For me to make real progress in this program, I had to realize that I wanted to smoke pot — was good at it, craved it, etc. — AND I wanted to quit. Both of those things are true. When I realized that, I was able to accept the fact that I was an addict, and I quit beating myself up for wanting to get high. I was able to say, “Okay, I want to get high, and I want to quit, and for today I will choose, with the help of others and my higher power, to not smoke pot.”
Anonmyity
Just posed this one on the Recovery Pipeline, where the topic this week is Anonymity — which, by the way, is as difficult to type as it is to say.
I think one of the original reasons AA adopted this tradition was that a pretty famous person (a baseball player, I think) got sober and told the world he was part of AA. Then he relapsed, and the credibility of AA took a blow.
The Importance of Recovery Friends
Friends were among the first gifts of the program for me. I came in lonely as well as depressed, sick, freaked out, etc. The first thing I saw was a room full of sober potheads. Their existence gave me hope, and I quickly figured out that I needed to hang out with them — in meetings and after meetings and at events — if I was going to stay sober, because most of my other friends were either not sober at all or had no idea what I was going through. Continue reading “The Importance of Recovery Friends”
Carl Jung on Addiction
What do You do When People Say “God”?
My girlfriend went to a small gathering of spiritual-minded folks last night, and when she came back she asked me, “What do you do when people say ‘God’?”
What followed was, typical of me, a long and rambling discourse that mostly left both of us confused. I could boil it down to this, though: depending on the context and speaker, when someone says “God” to me, I either:
A) do nothing, because there’s nothing for me to do,
B) translate their “God” into my “God” or some allegorical Being,
or
C) get a little defensive. Continue reading “What do You do When People Say “God”?”