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“Before you can break out of prison, you first gotta realize you’re locked up.” – K.W.
Addicts wake up feeling old no matter how old they are. There’s always a headache even if you never scored the night before. You can’t get out of your head that your source thinks somehow you owe him something. You just can’t figure it out and you’re paranoid that he’s coming at you.
There’s an accumulation of yesterday’s worries, financial stress, accumulated regrets, overdue apologies, confusion, and conclusions about all the problems you’d like to address. Racing thoughts dominate you about all of it. Typically your mood sucks and your attitude is bad about everything. Coke jaw and cottonmouth make your mouth miserable. Your bones hurt in your body. Your guts are on fire. You feel like shit! Welcome to a new day in an addict’s neighborhood!
You splash cold water on your face. It feels like someone turned the lights on. It reminds you that you are sober and still alive.
Last night was different. Laying out all the details of acting out on the floor of a 12-step meeting felt surreal. You can’t get away from your friend telling you that you did one step with eleven to go! And he wasn’t kidding! It’s early in the day and you get a call from him, checking to see how you are doing. In the conversation, he tells you that you need to go to a meeting every day for 90 days in a row! He also tells you that he wants to meet you and show you how to do a 1st step every day during that time period! He tells you that if you want to live a sober life you will have to be all in, and you will have to do it one day at a time. He asks,” Are you willing to take the plunge in recovery?” It felt strange to hear yourself tell him that you were!
He told you that the greatest tool for healing that you will ever engage is found within the confines of your own story! You must tell it again and again, searching for more detail and understanding. The deepest truths in your life are found by means of your acting-out story. Joan Didion wrote “We tell our stories in order to live” (White Album). It’s a part of scrubbing the wound that if left undone will spread the poison of dysfunction throughout your life and will lead you back to addictive behavior. Maya Angelou, the poet and civil rights activist wrote “There’s no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. A 1st step story is never one and done.
Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “life is meant to be lived forward but can only be understood backward”. So you go through the storage of your past that you stashed away and didn’t even know you had. It will take time and much effort to unpack where you have been.
Strangely, this process helps you to be present in the here and now as you do this work. You realize that you have been afraid to find out who you are. As you do this work, it registers that you can’t go back and live in the darkness again.
It’s like snow skiing. The only way to be truly present is to have awareness where you have been and where you do not want to be. That enlightenment helps you to be in the present moment otherwise you go down!
When you meet with your friend before the meeting that day he offers to be your mentor, your sponsor! After you accept he tells you that the next level is to go all the way back to your family of origin to uncover the underlying roots of your addictive behavior. You tell him that your older sister told you that when you were about one year old. You stood in your crib screaming for your mom until your mom came in and told you “to shut the fuck up”. You admitted that you probably were acting out in some way ever since! This was the first of many stories that needed to be excavated during your 1st step journey!
Sue Monk Kidd wrote “stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we are here” (The Secret Life of Bees). Carl Jung concluded that everybody has a story, and when derangement occurs it’s because the personal story has been denied or rejected.
Healing and integration come when people discover or rediscover their personal story. Voicing that story is paramount. This is what makes Step 1 the most important step. It helps you find who you are. So you look at your addiction life through the lens of reflection. The shortest distance between a human being and truth is your 1st step story.
