Wash Your Hands of It

This isn't Al-Anon, but it's interesting.

I read this recently in The Wall Street Journal. Research has found that when subjects washed their hands after making a difficult moral decision, they felt less guilty about it. A recent study found the same for non-moral decisions. It was a small study, and didn't compare washing hands to other activities with no relation to cleansing. Still.

When I have a difficult decision to make, I always pray and meditate on it until the way seems clear. Then I turn it over to God.

Next time, I'll also "wash my hands of it." I like the idea that the act is symbolic of "cleansing and purifying." And who knows? I might also ward off a cold.


I have a question for regular readers. Is there a past post you've found memorable? I've been asked to submit some posts for an E-zine and find that I'm a poor judge of my own work.

So, without making this seem like a homework assignment, is there something that comes to mind? If so, I hope you'll leave me a comment. Thank you.

Hubby and I are off to the land of no computers. I'll drop in for a return visit when we return. Till then, take good care.

Standing on Ceremony

Earlier this year, I wrote a story about the chief judge of one of the Native tribes in Arizona. He is a remarkable man, a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, and the first in his tribe to have graduated from law school. From the bench, he gained a unique perspective of the tribe’s problems.

He told me that 99.9 percent of the crimes he passed judgment on were the result of alcohol, either directly or indirectly.

"We’re a nation of adult children of alcoholics," he said.

This judge was very interested in Native traditions, especially ceremonies, and developed a court system that would incorporate those elements.

But what stuck with me at a practical level was what he had to say about ceremony. At Stanford, he taught a course on the subject which, he says, basically comes down to four things:

1. Purifying and cleansing
2. Putting things in order
3. Remembering and reconnecting
4. Prayer and meditation

In his class, he encouraged people to create their own ceremony using these elements. He told them not to overthink it. To keep it simple.

Wash the dishes, he said as an example. Then put them away.

When you wash the dishes, you are cleansing and purifying. When you put them away, you are putting things in order, restoring them to their proper place.

A program friend recently lamented that her job mostly consisted of cleaning. She was grateful to have any kind of job, of course, but this didn’t feel very satisfying.

I told her the story about my judge friend and his view of ceremony. I said it had helped me to reframe the way I think about things I need to do.

When I’m doing the dishes and feeling resentful about it, I think of the judge. I remind myself that I can think about it as doing a dirty job I'd rather not do. Or I can think of it as ceremony.

If I think of washing the dishes as ceremony, it changes the way I feel about my task, instantly. It transforms the ordinary into something sacred.

I’m powerless over many of the things I have to do in my life. But I can change the way I think about them. That’s the one thing that's within my power, always.

The Daily Reprieve

When programs friends or sponsees who have been doing well call at unscheduled hours to say that they are depressed or that obsessive thoughts have returned, I generally start by asking one question:

How’s your prayer life?

The longer I’m in the program the more important this question seems to me. This isn’t a disease we cure. We only get a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition. And that means exercising our spirit every day.

When I agree to take on new sponsees, here’s what I recommend:

Pray on your knees, at least once a day
Go to two Al-Anon meetings and one open AA meeting every week
Buy one of Al-Anon’s books of daily meditations and read it every day
Practice gratitude, actively, by writing a daily gratitude list

Those are the basics. And when people who have been doing well, suddenly aren’t, I have found they’ve stopped doing one (or several) of these things as regularly as they once did.

There are often good reasons for that. But the result is the same.

It happened to me several months ago during a bout of what may have been the swine flu. I was unable to get out of bed for two weeks. My only prayers were a fevered “God, just take me now.”

I didn’t attend a meeting, read any literature, talk to my sponsor. Then I got a phone call from my daughter with a request that threw me for a loop. She wanted money. It seemed like for a good reason. I didn’t know what to do.

I couldn’t reach my sponsor. My mind started its familiar spin cycle, its obsessive feedback loop. By the time my sponsor called, I had sent money and was agonizing over whether I should send more.

