Valentine's Day in Recovery

Even after all these years of recovery I catch myself having expectations for Valentine’s Day. How many resentments it has caused. Dates, boy friends, husbands. Even knowing that Valentine’s Day is a commercially created day, the cultural pressure exists.

How do recovering people practice loving kindness for ourselves and others on Valentine’s Day?  How does sobriety guide me to make a Happy Valentine’s Day in or out of a romantic relationship?  What does love really mean in the context of recovery?

One of the joys of sobriety is watching other people grow. For me, it has been particularly moving to observe sober men as they change their lives and beliefs.

Early in recovery—just shy of two years and at the point where the fog is clearing –a man named Fred who was in his early 60’s came to my home group one morning. It was his first day out of treatment and he was in pain. His “bottom” involved devastation at both work and home. He hurt.  I listened as he spoke and I recognized his grief. Then, after the meeting ended, I watched as the men in our group surrounded Fred, gave him phone numbers and insisted that he come to breakfast with them. I watched as the men gathered him, taught him, and loved him.

Even though others in the group had had done that for me, it was then, with Fred, when I was just sober enough to understand that I was seeing love in action. I hold that moment as one of my sobriety treasures. It was the day that I could also see the love that surrounded me and I felt my heart open enough to want that love to surround another person.

Maybe it’s because one of my own wounds is about my father that this touches me so deeply.

This morning at my home group I heard men talk about how recovery changed their lives. Tough guys were softened, fathers recommitted, lost men were found, partners tried again, new romances began and they were trying to do it all differently.

It makes me happy to see men change. To know that under different circumstances my father and my brothers might have changed too. To know that there is an endless supply of love in these rooms and that we are changed by that love.

In early recovery I used to hear, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” It felt like a puzzle, a bafflement. I didn’t think you could love someone into change. Hadn’t I tried that all those years before with disastrous results?  I know now that I didn’t really love; I was just trying to control someone or to make him take care of me. In romantic relationships, and sometimes as parents, we mistakenly try to love people into changing. It generally doesn’t work.

But in AA it does. We can be loved by our AA fellows until we can love ourselves. And when we have learned to love ourselves, we can then truly love others.

All Encompassing Recovery

In my earliest years of recovery I had the blessing of discovering two recovery speakers who, I now know, significantly impacted how I would recover.

One was the AA speaker, Bob Earle, who told his story of progression through various addictions and an array of issues leading to deep emotional and spiritual change. In one of his earliest talks Bob told his audience, “When I am ten years sober I don’t want to go to five different Twelve Step groups for my alcoholism, food, family issues, codependence etc. I want to go to one meeting where I talk about all of me.”

The other person who influenced me was Judi Hollis, PhD an eating disorder therapist and the author of “Transferring Obsessions” published by Hazelden. That small pamphlet was part of my daily reading from my first year. I know that her ideas made early recovery really hard, but now in later recovery I thank her every day.

Hollis was writing to an audience of Overeaters Anonymous members. She talked about what happens when a woman or man in food recovery begins to let go of that addiction and how, if a Higher Power is not the replacement, we will move on to shopping, decorating, exercising, dating, sex, work and using alcohol or drugs. In those earlier days of OA there were members who still used alcohol, seeing the separation of substances but not seeing the singularity of addiction.

It was not unlike the way most professionals viewed drug addiction and alcoholism 25 years ago. At that time most hospital treatment programs for drug addiction allowed participants to drink alcohol. In some programs people completing their treatment for drug addiction were given a Beer Bash as the celebration of their 90 days of clean time. We are amazed by that today. Maybe someday we’ll be amazed by alcohol treatment that includes tobacco use or ice cream parties on Friday nights.

Now, to be clear the influence of Earle and Hollis did not stop me from swapping back and forth between alcohol, food, shopping, exercising and overwork. It just made it so much more painful because the denial was much more short-lived. When I left a department store with two shopping bags of clothes I knew it was the same as sneaking out of a grocery store with two bags of cake and cookies. And I knew that the married man that pumped up my heart rate was the same “drug” as the extra hour on the treadmill. A drug is a drug is a drug.

