Restored to What?

In my Wednesday meeting, on the first week of the month, we study the step for that month. So yesterday's meeting was on Step 2. It was a great meeting.

Step 2 says: "Came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity."

Such a short, simple sentence. So packed with landmines.

First, there's the whole issue of "came to believe." This assumes you believe that there is a power greater than yourself, which I've written about in another post.

Secondly, it assumes that the Higher Power in question can restore you to sanity.

And third, it assumes that sanity is something you once had.

I was among the fortunate souls who came to Al-Anon with a relationship with a Higher Power. So I could stroll over the first hurdle without breaking a sweat.

Skipping the second for a moment, the whole sanity thing was more difficult for me.

I grew up "in this disease" as we say in the program. My mother and father were both alcoholics. There was abuse and neglect in our home from before I was even born. As a young child, I lived with my grandmother by court order.

I wasn't sure sanity was something I ever had. How could I be re-stored to something I never stored?

My sponsor helped me understand that being restored to sanity didn't have to mean returning to some previous condition. It could mean being restored to the way God intended me to be had it not been for the effects of alcoholism.

I could get behind that.

So the question became believing that the God I had a relationship with, who frankly wasn't very good at doing what I wanted him to do, could restore me to some condition I had never had and wasn't sure I would know when I got there.

No problem.

But I was willing to try something new. We "fake it till we make it," is the popular phrase. So I acted "as if" I believed. As a kind of experiment.

I prayed only for guidance as my sponsor had suggested.

I prayed on my knees. At first I had trouble with this. I had a million excuses: What difference did it make how I prayed? God would still hear me. I was getting older, kneeling hurt my knees. It hurt my back. It reminded me of masses I had endured as a child.

But I did it.

I got a pillow, and I kneeled on it. And I prayed. And I felt better.

Eventually I understood that by kneeling, I put myself in a position of humility. I couldn't be a know-it-all on my knees. And when I was humble, I was teachable. And when I was on my knees, I was praying. Period. I was not driving or in the shower or doing the dishes. I could still pray while I did those things. But for a few minutes each morning, I gave God my full attention.

And it worked.

And so I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

I'm still not sure what sanity looks like. God's not done with me yet. But today, driving to the meeting I thought about how we'd be studying step 2, and how I felt "happy, joyous and free." Just as God intended.

Can You Hear Me Now?

When I was a kid, I tried to be invisible. Not in any metaphysical sense. But literally.

I skulked, shadow-like, around corners and along walls, one arm stretched out ahead, like an antenna. My 5-year-old mind believed if I pressed myself close enough to the wall, I could pass by without being seen. I thought that’s what spies did.

When my mom and step dad didn’t look up from the TV, I was convinced it worked.

I also spent hours playing Cowboys and Indians in the backyard. Mostly, I was the Indian. In the movies, Indians could creep through the forest silently, without disturbing so much as a twig or leaf. I practiced this for hours but failed utterly. Beneath my feet twigs snapped and leaves crunched. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get it. I must have been doing something wrong.

I wanted desperately to learn to creep around the edges of things, silent and unseen. If I didn’t upset anyone, if I didn’t ask for anything—if I were silent and invisible—then everything would be okay. When that didn’t work, when things broke and fists flew, I wanted to melt into the wall. I longed to disappear.

Paradoxically, I also craved attention. When I got older, I learned to get attention from boys. If I did things other girls wouldn’t do, I thought it would make boys love me. And sometimes they did. But their conception of love was as distorted as mine.

I adapted to my surroundings, became a chameleon. I gave up everything I wanted and instead wanted whatever my current boyfriend did. I threw myself into their lives completely. I made them my life. In a different way, I made myself disappear. I wanted to.

Until I didn’t. Eventually, I mourned all the things I gave up and resented the person I gave them up for, even though he had never asked me to. Then I would insist on doing everything my way. There was no middle ground.

The only love I witnessed involved drama. So when things got too quiet, I made noise. I was like a manic-depressive, swinging between extremes. I shouted, wailed and beat my chest. My highs were high and my lows were low, but at least I was feeling, I told myself. I thought I was Living Out Loud.

When I made such a mess of things I feared they could never be fixed, I ran. If I left, the other person couldn’t leave me. I had control. I left relationships, careers, states. My life became one long series of fresh starts and new beginnings. I told myself I liked it that way. I longed to keep moving and never stop.

My biological father was a runner, too. I decided that running must be genetic. I had inherited the restless gene along with his eyes.

Eventually, I came to Al-Anon, and began to listen. I heard pieces of my own story when other people shared. It began to dawn on me that the traits I thought were “just who I was” were things I had in common with all these people. I began to understand that they were self-defense mechanisms that had once served me well, but had outlived their usefulness. Now they got the way of my happiness.

These character traits had been passed down from generation to generation. But it wasn’t the restless gene I inherited, it was the family disease of alcoholism.

Like someone with bipolar disorder, there was no cure for my dis-ease. But Al-Anon assured me there was a solution. If I were open and willing, and did what was suggested I could be restored to “sanity.” Not permanently. But I could receive a daily reprieve according to my spiritual condition. Suffering was optional.

Eventually, I stopped looking to others to fill the hole I felt inside. Instead, I strained to hear the small, still voice of my Higher Power. I had to learn to be quiet, to silence the voices in my head. But I didn’t have to be invisible.