It took her about two seconds for my sponsor to set me straight. She reminded me that the reason my daughter needed money was because she had taken certain actions. What she was experiencing were the consequences of those actions.

Oh, yeah. I thought. Duh.

But without the tools of the program, I couldn’t think about it clearly.

I’ve seen much more dramatic examples from people who have been in the program for much longer. People who work a good program.

A very dear friend fell dramatically off the beam after she stopped praying. She experienced a storm of difficulties and after one particular incident, she just couldn’t pray. Then she started skipping meetings here and there. I visited her after an elective surgery and was surprised to find her completely undone.

Through it all, she could still give good program advice. She had been in the program a long time. She knew Al-Anon chapter and verse. But this is a program of action. Knowing everything about recovery doesn’t do a bit of good without taking the actions we’re taught in this program.

Or as I read in another blog recently, God will put wind in your sails, but he won’t raise the sail.

Another friend admitted that after 16 years in the program, he had to call his sponsor and “turn himself in.” He had lost his faith.

She had him rework step 2. At the same time, he was working with a sponsee on the same step. God makes no mistakes.

He asked himself: What did I do when I was new?

The answer:
I prayed on my knees
I went to meetings
I read Al-Anon literature
I practiced gratitude

He did those things and climbed back on the beam.

Let’s Talk about Sex

I will begin by saying, in the tradition of public broadcast, that while this post does not contain content of a graphic nature, it does contain themes that may not be suitable for younger readers.

There is no part of our lives in recovery that we do not examine. So eventually, we need to talk about sex.

I’ve just completed my annual fourth step. This one was an AA-style inventory right out of the Big Book.

To be honest, I was a little skeptical that it would reveal anything I hadn’t already dealt with in my first fourth step, which I wrote in narrative form. But I prayed that God would reveal what needed to be revealed, took the action and waited to see what came up.

To my surprise, by putting things in a different format I saw different things. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the part of the inventory the Big Book refers to as “Sex Problems.” (Found on page 69, of course.)

Interestingly, that was the part of the Big Book we read and discussed at my last Big Book study. So it was fresh in my mind as I sat down to my task.

In the first column, I was to review my past conduct and indicate where I was selfish, dishonest or inconsiderate. Where did I unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion or bitterness?

There was no new ground to tread. I had revealed every sordid event in great detail in my first fourth step. But in such a condensed form, a few things stuck out.

The first is that I have behaved very badly. No surprise there. But seeing my behavior in it’s most concentrated form was bracing.

But the real insight I gained is that most of the sex I’ve had in my life, I didn’t enjoy. Rather, I used sex as a tool. I used it to draw men into a relationship with me. I used sex to keep men in relationships and to lure them back when things got bad. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it was spectacularly unsuccessful and just left me filled with shame.

I believe my sexuality was God-given. But that gift became twisted and distorted as a result of sexual abuse at a very early age.

I did things I didn’t want to do, because I thought it would bring me love and allow me to keep it.

Of course, I was trying to fill the God-sized hole I felt with another person. When one person wasn’t enough to fill the hole, I thought more would be the answer. Or doing more or different or more exotic sex acts with the same one. Of course that only filled me with more shame and left a bigger hole.

I just kept digging a deeper, wider hole in a cycle of self-destruction that didn’t stop until I began to feel my first spiritual stirrings. That path eventually led me to Al-Anon and recovery.

I stopped behaving in self-destructive ways. I learned what a healthy relationship looked like. I’ve been blessed with a happy marriage for going on eight years.

But what I didn’t realize until now was this:

Without going into the details that have no place here, I will simply say that God, in his wisdom, took away the one weapon I had deployed in all my relationships. In my marriage, I could not use sex in this way. It simply had no power.

And I was loved and accepted anyway.

What I learned is that love and acceptance are like God’s grace. It’s not something I can earn by doing things I imagine someone else wants me to do. But if I make myself right spiritually, it is a gift that is freely given.