It’s been said that we give up our addictions in the order in which they are killing us. That was true for me. Mine went in this order: food, bulimic behavior, alcohol, drugs and then the ones that are ongoing: relationships and work. I take those tigers for a walk every day.

There are still some audiotapes of Bob Earle around. Ask the old-timers in your home group. And Judy Hollis’s “Transferring Obsessions” is still available from Hazelden. 

Recipe for Real Recovery

So what is sobriety? What do you need to have, see, feel and do to say you are sober or really recovering? I’ve been chewing on this question while writing the book of this blog.

One of the best short versions of what constitutes sobriety comes from Terry Gorski who has written a lot about recovery and relapse. If you’ve done some ACOA work you’ll also know his name from the fabulously funny talk on recovery and dating that he gave. In my early years we passed his tapes around and quoted his lines to each other –it was recovery stand-up, brilliant and funny.

I’ve gone back to his 1986 book, “Staying Sober” for this recipe for recovery, and here is what he says:

“Sobriety is Abstinence from addictive drugs PLUS Abstinence from compulsive behaviors PLUS Improvements in bio/psycho/social health.”

That’s a pretty good way to ask the daily question: Am I sober now?

It's About Freedom

This 4th of July is about an extra summer day and writing time and swimming in the pool and indulging in some local-sourced Vitamin D--the real thing from the sky--so forbidden. The 4th of July is also about freedom--our country, constitution, and choices.

Folks in recovery understand freedom. We know what it tastes like. After many years of living free of compulsion and addiction we may forget how very changed our inner and outer lives are. Hence we say "keep it green".

I love finding new recovery writers and I want to introduce Dawn who blogs at RecoveringDawn and SheRecovers. Here's her link:

http://recoveringdawn.blogspot.ca/

Sex After Recovery

Here is a wonderful refreshing essay about sex after recovery--from the other side of the relationship. Check out my colleague Andrea's New York Times debut:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/fashion/a-measure-of-desire-modern-love.html?smid=pl-share

Faith on the Diving Board

 He was there at the end of the diving board. He would tread water for hours watching while I practiced my dives. For years it was our Sunday afternoon ritual . I was 4 years old when we began.  Daddy was there in the deep water, waiting for me. On those Sunday afternoons I believed that if he was there at the end of the board I could do anything.

He would wait, treading water, off to one side. He would look around and give me the sign that it was OK to dive. And I would stroll to the end of the board, tugging my stretchy lavender swimsuit, and bounce in the air before I dove in.

I would rise to the surface sputtering, and look for his face. He would hesitate a moment to let me right myself. I would cough and beam. He would grab the back of my suit and give me a push toward the side. “Swim to the ladder,” he would say. And he would stay out at the end of the board waiting.

I remember the feeling as I paddled to the ladder. The world was perfect: I was diving in the deep end of the pool; there was no pain, and no evil in the world. There was no need or want in my life.  I was a perfect, grinning, sunburned, waterlogged four-year-old, in love with the world, herself and her daddy.

He died when I was 18. In the intervening years life happened to me and to Daddy.  By the time I was 13, he was traveling a lot, and when we did spend the occasional weekend together we did not speak of personal things. There were no talks about plans or dreams. As a teen-ager I felt awkward with my father so I would interview him about his job.  I know a lot about industrial engineering. It filled our time. By then my addictions had begun.

On a July evening, when he was 56, my father had a stroke and died.

Has it affected me? Of course. To have had that closeness and to loss it; to have had those timeless moments of being safe and special and then to lose him when I still needed to ask what happened.

It took years of my life, of other relationships, addictions and even years in recovery for me to wrestle with those two men--the daddy who waited in the deep water and the man who left suddenly, without a word, when I was 18.

Somewhere inside, that four-year-old still wears her lavender bathing suit. She is at the end of a diving board and leaning forward to hear someone say, “You are so special.” There is a deep hunger for those words.  Can I ever get enough?

