The Recovery Show » Finding serenity through 12 step recovery in Al-Anon – a podcast

What it was like when we first came to Al-Anon? What do we remember about our first meeting? Did it “click” right away or did it take some time? When did we realize that the program was right for us? How did that happen? Spencer, Kelli, and Swetha, along with 7 other Al-Anon members talk about their first meeting, or meetings, and how they came to believe that they could find help in Al-Anon. For some of us, the first meeting was transformational and enlightening. Others of us just didn’t get it at first. Listen to our stories, and we think you will find something to identify with, and hopefully something to keep you coming back.

What is sponsorship? Why would you want a sponsor? How can a sponsor help you? How do you get a sponsor? How does being a sponsor help your program? Spencer, Kelli, and special guest Lynn discuss these and more.

Do you find yourself dismissing happy situations? … feeling hopeless about a difficult situation? Do you find yourself wondering if this too shall pass?

Step 5 says that we “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”. Why is this important? What were our fears and concerns? What was our experience? Join Spencer, Kelli and Swetha for a discussion of this step.

We talk with parents who have found support and recovery. Some of their children are still drinking or drugging, some have found recovery, and some struggle with mental illness.

Easy does it. What does this slogan say to you? Can you use it to make your life easier? Swetha, Spencer and special guest Dayana talk about it.

“… our thinking becomes distorted by trying to force solutions.” What does it mean to force a solution? When do we try to force solutions? How do we try to force solutions? We discuss these questions and others, sharing our experience, strength and hope.

How do we feel gratitude? Can gratitude help get you through a hard time? Is it something you can choose? Does finding gratitude make your problems go away? What is an “Attitude of Gratitude”?

Step 4 states “[We] took a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” What were our first impressions? What did we fear? What did we find? What was our experience of working Step 4? How has it enhanced our lives?

What does it mean to “trust the process?” What is “the process?” Is it meetings? The Steps? Working with a sponsor? Reading the literature? Swetha, Spencer, and special guest Anne H share our experience, strength, and hope on these questions and others.

We talk about blame -- how we blame others, how we take blame on ourselves and how we can move past blaming. We have learned that blaming is often a result of black and white thinking, and that we can have healthier relationships when we can look at our part in a conflict realistically, rather than assuming that one party must be totally at fault. Understanding that most people are doing the best they can most of the time lets us detach from, forgive, or accept others behavior rather than blaming them for what they did “to us.”

We talk about asking for help. When we came in, we did not have experience asking for help in a healthy way. We didn’t want to impose on people we barely knew, we still thought we could do it ourselves. How did we come to understand that reaching out was not weakness, that others gained as much as we did by being asked, and that asking for help did not mean giving up? How do we feel and respond when someone asks us for help and support?

Swetha, Spencer, and Kelli talk about our experience and understanding of Step 3, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.” Spencer kicks off the discussion by with his initial problem with that step. He did not grow up with an image of a God that he was willing to turn his life over to. Kelli’s initial reaction was “how can I get around this step?” Swetha also talks about her disbelief in the God of her parents. We all wanted to retain control of our lives. The question then arose, how did we get around our resistance to Step 3? Spencer points out that the step talks about turning our lives over to the care of our higher power, which he took to mean that he could agree to accept the guidance of his Higher Power or not. He also came to an understanding of a loving God, to whom it was much easier to conceive of turning his will and his life over. For Kelli, the key was to have an honest completion of Step 2, to recognize that her Higher Power could restore her to sanity. Another help was to listen to others share at meetings about how step 3 worked in their lives. Swetha suggests that she was almost working Step 3 out of spite, to “show” us that it would not work for her! She shares a story where she turned a “little” thing over, and had a good outcome. Experiences like that helped her to accept Step 3 in her life. How do we hear the voice of our Higher Power in our daily lives? Spencer relates a story where he heard that “still, small voice” that guided him to a good outcome in a conflict he was having with his wife. More frequently, he needs to reach out by going to a meeting, or by calling his sponsor or another Al-Anon friend. Kelli commonly hears her Higher Power through other people, and finds prayer and meditation helpful. She spent the previous week travelling for business with her husband, a situation in which she needed to call on her Higher Power for help, and was happy that she could. Swetha sends multi-page texts to her sponsor when she needs help. Frequently, she finds that by just writing out her problem, she finds a solution. Just the act of asking for help can be sufficient to get the guidance she needs. Spencer had been at a workshop, Loving Sober, the day before. The presenter said that his only responsibility in his relationship was to “see his partner as the expression of God that she is.” For Spencer, this illuminated another aspect of really accepting God into his life. That is, that everybody is part of, and an expression of God. If he is to turn his will and live over to the care of his Higher Power, he must work to see other people as God sees them, and when he can do that, he can let go of his resentments and expectations, and to love them. Swetha grew up in a mixed religious environment and felt surrounded by it, and couldn’t run away from it, so she started taking what she liked and left the rest. It turns out that a lot of the things she took were things we talk about in Al-Anon. She reflects on coming to trust other people, very gradually, in the program, breaking through her fear of vulnerability. She thinks she felt the same about developing a relationship with her higher power. As that relationship developed, she started reconnecting with what she had learned in her childhood. We end with a letter from a friend who grew up in relation with a loving God. When she came into Al-Anon, she felt that Step 3 was a “gimme” for her. But later, she found that she was having issues that needed a “3rd step” solution. She uses the AA 3rd step prayer to turn over her life to God daily, just “getting out of God’s way.”

