The Power of AA

The power of AA is that it can bring you peace. If you’re a Christian, this kind of peace:

“The Lord bless you
    and keep you;
 the Lord make his face shine on you
    and be gracious to you;
 the Lord turn his face toward you
    and give you peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26, NIV)

This post covers a lot of ground. It’s about addictions and grief and mental health and healing. I don’t know how to say what I say below, more simply. I hope it’s helpful to someone out there.

I got out my sewing machine and sewing box for West on Wednesday. West is with us for Thanksgiving and is taking the opportunity to sew some pants (trousers, not underwear!). They asked me for help but as usual it turned out there wasn’t actually much practical help I could offer and they are doing an amazing job of sewing their pants without it.

I’m generally not as organized as I’d like to be (and as I was before I was married, to my husband’s disappointment!) However I have managed to be quite organized regarding sewing and have everything to do with it in one box (except the sewing machine).

I have a box like that, metaphorically, in which I put everything which seems like it could be helpful to my mental health.

I probably started the box after I became seriously ill in 1996. I started reading psychology and self-help books after I was diagnosed. I must have felt they could help even though I wasn’t strongly encouraged to think there was much I could do about my illness except take medication and get enough sleep. At first I stuck to Christian psychology and self-help, then read more widely.

Anyway so I have a number of things in my mental health box. One is my notes on The Four Agreements. Another is my notes on Brain Lock, but I haven’t written about that here yet. Another is the 12 steps and that’s what I wanted to write about here.

I think I’d already come across the 12 steps by the time I met Jim early in 2006. The 12 steps went up a lot in my estimation after that because he would refer to them often in passing. My general sense was that Jim, who was a Christian, was pretty much right about everything. What I actually mean by that is, we tended to agree on just about everything! In any case, what that meant for me was that if Jim thought the 12 steps were profoundly helpful beyond their specific use for people struggling with alcoholism, then they definitely belong in my mental health box.

Why do they belong, though? How are they relevant to me? I’m not an alcoholic and I said goodbye to Jesus so I can’t directly apply the Higher Power stuff. Recently someone told me there’s a secular version of AA called Rational Recovery. I thought that might be helpful to me, if it was simply be a handy rewrite of the 12 steps without God needing to be involved, but evidently there are lots of differences between RR and AA, so that was confusing. I also got the sense from one website that AA works better than RR but I’ve lost that reference.

Anyway so I’m going to stick to the AA steps but not talk about God, rather than looking for secular alternatives. For people who do believe in God: since the AA does heavily depend on a Higher Power I can see why some churches host 12 Step Recovery Groups. It makes sense to me that they would take something that works and incorporate it, after helpfully making sure it doesn’t violate their belief system. And perhaps they have widened 12 step to cover support groups that are not just for churchgoers struggling with alcoholism. I’m not sure about that, though.

Anyway, what’s good about the 12 steps? What I love, in general, is that they are incredibly empowering. They say, you have an incurable disease and yet you can be symptom-free! That’s definitely what I want to hear regarding both my incurable diseases! (I have Crohn’s Disease as well as being diagnosed with Bipolar disorder aka manic depression) Speaking for myself, that AA message is the perfect way to compassionately empower people to help themselves as much as possible. “You have a disease” – that’s compassionate. Saying “it is a disease – diseases are not your fault” removes any reason for the person with the disease to feel guilty. Which is helpful, because when people prone to addictions feel guilty, they self-medicate with their drug of choice. It’s what addicts do. If they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be struggling with an addiction. Go figure.

What I am saying is, if you want to drive an alcoholic to drink, tell them it’s their fault. There’s a huge mistake made, that we tend to think the way to empower someone is to tell them it’s their fault. We think if they realize it’s their fault, that will make them realize they can do something about it. But it doesn’t work that way. Telling them it’s their fault makes them feel guilty and that drives them deeper into the very behavior you were trying to help them out.

Actually though, where is it in the 12 steps that alcoholism is a disease? Didn’t the 12 steps come about before anyone thought it was a disease? I think it might have. However step 1, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol” says the same thing. Or leads to the same place ie away from getting stuck in guilt that simply reinforces the addictive behavior.

Here are steps 1-3:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

So what’s important here? Admitting that I have an addiction/condition that I have not been able fix through whatever efforts I have put in so far.

