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A friend of mine tells a great story about a topic that I also experienced. He had about a year sober when he ran into some difficulties that pop up for newly-sober people. He found others still not trusting him entirely. He found himself having trouble navigating through conflict without 15 Natural Ice beers in him. He felt like the pink cloud had worn off. Basically, sober life was happening, and he hadn’t been able to numb out over it for awhile.
He mentioned to his sponsor that he couldn’t believe with a year sober—an entire year!—he’d be feeling like this. His sponsor promptly replied with a sober cliche, just with a personal twist. He said, “How long were you an alcoholic?”
The newly-sober guy thought about it and said, “Well, I got sober at the age of 30.”
The sponsor said, “OK, so you went into the woods for 30 years, and now you’ve been going the other way for 1 year. You see why your math about recovery might be a little off?”
They went back and forth about that for a little while, with the newly-sober guy saying stuff about how he didn’t drink alcoholically until he was 22, so technically it would have been 8 years walking in and 1 year out, which isn’t THAT much of a math problem that he’d be dealing with so much frustration right now.
That’s when his sponsor said, “Hey, listen, no matter how many years you want to count as alcoholic behavior and thought patterns, that was you RUNNING into the woods, and sobriety is you WALKING out.”
I love that story because I have found a lot of truth in it. From the moment most of us started drinking, it got more and more and more, and I certainly didn’t take my good old time. I remember my first weekends of college where I would go through one 12-pack of beer over two or three nights. Then the next weekend, I’d go through 15 beers. Then it’s be 18, and then a case. More. More. More. And quickly, quickly, quickly.
Sobriety, on the other hand, is a difficult stroll back out of the woods. In fact, the better way to think about it is that my drinking was me running down a paved path into the woods, and my sobriety is me going off the path, hiking through thick brush, bumping into trees, getting tick bites, stumbling into hornets’ nests… it’s not a 1-to-1 ratio.
And let me throw a quick thought out there to everybody who reads this who isn’t an alcoholic: This probably applies to you, too. Let’s say you’re 50 and you’re realizing you haven’t been the best sibling or spouse, that there is a behavior (or three) that you need to stop doing. If you change that behavior for a month, 2 months, 6 months, you might feel the same thing. “Why doesn’t my brother give me credit for this change?” you might say. Or, “I should have been listening better to my wife for the first 10 years of our relationship. But now I’ve been doing it for 3 months and she barely even acknowledged it.”
Think about that for a second: 10 years into the woods, 3 months out. You’re pretty much 100 yards from the spot you were in before!
If you think about change that way, the bumps associated with it can be much easier to digest. Because when you walk into the woods for 5 years and then walk out for 5 months, then get irritated because people aren’t noticing or thanking you, it means you set an expectation—that people will do x, y and z once they see the new you. Except, expectations are little baby resentment seeds that you’re planting. If you think because you’ve been on time for work every day for an entire week for the first time… where’s my raise?!?!… then you are going to be pissed when the raise doesn’t happen. You set an expectation, which blossomed into a giant resentment weed. That’s a tough way to go through life.
I’m writing about this today because I had some frustrations with my wife recently for bringing up some stuff that happened in 2006-07-08, when I was a full-blown drug addict and alcoholic. I immediately was thinking, “Come on now, the statute of expectations ran out on that years ago. I’ve been sober for 15-plus years now!” And that’s when it flashed into my head about the woods scenario. I was one way as a person for 31 years, then I got sober and changed dramatically … but one day at a time. When I was 32, I was much closer to the 31-year-old me than the 46-year-old me. And when I was 33, was that really all that different?
The point is, give people grace when you try to do a hard thing. It can be a hard thing for them, too. I was one person for 31 years, rushing into the woods. And now I have been army-crawling out of the woods for 15-and-a-half years (which is great!). But the rate of improvement just ain’t going to be the same as the rate of decline.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
"If you don't get sober for your wife, your kids, or yourself, do it for your dog. Both of you will be happier for it."
(Credit: Grapevine, January 2008, by Ed L. of Wrightwood, California)
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