The “Joy” Of Hitting Bottom

In Chapter 9 of my book, How the Bible became the Bible [ISBN – 978-0-7414-2993-3, Infinity Publishing, 2006] I described a little of my story as an alcoholic: During the last year [before I stopped drinking], I was drinking about a fifth [of vodka] a day and a half-gallon over the weekend. I had to have alcohol in my blood at all times, twenty-four hours a day, just to feel normal. That meant I had to have a drink every four hours or so—even in the middle of the night. And during that whole time it never dawned on me that this was abnormal.

Eight or nine months before April 17, 1987 [my sobriety date], I awoke one morning at three with severe indigestion and had my son take me to an emergency care facility. My diagnosis: critical, acute pancreatitis. “An ambulance is being arranged to take you to the hospital. Oh! By the way, your blood alcohol level is 2.8!” I had gone to bed (a.k.a. passed out) at 10:30 p.m. that summer night. If I had a blood alcohol level of 2.8 five hours later, just how drunk was I when I “went” to bed? In the mid-to-upper-threes? That’s well into the range of toxic, fatal alcohol poisoning.

I had done that night after night after night!

That was my life and that’s what I thought I had to do in order to “cope.” I thought I was relatively normal under the circumstances. After all, if you had my life, wouldn’t you drink, too?

I was relatively normal. I was a relatively normal alcoholic—a maintenance drinker who had lived for thirteen or fourteen years drinking a pint of booze every evening between 6 and 11 p.m. Then, all at once, I needed more. My sense of control left. Sometimes I could drink almost a fifth and appear outwardly sober. Other times I could have only several drinks and I’d black out. This loss of control terrified me because it threatened my ability to maintain my pretense—my front—to the world: that I was successful; that I had an important, pressure-packed job; that I was a good father; that ... well, you get the picture. Anything that would crack that shell and let the world see the awful mess and hollowness inside me was to be avoided at all costs.

The last year or so of heavy drinking began with intermittent shots of vodka during the night. I’d wake up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat with the shakes. Later, leg cramps would come as well. I’d go to the bathroom and then “snitch” a swig of vodka. Soon, that 4 a.m. pattern became a 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. pattern. I didn’t understand that I was experiencing alcohol withdrawal. It seemed that three or four hours was about as long as I could go without a drink—day or night, asleep or at work—day after day. I began carrying a flask with me to work because I couldn’t last all the way to the two double-vodka gimlets I had for lunch. I kept a bottle in my car so I could make it home after work (as well as one in the trunk—for emergencies! Unless you’ve been there, it’s hard to imagine the nightmarish, stark terror of being stalled in traffic gridlock—alone—with the thought of no vodka.).

Within the blink of an eye I was having mid-morning and mid-afternoon grapefruit/vodka cocktails at my desk. I now believe that those two small cans of grapefruit juice were providing me all the nourishment I’d get some days. Co-workers and clients began to complain of alcohol on my breath. I would explain I had a prescription throat spray for my sinuses. I bought a pair of self-darkening prescription glasses to help hide my red, puffy eyes.

Rule number one: Keep up the pretense. Rule number two: There are no other rules.

It took all that living, if you want to call it that, to get me to a place where I finally gave up. Gave up what?  The pretense, the vodka, the illusion that I could handle myself, the belief that I could manage my life.

I really believe that without “hitting my bottom,” I would never have made it to Alcoholics Anonymous and witnessed the hope, happiness, and serenity I found there. Today, I am very grateful to be a recovering alcoholic.

I think my story may be a very apt analogy to what is happening in our country. In order to wake up and seek real transformation, we have to “hit bottom” as a nation, just as I did as an individual. Although sometimes I wish events in my life had taken a different course, I know in my heart that it took all that happened to me to get me into those rooms where I found an acceptance that transformed my life.

What happened to me has happened to every recovering alcoholic who, in working AA’s program of recovery, will readily admit they would never have become a grateful member of AA’s Fellowship without having hit their bottom. So, perhaps ….