And for that, I thank God.

The Breakfast Club

I attended my first Alateen meeting last night.

When I walked in, my first thought was "Breakfast Club." There were a couple of kids with gloves with the fingertips cut off. Three of them wore winter hats, one with ear flaps.

Should I mention the temps hit 100 yesterday?

I tried not to stare at one girl, whose side part seemed to originate at about her ear. I kept looking to see how she kept her hair from cascading down her face.

One of the older boys brought his new iPad. Another showed the other Alateen sponsor pictures of his new dog on his cellphone.

After my certification training and my conversation with my sponsor, I had certain expectations. (I cringe to have to write this, but it's true.)

I was surprised to find kids ranging to 8 to 18. There are differing thoughts on this. At the certification training, the Alateen coordinator said that groups are often age segregated, as the things the older kids want to talk about is not always appropriate for the younger ones. She also said the older kids use a fair amount of profanity.

"Don't expect them to behave like adults in an Al-Anon meeting," she said. "They will sit on each other's laps. They will be texting while other people are talking. This will bother no one but you. Don't think they are not also listening."

The Alateen sponsor last night told me that this group used to start the meeting together, then break up into two, age-segregated groups, but they haven't had enough certified sponsors to do this for some time.

But the kids were all respectful. One boy started to say a swear, but caught himself. They all seemed to like and care about each other, and to want to be there. They had voted not to allow texting during the meeting, and the chairperson (an Alateen) enforced the rule.

At the appropriate time, the other Alateen sponsor introduced me and asked me to say a little about myself. I said that I was recently certified as an Alateen sponsor. (At this point, the boy next to me offered me his fist in congratulations, which I bumped with my own.) I said I had grown up in an alcoholic home, that I had been in the program for a couple of years, that my daughter was the reason I was in Al-Anon, that I was happy to be there.

The other sponsor explained that they would get to vote me in.

"You don't have to take what we give you," she said.

"I vote for her," the boy next to me said.

"Well, let's wait until we know she's interested," replied the other Alateen sponsor.

"Are you interested?" a boy sitting across the table wanted to know. His gaze felt intense. The room got quiet.

"Yes," I said. "As a matter of fact I am."

"Okay, then," the boy said, slapping the table. "I vote yes."

Then hands went up around the room and there was a little cheer and they boy next to me said, "There, now you're in. You can't back out of it."

The kids run their own meetings, and the chairperson shared on the topics of laziness and trust. They passed by getting up and hugging the person they were passing to.

There was a lot of giggling and side whispering which, as the Alateen coordinator had said, seemed to bother no one but me. The kids all shared, but one, who asked the other Alateen sponsor if she was allowed to pass. They seemed to talk easily and honestly.

Laziness was the chief topic. They confessed to not doing their homework and barely passing classes as a result, cleaning their rooms by stuffing everything in the closet. One girl said it took her, "seriously" all day to clean her hamster's cage, while it took her mom just an hour. The older kids talked about putting off filing financial aid paperwork, looking into colleges, looking for jobs.

As for trust, more than one kid said, "I trust you guys."

The girl with the side part shared that she had invited a friend to the meeting, whose parents were alcoholics. "It's really fun and awesome," she told her friend. But her friend didn't want to go because "then everybody would know. It was sad."

After all the kids had shared, the other Alateen sponsor shared. Then she passed to me.

She did this with by offering me her fist. I hit her fist with mine, and then we both opened our hands flat, as the kids had taught us to do. We both laughed as we did it.

While I talked, kids looked at the table or their hands or fidgeted with the tassels on their hat. They sneaked sideways glances at me. But they got quiet. I could almost hear the Alateen coordinator say, "Don't think they're not listening."

Then we all shared "happys and crappys," of each. Me included. My happy was that I had been voted in, and they all cheered.

Entirely Ready

A relative newcomer in Al-Anon once confessed to me her reluctance about steps six and seven.