Spencer, Swetha, and guest host Nic talk about shame – what it is, how we feel it, how we used to deal with it, and how we deal with it in recovery. We start by looking at the difference between shame and guilt. When we do something wrong, we feel guilt, and we can deal with it by making amends. When we feel shame, the message we are hearing is “I am a bad person”. We react to shame by hiding it and internalizing it and stuffing it down. We feel that we are not worthy, and that we will lose our friends, be ostracized if we reveal the thing that caused us to feel shameful. Spencer refers to a TED talk (“Listening to Shame”) by Brené Brown, where she says that shame “plays two tapes”. The first is “you’re not good enough”. The second is “who do you think you are?” We all identify with these messages. Swetha reflects that when she gets a compliment, she thinks “Oh! I fooled them! If they only knew the real me, they wouldn’t say that.” Nic hears “you’re never good enough”, that she could never live up to expectations. One source of our shame is self-judgement, where we judge ourselves more stringently than we judge the people around us. A big part of that is comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. Spencer reflects on a new role he’s taken on at work, where he continually hears the “who do you think you are?” message, because he is still learning the new skills he needs to do that job up to his own expectations of himself. Nic’s core shame issue is perfectionism. She has felt that “competence equals perfection”, and is trying to learn that “competence equals competence”. Swetha recalls an episode from her childhood, where she came home with a 99.36 grade in her class, with a highly complimentary note from the teacher. Her mother’s first reaction was “where’s the other 0.64%?” Ever after, if she didn’t make 100%, she felt that she was underachieving and not being who she should be. Being honest and open is something we learn by example in the program. Swetha’s first reaction to hearing people talking in meetings was “they are so brave!” Her fear, before the first time she did a meeting lead, was “what if I’m too sick and they tell me not to come back?” Her sponsor assured her that the worst that could happen was that we would say “wow, you are really sick, please keep coming back!” She has come to realize that feeling vulnerable, sharing in meetings, doing the podcast, is really a source of strength for her. When others reveal their struggles, their failures, and their fears, it means that we can identify with them, because we have those same struggles, failures, and fears. And that means that maybe we can also identify with their victories and believe that they could come true for us, too. How do we move out of shame? By opening ourselves up, by being vulnerable, and by sharing our shameful moments and actions. Because, as Nic notes, shame needs secrecy, silence and judgement to thrive. By breaking through the silence and secrecy in a safe place, one without judgement, we can start to destroy the shame itself. Swetha reflects back to the Al-Anon closing, where we say “you will come to love us in a very special way, the same way we already love you”. She didn’t understand this at first, but now really finds it to be true. As Brené Brown says, “the two most powerful words when we’re in struggle are ‘me too’”.

Kelli hosts Swetha and Spencer as they share their experience, strength, and hope about detachment. Kelli opens with a reading that links detachment to self-acceptance and self-care. The first time that Spencer heard about detachment was when his uncle told him, “I hear that you’re supposed to ‘detach with love’”. Spencer had NO idea what that meant. He did not understand how he could detach and love at the same time. When she came into AlAnon, Swetha wanted certain people to just be gone from her life. She received a sheet about detachment, which started “Detachment is neither kind nor unkind...” and felt relief. Kelli thought that “detachment” sounded like giving up on a person. Kelli relates to a reading that said, if a friend had the flu, we would forgive their inability to meet a commitment, that we could detach the person from their disease and realize that the behavior was a result of the disease. Another reading explains different forms of detachment: Your alcoholic passes out on the front lawn. Detaching with anger, you turn on the sprinkler, then go to bed. Detaching with indifference, you go to bed. Detaching with love, you put a blanket over them, and then go to bed. The outcome for you is the same; the outcome for the alcoholic is very different. Also, the emotional outcome for you is very different An important part of detachment for Spencer was to detach the disease from his loved one. With a disease that affects behavior, such as alcoholism, this is often hard. Kelli was familiar with “numb” detachment, growing up. Her response to something she didn’t like was to just shut down and walk away. Later, she swung over to angry, “middle finger” detachment. Now she has some tools she can use, such as calling her sponsor, praying, or just using her “pause button”. Swetha had practice with angry and fearful detachment. She would “suppress, suppress, suppress” then explode. She has come to see that if someone with the flu sneezes, she can move away, or say, “please don’t sneeze on me.” She can do the same with alcoholic behavior. A friend in the program used a visual analogy. She said “I was entangled in a relationship with an alcoholic”, holding up her hands clasped, with fingers interlaced, “so whatever happened to him, happened to me,” moving her hands -- as one moved, the other moved with it, willy-nilly. “Loving detachment,” she said, “is more like this,” holding up her hands palm to palm. “We are still close, but if he goes somewhere I don’t want to go,” moving one hand away, “I don’t have to go there with him.” A listener had not understood that she did not have to be affected by someone else’s actions. In Al-Anon, she learned that she has a choice whether to feel others’ feelings or to be involved in others’ problems. Learning that we are not responsible for other people’s feelings was difficult, but so important to our recovery. A tool we can use to detach is to remember not to “pick up the rope.” It takes two people to engage in a tug of war, and if we decline to pick up the rope, the conflict can be defused or avoided. When we practice detachment, we are able to attend to our own needs and take care of ourselves, which can also make us better partners and more pleasant to live with. Kelli can be so focused on the other person that she forgets what else she needs to do. By detaching, Swetha stops feeling like a victim and feels more connected to her higher power and to serenity. Being able practice loving detachment enabled Spencer to stay in a loving relationship with his loved one as her disease progressed. Even in sobriety, we need to practice detachment, as Kelli relates, that when alcoholic behavior surfaced (without the alcohol), she did not follow her “normal” reaction, which would have been to just walk away. She is grateful that she could stay connected in detachment.