I’ve learned a lot from listening to that little girl. I know that in romance we get some of that need met, but romance has its own path and after a while no one wants to admire us every day.  Another way to meet this need is with an affair.  Having an affair is a way a four-year-old can twirl in a 40 year-old body and hear again, “You are the only one.”  

In the first five years of recovery I practiced healthier solutions.  I practice in the mirror: “Diane, You are very special.” But all the praise and promises in the present cannot fill a hole that exists in the past.

Later I learned to meet this need in a spiritual way. In the rooms I began to meet people who had a connection with their God or higher power that helped them to live believing that God smiles warmly on them.

So what is the gift from a father who left when we were both too young? It’s this: For a long time I resented the missing memories; no father-daughter chats, no drives to college, no adult conversations. But I have this other thing--a picture in my brain and in my heart of my father still there at the end of the board, smiling and waiting.

Today I believe in a God who looks around my life and says, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want anyone to get hurt; then, “OK, go for it, I’m here.” I have a God at the end of my daily diving board who says to me, “Okay now, catch your breath. I’m here.”                                            

Mother in Law

On the road in Palm Beach…

And I am humming the Eddie K. Doe song,  "Mother-in-Law”. It makes me laugh but in truth it’s a dilemma for a recovering woman. Here I am, every day, praying for God’s will and to surrender my will and to see God in everything and to be kind and caring and generous and gracious and then I want to kill this woman!

It feels tricky too because I am torn between just going along and getting along and the other part of my recovery which is taking care of myself and saying “No”, and “No, thank you”, and “I would prefer…”

We struggle with food—she’s a fabulous cook—but I am trying to eat more healthfully. Her feelings are hurt if we don’t clean our plates. I’m tempted to put a baggie in my lap and sneak my dinner into the trash. But being reduced to that version of codependence is my wake-up call.

Yesterday I had this revelation: If she told me that her feelings would be hurt if I didn’t try her favorite cocktail I’d be thinking, “Oh well, you gonna feel bad.” I wouldn’t take a drink to please a hostess so why eat to please one?

But there is another side to this too: I am a mother-in-law as well. Visiting my mother-in-law makes me much better when the shoe—or the quiche—is on the other foot.

I’m counting my blessings: my mother-in-law does not drink and she’s in good health and she lives in a very beautiful place. But I’m heading to Nordstrom where the shoes are not booze and the fragrances are not cake and I can find a souvenir to take home to New York!

Recovery Film Festival

It's not happening until September 2012 but this is worth putting in your calendar now. Together: a newspaper of Health and Recovery will present the first "Recovery Film Festival" September 28 to 30 2012 in New York City.

So you know, because it's New York City, that you may want to make a hotel reservation now or rekindle that waning friendship with the folks you know who have an extra, bed, couch or guest room in Manhattan.

The Recovery Film Festival will have 30 hours of films in several venues. They will show great classics like "Days of Wine and Roses", "Lost Weeekend" and "Under the Volcano" as well as contemporary recovery films like "28 Days"--with Sandra Bullock as the scariest wedding guest ever, and "When a Man Loves a Woman" with Meg Ryan as nominee for cutest drunk Mom.

And because we are hearing about this now--9 months away--there is time to enter a film or documentary short to the jury for possible showing at the festival. No fee to submit a 20 minute or shorter video.

You can read more at www.together.us.com

The Two Parts of Life--and Recovery

Nikos Kazantzakis, philosopher and writer (He wrote “Zorba the Greek”) said, “In the first half of life we fight the devil; in the second half of life we fight God.” He was saying that in our growing up and in young adulthood we are learning what not to do and about right and wrong, But in the second half of life—in maturity and in our aging into death --we let go of rules and surrender to what is bigger and unknowable.

The first half of life is about discipline and self control and managing yourself. But the second half of life is about giving up control; it is about surrender. That, of course, is much harder.