If God removed her defects of character, she wondered. What would be left of her? Would she be full of holes like a piece of Swiss cheese?

At the time, I confess that I couldn’t relate. Of course you won’t be like a piece of Swiss cheese, I answered. You’ll be the person you’ve always been, just without the character traits that have gotten in your way.

I sailed through step six. I couldn’t wait to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. I knew them all too well:

I was controlling, introverted and selfish.

I knew those character defects had started as self-defense mechanisms. I tried to control things because life in the family I grew up in felt so out of control.

I became introverted because I had learned early in my life that I could not count on other people. Life became easier and less painful when I relied only on myself.

I was selfish, because when I was growing up, it felt like there was never enough. There wasn’t enough money or time or love. So I horded these things. I was afraid that if I gave them away, there wouldn’t be enough for me.

I also knew those self-defense mechanisms had overshot the mark. Now, they just got in my way.

Good riddance, I said. I’m ready. Bring on step seven.

But as I got farther into my program and started to gain more insight, I realized that those obvious defects of character were just the beginning. One by one, I began to see how traits that I believed to be at the core of my very nature seemed to have been shaped by this disease.

There was my restlessness and need for constant change.

My serious nature.

My love of quiet and solitude.

Even my love of stories. I was an English major. I became a journalist. One of my greatest pleasures is reading. I couldn’t think of anything that was more central to my nature. But was that innate, or had it been an escape? I couldn’t be sure.

A some point, I made a list of the characteristics I was sure were not shaped by alcoholism. My list included my shoe size, my eye color and my IQ. The rest was pretty much up for debate.

I started to think that newcomer had been more perceptive than I had been.

For the first time, I realized I had no idea who I really was under all those layers. But I did believe that God could restore me.

And I could hardly wait to meet myself.

In the process, what I learned is that God doesn’t remove all my character defects at once. And for everything He took, He left something in its place.

As I became less introverted, I became more loving. As I became less selfish, I became more generous. As I became less controlling, I made room in my life for spontaneity and guidance from my Higher Power.

In every case, God didn’t leave me with holes. He left me whole.

And, no matter where I was in my program, He only removed my defects when I was entirely ready.

Grace Calling

God came calling the other day.

At least I’m pretty sure it was Him. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure. He takes so many forms.

But I’m pretty sure it was Him, because I had been praying for guidance, and this seemed to be His answer.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you probably know I recently got certified as an Alateen sponsor. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Then Alateen certification training just happened to be held on a Saturday I was going to be in town, which was rare. So I went and got certified.

I knew there was a need—a desperate need—for Alateen sponsors in a couple of groups. The problem was that those groups were held on nights that I’m almost never in town. So I’ve been praying about it, knowing that God would put me where he needed me.

Then last Monday, when I saw my sponsor at a meeting, she said: “Remind me to talk to you about Alateen during our call time.”

So I did.

My sponsor has been an Alateen sponsor for three years, in one of the groups where there is a desperate need. At this point feels she’s probably been there too long. She feels burned out. But she’s unwilling to just walk away.

“I know you’re not usually home on Thursdays,” she began. “But I was wondering if you’d be willing to commit to one week a month.”

I had thought about that myself but I worried how my husband would react, and whether one week a month was enough to forge a meaningful relationship with the kids.

But now I was feeling led.

I agreed to talk with my husband about it. As it happened, I knew this weekend we’d be home, so I could attend the meeting and meet the kids.

She told me the meetings varied between 10 and 20 kids each week.

“I have to tell you, it’s a rowdy group,” she said. “That’s part of the reason we’ve had trouble getting sponsors in there. You definitely have to be able to be willing to be tough with them and tell them to cut the crap.”

Yikes! This was beginning to sound tough.

But I reminded myself that God puts me where he needs me. That I always get more than I give. That God doesn’t choose the equipped, he equips the chosen.

I talked to my husband, and he was supportive.

So tomorrow I will attend my first Alateen meeting.

Pray for me.