It’s October again, and I found myself sitting in southern Indiana in the wood-paneled building surrounded by addicts and alcoholics just like last year.
This time I was there for an AA meeting and not weekly visitation for my husband. We had the girls in tow. The four of us walked in together, and we would be leaving together as well.
The old timers hugged Chris, checked in on him, teased him. A friend admitted he’d slipped and was starting the sobriety count again. People grabbed waters and coffees, and as the meeting began, the girls put their headphones on and turned up their tablets.
AA meetings aren’t for little girls.
There’s a rhythm to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, just like any other meeting you’d attend. There’s an opening script, a call for restarts, a time for sharing milestones. They begin with 24 hours. Anyone starting over? Anyone been sober for 24 hours? And they work their way up.
Chris stood up at the one year call-out and declared his one year of sobriety. His sponsor said some words, and Chris got his one-year coin.
I thought I would cry when this happened, but I didn’t.
The moment passed, and the meeting opened to comments and questions. As the conversation warmed up, a guy spoke up about his fears as he begins to work through step four.
In AA, step four is when the alcoholic makes “a searching and fearless moral inventory of” themselves. This normally involves a lot of time and paper: the recovering alcoholic writes out all his or her moral failings, all the decisions alcohol played a part in, and all the areas of his or her life affected by alcohol.
For an alcoholic, this step is long, exhausting, hard, and painful. Alcohol helped them forget things, but there are still millions of things they can’t forget and until they confess them, they’ll continue to be weighed down by them.
And so the alcoholic writes them down. All of them. As many as he or she can remember.
When you’re done with step four, you move to step five which is “admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
You have to confess all the shit you’ve done. The shit no one else knows about. The secret shit you’d like to forget. The lies. The stealing. The hurting of others. The deceit. The cheating. The wrecks. The manipulation. The destruction. The things you swore you wouldn’t tell anyone. The things you only did because you thought no one would ever know.
Everything.
Now you can see why someone was anxious and worried about step four. Not drinking is hard. Not drinking while you write down and then say out loud all the very worst things–pages and pages–that you’ve done is hard multiplied by one hundred.
Alcoholics who are trying to do the work know you can’t skim or gloss over this part, because it comes back up and you drink again. You have to get it all out, get it all on paper, and then say it all out loud to move on.
You don’t get the benefits of hard work (in this case: sobriety) unless you actually do the hard work.
Here’s why I’m telling you this: because we’re all carrying things that are destroying us. We might not be driven to drink or to numb with drugs, but we’re all weighed down with secrets and regret and shame and it is one-hundred percent impacting our actions, relationships, families, and conversations.
We don’t get the benefits of hard work (in this case: intimacy, healthy marriages, wisdom, authentic friendship, peace, joy, contentment) unless we do the hard work.
Everybody wants the results but nobody wants to do the work.
One guy joined the conversation to encourage the speaker through his step four wrestling, and then he said when he was working on steps four and five, it destroyed him because he just knew when he said his stuff out loud that “they’re going to hate me as much as I hate me.”
They’re going to hate me as much as I hate me.
If that’s not the most honest and truthful reason people lie, I don’t know what is.
They’re going to hate me as much as I hate me.
I can’t get that out of my head. I can’t get that out of my heart. I can’t make it stop echoing in my ears.
They’re going to hate me as much as I hate me.
That’s it, friends. That’s why we lie and hide and deceive and manipulate and cover up and scheme and destroy. Because if people knew the real us, they’d hate us just as much as we hate ourselves. So we keep digging bigger holes and we keep creating more faces for more people. We keep doing things we would never own up to because we hate who we are and we for sure don’t need other people to hate us too.
But the secret is when alcoholics confess to their sponsors, no one hates them. No one is shocked. No one is even impressed. Because sponsors are alcoholics too. Because sponsors have done their own horrible things. Because sponsors have already done their own hard work. Because sponsors understand the power of saying it out loud and then letting it go.
AA isn’t a religious organization, but if you’re not seeing Jesus in this madness, you’re not paying attention.
AA demands community, honesty, confession, grace, forgiveness, and a changed life. Sometimes the alcoholic has to start over fifty times before he or she gets it right, but each time, AA is there with open arms and a bunch of broken, beautiful people who want to walk with you.
Jesus demands community, honesty, confession, grace, forgiveness, and a changed life. Sometimes Jesus followers have to start over fifty times a day before he or she gets it right, but each time, Jesus is there with open arms and a bunch of other broken, beautiful people who want to walk with you.
The truth is we’re all weighed down by something. We get to wake up every day and continue to carry it which we know will lead to our self-destruction, or we can start the hard work of admitting, asking for forgiveness, and living a better life.
They say after recovering alcoholics complete step five, you can see them almost float out of the room. I don’t think humans can fly, but I think the closest we’ve ever come is when an addict stops carrying the traumas and scars and shame that has controlled them for so long. You can’t describe or imagine that first feeling of freedom after being in bondage for so, so long.
They just float out of the room.
We can do that too. We can float–unashamed and untethered–all we have to do is start the work.
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Wow! What a post! I grew up with alcoholics, so I know what AA is all about. Thanks for reminding me that the steps can still be used in practice in everyday life. We all have something we are powerless over. Using the steps helps keep us free of the “ick” that would bog us down.
I thank the Lord for your posts!