list of my drunken misdeeds, and for my Fifth Step, I recited this list to the sponsor I rarely saw or called, tossing in an amusing detail added here and there to keep her attention. And so on. I went to lots of meetings, but I barely skimmed the surface of the Steps, and above all I avoided close examination of my own soul and any mention of God. My secrets stayed secret, and I stayed sick.
Eventually, meetings began to irritate me. I looked around the rooms and focused on the few sober alcoholics whose lives seemed marginal to me and decided it was crazy to depend on them for guidance. Besides, I had a new partner, who was not an alcoholic, and my life was manageable now. Maybe it was a mistake, I thought, to define myself in terms of a disease. Coping without alcohol no longer seemed difficult. I concluded that I could stop attending meetings and stay sober with the other tools AA had given me.
In truth, I had little real practice with most of those other tools. My moral inventory had been neither fearless nor searching. I had never admitted my most serious shortcomings to myself, let alone to another person or to the God I didn’t believe in. The self-centered fears and resentments I had carried through my drinking and into sobriety were still with me, because I could not remove them myself and was far from ready for God to remove them. Now, without meetings and fellowship with other recovering alcoholics to subdue them, my character defects took on new strength.
Any veneer of emotional sobriety I might have developed quickly wore away once I stopped going to meetings. I didn’t beat my new partner—at least I hadn’t hit anyone since I’d stopped drinking—but I did try to control her every breath and showed no respect for her feelings. My frequent outbursts of obsessive jealousy left me humiliated and ashamed, and so did the romantic obsession I developed with another woman that led me to betray my partner. When my escalating emotional turmoil kept me from concentrating on my work, I made serious mistakes that cost me a job and increased my sense of shame. I had not picked up a drink yet, but emotionally I was worse off than ever. Finally, when I hit what I now know was a spiritual bottom, I went back to the one place that I knew would still welcome me—AA meetings.
This time I was ready to open my mind and my heart to the program in its entirety, to seek serenity and emotional sobriety and not just the quick fix. Now when I looked around the rooms, I focused on people who had what I wanted. I saw that they were the ones who worked at improving their conscious contact with God as they understood Him—or Her, or It. I still couldn’t claim even the slightest knowledge of God, but it was clear to me at last that I needed to depend on something much bigger than me. Even AA couldn’t fill that bill, because it was made up of people like me. My understanding of a Higher Power is still subject to shifts. Sometimes, I think of it as The Unknowable, or as The Great What Is. Often, I envision it as an indifferent force, something like an electrical current, that is available to all living things and from which human beings can derive strength and generosity and acceptance. The one thing I feel sure of is that it’s more powerful than my will or any mere human or collection of humans, even AA as a whole; that’s what makes it higher.
Having acknowledged a Higher Power, regardless of how little I understood of its nature, I was ready at last to take the Steps of AA as they are and not as I wished them to be. For starters, I saw that I had not restored myself to sanity, and that I never could. All the Steps seemed different now, including those that don’t specifically mention a Higher Power.
The Fourth Step, to me, is like a tour of a haunted house. My first time around, when I heard the scuttling in the walls, I raced alone through the hallways and out the back door. This time, the acceptance of a Higher Power gave me the courage to open the closet doors and even venture into the cellar. I found long-hidden stores of fear and resentment. I found a few hidden treasures, too.
Having uncovered my character defects, I could admit the exact nature of my wrongs, not just their most obvious manifestations. The hardest part of the Fifth Step was admitting the truth to myself. I had to look at the fears and insecurities that led me to hurt that former partner in many ways, not just physically, to harass and betray my current partner, and to hurt others I loved as well. I preferred to see myself as an unfailingly generous friend who had pulled myself up by my bootstraps, required little from others, and never gave in to self-pity. Instead, I had to admit that my need for the love and approval of others felt bottomless, that I deeply envied my friends’ achievements, and that I blamed the deprivations of my childhood for my own failure to rise above the level of mediocrity. Admitting these character defects to my Higher Power was easier than admitting them to myself, because my understanding of God has nothing to do with judgment and everything to do with the acceptance of what is. Once I felt secure in the acceptance of a Higher Power, admitting the truth about myself to another human being seemed much less risky.
If the Fourth Step is the exploration of an abandoned house, I have come to think of the Fifth Step as raising the blinds and throwing open the windows. The house has air and sunlight now, and it’s no longer haunted. When people come to the door, I can welcome them without shame, and I can even invite them in. Some rooms are private of course, but none are secret, and I live in all of them.
Cheryl M.
New York, New York
Condemned to Live an
Underground Life
JULY 1976
The group was a medium-sized one in a residential suburb of a large Western city. It was the weekly speaker meeting, and I was introduced as “one of our younger members from the __ Group.”
I stood up, identified myself as an alcoholic, and launched into the story of what I used to be like, what happened, and what I’m like now. Well, almost. For there is a vital part of my story that I could not and would not tell those fine people.
“I am an alcoholic, and I am a practicing homosexual. I don’t look it; I don’t mince when I walk or wear outlandish clothes; I don’t go around the room after the meeting soliciting good-looking male AAs. But the fact remains, I am a practicing homosexual.” I’ve often speculated on the reactions of those people had I made that statement and told them the parts of my past and present that I left out or glossed over in my pitch.
For that matter, what would your reaction be?
Throughout the darkest depths of my drinking, I tried desperately to come to terms with the fact that I was a homosexual, a member of a minority group looked upon by great segments of society as “revolting,” “disgusting,” “unnatural,” “queer.” I lived in a triple world: the facade of a normal man; the self-abasement of alcoholic drinking; the secret knowledge of my homosexuality.
Toward the end, quantities of booze would wash away the barriers between the worlds, and I would go on a wild, alcoholic trip, motivated by my desire to be with others like me. It always ended in disaster. One trip ended in my discharge from the service as “undesirable”; another caused untold embarrassment and heartache for my family and the firm that then employed me.
No matter how hard I tried, I sank deeper and deeper into the guilt-filled whirlpool of alcohol and sexual desire. Then, one day, alcohol became the most important thing. I was drinking to be drinking, not to numb the inhibitions of social behavior so I could be what I really wanted to be. My homosexual companions and friends rejected me as an untrustworthy drunk who might give away their own secret. Several of them tried to protect me from what seemed to be eventual self-destruction. This time, I rejected them—the very people I wanted to be with. I was really all alone.
I had tried AA several times, each time for a different physical or material reason. When sober in those periods, I put on a bright mask of confidence, but I lived in fear and frustration. I got nowhere with AA. I couldn’t be totally honest with myself or anyone else. I was a homosexual.
