difficulties, I discovered this semantic truth in the most involved way. Recently I was confronted with a work project that should have presented no particular difficulties, and yet it did. I blocked and blocked and couldn't rationally get around why I was procrastinating, fearful, unable to come to grips with it. I was thinking resentfully that in this year and a half in AA the only departments of my life that had become remotely manageable were my AA activities. I had no feelings of guilty inadequacy after I had been secretary of my group. I met my Grapevine deadlines. I spoke frequently at open and closed meetings. I had done everything requested or required of me without any anxiety as to the perfection of my performances. Why was I having so much difficulty in the other areas of my life?
Quite suddenly and without any warning bells, the simple solution came to me. I had surrendered to only one thing: my alcoholism. I accepted divine and temporal help in everything that had to do with my disease with complete humility but I never had extended this wonderful freedom from pride, resentments, envy and need for perfection and competition into "all my affairs."
So it finally came to me in this time of really deep need: I had had no understanding of the meaning of spiritual awakening. And because I accepted all things in AA as natural and just and healthy and good, I was only permitting an unconscious use of my spiritual awakening in AA areas. And I had never brought it out and looked at it before.
Now I hope and pray I can indeed carry to all my affairs the conscious use of surrender and humility and gratitude, employing them with the knowledge that, if I do, my affairs, under God's direction have a better chance of reaching a daily truth.
H.W.
Westport, Connecticut
Win Or Lose
August 2001
AS A HARD-CHARGING MARKETER, I used to focus only on winning. I worshiped people like football coach Vince Lombardi, revering him as the patron saint of conquest. So any time one of my victories was less than complete — or, God forbid, I actually lost — my sense of failure was absolute. And this always made me a sitting duck for self-pity — the handmaiden of John Barleycorn.
Joe C., my sponsor, picked up on this soon after we met. He gave me some good advice. "Take the words 'success' and 'failure' out of your vocabulary. Replace them with 'honesty' and 'effort,'" he said.
I wasn't yet ready. I was an advertising hotshot who thought he knew more about competition than did Joe, an electrician at the time. So I continued my Type A behavior and reveled in constant conflict at home and on the job. But his words haunted me for years.
In time, I began to weary of the anger, resentment, and hate fostered by my competitive attitude. One day, another old-timer, Claude W., asked, "Why are you so afraid of losing? Don't you trust God?" Heatedly, I pointed out that, like him, I was in marketing and was paid to succeed.
His response had roots in the same stock Joe had planted years before: "Don't you know that success and failure share a common denominator?" He paused and then really let me have it. "Both are temporary!"
His words have stood the test of time. They helped me to stay sober and to find joy in my chosen profession, with my family and among friends. I thank God, Joe, and Claude for teaching me this lesson in plenty of time to reap its rewards.
Jim M.
Escondido, California
Spiritual Agony
February 2001
MAKING AN AMENDS to the murderer of a precious friend was the most terrifying prospect — next to taking another drink — that I have faced in sobriety. But it also turned out to be the most liberating action I have ever taken sober and the opportunity for which I am most grateful.
My drinking career was short but intense, complete with downing eye-openers on hangover mornings, innumerable blackouts (including a few of the four-day-long, wake-up-in-another-country variety), two car accidents, and four stints in the psych ward, where I detoxed for what I pray was the last time. I was nineteen years old.
I have been sober now for almost two years, and I never cease to be amazed at how deeply the Promises come true for me as I incorporate the principles of our program into my life. However, the first six months of sobriety were enormously painful. I got little relief from the spiritual agony I was in, and, because I did not take the Steps, my compulsion to drink was not lifted.
One chilly October night, as I waited for a ride, shivering and half-heartedly participating in an after-the-meeting meeting, someone suggested that I pray the Third Step prayer and get to work on a Fourth Step. To put it mildly, I balked. I had read the Big Book and sat in enough meetings to know that taking inventory of my resentments — and forgiving those who had wronged me — would play large roles in working the Fourth and Fifth Steps. But because I was, in my mind, the epitome of an innocent victim, I saw no reason to forgive anyone, and I nursed my resentments as if my life depended upon keeping them alive.
Finally I had had enough. My spiritual agony was becoming unbearable. I didn't want to drink again, and without fail, every AA I met with a quality of sobriety I wanted had taken the Fourth and Fifth Steps thoroughly. As one of them put it: "If you want what I have, do what I do." So I sat down and wrote my Fourth Step.
Then in admitting my wrongs to another human being, I was able to see that my resentments had not just been eating my lunch; they had been ruling my life. The people for whom I burned with hatred didn't even know I hated them, and if they did, they probably wouldn't care. My anger was poisoning my soul, not theirs. I wanted to hurt them and was only hurting myself. It was as if I were swallowing rat poison and waiting for those I thought were rats to die. And I was truly surprised that it didn't work.
One especially difficult resentment was a reasonably justified one. When I was a teenager, a dear friend was murdered. He had been an important part of my life and the closest thing I had to a father. When he died, I felt as if I had been dropped into a shark tank with an anvil tied to my foot. "Swim!" the whole world seemed to be saying, jeering at my confusion, loss, and pain.
His killer was found guilty, but insane, and sent to a state mental institution. Imagining the murderer in a paint-chipped ward full of drooling patients in straitjackets gave me some relief. At least she was locked up and in a terrible place, although that wasn't bad enough, of course. The only fitting justice for her was to be slowly tortured to death with my bare hands. And not even that would have satisfied me. I wanted the killer to hurt like I was hurting, and that just wasn't possible.
In the rooms of AA, I found a God of my own understanding, and, with his help, I was able to forgive the person who had caused me this deep pain. But forgiving is not forgetting, and the death of my friend occupied a lot of space in my mind and heart on a daily basis. Though I no longer burned with hatred, the killer was still living in my head rent-free.
I prayed for compassion and received it. One night I was struck with the realization of how lucky I am. All the mistakes I made when I was ill had been repaired to the best of my ability; none of them had been permanent and final. The agony of being responsible for someone else's death is a horrible thing. I learned that in the rooms of AA while listening to people whose drinking led to another's death, usually when they were behind the wheel of a car. There but for the grace of God went I. As an active alcoholic, I was a potential killer every day. That was the truth, and like all truth, it was hard to swallow. I also realized that when my friend's killer was restored to sanity through proper medication for her mental illness, an overwhelming and unamendable regret would be part of her life forever.
A few days after reaching eighteen months of sobriety, I knew that the
