We are careful not to hold one another back or discourage one another from trying to follow our dreams. “After many years of sponsorship,” one member said, “I finally realized I wasn’t going to keep anyone from doing what they really wanted to do. The question was whether they were going to be comfortable sharing honestly with me about it. When I set demands or limitations, I became one more thing for my sponsees to work around.” We help each other to see clearly what we may be getting ourselves into, but we also listen for our own guidance.
The real issue may not be our ultimate failure or success, but our faith in the process. Another addict shared: “I had years clean when everything fell apart: marriage, job, finances, and my relationship with my kids. People reminded me that every clean day was a successful day. That didn’t seem good enough anymore. I thought they were putting me down. But I actually was successfully working an NA program. I needed a priority adjustment. I’m still putting things back together, but today I am happier and more fulfilled.” We start to see that big changes in our lives are not the end of the world, just the end of a phase or an experiment. A member observed, “I thought ‘no matter what’ meant don’t use even if there’s an earthquake. But I am learning it also means keep going even when you don’t feel like it.”
Continuing to do as we were taught even when the sky is falling doesn’t just get us through. When we experience hardship, we can get angry and resistant. It can be hard to sit through a meeting or hear what anyone else has to say. We think we can just put our heads down and bull through it, but that tends to make things worse. It’s like saying, “I’m just going to run on my own will until I get through this hard time, then I’ll turn it back over.” When we keep coming to meetings even with our attitude, we hear the message in spite of ourselves. We show up, and the message finds us whether we are looking for it or not. We learn from the experience and we grow. We often find that the new place we are in as a result is better than what we had resisted letting go.
A Leap of Faith
NA gives us different versions of success and failure than the rest of the world. Our lives are successful because we are clean, we help people, and we have a relationship with a power greater than ourselves. That can be hard to remember when our outsides are in turmoil. If life is a dream, then we may occasionally have nightmares! We experience ups and downs, but we have a disease that tells us it was “always like this,” however well or poorly we’re doing. We can get drawn into thinking either that we’re immune to failure or that life will always be difficult for us. We each go through hard times and great success, and we learn that they are not the whole story—or even the most important part of the story.
Both success and failure can be challenging for us. Some of us create crisis because we don’t know how to deal with positive experiences. We may fear success because it will bring more responsibility, and that feels like a trap. We may be concerned that success will lead us to lose focus on staying clean. It may simply be that avoiding a challenge is easier than risking failure. Perhaps we don’t feel worthy, or failing feels normal.
Recovery is a process of evolution. We want to become the best person we can, doing work we feel is important, feeling loved and valued. There cannot be only one way to do that, because we are all different. We want to be given a road map to success, but few of us find that kind of specific direction gets us very far. We learn what is right for us through our own efforts.
We may not have dreams when we get here. Our experience may have taught us that it’s not safe to share our dreams or to want them too much. We have to find a way to hear our own desires. Over time, we gain a keener understanding of what it means to live in harmony with our beliefs. Even when we share our lives with others, our willingness to fulfill our responsibility to ourselves determines our ability to feel love and be satisfied with our lives. It’s the integrity with which we live our lives that is important. After all, if we don’t like who we are or how we act, if we find our own company uncomfortable, does it really matter what or how much we have?
We build a foundation, a fellowship, and a life—not necessarily in that order. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to be involved in developing an NA community know how gratifying it is to grow something from a seed. The experience is unlike anything we know. Many of us devote ourselves heart and soul to NA, and the process of building our own lives comes later. We may find ourselves beginning a career or to seeing to our financial security years after our peers seem very settled. There is no right or wrong way or order in which our recovery happens.
We all have experience starting over in our lives with new people, places, and things, stepping into a new way of life we don’t quite understand. The desire to survive and feel fulfilled is not unique to us as addicts. In recovery, we begin with connection to others and work our way to basic safety. And perhaps it has to be this way. To believe that we can trust the love in our lives is challenging. Those really deep needs are the ones we believe won’t be met. It begins with the amends process: the understanding that we can forgive and be forgiven, that we can take responsibility for our actions and make better choices.
Throughout our recovery we improve our behavior, our attitudes, our perspectives, and our lives. The awakenings we have as we work the first eleven steps give us the ability to act in a new way. We ask for knowledge of our Higher Power’s will for us and the power to carry that out. After all the surrendering and housecleaning in the previous steps, a constant conscious contact in the Eleventh Step changes us. The more we embrace our powerlessness, the more deeply empowered we are to take action in our lives. Our Basic Text tells us that we find God’s will for us in the things we value the most. We may describe this in very spiritual language, or just know the feeling of being at one with what we are doing. “I know I’m doing my Higher Power’s will when all that noise in my head goes away.”
On some level, this is all about faith. Living our dreams requires that we believe they are possible. When we act on faith, we move in a positive direction. It can be very frightening and sometimes a little weird. Taking a leap of faith asks us to trust either that there will be ground beneath our feet or that we will be able to fly. Small steps give us the courage to leap.
