al-anon journal

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Tradition Five - Training and Discipline

“Each Al-Anon Family Group has but one purpose: to help families of alcoholics. We do this by practicing the Twelve Steps of AA ourselves, by encouraging and understanding our alcoholic relatives, and by welcoming and giving comfort to families of alcoholics.” Al-Anon's Tradition Five

Al-Anon is a program of retraining. We come into the rooms with all kinds of bad habits and old history. Some of us, myself included, arrive looking like an emotional junkyard of good intentions gone awry. Some of us arrive broken, some angry, and some so bitter and resentful we can hardly see the soft heart protected underneath their armor. But we all come for one reason: we want to find a way to make things better and we are willing to work for it.

I know that when I first found Al-Anon, I was having a hard time getting results with anything because I thought I had to tackle everything. The scope of work I bit off was way out of my league and, unbenounced to me, the position of Supreme Goddess of the Universe had already been filled. Fortunately, Tradition Five reeled me back in. We don’t practice the Twelve Steps of AA on our alcoholic, on our kids, on our workplace. We practice the Twelve Steps of AA on ourselves. That is the only sane and manageable thing to do. It is only after we learn to help ourselves that we have anything useful to offer to others, and ultimately, that is where real discipline must be exercised.

As for the alcoholics in our lives, they are simply not ours to fix. They are ours to love. If we didn’t love them, none of this would hurt. Even in their darkest moments, and in our strongest resentment, we do still love them. That is precisely why this dance makes us so crazy. But they are still not ours to heal. When I am practicing the Steps myself, I am able to put down my resentments and my enabling habits and simply show that kind of encouragement and understanding towards my alcoholic. Not condescending pity or debilitating helpfulness, but real compassion - compassion that comes from a place of respect for the other person. This is how we help our alcoholic loved ones.

Lastly, to accomplish our purpose, we open our hearts to others and welcome them. Notice it doesn’t say we help by giving advice and trying to solve their problems. We simply welcome others to the group and pass the tissue when the waterworks begin. We let them know that they are not alone. We help by being an example, and by giving those in pain the space to help themselves.

This is where we practice, train, and retrain. This is where we shed those old and nasty habits that don’t serve us any longer. As a group, we have but one mission: to help the families of alcoholics, but to do so, we must exercise discipline - the kind of discipline we learn from the Traditions in this program.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Step Five: Spring Cleaning

Like everyone else, I made mistakes along the way. Some big, some small. Some conscious and some I didn't see until I was a good ten years down the road. Sometimes I made mistakes because I just got tired of being the good girl all the time, but my worst mistakes were the ones I made while trying to be perfect. It was so important for me to succeed that I focused too hard on the result, and not enough on the process. But that was part of my training.

I grew up in a house where appearances were everything. We were masters at stashing clutter into closets and hiding the laundry in the dryer when someone announced they were dropping by. Any empty cabinet we could find was fair game, and sometimes things got lost in the stash forever. I have even participated in the sweeping of dirt under the rug, literally. Everything visible looked spit-shined and spanky clean for company, but God help you if you opened a closet or, for that matter, asked anyone how they really felt inside. We were poised for the show, and as set up for disaster as a Wylie E. Coyote cartoon. One peek behind the door and two years of clutter would avalanche onto your head, burying you in a dusty pile of junk.

I know for my mother, opening the closet door and dealing with the mess inside was simply too overwhelming to tackle. She grew to protect herself by believing that if she couldn’t see it, or didn’t want to, it must not exist. Even before Al-Anon, I knew that wasn't true. Not for my closet, and not for me. But old habits die hard and even though my physical closets are usually clean, my mental ones look a bit more like that cartoon.

For me, Step Five is my chance to open the door and let everything I’ve stuffed there fall into the open. Once it’s all in pile at my feet, I can take a good look at my inventory. These are the secrets, the bad habits, the little goofs and the big ones that I've stuffed in my closet for appearances sake, and it's likely going to be a bit overwhelming to tackle alone.

Fortunately the Fifth Step allows us to choose a witness. Someone who can help us sort through the clutter and make sense of what’s there. Someone who helps us stay focused on the task until we make it all the way through the pile. The Fifth Step is a bit like spring cleaning. I may not get rid of all my junk in the first pass, but at least I know what I've got to deal with. I may find that some things I had stuffed away are now valuable to me again, and I can dust them off and bring them back out into the open. Other things are simply not repairable and should not have been kept in the first place. If the Fifth Step is anything like cleaning out my real closets, most of what I’ve been harboring that is taking up space is simply junk that I can let go of, if I just take it out and look at it.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Communication

The other day, as I let my thoughts flow freely from the end of my favorite pen, I had what I call an “ink blot” – one of those epiphanies that escapes onto the page when I’m not paying attention. It said, “I prefer to communicate in writing, because it’s an expression, not an interaction.” I hadn’t really looked at it that way before, but it made perfect sense.

