When I went to rehab, I heard lots of crazy lies. One of the biggest was repeated almost constantly by a woman who quoted this passage from the introduction to the text Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: A.A.’s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.
It just sounded like bullshit, and I absolutely could not hear any truth in it–at least none that related to me. For all the beautiful rich people I was in treatment with (and their families and cars and second homes and blah blah blah), a chance to not lose everything made sense, but what did I have to lose? I would be going home to live alone and diseased just like before I went in.
I didn’t hate life as much when I checked out of rehab as when I checked in, but it just seemed like such a strong-arming fairy tale, like the creepier aspect of “he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.” I didn’t think I could be “good.” The only way of life I had known for a long time had been one of self, suffering, and despair.
I did my fourth and fifth steps in rehab (with a sponsor from the community outside the facility), and that really did remove most of my guilt and shame and stuff. But I still felt like damaged goods.
My only goal for treatment (the day I checked in, they asked me to write down my goals for treatment) was to not want to die every day. It wasn’t that I had been actively wanting to kill myself every day—that would come and go—but I did want to die every day.
When I left treatment, I no longer wanted to die, but my perspective was still pessimistic (at best). I had to take some sort of depression-o-meter before I checked out, and ended up having to meet with the head of my treatment team as a result. My answers to the random questions like Do you believe you will be happy in ten years? and Do you believe you will be in a relationship in ten years? &etc were all No. There was no evidence to support a positive response to those questions.
Now there is. It didn’t happen overnight, and it hasn’t been without some struggle and effort (including doing the steps again with new sponsors, going to meetings, learning to meditate, learning to pray in my own way, etc.
So, while what I heard in rehab was a bunch of crazy lies, what I was told was true—I just heard lies. There are some bells you can’t unring, and they were all ringing for me in rehab and early sobriety. While doing my fourth step, I really did see the debris and chaos, destruction and waste, and until I had something like a spiritual experience, I couldn’t imagine a different kind of life for myself.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to. I just did what I was told to do (for the most part), and gradually, without knowing it, I have become happily and usefully whole. I cannot say I’m in a constant state of giddy happiness, but I know that I am whole, and on balance, I’m happy the vast majority of the time. And when I’m sad, it is because of something outside of myself, and it only lasts for a little while—it isn’t because of me, or because I’m me, and I can let it pass. Without needing reasons to drink, drug or be miserable, there’s no reason to hold on to the hurt that passes in and out of everyone’s lives. I didn’t get the usefully part of the happily and usefully whole phrase, because I was already very productive in my work life (which was the only way I could think of myself as being useful), but I think now that it means being useful in helping others along this strange and wonderful path to being better than ok, to being good, to being alive.