Commitment
The tools we use to practice our recovery serve us in all our affairs. Imagination is a tool, and when we give ourselves permission to dream we are using that tool to explore our own hearts. It can be frightening to look at what we really believe, what we want, and who we are. By practicing prayer and meditation, we learn to listen to our own inner voice and to know when something is true for us. The people we trust help us to sort out the truth within us from the driving voice of compulsion. We make decisions born of desire—just like staying clean. “We tell newcomers to suit up, show up, and give NA everything they’ve got. Why shouldn’t I do this in other areas of my life?” a member asked. Learning to dream is important, but it’s not a way of life. Willingness without action is fantasy.
It’s one thing to have faith in a power greater than ourselves, and quite another to have faith in ourselves. Some of us take a long time to come to believe that we can contribute to the world in a way that serves a greater good, or that serves our values and sense of purpose. Doing the right thing when no one is looking is an act of service to what we believe in. Some of us call this integrity; the Sixth Step calls it character. Whatever we call it, this practice is the discipline that forms the basis of our growing maturity.
As principles go, discipline might be one of the less popular. We talk about commitment almost from our first day clean. We make a commitment to show up, to stay clean until our next meeting, to call someone before we pick up. Acting on the commitments we make requires discipline, and that’s a skill we develop as we practice. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us, but our long-term goals are often served by postponing short-term gratification. Discipline is commitment in action, a demonstration of our willingness. It is different fr
om “willpower” or “self-will” in that we are not trying to force ourselves to change. We are changing our relationship to our own behavior. The more we trust the process, the more we are willing to practice discipline. “I got where I am by the grace of God—and a stubborn refusal to go away,” a member shared. When discipline and faith come together, we begin to become the people we wished we could be.
Talent or interest may come naturally, but any skill takes practice. Developing the focus and energy to stay on task is one challenge; allowing ourselves to take risks is another. It takes courage to face our own creativity and discipline it to produce the things we want. A member shared: “I don’t feel I have the freedom on the inside to do what I have the ability to do on the outside. I see that as a future freedom.”
Awareness is not the same as control. We don’t automatically get freedom from our defects just because we see them. Awareness gives us hope and direction. Sometimes that can be a motivator to get us working, and sometimes the best we can do is wait. When we can’t see our way around a defect or an obstacle, it’s often because there is other work that must be done first. Self-acceptance frees our imagination. Work on the amends steps allows us to feel worthy of success. The answers are in different places for each of us, and we may not know them until we’ve found them. Doing the work of recovery frees us in ways we can’t predict. It’s only in experiencing freedom that we learn we were bound before.
Goals are dreams we put into action. We can understand the work and measure our progress more easily if we break our goals down into steps. After all, we know a thing or two about doing things in steps! Setting achievable goals and celebrating milestones along the way allows us to see our progress, and gives us moments when we can step back and evaluate where we are and where we are going.
Education
Addiction can be pretty disruptive to education. Some of us stopped early in the process, or never felt engaged by it at all. There are gaps in our knowledge, either as a result of our addiction or where we come from, and these can be a source of shame as well. Lack of information is not a character defect; it’s just something we don’t know yet. There is a difference between not knowing and not being teachable.
Recovery is an education. We are learning principles and practicing a new way of life. In the process, we learn to read, write, care, share, practice, show up, and keep coming back. The abilities we develop as we work the steps are easily transferable. When we apply these skills to other kinds of learning, we tend to do surprisingly well, even though the method may be very different. Even if we are starting at the beginning, there are few limits to how far we can go.
Many of us go back to school after we get clean, and we can be surprised at the challenges we confront. Even a training program at work can be intimidating when we are not used to learning that way. It’s not something all of us do, and many of us go back for a little while and decide it’s not for us. “I was grateful for the opportunity, but I also found out I didn’t have to do that,” said a member. We may go back to school because we need new skills, or just because we want to try something new. “I had really distorted ideas about what society was,” said one member, “and what the playing field was. Before I could fully participate, I had to learn how it worked.”
We learn more than just the subject we are studying. We learn how to learn. Just as our bodies were damaged by our addiction, our brains have taken a beating. Whatever we study, whether it’s playing the guitar, welding, knitting, or philosophy, learning gives our minds a workout. We can see and feel the healing as we practice absorbing and retaining information. We learn to work under pressure and to accept feedback. We learn to persevere through a learning curve. Impatience is a stumbling block: We want to know something, not to learn it. Studying is an exercise in staying focused. Our practice at being teachable is a good start.
Some of us go back to school with a specific plan in mind, but we can surprise ourselves. The joy of learning can be its own reward. We may not know what we are good at, and chances are we’re smarter than we think. “I believed I was stupid because it took me so many years of relapsing to get clean,” a member shared. “Getting a degree helped me to believe in my own intelligence.” Being open-minded about our talents can allow us to follow a path we had not imagined.
