Typo there: I do mean “I pray to God…” I am very far from perfect - especially when it comes to my spelling! 😂 Thank you John.

My sponsor once related the pickling process of a cucumber to alcoholism. No one knows exactly when a regular person becomes an alcoholic just like nobody can tell you when a cucumber becomes a pickle…but once you are a pickle (or alcoholic) there is no going back.

I heard a man describe one of the best methods to defuse a fight: begin by acknowledging how one contributed to the conflict & own up to those parts. You clean up your side of the street first & the effect is the other person will also go from finger-pointing to cleaning too.

Tonight, a woman gave a lead where she detailed feeling “crispy” after not attending her regular AA meetings. Some people interpret this & joke that she is in AA withdrawal but I actually think this feeling is related to our universal human need for community. There are other aspects that come along with community like our need to express ourselves, connect with each other, see other people who we have come to respect & belong to something greater than ourselves. AA facilitates all of this. It wasn’t an accident that we were all completely isolated & alone when we were habitually using substances. In this way - the AA meetings literally are the positive coping mechanism that people in recovery use to replace what they once used substances to achieve. Thus, feeling “crispy” after forgoing normal AA meetings is almost like the body’s self-defense system - like an early warning alarm to make you aware of danger.

“Our secrets are what keep us sick.” AA didn’t teach me anything new concerning integrity or honesty but I got so used to NOT talking about things that I literally never learned the value of doing so or even how to do it. It was a liberating thing to talk about my experiences in the Army & the death of my friends. After I addressed those subjects, I was effectively liberated from my dependence on Alcohol in order to sleep at night. I cannot over-stress the importance of how important it is to get everything out, in the open. You cannot move past a thing unless you actually openly acknowledge it, address it, own up to your parts of it & let it go. This is exactly why the breakout groups in AA work on Vegas rules: “what you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.”

Athletes train in their events to turn complex feats like completing a pass with a football or hurdling obstacles while track-running into "muscle memory." Alcoholics and addicts do something similar. They rationalize using substances whenever they feel anything in life, good or bad, because the substances themselves are the primary coping mechanism these people use to live life. AA and the 12-steps is literally the process we use to "re-wire" our brains and not engage in this very familiar destructive cycle. One of my friends described substance use as the 8-lane super highway we've built in our heads. When we come into the program, we literally have to blaze a path through the forest to build a completely new road because we've often never dealt with life on life's terms without chemical assistance before.

Part of the 12th step is putting the principle of tolerance into practice in all arenas of our life. We must realize that others begin their journey to sobriety from different places with different experiences. Understanding and acknowledging first that we were wrong in our understandings & opinions when we were a newcomer to AA ourselves helps us to contextualize when others are in the same place. Sometimes people have to go through being wrong in order to truly understand the virtue of being right. You cannot give away something you don't have so when advising others, speak first from what has worked for you personally and then why.

This is exactly the attitude one needs to adopt when entering & pursuing sobriety. You know it can be done because there are entire meetings of hundreds of alcoholics in recovery who were exactly where you find yourself. Doing it "your way" got you to where you find yourself now. Humble yourself enough to listen to the people who've demonstrated recovery or alcohol will do this on its own, right before it takes your life.

The 9th Step is an intersection of a person's integrity and personal responsibility. For myself, the most important people I owed something to when I got sober was my nephews. They grew up watching me drink every night & I spent 17 years teaching them that alcoholism was "normal." My living amends is to spend at least 17 years showing them that I am more than capable of not engaging in this behavior...& I fully intend to keep right on going so I can continue to show them who I really am when I am undiminished by substances.

“What you’d prefer to believe” is a luxury you can’t afford in recovery. God is not negotiable in the program. I would have believed in a spaghetti monster in the sky if they told me believing in it would have helped me get sober. I woulda shown up to meetings with a fork! 💯

This step is about introspection & accountability: it is about always cleaning up your side of the street before you look to your neighbor’s. A pre-requisite to working this step is to honestly understand how you are the primary author & contributor to your own problems in life.