By the way, a problem with saying to addicts “Just try harder, you can do this!” – which I expect they hear a lot – is that you don’t know how hard they’ve tried already. They might have been doing everything in their power and it all failed. They probably have been, in fact. So the well-meant attempt to encourage someone struggling with an addiction with “Just try harder, you can do this!” is extremely disrespectful, hurtful and invalidating. Because it implies you’re assuming they have not tried very hard. That’s probably incorrect and disrespectful. It’s the ‘guilty until proved innocent’ approach to guessing what’s going on in someone else’s head/life. You’re also assuming they could fix it themselves if they just did what they are doing already, except more of it. If you knew they were trying as hard as they possibly can you’d know that is not only incorrect but impossible. No-one can try harder than their hardest. So that is very invalidating. 

At this point, though, along come the 12 steps, saying: “You’re right! You can’t fix this by doing more of what you’re already doing! Time to try something different!” Which is both heartbreaking and scary and very validating. If believed, it can be the truth that sets us free.

Recapping: so, yes, it is very important to get to the point of: “What I am doing doesn’t work. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity (it would be the same, because I am already trying as hard as I can – no increase in effort is possible). I need to try something different.”

And it is also important to decide to try something different. No matter how hard that might be. Actually the main reason it is hard is because, not doing the addictive behavior is going to hurt. Why is it going to hurt? Because the whole point of the addictive behavior is that it’s self-medication. Addictive behavior stops the pain. If you stop the behavior you will have to feel the pain.

Pain is scary but the good news, I believe, about most emotional pain, is that it is actually supposed to be a process, like grieving. In recent decades grieving has helpfully been described as a process with different stages that a person moves through. There may be 5 or there may be 7 stages and the order can be all jumbled up. But the point is, it is a process that you can move through, and if you do, you will heal and there will be a measure of peace at the end. There is still much sadness I expect, when there has been any major loss, but there is also acceptance. Life is different but life can go on.

What we tend to do, if something starts to hurt a lot , is try to run away. We’re literally wired that way, because what hurts is likely to take our life away if we don’t intervene and remove ourselves from the immediate cause. How do we run away from emotional pain? We self medicate. We engage in addictive behaviors that enable us not to feel the pain. They distract us or they literally change our brain state so the pain is gone for a while. But what that means is, we stop the grieving process at the point where it hurts a lot. If we stop self-medicating, yeah it will hurt because we never went through the process. If we want to successfully stop our addictive behaviors we need to actually stop them enough to let ourselves feel the pain, then continue through the grieving process until we reach acceptance and peace. If we get there perhaps we won’t need to self-medicate any more!

So steps 1-3 involve accepting our situation: that we need to try something new, and also we committing to trying something new even though it will hurt. It will hurt but it will allow us to heal by enabling us to go through the grieving process for whatever it is we need to grieve.

For what it’s worth I think people self-medicate all the time instead of grieving the tiny things in life that hurt. Someone goes to have a drink after work because their boss was unfair to them. Instead of feeling the sadness and moving on, they have a drink. That could have the negative consequence that it leaves them stuck at the ‘angry with my boss’ stage of grief. They might then act out, annoy the boss and lose their job. If they had grieved the situation instead of self-medicating and getting stuck at anger, they could have reached peace and then, in a controlled yet assertive way, gone to their boss at a good time and said ‘by the way, can we talk about something that happened the other day? I didn’t get a chance to explain why I used those assumptions in my model. I’d actually done a lot of research into why they were the right assumptions. Can I go through that with you because I still believe there’s better evidence for using my new ones than yours aka the ones our company has always used.”

If I grieve instead of self-medicating, then I will get to peace and acceptance and can assess in a controlled way if there is a good action step to take. Rather than self-medicating and getting stuck in the grief, perhaps at anger, and acting out. Which is likely to hurt me and others, but probably me most of all. Self-medication feels good in the short-term but tends to mess up our lives in the longer-term. It is fundamentally counter productive.

Recap of steps 1-3: accept that I’ve failed to stop the behavior/cure the illness myself and that trying something new is the only way; commit to trying something new (but realize it will hurt, because the whole reason I do what I do is to stop things hurting).

Ok steps 4-9 are:

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Steps 4 & 5 are the actions steps that follow. We look at how we spend our time. We consider, which of those things I did yesterday was I actually doing to self-medicate? This is subtle and complicated because we try to rationalize our self-medication. And it’s quite easy to do because most self-medication is in the form of, a legitimate, harmless or even beneficial activity taken too far.

