Tag: Big Book

What’s The Problem?

In the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the second chapter is called “There Is A Solution”. On page 25 of that chapter, there is a paragraph that opens with “There is a solution”. But what is that the solution to? In other words, what is The Problem?

I go to a lot of AA meetings. And at many of those meetings, I hear a lot about not drinking. I hear that the problem is alcohol. But what if the problem isn’t alcohol?

I realize that question is provocative to ask in an AA meeting. I ask that question because I quit drinking a number of times. Every time I started again. Every time I quit drinking, it seemed to me that my life got worse, not better. The whole “don’t think, don’t drink and go to meetings” was not working for me.

I have a number of addictions. A brief list includes alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, spending. Maybe food too. Maybe internet doom scrolling. I’ve attended meetings for four of those addictions. I gravitate towards anything that provides a dopamine hit and a minute of distraction.

When I first started attending AA meetings, I abstained from drinking and taking drugs for about 4 months. And my life got worse. I got worse. I didn’t have my pain medicine anymore (alcohol and drugs) but I still had all of the pain.

After a meeting one night, I asked my sponsor what to do to recover from alcoholism, and he said “you need to work the Steps”. And it changed my life. Now my life didn’t get perfect. But it started to change. I started to change. And the obsession to drink and take drugs was lifted.

What working the Steps did for me was to help me understand The Problem. I learned that the problem wasn’t alcohol. It wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t pornography or gambling or the internet.

It was my alcoholism. It was me.

I wasn’t happy when I learned that. Far from it. I learned that I have a void. People call it “a hole in my soul”. For me it is a sense of “Not Enough”. I read in a Patrick Carnes book on sex addiction “Out of the Shadows” a phrase (and I’m paraphrasing here) that Carnes core message was “I am not enough, there isn’t enough, the world is not a safe place, and my needs can only be met with sex”. I related to that.

I had been trying to meet all of my needs with a combination of alcohol and drugs and sex and spending and porn and….whatever. Whatever I could pour into the hole in my soul to temporarily help me feel like I was enough. And none of it worked. And I became addicted to all of it.

I also learned that I couldn’t just “stop drinking and go to meetings”. That wasn’t a solution for me, and I didn’t know why. Now I do. I now understand that The Solution is a spiritual solution to a spiritual malady.

Part of my spiritual solution comes from connecting with all of you. By trying to be authentic, and transparent, and by trying to help others.

Thank you for letting me share!

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

Meetings When I Travel

On page 162 of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”, Bill W. wrote “someday we hope that every alcoholic who journeys will find a Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at his destination”. These were amazing words for him to write, because at the time he wrote them, there were fewer than 100 recovering alcoholics in Ohio and New York.

Eighty years later, alcoholics journey all the time. I am one of them. I was lucky enough to go on a vacation in the first year of my sobriety. My sponsor suggested that I should attend a meeting (or 7) while on vacation. He explained to me that my alcoholism didn’t take vacations, even if I did.

I promised him that I would go to meetings, and I am so glad that I did. I remember those meetings even though 28 years have passed.

I am now in a position where I travel overseas for work. So I make it a point to go to meetings when I travel for work. As of today, I am lucky enough to have attended AA meetings in 14 countries.

I hope that you do not mind if I share some of my experience in locating and attending meetings when I travel. I hope that my experience is helpful for you.

It helps me to do a little bit of research before I travel. Since I have an internet connection at home (and I don’t necessarily have one in every destination), it helps to find a meeting schedule in advance, and print it out.

It helps me to commit to someone else (my sponsor, my wife) that I will go to a meeting when I am travelling. The truth is that travel is hard. Sometimes I don’t have a lot of energy after flying for 14 hours. But since I have made a commitment to someone else, I feel obligated to go to a meeting.

It helps to have cell phone (mobile) service when I travel. If you travel internationally, make sure your cell phone works in your destination. This is helpful for navigating from your hotel (or apartment) to a meeting.

It is really helpful to do a bit of mapping, in advance, if you are travelling to a large foreign city. Some places are complicated. Going to meetings in Tokyo, for example, is very complicated (at least to me). The layout of the city was confusing for me the first time I travelled there.

One of the great benefits of going to meetings in other places is that I have met wonderful people, and attended some of the best meetings I’ve ever been to. Here are a couple of travel stories from some of those meetings:

1) My wife and I attended a meeting in Bermuda. At the meeting, three gentlemen started talking to us, and were surprised that we were attending a meeting where this meeting was located. They graciously noted that the neighborhood was not very safe for visitors, and they escorted us to the bus after the meeting. Theirs was a kindness I have not forgotten many years later.

2) I recently attended a sunrise beach meeting in Florida. I did very little advance preparation (I ignored my own advice) and I came to the meetings with only a towel. I noted that every other person at the meeting had a beach chair, but I didn’t think much of it. A few minutes into the meeting, I felt some pain in my feet and my ankles, and I realized that I was being eaten alive by a swarm of fire ants. I spent the rest of the meeting watching these ants carry parts of my body away for breakfast. Next time I’ll bring a chair.

3) This year I visited Africa for the first time. I arranged to attend a meeting in Johannesburg. I connected with a wonderful man at Intergroup, and he picked me up at my hotel and took me to the meeting. The people there were so passionate about their sobriety. One thing they did that I’ve never seen before- they lit a Serenity Prayer candle at the start of the meeting. I stared at that candle for an hour, during one of the best meetings I’ve ever attended.

4) Lastly, I attended a meeting many years ago in Hawaii. At the end of the meeting, it was the chairperson’s prerogative on how to close the meeting. This chairperson announced that we were going to hold hands, and sing the first two verses of “Mustang Sally”. I kid you not, we sang the first two verses of Mustang Sally.

I do hope that you have the opportunity to attend some meetings when you travel. And as it says on page 164 of the Big Book, “may God bless you and keep you until then”.

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

Page 87

Several years ago, one of my colleagues sent an email to his boss’s boss. He sent the email in anger. The email was typed in capital letters, with multiple colored fonts. Some of it wasn’t very nice. There were curse words and accusations. He lost his job the next day.

My guess is that he regretted hitting the “Send” button on that email.

One of my friends in the program likes to say “let’s think about Page 87” when things get heated. Anytime there is a clash of personalities, or someone gets upset, he says “it’s Page 87 time!”

He is referring to a passage in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, on (you guessed it) page 87, that states “…we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action”. A couple of sentences later it says “we are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity or foolish decisions”.

My guess is that the colleague who sent the email in different color fonts (and lost his job) would have benefited from pausing.

I attended a training course at work a few years ago, and they described “the 24 hour rule”. The idea was that any time I see an email that makes me want to yell, I should wait 24 hours before responding. In other words, I should pause. (By the way, I am convinced that World War III is going to start with an email).

In our society, we put so much emphasis on acting quickly, on responding right now. That makes a lot of sense if you work in an emergency room, but for the rest of us, it pays to wait sometimes.

I use this tool at home a lot. I will ask for a day to think about something (“can I think about this overnight and get back to you?”), and I wait. That gives me time to ask my sponsor, or one of my role models. I can pray and meditate. Whatever I do, if I take my time, I avoid some foolish decisions this way.

Just after the text on page 87, at the top of page 88, is a one sentence paragraph:

“It works -it really does”.

They were right. It really does.

With Love,

The Recovering Urchin