• ·      … we have to have Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Mike Pence work to eliminate the recent regulations that protect water, air, natural resources or our wilderness areas.
• ·      … we need this Administration and complicit Republican Congress to roll back civil, religious, LGBT, workers’, women’s, and minority rights in favor of business and evangelical Christian beliefs.
• ·      … we need to have this Administration and its Republican congressional support move back to the pre-Obama financial regulations to control Wall Street and lenders (including credit cards) just as the Bush Administration did. This way we can openly enjoy a repeat of the 2007-08 financial crisis.
• ·      … we need to come face-to-face with our very own ignorance in determining the difference between fake and factual news, as well as determining that voter participation and political awareness is both a blessing and a responsibility and non-participation carries with it a very severe penalty.

Be grateful, be aware (without fear or anger), and begin in your own way to work for our national recovery.

As I’ve stated before, “I have to understand, on a visceral level, who the “Me” or “I” really is when I am speaking or thinking. The “I” that says to myself, “I really need a newer, more reliable car” is a different “I” than the one that says to Spirit, “I can’t do this anymore; help me perceive things the way You see them.”

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening to me and getting to know me – warts and all. As always, feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#4 Jan 2017

Copyright 2017

Don’t Think So Much Sometimes … Just Do

Early in my recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous I was mesmerized by one of the simple sayings of old-timers in the Program: “You don’t think yourself into a new way of living, you live yourself into a new way of thinking.” I had always prided myself on my intellectual prowess, my ability to discern and apply specific lessons to a wider field, and my ability to remember and to “connect the dots.” Now I was basically being told to ignore my intellectual strength and just follow simple directives.

They also said over and over: “If you want what we have do what we do.” They did not say, “Think about doing what you think we are doing.” They simply said, “Just do what we do.” These old-timers also said: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Do the steps – don’t think about the steps, memorize the steps, opine about the steps. Just do the steps and you’ll change and, eventually, come to understand that you have had a spiritual awakening. You will no longer be the same person – and you will probably be the last person in the room to recognize how much you have changed. They also reminded me: “Work the Steps, live sober today, and the rest of your life is none of your business.”

So, if they said “Jump!” I jumped. If they said, “Get here early and make coffee,” I got to a meeting early and made coffee. I did what I was told and I got better. My compulsion to drink left me – although I couldn’t remember when that happened. I began thinking of others. I became aware of my impact (or not) on others depending on how I had acted. All these things were new to me, a little uncomfortable to me, and always a little awkward for me.

And then I had a marvelous experience during the early years of my recovery.

While I was still drinking, a young man from my university (although many years behind me) came to work as a software developer on a project of which I was the Test and Integration manager. Several years later, now sober, I was a Program Manager overseeing 7 different projects. I hired this same young man, Joel, to be a project manger over two of the projects. Our client, a federal departmental director, was very difficult to work with. He called and wanted me to fire Joel and to cancel our work. Joel and I went to see him. After the meeting the client not only rescinded his request for terminating our effort, but had actually expanded our scope of work. Later that day, Joel asked if he could discuss something privately with me. We went to lunch.

Joel told me something like this: “When we worked together 3-4 years ago, I got to know Don O’Dell from North Texas State University. You still look the same and still smoke a pipe, but everything else about you is absolutely different. What has happened?”  I told him about my recovery in AA. We became very close friends.

That acknowledgement of how much I had changed was such a wonderful gift to me. I had just been doing what I had been told, and here was a total “outsider” who was amazed at how different I had become. It was such a cherished bit of feedback.

All this is true for A Course in Miracles (ACIM), a well.

It’s been two years since I have worked the lessons in the Workbook For Students in ACIM. In the Introduction to the Workbook, there is an instruction that is very reminiscent of what I learned in AA (Bold emphasis is mine): 

INTRODUCTION

1 A theoretical foundation such as the text provides is necessary as a framework to make the exercises in this workbook meaningful. Yet it is doing the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of this workbook to train your mind to think along the lines the text sets forth.

2 The exercises are very simple. They do not require a great deal of time, and it does not matter where you do them. They need no preparation. The training period is one year. The exercises are numbered from 1 to 365. Do not undertake to do more than one set of exercises a day….

4 The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world….

6 The only general rules to be observed throughout, then, are: First, that the exercises be practiced with great specificity, as will be indicated. This will help you to generalize the ideas involved to every situation in which you find yourself, and to everyone and everything in it. Second, be sure that you do not decide for yourself that there are some people, situations or things to which the ideas are inapplicable….

