I tell you the saloon is a coward. It hides itself behind stained-glass doors and opaque windows, and sneaks its customers in a blind door, and keeps a sentinel to guard the door from the officers of the law . . . it strikes in the night.
With AA’s suggested Twelve Steps, as with everything else in AA, we can take what we like and leave the rest, but what if removing what we feel we need to remove is like pulling on a single thread that causes the whole tapestry to become unraveled?
As a child, I had the common experience of growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent. My step-father was a daily drinker who was incapable of forming a loving relationship with me or my younger brother. When my stepfather had been drinking he seemed to resent us and was emotionally abusive.
When I returned to a 12 Step recovery group four years ago, 30 years after walking into the fellowship’s rooms for the first time, both the program and I had changed. Phone meetings made up a large proportion of all fellowship meetings, affording me the opportunity for recovery in my new home, a state with no face to face meetings.
While AA as such has always made a point of including all who suffer from alcoholism, there have been instances where the inclusivity hasn't always worked well, either because of human limitations of our members or because of some aspects of our program which may not serve certain subgroups as well as it was intended.
Throughout my recovery, one of the ways I have measured my spiritual fitness has been whether I am able to have fun without drinking, especially in situations where other people are having drinks. In the past two weekends I had two very different experiences at drinking parties. Nothing drastic had changed in my life in that week, all circumstances were basically equal. And yet, one week I had a great time and the next week I was miserable. What, if anything, changed in my “fitness” in that short time?
Could a real alcoholic who had just consumed six drinks refuse the next one if a gun was held to his head, and he was told it would be used, if he reached for drink number seven?
The novelist E.L. Doctorow said that for him writing a book was like driving at night with the headlights on – he could only see a short distance ahead, but he could make the whole trip that way.
Consider the onion as a metaphor, how does it apply to alcohol and addiction? Onions, like people come in all sizes and colors. An onion is usually round – a circle denoting wholeness but must be peeled to find the gold inside.