I was chewing on these ideas today and I realized that there is a parallel for us in recovery. In the first period of recovery (as we go into the woods) we fight the devils: alcohol, substances, addiction, impulse, weakness, and our “character defects”. We learn self control and self management and discipline—what many of us did not learn earlier. We learn the disciplines of AA to give our lives structure. And in later recovery (maybe the “out of the woods” period) we seek God even more than abstinence, and having some structure then from living a 12 step life—we then live sober not to follow rules but as surrender. We go from the known and dictated and externally imposed toward what is greater than us and what is completely unknown. Hence faith.

Hymn of Gratitude for Recovery

For more than 25 years, always alone in my car—blasting the radio, tape or CD-- I have sung a hymn of gratitude for my recovery. It goes like this:

Your love, is lifting me higher
Than I've ever been lifted before
So keep it up--
quench my desire,
And I'll be at your side, forever more.

You know it’s your love that keeps lifting me
So keep on lifting me Higher and Higher
Yes your love keeps lifting me
So keep on lifting me
Higher and higher.

Now once, I was downhearted
Disappointment was my closest friend
But then you came, and it soon departed
And he never
Showed his face again.

And your love keeps lifting me Higher
So keep on lifting me higher and higher

I'm so glad, I've finally found you
Now a one-in-a-million girl
And I whip my loving arms around you
And I can stand up, and face the world.


The original lyrics were by songwriters Jason and Miner. First performed by Jackie Wilson and later, a second platinum record, when performed by Rita Coolidge.

What is your recovery song?

The Mother _______ with Recovery

Click on the link below to read a commentary about, “The _______with the Hat”, the Tony award winning play written by Stephen Adley Guirgis. It’s a play about recovery and a play that has stumped all media who want to write about it because the full name of the play—that part with the long dash____can’t be printed in most papers nor on signs or billboards. (I can’t fill in the blank here either or this blog will get blocked by your spam filter).

Ah, well. The play is good and it has won some Tony’s and other awards. And this piece of commentary from today’s New York Times arts section is also good in what it says about recovery realities. Take a look.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/theater/recovery-as-seen-on-stage-and-on-tv-and-in-movies.html

Longer is Harder

One of the hardest things in long-term recovery is when you can’t quite get to where you really want to be. I’m talking about beliefs and behaviors. Finding myself saying or doing something that isn’t in line with who I want to be and who I know I could be or who I probably will be. Soon, I hope.

When I do something now that I don’t like it seems harder to accept because there is no one to blame. Blame is so over. I have too much program in my head and in my being that even when I want to blame or try to blame I get it. I know. But there is also no fallback position in later recovery like, “I won’t do that after I have a year of sobriety” or “After I work the steps then I won’t be like that anymore.” Nope. There is just me, my head and patience.

The good news is being able to visualize and imagine what a new behavior would look like, what my changed belief might sound like and how much more peaceful my life would be. But this too is humility. Patience. Progress. Not perfection.

AddictionLand

I friend recommended the blog “AddictionLand.com” to me this week and I have been reading non-stop. I think you will like this too. AddictionLand covers all kinds of addictions: food, sex, drugs and anger addiction too and the stories are powerful.

Another woman’s story of addiction and recovery—and lots of expert resources here as well.

additionland.com/blogs

Recovery When Life is Really Hard

Over the last year my good friend Meg has written a book about her life in the year after the death of her daughter Maggie. Meg’s book, “Standing at the Edge” has just been published. It is a stunning book about death and life and grief and recovery. It is a day book—a small gemlike entry each day—the end result showing us what 12 step recovery is like and how it works in the trenches. How a woman lives her recovery in the face of the hardest things we have to live thru sober, abstinent, clean and one day at a time.
Below is a snippet from January 12 called Letting Go:

“I rarely have trouble sleeping, but when I do lie awake in the darkest and coldest hours, it takes awhile for me to realize that I am holding on, keeping my body tight against the pain of grief. I don’t know what this resistance to the mourning is about, whether it is instinct to avoid pain or some habit of my upbringing or personality. Nonetheless, it never fails that when I relax and let go, give myself to the great powers that are carrying me, and soften to the loss, then I am comforted and I can fall asleep. This has been the greatest lesson I have had to learn and relearn in my long recovery through the twelve steps: that I can let go and trust a power greater than myself.”

