Before and after a meeting today we talked about the lack of honesty we had when we came into this program. How for a long time in here we could never go back and see how we had been lying to ourselves. Then, as time went on, we found we were finally able to begin to open up and face our defects and tell the truth.
One of those a friend of mine in here and I had to admit to ourselves how long we put off facing the fact of our insanity out there, while we were drinking. And another friend after the meeting and I were able to tell each other just how crazy we were. We could not face the fact that we were saying and doing things, which others must have observed we were doing which they knew was insane.
Yet the things I had to face early on were those which were blocking me from being able to do what I needed to do. I had to talk about how I had to be able to be torn down by my old sponsor, who opened me up to this program. How absolutely right he was, when he told me that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I only thought I did. When he told me that it hit me right between the eyes. Somehow I was able to admit how right he was.
I read in a book about this program, how Bill W. and Dr. Bob didn’t know for a long time, how much alcoholics could lie to themselves and others about how much pain they suffered coming into this program and trying to get sober. It often cost them their sobriety and they went back out and drank again. After time they could be challenged and face the truth, which saved them.
I remember how Bill wrote that into the First Step in the 12&12. How the pain within us opened the door to surrender to this disease of alcoholism. How it helped us to listen as only the dying can listen. How it also helped us to begin to do what we needed to do. To begin to get open and work these Steps and begin to change.
I had to get open about this in the meeting today, when I saw a fairly new person gambling with his sobriety and life in here. I tried to demonstrate how I had changed and how much an effect that has had on my life. That I’m still alive and sober after all these years, when I probably should have died from my alcoholism, which had total control of me back then.
Anyway I often have to go back to just how important that First Step and my being able to surrender totally to it was. And how grateful I am. The beginning of that spiritual awakening and my being able to stay sober a day at a time. I can only hope that someone else can benefit from my being willing to open up and reveal what I have been given in here as result. To be freely willing to give what was so freely given to me.