8 Some of the ideas the workbook presents you will find hard to believe, and others may seem to be quite startling. This does not matter. You are merely asked to apply the ideas as you are directed to do. You are not asked to judge them at all. You are asked only to use them. It is their use that will give them meaning to you, and will show you that they are true.

9 Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy. But do not allow yourself to make exceptions in applying the ideas the workbook contains, and whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than that is required.

I cannot just think about the Course, or memorize pithy quotes from the Course, or opine on the meaning of the Course. After reading the Text, I just need to do the Lessons as instructed.

As I’ve stated before, “I have to understand, on a visceral level, who the “Me” or “I” really is when I am speaking or thinking. The “I” that says to myself, “I really need a newer, more reliable car” is a different “I” than the one that says to Spirit, “I can’t do this anymore; help me perceive things the way You see them.”

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening to me and getting to know me – warts and all. As always, feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#1 Jan 2017

Copyright 2017

Connecting Spirituality And “Hitting Bottom”

There are two tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous that have proven to be very true for me: 1) No one can declare me to be addicted to alcohol but me; 2) There is no definitive description of what “hitting bottom” means; that, too, is up to me to define.

However, for someone to define these two tenets for themselves is the singular starting point for anyone wanting to recover from.….whatever. It is what is summed up in the first of AA’s Twelve Steps: Admitting to powerlessness to alter an addiction and owning up to a current life that is unmanageable. In short, honestly saying to oneself: “I can’t….

·      Stop drinking,

·      Stop my focus on anything but the dark and negative,

·      Stop gambling,

·      Stop my addiction to the rush and thrill of sexual escapades,

·      Stop my cravings for sugar/sweets,

·      Stop waking up each morning full of dread and self-loathing,

·      Stop living each day, regardless of what has happened or not happened, scared and worried or feeling exasperated, frustrated and disappointed,

·      Stop needing to “escape” my life via the emotional highs I reach as I immerse myself in my congregation’s orchestrated weekly performances,

·      Stop my insane gossiping about everyone I meet – knowing that to focus on them is simply my way of not focusing on myself, which just might be why my life is out of control. 

I believe it takes some form of “hitting bottom” for us to say in desperation “I can’t….” and really wanting to live life differently; to say “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired and I can’t continue anymore. But, I don’t really know what to do”

I have been reading Richard Rohr’s book “Falling Upward – Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life” [Jossey-Bass, 2011]. He doesn’t use the specific words, “hitting bottom,” but often that’s what he is talking about. The first half of life is largely concerned about surviving successfully. We all try to establish an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community and security. As he puts it: “…building a proper platform for our only life.” [p. xiv].

Rohr defines the second half of life as “the task within the task.” He also calls it “what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.” [p. xiv] The second half is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in that task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with … a growing honesty about our actual motives. … Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks. This pattern is invariably true for reasons I have yet to fathom…. Those failings and fallings must be there for a purpose, a purpose that neither culture nor church has fully understood.” [p. xv]

We in AA call this “hitting our bottom.” I have not heard this term in the New Testament or in A Course in Miracles (ACIM), but I would like to think that Jesus would call this pattern of falling/failing an unmistakable collapse of our egoic thinking, which leaves us – even if only temporarily – open to the whispers of the Holy Spirit suggesting to us a different way of perceiving and living life.

Did God, as I understand God, cause me to stumble and fall, just so He could pick me up? No! I caused my fall all by myself, and I no longer know how or where to stand up. By honestly admitting “I cannot do this anymore” I have opened myself up to a dimension – which had always been there, but remained unseen by me – that changed my life.

Just like the young man, who went off to college and then the military, and returned home amazed at how his father had matured during his absence. It was not his father who had changed. His 8+ years away from home had slowly altered his perception of life and he was “seeing” his father in a new light.

As I’ve stated before, “I have to understand, on a visceral level, who the “Me” or “I” really is when I am speaking or thinking. The “I” that says to myself, “I really need a newer, more reliable car” is a different “I” than the one that says to my Holy Spirit, “I can’t do this anymore; help me perceive things the way You see them.”

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening to me and getting to know me – warts and all. As always, feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#4 May 2016

Copyright 2016