It’s fine to engage in fun activities and it’s a helpful break and rest from serious stuff – but if we are doing them to self-medicate and avoid feeling or talking about things that hurt then it’s self-medication. This is important: if you’re grieving something huge, like the loss of a loved one, go ahead and self-medicate! It is overwhelming! Do whatever you need to in order for the grieving process to proceed at a pace you can handle. Take breaks. Do whatever you need to but, try not to get so deep into self-medication that you stop the process altogether, indefinitely. If you stop the process then you’ll get stuck somewhere like anger. You’ll be stuck always needing to self-medicate. You’ll continually act out in counterproductive ways. So – take breaks but come back when you’re ready, so that you don’t get stuck before you get to peace and acceptance. And the bittersweet new reality. Which is exquisitely sweet as well as bitter.

So be brutally honest with yourself. Is all this running around, saving the world, helping people I don’t know, is it in reality, self-medication and a distraction from my own need to grieve some stuff? If so then actually the best thing for me right now is to be selfish. To take care of myself and let others take care of the other problems out there. Until I’ve finished grieving and am ready to come back to that. If that ever happens – it’s ok if it doesn’t even happen. If it was self-medication I should not have been doing it in the first place!

Ok so, this is why the 12 steps belong in my mental health box. Because living an appropriately balanced emotionally healthy life is the best way for me to protect my mental health. Because self-medicating is counterproductive and could, in my case, lead to insanity. So the 12 steps, in helping me move away from self-medication, are personally helpful to me.

Another key component to the action steps is, what is the new thing I need to try? For many people it seems to be, find some other people who understand (also struggle with addictive self-medication) Be brave enough to be honest with them and let their validation start healing your hurt on the inside. Let their friendship help you feel less alone in your struggle against this behavior/illness/condition. Let them hold your hand and walk with you as you take baby steps away from the self-medication and into feeling the pain. Let them help you grieve so someday you can reach acceptance and peace.

The other hugely important component to these action steps is making amends. To human beings. Praying that God will forgive us for hurting others is not enough. Step 9 means literally saying sorry to the people we hurt. (And possibly more reparation). The apology doesn’t necessarily need to be in person because these days we have zoom and emails and text etc. We have a lot of options; but the point is, however we do it, we do need to say it in a clear way. It needs to be a true apology and not the fake apology of “I’m sorry I did something which has caused me inconvenience in my own life”. In my experience some people (including me.) have a hard time apologizing for anything, Then if they do apologize they sometimes offer out the fake kind before they really understand that the point of an apology is that I am sorry I hurt the other person. Not that I am sorry I hurt myself (although that is real and in fact is something that needs a little grieving over, imo)

I believe this part of the 12 steps gets it exactly right when they say, make amends but only if it won’t hurt the other person further. Exactly!! Don’t hurt someone even more that you’ve already hurt! Unfortunately this does tend to happen because a form of self-medication is, craving forgiveness from those we hurt. So, even an apology, if it’s really about me getting validated for apologizing, is self medication!

People are right to feel hurt even more if they sense that my apology is simply about me craving to hear them say “I forgive you”. If they sense that then it’s the last thing they will feel like saying, so seriously, don’t bother trying to apologize if that’s what you’re after. You will only get hurt more when they seem to angrily reject your apology. What they are actually rejecting is your attempt to get someone you’ve already hurt to keep meeting your needs. You’re continuing the very behavior that hurt them in the first place ie using them to meet your needs.

I need to clarify: it’s not wrong per se to ask someone else to meet your needs However it is abusive if they did not consent. And even if they consented it could be an unhealthy codependent relationship in which you crave them meeting your needs by rescuing them and they do it because they crave the validation of being ‘a rescuer’. It’s self-medication for them as well as you. It would be best for both of you to move away from self-medication and grieve instead. (If the other person is your partner then perhaps you both need to grieve the same thing and it would be helpful to grieve together). Anyway, ideally, start moving away from your own unhealthy self-medication and stop creating scenarios that encourage other people to self-medicate because they crave the validation of being your ‘rescuer’. Don’t make it hard for other people to stop self-medicating by making it easy for them to self-medicate by being your rescuer.