Many of us share the feeling that we must catch up or make up for the time lost to our addiction. We struggle with the feeling that we are somehow just not enough. Making time for our commitments at school and in NA can be a lesson in balance. We may imagine that all of our classmates are using, or that “they” are a unit we don’t fit into. We can be insecure and judgmental at the same time. “The process was surprisingly emotional,” shared a member. “I wore my recovery like armor. I felt lonely and unnoticed, but I didn’t have the self-acceptance to let anyone in.”
If we tend toward perfectionism at all, chances are we’ll get to confront it when we go to school. A member shared: “I felt like a failure if I got less than a perfect score on a test. I couldn’t sleep until I figured out where I had gone wrong. I wasn’t competing against the other students: I was competing against my own fear.” Right behind perfectionism is a wall of shame. Any misstep feels like it opens a window on that secret. Suggestions feel like criticism, and criticism feels like condemnation.
Often we act as if our lives will really begin at some future time: When we get a certain amount of cleantime, when we finish school, when we get that job, or when our lives have magically become manageable. In a “just for today” program, we learn that what matters is not what will happen at a future date. Our lives are what we’re doing right now. The way we live on the way to our goals is the way we live. Tall trees require deep roots. We need to ensure that we are taking the time to build and maintain our foundation as we move forward.
Money
Whether we have a lot of it or very little, most of us have a challenging relationship to money. There is no one right set of values, but we do have principles that we practice. Our Seventh Tradition talks about being self-supporting through our own contributions, and while the tradition makes direct reference to the groups, many of us find that practicing the principle in our own lives is essential to experiencing freedom. We learn to support ourselves financially, and we find that there are other ways in which we can practice self-support. We learn to carry our own weight, clean up our own mess, and contribute in the places that are important to us. It can be very hard for us to share about our relationship to money. Sharing honestly about this with our sponsor can open the door to healing in all areas of our lives.
Having money and working may be totally unrelated when we get here. We found the financial resources that we needed in our active addiction in all sorts of other ways. We stole, we manipulated, we took advantage, we persuaded others of our entitlement. We were takers, and we squandered the resources that were made available to us. In our self-centeredness we were oblivious to the toll we took on the people around us. The awareness that we might never be able to repay what we owe can be part of the force that drives us to a new way of life. We owe a debt, and every time we act in the service of a greater good we can feel something shifting inside us. We have a contribution to make, and making it is not a sacrifice: It serves us at least as much as those we serve.
The sense of entitlement that enabled us to live as we did in our addiction can follow us into recovery. Often it shows up in more subtle forms. We don’t steal people’s purses anymore, but it may seem perfectly reasonable to take supplies from work, to shoplift a little, to continue taking advantage of people. We may know that this kind of dishonesty is wrong, but harbor the sense that we’re not being paid what we’re worth, that we deserve a break we’re not getting, or that the people we serve at work, at home, or in NA should be more grateful than they are. Sometimes it shows up in our distrust of others: We constantly suspect that someone is trying to get over on us.
This simmering resentment can be incredibly destructive. We
see not what we have but what we lack. We feel our vulnerability rather than our security. It’s hard to be happy when the world feels like a hostile place. Learning to practice faith and gratitude does not mean that we give up our “street smarts.” It means we start to develop a different kind of intelligence. We can stand up for ourselves without feeling like we are fighting for our lives. We begin to trust that our needs will be met, and to see the imperfections in our circumstances as opportunities rather than barriers to growth.
Even in recovery, obsession and compulsion play out in our spending habits. We shop impulsively or compulsively, and get obsessed with having the newest or the best. We use our money unwisely in an attempt to fill the void: We want to buy love, approval, or the appearance of success. “I thought I could buy my way out of addiction,” said one member. Money becomes one more way to play out our control issues, and we get so rigid that we create more problems than we solve. Or we simply let money and opportunities go by, feeling like poverty is probably appropriate for us. Some of us find that it’s not “stuff” that attracts us, but the pursuit. This drive can bring us to great success or it can be the compulsion that fuels yet another symptom of our addiction. We are the only ones who really know the truth. If we are gambling, working the system, opening and closing businesses, veering from financial success to failure and back again, we might want to take a look at what we’re up to. It can be difficult to admit that we have a troubled relationship with money; sharing honestly with someone we trust can begin the process of change. Financial unmanageability is often a symptom of a larger issue. Like so many things we struggle with, it is a practical problem with a spiritual solution.
“Very small things,” one member shared, “like paying the bills on time, gave me a feeling of self-worth.” Another member shared that she began to overcome her resentment of paying her bills by writing “Thank you for your services” on her payments. Simply meeting our own obligations can be a victory. For some of us, this resolves quickly. Others spend a lifetime learning to manage. Financial turmoil is not unusual for NA members, but it is not a requirement. Acting out on our disease has financial consequences. But many of the ways we show our recovery have financial consequences, too. This doesn’t mean that when we are working our program we get rich. Some of us never make as much money in recovery as we did when we were using, and being responsible can be expensive. But many of us find success in recovery, and do achieve financial comfort. When we are practicing sanity and living within our means, we can be comfortable with ourselves and our circumstances, no matter what they are.
Living Clean Page 18
