Messy Sobriety

“He will also report that out of every season of grief or suffering, when the hand of God seemed heavy or even unjust, new lessons for living were learned, new resources of courage were uncovered, and that finally, inescapably, the conviction came that God does ‘move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’”

-Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions p. 105 (Step Eleven)

My sobriety has always been messy. From the outside it often looks like I am not doing very well—that I am too emotional and don’t seem to have it all together for someone with two decades of recovery.

However, that is an illusion. I have amazing sobriety. It is just realer than you expect. And why? Because I am a real alcoholic. I do not react to life the same way as normal people. I live authentically, and, let’s face it, this life is full of challenges. The difference between me and someone whose ego is better intact is that I will let you know that there are problems. I will not hide them. I will not stuff them down into pretending they don’t exist. That just isn’t me. My honesty and self-disclosure has worked so far to keep me sober, and I will keep practicing this principle as long as God gives me breath for another day.

For nonalcoholics this is very confusing. But for us, the people who get it, it makes total sense. From the moment I took my first sober breath on June 29, 2005, my ego has been out to destroy me. The ego is an evil genius. She wants to hide and keep secrets. She wants to pretend. She likes to think she is superior to everyone else. She wants others to see just how important she is. She wants to be right—all the time. She doesn’t want God. In fact, she made her mind God, so she thinks she has a God working in her life, but it is really just her self-sufficiency carrying the load. She wants to be anything but herself.

So what appears at times to be a walking and talking disaster is actually a chronic alcoholic and alanonic negotiating a very real existence. It is colorful, it is exciting, it is scary, and it is oftentimes confusing. It is confusing to her and it is confusing to those who know her.

Here’s an illustration. I was asked this week how my mental health was by a family member. The question really threw me because my mental health has been very strong for quite a while now. Later when I reflected on the question and the person asking it, I realized what was going on. What he was asking about was not mental health—it was grief. When I saw him several months before, I was experiencing incredible grief over multiple losses. So I was experiencing feelings. Emotions. And for many people in this world, that makes me not okay. Having been in recovery for so long and being encouraged to express my emotions, I was just not as used to the “no feel” rule that many people live by.

Alcoholism is such a tragedy in most homes that not feeling becomes a survival skill—a coping strategy. The same is true when there is physical, mental, verbal, financial, and spiritual abuse. If we did feel at all, the fear is that the feelings would take over and that we would not survive. So instead we push the feelings down, cramming them deep inside ourselves and living numbly. This is a very common story in Al-Anon recovery. The situations in our homes was so out of control that it was actually unsafe to feel anything.

However, when my own losses began early last fall, I experienced all of the feelings—all of the sadness and hopelessness and darkness that are so common when we lose people we love. I also lost my dog and was the person who had to make the decision to end his life, so my grief was layered. It was profound and overwhelming. I was so sad that at times I could not stop crying. Something would trigger me and I would burst into tears. This actually happened at school and in front of the kids many times. And I just didn’t care. I knew, because I had learned in my programs, that processing grief was good and necessary for healing. I actually teach a unit on grief in one of my classes, so I myself have become very educated on its psychological and social impact.

And because I spent a good four months in actual hell with the grief, really allowing myself to feel everything and talking about it openly, I healed. The grief did not linger or come out sideways in anger and addiction. It did not lead me to questionable behaviors. I was steady. It improved my life because I had overcome a horrendous time. It made me so much stronger and better able to help others. That’s the entire point of all of our sober experiences—to share our experience with others. My new sponsor did that for me. She knew what I was going through and just let me experience it. She never tried to fix me. She never tried to manage my feelings, and I am so grateful to her for that.

During this time my relationship with God seemed difficult, but I never stopped pursuing that relationship. I persevered in prayer and meditation. I kept working with others—that intensive work with alcoholics and alanonics that saves me every single time. I really did believe that God would get me through it. With every reading from my recovery literature, with every inspirational song, with every scripture passage read and every meeting and liturgy attended, I just let that Power flow into me. It sometimes let me feel better for a moment and more often not feel anything but continued pain, but I never gave up on God. In fact, that became my mantra: God, I am never giving up on you.

My ego would have loved for me to circumvent the grief—to go around the grief instead of through it. It doesn’t want me to feel any painful emotions. But the God of my understanding made me one very clear promise. He didn’t promise that I wouldn’t have pain and suffering in this lifetime, but He did promise that He would never leave me. I reached for that hand every single day as I continued my sober practices. And it was true—He never left me. Not once.

I had the joy and humility of turning 21 years sober on Sunday, June 28. I am so grateful for a useful and real sobriety. Only in sobriety would I have ever had the experience in feeling all of the feelings and learning that they did not overcome me.

Dear Readers- Thank you for your faith in me for the past 3 1/2 years of writing Ask Anonymous. I treasure all of you and am thrilled about every like, comment, and new subscriber.

For those experiencing intense grief, I want to recommend an amazing stack by Jason MacKenzie titled Man Down. His writing on grief is the most real and profound I have ever experienced. He is so real and offers real tools to men experiencing the loss to death of someone they love. As a woman I also read everything he writes, which helps me better understand the men in my life experiencing profound loss. Enjoy!