Ok, so, steps 10-12 are

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The point of steps 10 & 11 is, keep going if it’s working, even if it’s hard. You might be tempted to give up if it seems too hard. In my experience it is very hard work going through any level of grief process. It’s extremely draining. And what do we want to do more when we’re tired? Self-medicate! So, be honest with yourself about how hard it is and grieve that, rather than reaching for the nearest addictive self-medicating option.

This is important: how do we know whether it’s working? We look and see whether we are engaging in less self-medication. Don’t judge whether it’s working by how you feel. Because if it’s working you’ll feel worse not better for a while. On the other hand, feeling worse doesn’t necessarily mean it’s working per se. Some of us are actually addicted to feeling bad. That could even be a type of self-medication, as odd as it sounds. And anyway, bad stuff happens that is unrelated to our addictions. We can’t control the world around us. So, it’s best to go with the feelings, let them happen, and count to ten rather than self-medicating. Self-medicating is absolutely a habit and habits are hard to break. However in my experience, not self-medicating can also become a habit, if we stick at it long enough. I think most people who have quit substance abuse will say it does get easier at some point, even if the temptation never goes away fully.

Recapping and adding on, the test of whether it’s working is, how are we spending our time and what is our real motive for how we are spending it? There’s an easy way, by the way, to know if a specific activity is mostly about self-medication. If it isn’t then it will be easy to stop. If it’s hard to stop then it’s mostly likely at least in part self-medication. (This probably should have gone up with step 1). 

Step 12 is simply, go help others with what you’ve learned. And keep applying this in your life, not just regarding alcohol addictions but any self-medication. Well, I think I already got there on a wider application of steps for people struggling with alcoholism! I have never even been drunk, fwiw. So that was not what drew me to the 12 steps.

Those are all the steps. In my head I thought, ok, so all I have to do is do follow these diligently and consistently.

So I was extremely surprised to read the next line which was the first thing under the 12 steps:

Newcomers are not asked to accept or follow these Twelve Steps in their entirety if they feel unwilling or unable to do so.

My reaction to that was “Wait, what? I thought I was supposed to follow these steps or it won’t work. Now you’re telling me I don’t need to? What is going on here?” I think one somewhat subtle nuance is that if following rules is your self-medication, you cannot fight it unless you can break the rules. So this statement rather ingeniously opens the 12 step method up to people who need not to follow the 12 steps too precisely because that’s their self-medication. It also – and this is probably more what the intention was – implies, it’s ok if you don’t believe in any specific Higher Power. Take what works. Leave what doesn’t. The point here is to help you, not to enforce a Dress Code of clothes that don’t fit you

The website continues.

They will usually be asked to keep an open mind, to attend meetings at which recovered alcoholics describe their personal experiences in achieving sobriety, and to read AA literature describing and interpreting the AA program.

So people are encouraged to be around others going through the same struggle/process. That makes a lot of sense to me. As I said above (I think), perhaps the part that is new for most people is, stopping trying to “go it alone.”

AA members will usually emphasize to newcomers that only problem drinkers themselves, individually, can determine whether or not they are in fact alcoholics.

I love this part. No judgment! We take you at your word. Whatever we may think, we let you decide when your behavior is an unhelpful self-medication. If/ when you want or need help, you have our meeting schedule; we’re hear for you. 

At the same time, it will be pointed out that all available medical testimony indicates that alcoholism is a progressive illness, that it cannot be cured in the ordinary sense of the term, but that it can be arrested through total abstinence from alcohol in any form.

In their final statement they are honest and explain in a simple way that you might struggle with the temptation to self-medicate for the rest of your life. Even if you work the 12 steps. You may need to abstain self-medicating behaviour for the rest of your life if the only other choice is uncontrolled destructive self-medication.

I believe that, since many forms of self-medication are legitimate or beneficial behaviors taken too far, once we admit to their self-medicating role in their lives, we can hope to recover the good part and set aside the compulsiveness and self-medication aspect. Hopefully we can return to, or find for the first time, and enjoy, moderate engagement. If we are honest and admit we are tempted to go too far (because it feels good!), then we can take the action step of setting limits for ourselves. Time limits or whatever sort of limits we need will enable us to make space for what makes us happy and also leave space for us to grieve and feel the feelings we need to feel.

Self-medication numbs the pain but I believe that perhaps it also stops us feeling the joy we could feel at what’s amazing and beautiful and good in our lives. So perhaps if we give up our unhelpful self-medicating behaviors we might find a happiness  – and a peace – we never knew was possible. On the other side of the grief. I don’t know, but I truly hope so.