Someplace in the literature, Bill describes the types of alcoholics. The first type he portrays is what he calls the psycopath. A man who wants to stop drinking, but never makes a decision to do so. That was me. When I was drinking, I could never make a decision. Or, when I did, it was usually the worst thing I could have done.
When I was finally driven into this program by my hitting bottom, I found myself in a familiar territory. It was like I came home, but there was something different here. Something entirely alien to the way I had been living. I had already surrendered to my being powerless over alcohol, but now I was being asked to commit myself to an entirely different way of living. I was being asked to surrender further and turn my life and will over to the care of God or a higher power.
This was the key to my new found sobriety. If I would allow myself to be humbled and accepted this higher power into my life, I could be restored to the sanity of not drinking. But there was a catch to all of this. Even though I was to turn my life and will over to God’s care, I was still responsible for making all the decisions. My life was only in His care. The rest was up to me.
The first decision I had to make was to not take a drink and this for just one day at a time. I would always have to make that decision when a new day would come. The second was to work the rest of the steps into my life, which was to completely change my life. Not easy decisions for someone as messed up as I was. But as egomaniacally driven as I was, I did follow the program laid out for me. Thank God I did. I’ve never regretted those decisions.
But what about the rest of the decisions I was to make over the years? This I can tell you, some of those have been wise and some of them haave been very foolish. Some were easy and some were difficult and hard. I’ve spent long hours wrestling with some I had to make. But then, as time went on, I found a way, as most of us do, that there was an easy way and a hard way. The latter was where I found myself making some very foolish decisions. How I stayed sober through these is still a mystery to me. The foolish decisons were always ego driven.
What I discovered was that if I was to run some of these decisons by someone else, asking for their counsel and their experience and hope in these matters, I found that the road ahead opened up to me and things would often turn out well for me. When I failed to listen to others or didn’t even approach them, that’s when things often turned out badly for me. I often found myself flat on my face. Thank God there were people in the program who were willing to pick me up and put me back on track.
Of course, one of the things I found I had to do was to ask my higher power for help and then I realized that I was always being directed to talk to my sponsor or someone else, who had the kind of sobriety I needed to make the kind of suggestions I needed to hear…if I would but listen to them.
I was thinking about this this afternoon, after a meeting on decison making. A kind of meeting where unmanageability was vaguely being discussed, coupled with the thought of the promise that God would do for us what we could not do for ourselves.
As another year of sobriety draws to a close and my anniversary draws near, I found it a good idea to do a little reflection on these things. Like I said, just thinking.