“Standing at the Edge” by Meg Tipper is available on Amazon.

Baseball, Recovery and Spiritual Life

The first thing I learned about baseball is this: If you raise your hand a man will bring you food. I learned this at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and in my first year as a fan I spent most of the game facing the wrong way. Raise my hand, get ice cream, raise my hand, get popcorn, raise my hand, get peanuts. It was 1958.

Two years later I understood baseball was a game. On summer afternoons I’d beg my brothers to take me with them to the ball park. I was falling in love with baseball.

If baseball has taken hold of you too, you know it’s about more than your team winning. Sports, like religion, and like AA, offers consolations: A diversion from our daily routine, heroic examples to admire and emulate and a sense of drama and conflict in which nobody dies.

John Gregory Dunne wrote that, “Baseball is the couch on which we examine our psyches”. George Will said, “Baseball is the universe”. And catcher Wes Westrum said, “Baseball is like church, many attend but few understand.”

We have these sayings and many more because baseball is one of the greatest sources of metaphor in American life. And understanding metaphor is important because having and using metaphor is what allows us to talk about intangibles like spiritual life.

The historian, E.H. Gombrich, wrote, “Every culture has its favored sources of metaphor which facilitate communication among its members. Any cultures religion is what provides the central area of metaphor. The Olympus or Heaven of any nation will offer language and symbols of power and compassion, of good and evil, of menace and of consolation”.

Americans live so far inside the institution of baseball and so deeply in its metaphors that sometimes we can’t even see it. You may say you’re not a sports fan, but have you ever said: “She’s always in there pitching”. “You can’t even get to first base with him.” He’s out in left field.” “She was born with two strikes against her.” We talk baseball all day long.

Bart Giamatti, former President of Yale and former Commissioner of Baseball said, “Baseball has no clock and indeed moves counterclockwise, so anxious is it to establish its own rhythms independent of clock time.”

Baseball is one of the few sports that remain timeless. A game can be fast or slow. In this one area of our lives the clock isn’t driving; we surrender the clock to the event. But there is something else in this game that asserts the primordial and the spiritual: In baseball we begin and end at home. Home plate is not fourth base. The goal of the game is to get home and to be safe.

That is what we want. When we come to AA people say, “I felt safe and I was at home”. Home implies safety, accessibility, freedom, comfort. Home is where we learn to be both with others and separate. That’s what baseball players are: individual athletes with distinct areas of responsibility but also and always a team. Kind of like a home group.

An Intimate Gathering of 50,000

So “Why?” I’ve been asked, “Would you go to Texas in the summer to spend five days with 50,000 people?”

Simple answer: Because they are 50,000 sober people.

Better answer: Because with 20-plus years of sobriety I can sometimes begin to think I know some stuff; I can sometimes feel like a senior member of my group; I can smile knowingly at newcomers and I can forget that I am just at the beginning of making a sober and sane life.

But in San Antonio I was a baby again. Yes there were folks there with one year or maybe 5 five years but the typical attendee had 10 to 20 years of recovery. The speakers had 18, 28, 38 and 52 years of sobriety. One evening five speakers each had more than 40 years. Folks with that kind of history have been sober long enough to change careers several times, have more than one marriage or divorce or death –in sobriety. They have seen AA change and they have changed. They have had many sponsors and home groups and sponsees and worked the steps a variety of ways and their immersion and transformation shows.

Being with those folks doesn’t make me more sober or make time move faster but it is a powerful reminder that there are lots of people who still have what I want and it makes me recommit to this life out of the woods.

Don't Do That

This is the new slogan for women with more than ten years of recovery.

