months without a drink.
I'm also divorced two years from a thirty-plus year marriage. One day, after sitting alone, soaked in tears and feeling empty, worthless, and crippled in the smallest task, I reached out and gave my phone number to someone else—they were hurting, too. In that simplest of acts, my world changed.
I thank AA for helping me live my life instead of my regrets.
Valerie
Salt Lake City, Utah
How My Father
Twelfth-Stepped Me
July 2004
I was in a county jail, in the darkest moments of my life. I had just been arrested for some very serious charges, which I was guilty of. I was without hope and believed I was never going to get out. My alcoholism (and obsession with drugs) had led me to commit crimes I didn't think I was capable of.
It was then that my dad began to Twelfth-Step me. I don't think either one of us knew that's what was happening. He was just a father trying to help his lost son, and I was in no position to turn down help from anyone.
He told me he loved me and was going to do everything he could for me. He told me he was angry and hurt by the things I had done, but that he was still going to be there. I didn't know at the time that it was possible to feel anger toward someone yet still treat him with love. The AA program had to teach me that, as it probably had taught my dad. My father has been an active, sober member of AA for over thirteen years now.
I was subsequently sentenced to fifteen years in prison and transferred to a penitentiary. I still believed that my life was over and spent my time involving myself in anything that would distract me from the hopelessness, emptiness, and shame that was always present. Gambling, alcohol, and drugs occupied a lot of my time.
My father was there every step of the way, visiting regularly, accepting countless collect calls, supporting me financially, and just being a dad. He suggested meetings, but I was full of excuses and he didn't push. He just kept loving me.
After more than two years of this, I experienced a series of events which triggered my spiritual awakening. I realized that if I kept doing what I was doing, I was one day going to leave prison the same man who went in—at best. And I knew I would probably repeat the same crimes, if not worse ones. I was terrified by that prospect, enough that I became willing to do something. I started attending AA, and entered a lengthy treatment program available at my institution.
Through God's power (certainly not mine), I was able to shed the destructive behaviors I had been exhibiting. But the emptiness and shame of so many years of drinking and drugging were more present than ever. I was told that the Steps would help, and I was willing to try.
My father was still visiting regularly, but the tone of our visits was definitely changing. Whereas before we had discussed sports or politics, now we started talking about what I was doing in the program. Whatever difficulties I was having, he shared his experience, strength, and hope about similar difficulties. He didn't judge or advise, he just shared. Our visits had become AA meetings, one alcoholic sharing with another.
It was just what I needed. And then one day it hit me like a ton of bricks: My dad was living, breathing evidence that the AA program worked. I didn't need anyone to tell me what it was like, what happened, and what it was like today, because I had personally witnessed, over time, my father's transformation into the honorable man I loved so much.
The joys that have followed have made me feel I'm the most blessed man on earth, though I continue to serve my prison term. In that same visiting room where we spent so many hours, we shed tears as we made amends to each other and put our pasts to rest. In that same room, we got up together and shared our stories with a group of recovering men. And in that same room, we continue to have our two-man meetings to this day.
My father didn't Twelfth-Step me by sharing his story and then leaving me a book to read. He did it by being a living example, day in and day out for many years, of how AA can make a man more than what he was. And in doing so, he helped me come to believe that I could do the same. That's how it works—one alcoholic sharing with another, even a father and son in the cold, drab visiting room of a prison.
Dave R.
London, Ohio
Sitting in Silence, Listening
November 2009
In early sobriety it was suggested to me that I think of prayer as talking to God and meditation as listening. That idea took hold. I sobered up in 1972; in 1984 I learned how to meditate at a Catholic retreat center, under a priest who had spent 25 years in Japan studying Zen Buddhism. That was my introduction to the practice of meditation, and it took.
In 1985 I was down and out with chronic fatigue, so I began a meditation meeting in my home, mostly to get me up and out of bed. My group, mostly local women alcoholics, met from 7 to 7:30 A.M., Monday through Friday. There was no talking. It was just sitting in silence, listening, for 30 minutes. At 7:30 I'd gong a gong and we'd all stand in a circle and bow, using the word Namaste, which means “I honor the divine in you.” They'd leave and I'd go back to bed.
It's now years later and I'm into my sixth year of healing from chronic fatigue. I believe that there's a touch of good in every single thing. The biggest gift of living with chronic fatigue for 19 years is that I became dedicated to meditation—to listening to God—and I learned how to quiet my mind. The morning meditation ended a few years ago, but a Wednesday night meditation group continues. The best gift of meditation, from my perspective, is that I've been introduced to the Spirit of the Universe by experiencing it in the very breath that I breathe. I love that God is available to all equally, that he's all about love, and that some of us experience that source of love by simply practicing the AA principles in all our affairs.
Linda I.
El Granada, California
It's Showtime
June 2009
Something obviously needed to be done in my 18th month of recovery. I prayed for God to take my will and my life, as he had done early in my sobriety, but my alcoholism was creeping back into my life, demanding to reassert its central place. As my physical and fiscal health returned, I felt my initial elation and freedom slowly turning to a vague dissatisfaction, a mounting sense of “not enough.” Enough what? I asked myself, stymied.
My feelings were hurt more frequently, small things began to increasingly irritate me, and the quiet moments I used to relish were becoming (dare I say it?) boring. The spiritual intoxication I had felt while placing my entire faith in taking the Steps was waning. I realized that as the terror of facing myself and my wrongs subsided and as my amends were made and accepted, so had my urgency to leave things in God's hands.
My alcoholism was now counseling me to whip my finances into further shape to make up for lost time, or to finish the book that my drinking had abruptly halted five years ago, or, better yet, to cling to my partner and feed off his 20 years of recovery. I tried to resist by willpower and praying for the strength to thwart my ancient compulsions, petitioning God for balance in my life, but I was clearly failing. Fearful that I would succumb entirely to my old demons, I continued to read the Big Book with my sponsor.
One night while we were reading “The Family Afterward,”
