses and their loved ones. They will be of all races and colors and faiths, as well as atheists and agnostics.

They will be walking to celebrate recovery.

This will be PRO-ACT's Annual Recovery Walk.

We walk to let Philadelphia see that the face of Recovery is as diverse as the city itself. That individuals and families from every walk of life recover from the ravages of the disease of addiction.

We walk to show that, as it says in the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, We Do Recover. Last year there were almost 5000 of us. Let's make it more this year. Check out http://www.recoverywalks.org/ and http://proact.org/ to find out more.