In earlier stages of recovery we learned, “Easy Does It but Do It” and we learned “Feelings Are Not Facts”. We learned “Look Back but Don’t Stare” when we had to consider issues of our past. And we were reminded that “Under Every Skirt’s a Slip”—my all time favorite slogan--from old timers who knew that romance and sex had to handled carefully.

But last week talking to my friend Stephanie—who also has double-decade sobriety—she was telling me about something she does to undermine her happiness and I said, “Don’t do that.” Later in the conversation I was bemoaning a bad habit of thinking myself into misery and wondering how to change it and she said, “Don’t do that.” And it hit me: “Don’t Do That”—anymore. Whatever “it” is, don’t do it anymore. Don’t shop with credit cards; don’t eat cookies at 11 at night; don’t say yes to the volunteer commitments you know you’ll resent.

After ten years we do know some stuff about ourselves. The road is long and there are surprises at every turn but many of us know the things we do that make us miserable and for many of our issues what we most need to do is, “Don’t Do That.”

Recovery is a Habit

Recovery is not an insight; it’s a habit.

Meetings
Reading
Service
Phone calls
Working the steps

These build the HABIT of recovery.

Sincere

Here is a new way of looking at sincerity. The Latin root of the word sincere is “sin-cere” meaning without wax. It comes from a time when selling marble to sculptors and stone masons was big business. Disreputable stone sellers would hide the flaws by filling cracks in their marble with wax so that a “sincere” dealer was one who did not cover over or hide flaws with wax.

What if the way that we are sincere is by not hiding or covering our flaws? To go as-is, as we are, allowing our flaws and yes our cracks, to show.

Sincerely yours,

Labor Day is New Year's Day

The new year has never entered with champagne and icy roads, nor begun in silver lame and silly hats. Though you may have spent many a January saying new years words, you know as well as I that the real new year begins now, as it always has, the day after Labor Day. It does not matter that it is hot outside or that you are still putting on shorts when you come home from work. The new year begins as it did for 12 critical years. It begins with back to school.

And it does not matter how long it has been since you went to school, or if you have kids of your own going off to school. You know in your bones that the new year begins now. And how could it not? For 12 most important years you went off on that first Tuesday in September to try out the new identity you had forged over the summer. Was your look changed this year? Had you let your hair grow long? Or cut it short? Would they recognize you right away? Would everyone sense the new sophistication gained at summer camp in New Jersey, or two weeks visiting your sister in L.A.? Yeah, you were that same old kid when you left on the last day of school in June, but every year in the fall there was a new you and it debuted the day after Labor Day.

Every September you promised yourself you'd be more popular, more friendly, more outgoing. Or you promised you'd play around less, make new friends, hang out with the good kids.

If it was a year of changing schools then there was more newness and more opportunity to be a new you. That was the beauty of the beginning of September. Every single year you could return from summer and try out a new identity. You could be a scholar this year after a past as the class clown. Or you could be the friendly one after years as the grind and curve setter. The opportunity to redo your image came every year the day after Labor Day. And it still does.

September is the time to not only promise yourself a new exercise program, but to start it. It's still light after work and it's not cold in the morning. You really can go exercise. September is the time to start a diet that will stick. You are coming off a summer of fresh foods, and you are not bloated by 30 days of holiday treats and booze. As for a new look; who can afford one in January? You've worn your name off all your plastic just trying to get through the holidays.

No, the new look and image you have been promising yourself comes in September just as it did when you were a kid. Remember how it worked in Junior High? You decided to wear a tie and tweed because that summer you discovered poetry (or an older girl who liked poets). Or you promised yourself that you would set your hair in a smooth flip every morning to look like those girls in the magazines.

In September you could try out in public all those looks you had been practicing in the mirror behind your bedroom door.

So what if the good intentions only lasted a few weeks. Some part of it always stuck, some part of the new you was the real you and real change and that's how you moved on.

And you still can. The chnages happen in September. Buy some new sox and a red plaid shirt. This is the time to be kinder, nicer, smarter, to listen more, eat less and to hang out with the good kids. The trees remind us how it's done; try some new colors, shed the old layers. It's September. Happy New Year!