I’m a relatively shy person. I’m guarded and hesitant to engage unless I’m on my own turf. I’m conversationally risk adverse. Where I am comfortable is in situations where the conversations are one-sided. Writing, reading, teaching, or of course, directing the universe from my righteous podium.

I prefer emailing my long distance friends rather than talking to them on the telephone. I leave notes to ask for what I need around the house, rather than asking for help face to face. And god help me if I get stuck in a room full of strangers at a mixer – I’d rather crawl out of my own skin than try to work my way through that one.

So it’s not surprising that my Al-Anon home group is a writing meeting, which was the only way that I shared in Al-Anon for a long time. By writing, I could carefully choose the words I used to express myself, making it a safe communication for me. At first, I struggled reading aloud to the group, but with practice, my voice has settled in. From there, I learned to share without a script in meetings. Clumsily at first, but even that got better over time. Someone once told me that to get more comfortable with sharing, I should put my hand up at every meeting, to show up for myself, even if all I had to say was, “Hi, I’m here today.” I did, and it eventually became more comfortable.

The safety net in the meetings, though, has always been the Crosstalk rule and the Traditions. No interruptions, no direct advice, we just share by throwing things out into the middle of the room. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. It’s a safe, somewhat self-regulated audience and even though it has helped me tremendously, it’s only part of how Al-anon works. Those are the one-sided conversations.

What I keep cheating myself on are the interactive ones. The ones where someone gets to respond and ask, “Wait, go back a minute, why do you feel that way?” Maybe that kind of communication has been too vulnerable for me. Too hard to control. And as I look down at my ink blot, suddenly it becomes clear to me why I have had difficulty from the beginning working with a sponsor in this program. Sponsorship is the interactive part of the whole deal and I’ve been refusing to engage.

I spend a lot of time in my life trying to figure out how to let the guarded part of me be heard, but I’m starting to see that I don’t really even bring her to the conversation. I am one of those people who diminishes my relationships by not offering myself to them. So I guess it’s time to start practicing that, like I do everything else in this program. Maybe it’s time to not only share at the meetings, but to engage in some two way conversations as well. Let my guard down and say, “Let’s have coffee.” Or god forbid, pick up the phone once in a while and call my sponsor. Who knows, I might even learn how to survive a cocktail party soon, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Inside Out

When my journey into Al-Anon began, I had but one mission: to learn how to deal with the drinking habits of someone I loved. I didn’t know that this would be a class I would never graduate from, nor did I understand that it would be about me and not him. I didn’t understand that when you seek change, you mess with the scaffolding that surrounds your life, and protects your delicate psyche. Sometimes change in one area causes a collateral shift in another, and suddenly you realize that what you thought was the source of your chaos, isn’t even part of the conversation any more. Then, you have a choice; brave the new conversation or run.

I am feeling the effects of a paradigm shift these days. My scaffolding is down and I am taking a good hard look at the cracks in my foundation. It is unsettling, for sure, but I need to be able to get close enough to the defects to see how badly they compromise my strength and my serenity. Maybe for the first time, I am looking at them with some clarity. A searching and fearless inventory, as they say. This time though, I’m not looking out of idle curiosity. This time, I want to clean house and let go. This is my new conversation.

After all the positive change that’s taken place in my life, I still feel trapped, stifled and taken advantage of. I can’t seem to carve out the life I want for myself. I talk a lot about it, but I don’t ever seem to stop bartering away my precious time and energy to others. Why? Because at the core of it, I still believe that if I don't create value by meeting the needs of others, I might not be enough. But enough for what? I've worked hard to create security at the hand of others, and I've done a good job of it. But I've forgotten to foster myself. And suddenly the scaffolding comes into clear view. It seems that this structure I have built for my protection has turned out to be a form of entrapment. I’ve built my very own cage.

The Al-anon Promises tell us that “if we willingly surrender ourselves to the spiritual discipline of the Twelve Steps, our lives will be transformed.” It might get a little ugly first, sometimes deeply personal and revealing. But the beauty of these steps is that if we are disciplined and let one step lead to the other, the process carries us out of trouble. I’m banking on it. I don’t trust myself yet, but I trust the steps. I’ve seen enough to know that these are not empty promises.

There’s a part of me that’s been living in the shadows of the scaffolding for a very long time now. Somehow, while searching for an answer to alcoholism, I noticed a shift and saw the scaffolding for what it was. Protective yes, but stifling as well. So now, I have a choice. Instead of continuing to build up the structure to protect what's vulnerable, it's time to start peeling away some of the layers that keep me trapped inside. I'm sure it won't be as safe, but I'm looking forward to some fresh air and light.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

How Do You Learn?

