The 12-Step Gauntlet

I'd like to share more from Martin Nicolaus' book, "Empowering Your Sober Self." http://www.amazon.com/Empowering-Your-Sober-Self-Addiction/dp/047037229X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250777093&sr=1-1#This book is helping me articulate and understand my own experience and I believe that will help me move forward in my recovery.

The 12-Step Gauntlet of Negativew Emotions

Research shows that stress and other negative emotions are important risk factors in producing relapse in the newly sober. Negative emotional states are by far the leading cause of relapse. In this regard, the clinical wisdom of exposing people who are newly sober to the experience of the 12-step program is open to question.

The 12-step program, as others have pointed out, is a gauntlet of negative emotional encounters.

In step 1, as we have seen, there is the stress of feeling powerless.
In step 2, there is the stress of being labeled insane.
In step 3, people are asked to surrender themselves, again raising the feeling of powerlessness.
In step 4, people are told to take a "moral inventory" implying that they are morally deficient and setting the stage for feelings of guilt and shame.
In step 5, people are supposed to focus on all their "wrongs."
Step 6 centers on the person's "defects of character."
Step 7 has to do with "shortcomings."
In step 8, people are asked to look at all the harm they have caused to other people, underlining what Bad Persons they are.
In steps 9 and 10, this is repeated and deepened.
Step 11 implies that people are too clueless to figure out what to do with their life.
Step 12 calls on people to recruit other alcoholics to undergo this same series of exposures.

In my experience, the program of AA was a house of cards that toppled when my addiction became reactivated. After six years of working the 12 steps, I felt so bad about myself inside that I didn't feel I deserved sobriety, or much of anything good in my life. Intuitively, I knew that not only was it not helping me, it was making me worse. But every person I spoke with (almost), every professional, every recovering person (almost) still said AA was the way to go. And because I really do try to be a very good girl, I went back over and over for 15 years, not consciously realizing that every time I walked through the doors it reinforced the negative feelings about myself. You can't keep feeding yourself the poison and expect to get well. In my opinion that goes for alcohol and AA.

Gaining Understanding

I realize I've been over some of this before, but I'm going over it again and again until I understand my own epxerience better.

I've resumed the treatment activities that I started before I moved to Lakeside and the whole job fiasco unfolded. I'm attending intensive outpatient treatment at the local chemical dependency center and so far it's been a wonderful experience. The counselor I have is not attached to the 12 steps as a recovery model and there are many people attending who have no interest in using AA. In our first session she asked me if I had been attending AA and I told her yes, intermittently, but that I didn't feel it helped and actually seemed to exacerbate my anxiety, which has been a major stumbling block in my ability to stay sober. She said, "Well then for god's sake, don't go!" The sense of relief I felt at being heard and understood was huge. The sense of relief I felt at moving forward with my recovery without AA and having the support of my addictions counselor left me sitting there in tears.

I suppose some would wonder why that's such a big deal and I'm going to explain why. I know I'm not alone. When I went through inpatient treatment in 1988, the entire professional staff, who seemed to have a good understanding of addiction as a disease and who skillfully transmitted that information to the patients also offered the 12 steps as the one and only cure for the problem. I desperately wanted to be free from my addictions and I bought into their cure fully, with my whole being. I started the steps, got a sponsor and quit using. For the first two years, I was on medication for depression and anxiety that helped tremendously and I was also in professional counseling. I did pretty well for those years. But when that ended, I was left with AA for support. And this strange thing happened to me: the more I worked the steps, the worse I felt about myself. As my sobriety continued you would have thought I would be feeling more self-esteem, more pride in my accomplishments and more connection to the world as a whole, but that's not what happened to me. I began to feel worse. AA encouraged me to get off the medication that was helping me; it encouraged me to focus entirely on my "character defects" and on correcting all the damage I had caused with my self-centered, egotistical, resentful behavior. It taught me that I was inherently flawed (sound familiar?) and that nothing on earth could save me from myself but a higher power. Because I fully believed in a higher power I began to wonder why I wasn't having the same experience most people seemed to have. And I felt worse, and worse.

Finally I drank. And then what did I have? Nothing. Because I didn't believe that I had kept my own self sober all those years, had no feelings of self-esteem or pride and believed that I was fully lost without the higher power on whom I had been depending, I drank a lot. After all, what was I? A tornado moving through the lives of those I loved most, a selfish woman-child with a head full of resentments and a heart full of guilt. I wasn't worth sobriety and I didn't believe I could do it because for six years I had been told that I couldn't do it.

It's bothersome to me that I had to have someone give me permission to not continue attending AA, that I wasn't able to use my own intuition and common sense to make that decision. But I also realize that's part of my problem, part of my addiction - a lack of trust in myself. And I also realize that I was only trying to use what was available to get well.

Martin Nicolaus, founder of Lifering Secular Recovery, has a new book out called, "Empowering Your Sober Self." Here is an excerpt with which I can fully agree:

"One of the most paralyzing notions that stands in the way of recovery is the belief that you become addicted because of defects in your character. If you believe this, you will have a hard time getting free of addictive substances because character, by definition, is unchangeable; it is who you are.

For many decades now, laboratory animals have been teaching experimenters that this belief is mistaken."


And . .


"People who use addictive substances are notoriously hard on themselves. The reason is partly that the world is hard on people whose substance use has become too obvious, and we internalize those value judgments. There are elements in the traditional recovery protocol that reinforce these negative judgments."