Came to Believe

I've been reading "Lit" by Mary Karr, about her descent into alcoholism and the break up of her marriage. Karr wrote the classic memoir "The Liar's Club." "Lit" is her third memoir. So she's no novice to the genre. But I read that it took her something like four years and three tries to get this one right.

I find myself drawn to memoirs of addiction. With each one, I gain a little more understanding, a little more compassion. It's a popular genre, too. It's interesting to me that no one writes memoirs about Al-Anonism. Why is that?

Anyway, being something of a student of the genre, it strikes me that the biggest obstacle to recovery initially is the inability to believe in a higher power.

I was fortunate that I had a God when I became a member of Al-Anon for real. But it wasn't always that way.

As a very young child living in the home of my devoutly Roman Catholic grandmother, I believed in a God. That God was loving and resided in picture books and in my grandmother's Bible, which was illustrated with gorgeous reproductions of famous Renaissance paintings. But my mother didn't attend church and after I went to live with her, I gradually lost faith.

It wasn't that I didn't want to believe. I did.

I envied people with faith. They seemed happier, more at peace somehow. But I didn't know how to do it.

I tried to intellectualize my way to a belief in God. In college, I took a survey class of Western Philosophy. It seemed that proving God's existence was priority number one among the philosophers I was studying. I read with intensity, looking for the proof that would allow me to finally believe. But faith always eluded me. There was always some leap of faith I couldn't follow. Rene Descartes, for example, went from "I think therefore I am" to therefore there must be a God.

I just couldn't make the leap.

Then one day, I found myself in the fallout from another failed relationship. I was miserable. I knew something was broken, but I didn't know what. All I knew was that all my relationships turned to dust. I couldn't find any pattern in the men I had been seeing, so I could only conclude it was me. I made up my mind to figure out what was plaguing me and fix it.

Ironically, this was also the first time I attended Al-Anon at the suggestion of a friend. With my upbringing, I certainly felt like I qualified to be there. But at the time I wasn't living with an alcoholic, so I felt like I was cheating to be there. I didn't think my problem had anything to do with the family disease of alcoholism (how little I knew!), so I didn't get a sponsor or work the steps. After a few meetings, I quit going.

But a friend invited me to church. For some reason, I went.

I don't remember a thing about the service, except that I felt foolish because I couldn't stop crying. I started crying at the first note of the first song and struggled to regain my composure as people filed out around me at the end of the service.

I had no idea what was happening. I only knew something was. Until I figured it out, I had to stick around. I kept coming back, as we say in the program. All I knew was that I felt good in church. And eventually--and I mean years--I realized I did believe.

I believe so completely that I often forget that there are many people in the rooms of AA and Al-Anon who are still struggling with the idea.

Here are some suggestions I've heard in the rooms:

Your higher power can be anything. It just needs to be a power greater than yourself.

For many people, that higher power is the program itself. That would have worked for me. I can't deny the mysterious power the program has or how it seems to work so well for so many without anyone being in charge.

Some people have "fired" the God of their former understanding. This was often a mean and punishing God or a neglectful God. One technique I've heard is to write down all the characteristics of your ideal God and "hire" that God.

In "Lit," a speaker at a meeting tells Mary: "Faith is not a feeling. It's a set of actions."

The line reminds me of a time in my own early recovery when my husband and I were on vacation and I was worried that I would not be able to attend a meeting. We were staying at a resort in a remote part of Costa Rica. As fate, or God, would have it, I signed up for Yoga. I was the only student.

What seems obvious to me now, though I didn't realize it at the time, was that my Yoga instructor was in program, and he talked program to me every day. "It doesn't matter what you practice," he said. "It only matters that you practice."

In "Lit," the speaker tells Mary: "Pray every day for 90 days and see if your life doesn't get better." Even if you think you are praying to the air. "Call it a scientific experiment... You can make up your own concept of what to revere. Like Nature..."

Another AA member tells her: "Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself... Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary.... Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on."

She did, and her life did get better. Like so many others before her.

I don't know how electricity works. But I know I flip a switch and there is light. I don't know how prayer works. I just know it does.

My Coupon Folder

The other day I found myself cleaning out my coupon file, and I thought how it was like my experience in Al-Anon, because cleaning out my file is really about reminding myself what I have and getting rid of things I don’t need. Out go the coupons for things I no longer want. On the other hand, I find coupons that feel like gifts—a forgotten movie pass or a gift card. Of course, there are disappointments, too, coupons I wished I had used but find they have expired. Those coupons are the reason I like to clean out my file. So I can take advantage of them before it’s too late. That's also why I keep coming back to Al-Anon.

I started thinking about what would be in my Al-Anon folder. My discard pile would include my obsession with my alcoholic, the conviction that I am always right, and my need to control other people—though that one sometimes feels like a coupon that arrives every week in the mail. A Value pack.

Among the things I rediscovered were my relationship with my higher power and the gift of living my own life. Fortunately, those didn’t have expiration dates. They were like manufacturers coupons, just waiting for me to use them.

Along the way I added a few things:

An awareness of the nature of my alcoholic’s illness, and of my own.

The ability to detach with love.

With step four, I reviewed my life, saw it differently, and let go of old grudges that, on inspection, I wondered why I’d collected at all.

With the guidance of my sponsor, in step five, I’m examining things about myself that were too close to see on my own.

For me, this program has been a little like getting a pair of 3-D glasses. When I strap them on, things that seemed unremarkable pop out in surprising ways. I wondered what I couldn’t see yet, and what else I might be ready to let go of. I could hardly wait to find out.