An Idea That Changed My Life

For the past seven years, I have participated in a contemplative writing group. The six of us choose a topic and all write on that for our next meeting. It is amazing the different ways we all approach the same topic. For our meeting yesterday, we wrote on an idea that changed our life. They thought I should include what I wrote on my blog, so here it is:

In 1935, Bill Wilson, a New York stockbroker, was in Akron, Ohio on business. At the end of the day, the bar in his hotel’s lobby called to him. He was scared. He had achieved a tentative sobriety before this trip and didn’t want to fail again. He entered the phone booth located outside the bar, closed the door to the sounds of music and gaiety, and began calling clergy in town seeking the name and number of a drunk who might be willing to talk with him. His hands shook as he fumbled through the phone book and dropped coins in the slots. He was directed to Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon who many in town had tried and failed to help stop drinking.

Dr. Smith answered the phone through slurred speech and was greeted by a strange request. This New Yorker seemed desperate to talk with him because if he didn’t, he was sure he’d get drunk. Smith didn’t know how talking with him would help, but he agreed. He was a doctor, after all. Dr. Smith opened the door to another professional man, a fellow sufferer, who had achieved success at maintaining sobriety, something that continued to elude him.

This meeting between Bill W. and Dr. Bob, as they came to be known, proved fateful. Both men had been exposed to the Oxford Group, a largely non-alcoholic group that emphasized universal spiritual values in daily living. But what had helped Bill W., something that was news to Dr. Smith, was the idea that alcoholism was a disease—a malady of mind, emotions, and body—not a failure of morality or will power. Bill W. said the only way he had found to stop drinking was by talking to other drunks, which was the reason for his visit.

During the duration of his business trip, Bill W. stayed in the Smith’s home. He and Dr. Bob began visiting other drunks at Akron City Hospital. Dr. Bob and one of the men they visited achieved sobriety. With the experience of these three drunks undergirded by the Oxford Group’s spiritual principles, Alcoholics Anonymous was born.

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That same year, 1935, my mother, the oldest of six children, was fourteen. Her youngest sibling, my uncle, was two. They were oblivious to the history being made just two hundred miles and three hours from their home in New Bremen. Their own alcoholic drama was being played out. Seven years later, in 1942, while my mother was pregnant with me, my grandmother had had enough of her husband’s violent drunken episodes and womanizing. She filed for divorce, the mind, body, and emotions of the whole family scarred.

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Lois, Bill W.’s wife, had spent years trying to get her husband sober. It was her life purpose and she felt needed. Once he did achieve sobriety, she was surprised to find that she wasn’t living “happily ever after.” It was a bitter pill that his success could not be attributed to anything she had done. And she was as neglected as before. Instead of drinking, her husband went to meetings. One Sunday he asked her if she’d like to go with him. To their astonishment, she threw a shoe as hard as she could and shouted, “Damn your old meetings.”

That was a turning point for Lois. She decided to change her attitudes and behaviors by using the same spiritual principles her husband was using to stay sober. She and other wives of recovering alcoholics met independently to work on themselves. They came to view alcoholism as a family disease, an idea that changed my life. Al-Anon, the spiritual recovery program for family and friends, was born.

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In April 1983, forty-one years after my grandmother divorced my grandfather, I was as miserable as Lois W. Despite seventeen years of trying to make my  husband over into one that would make me happy, we and our children were worse than ever. Then I attended a weekend intensive workshop with Anne Wilson Schaef. She was in the process of writing a book called, When Society Becomes an Addict.

Hearing for the first time about the effects on the family of an alcoholic’s drinking, I was led to read It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black. I read it to better understand my mother. But as I read about how the family disease operates and the survival roles adopted by the children, I found not only my mother, but myself. Even when the alcoholic drinking is not present, the behaviors and attitudes get passed down to the next generation.

As oldest children, my mother and I block our emotional pain and disappointment by trying to excel. I also avoid stress by losing myself in books. In these books, and, later as an adult, in workshops and training programs, I hoped to find a better way of living and relating.

In September 1983, I began training with Schaef in Living-in-Process, a spiritual way of living compatible with twelve step programs. Trainees were expected to identify their addiction and to work a recovery program that addressed it. In late February 1984, I attended my first twelve-step meeting. I was so nervous, I had diarrhea. It took me until July to feel as though I belonged. Eventually, as I changed my focus from how my  husband and children needed to change to what I need to change about myself, I began to achieve more serenity and equanimity—the very spiritual qualities needed by a person who fits the Enneagram One (Perfectionist) and Four (Romantic) personality styles. I found in the twelve steps the practical spiritual approach I needed for guidance.

The trials I have been given in my  adult life have born a striking resemblance to that of an active alcoholic/addict’s family, even though drinking/drugging has not been our problem. Focusing on my spiritual growth meant I needed to change my attitude and behavior in specific ways. Whatever success I obtain in…

• turning my challenges over to a greater power;
• living one day/one minute at a time;
• doing the next right thing in the easiest, simplest way possible to the best of my ability focusing on progress, not perfection;
• accepting what is;
• asking myself how important whatever it is that is bugging me and letting go of trying to control it;
• reminding myself that this too shall pass;
• detaching with love;
• putting first things first

…I owe to Bill and Lois W. and Dr. Bob, and all those who helped them find a way out of suffering, not only for themselves, but for countless generations to come. I am grateful to be one of them.

And as I come to the end of writing this piece, a vision of millions of suffering souls holding hands and walking together out of the pits of hell emerges in my consciousness. My heart fills with awe at this community…our common unity…and for the idea that has changed all of our lives.

~~~

Confession: When I am under stress as I have been these past couple of months, the pain I experience carries me back to old attitudes and patterns of behavior. Thankfully, by connecting with other sufferers who understand and empathize and by continuing to utilize the principles of the twelve step program, I just don’t stay there as long.