“Each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting Al-Anon or AA as a whole.” Al-Anon's Tradition Four

I had an interesting conversation with someone about the program this weekend. As a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he is a purist who believes in delivering the message of AA the old fashioned way, one alcoholic taking another through the Big Book, face to face, one page at a time. That was the way Bill W. did it and it has worked for millions of alcoholics since then. He felt that Big Book study, 12 and 12, and speaker meetings were really the lifeblood of the program, and all the other meetings which follow an alternative format are, in his opinion, a diversion from program in it’s purest form. He was referring to meetings such as fourth step focus, crosstalk meetings, and even writing meetings.

I had a completely different take on things. In my mind, we all come into the rooms of AA, Al-Anon, or any other twelve-step program to change. Some of us walk through the doors with an intent to change others (I’m not naming any names, here, just saying). And as we begin to understand how this works, we find that effective change only comes when we teach ourselves (not those other folks) how to think differently, about everything. We have to accomplish a full press paradigm shift in our brains, and for the stubborn among us, that can be a daunting task.

Reality is - we all learn differently. Some of us like to have one on one contact and be walked through their lessons, line by line. Personally, I don’t like to be led when I’m learning. Some of us are visual learners, some listeners, and a few of us learn by voraciously devouring every book we can find on a subject. I’m one of those people who grinds on the material, and converts it into simple metaphors that help me to apply the lessons to my daily life and anchor them in my chemistry.

For me, Tradition Four is brilliant. Each group can be autonomous enough to find its own method of teaching, so long as what is taught remains the same and is done in a way that honors our Traditions. My AA friend learns in much the same way as Bill W. originally taught the program to alcoholics; one on one, personal contact, reading together and talking things through. If that were the only format available to me, I wouldn’t have stayed for five minutes. I learn by reading and writing and working through my thoughts, editing them until all the puzzle pieces fall into place and I can see the picture clearly on the table in front of me. I came to my home group because it was a writing group, because I couldn’t articulate my voice anywhere other than on paper. That’s improved considerably since I came into the rooms, but I definitely needed a comfortable place to start.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Quiet Choices

Our lives today are noisy, both literally and figuratively. I get to a point in the day sometimes when I can’t even hear myself think, and I become hypersensitive to not only sound, but everything that comes with it. I crave silence and solitude, but it’s hard to achieve unless one lives nearly alone, say on a farm, in the middle of nowhere.

I get up before the crack of dawn every day. I got into that habit when I first came to Al-Anon and needed to carve out some time to do a daily meditation and reading. My house was full at the time with two grown boys, an alcoholic husband and a couple of extremely large and demanding dogs. Fortunately, none of them would even think of being conscious at four or five in the morning, so I staked my claim to the early morning hours and have held onto them for dear life these last few years.

It has been my time for listening, to myself, to my heart, and to my higher power. Each day, I read for a spell to feed my soul. I meditate. Sometimes I just sit quietly and let the thoughts settle in my brain. I write a bit, not in a structured way, but in the freeform way that lets creativity flow out my fingertips onto the page. As random thoughts float into my head, I jot them down on the index cards I keep next to my chair, to pick up again on the weekend when I have more time to think them through. These silent morning hours foster the two things I value most in my personal development – my spirituality and my creativity.

Absent those hours in silence, I am reduced to nothing more than a human doing. A racehorse jumping out the gate in a deafening barrage of competition and expectation. When I am on that racetrack, I am driven by nothing other than my will: my will to succeed, to win, to go faster and harder than the challenges put in front of me. I feel like I was raised for that one singular purpose, and yet I have come to a place in my life where I question the track at its core.

I find myself at a crossroads these days. I have spent the last four years listening to myself and my higher power during those precious silent hours. Experiencing the serenity that is cultivated for me inside of them. And yet each and every morning as the sun comes up and the sounds of daily life become audible, I find myself still standing in the starting gate, with those who have bet on me cheering me on in the stands. If I don’t participate in the race, they have much to lose, and yet as the gate drops open, I am paralyzed. I don’t think it’s fear this time. It feels like something else. I think that somewhere in those silent hours, I’ve made a choice. I’ve heard what is important to me, and I’ve discovered that it’s not the race. In my heart, I think I’ve already walked away from the gate, ready to relinquish my will. I’m just trying to figure out what to do with the folks in the stands, the ones who bet on me to keep running until they were done with me.

© Copyright 2013 al-anon journal
Photo Credit: www.istockphoto.com/07-04-12 @ Anett Somogyvári