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The other night, I walked into the middle of a conversation between my wife and daughter. They were discussing how my daughter had mixed feelings about a situation—how part of her wanted to be angry and hurt about it, and the other half wanted to move on and find happiness.
I wandered in and of course tried to drop some BRILLIANT wisdom into a conversation I wasn’t invited into. I mentioned the “two wolves” story, which I have heard many times over the years in the rooms of recovery.
In case you have’t heard it, it’s an old parable, supposedly having Native American origins, in which an older person is talking to a child about how there are two wolves living inside of each one of us, fighting every day.
One is the worst human instincts: angry, fists balled up, ready to lash out, envious, greedy. The other is joyous, peaceful, content, forgiving.
The child asks, “Which one wins?”
And the elder says, “The one that you feed.”
So the basic point is that whatever part of you that you nourish, that’s the part that survives and grows and wins the fight. The other one starves.
So I started in on that story and my wife immediately says, “Hey, keep your two wolves b******t to yourself,” and we had a good old laugh. It’s a running gag at my house. Everybody loves and respects the program that I have, and I hear my wife and kids constantly doing and saying things that were injected into our house because I brought them home from sober friends and meetings.
But—and this is a big but—I also sometimes overstep my bounds, and I think it’s perfectly fine when somebody calls me on it. Because the truth is, my program works for me, and that’s the only person it has to work for. There are parts of my program that my friends and family don’t want or need. For instance, not everybody wants to list their character defects and work through them with somebody else. Not everybody wants to seek out old boyfriends and girlfriends to apologize for wrong doing. Cool, totally fine, you do you.
And as I think about this, sometimes my recovery wisdom might not even be welcome by other recovery people, either. That’s totally cool, too. Nobody has to have the same journey I took, and that’s actually encouraged quite a bit in our literature—we all find different brands of sobriety, and that’s perfectly fine.
So if I hit you with my “two wolves” b******t at the wrong time, feel free to tell me to go get eaten by a hungry wolf!
In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)
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:
I asked a newcomer how long she had been sober. She said, "Today would have been 30 days, but I drank last night, so now I only have 29!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2006, by Dallas B. of Fort Smith, Arkansas)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
