Peace of Mind 137-139

PoM 137

For Patrick: On self-compassion…

The first time I ever heard that alcoholism was a disease, I was 16 years old and heard my girlfriend describing her father.

I didn’t believe her. I really thought she was rationalizing to delude herself about her pain.

When I was 26 and went to my first AA meeting they talked about it as a disease, but I still didn’t believe it for another eight years.

When I got into Sex and Love Addiction Recovery when I was 34, I had been around long enough to hear it…and trust it.

They described it as an “obsession of the mind and allergy of the body”.

Living in Atlanta Georgia in April I fully understood the realities of allergies.

They said when I took alcohol into my system I had a chemical reaction that made me, not only drunk, but insatiably want more.

That made sense to me.

When I applied it to sex addiction, specifically masturbation and affairs, the light went on.

I was not a “Bad man trying to get good. I was a sick man trying to get well”.

When I thought of all the people I had known who were sick with cancer, diabetes, strokes and heart disease I never once got angry with them for having those illnesses. Rather, I felt compassion for them.

Why wouldn’t I do that for me?

PoM 138

For Leland:
(To be read slowly)

Just….. Breathe

PoM 139

For Patrick:

…staying in touch with HP when it’s not coming easily?

The first time I ever looked for God I was five years old.

There was an unbelievably loud thunderstorm in my middle class suburban Virginia neighborhood.

I sat in the hallway, as far away from the windows as I could get, with a pencil and a small tablet of paper…and drew a picture of God.

I didn’t think about God much for eight years and then met a boy who was two years older than me and had a weekly prayer group.

He was an evangelical Methodist.

Very conservative theologically, but very on fire with God.

Girls and beer got interesting to me and I drifted away after a couple of years.

At 27 years old I joined AA, after my first tenuous meeting a year before, when I had seen the Third Step on the wall, with the word God in italics, and had walked away.

AA worked fine, but I was having problems with pills, too, and they wouldn’t let me talk about that in AA at the time.

So, I called the minister who had helped us evangelical teenagers when I was 13.

He introduced me to a very enlightened Episcopal priest and I learned a lot about my own misunderstandings of God.

But, I never really fit in with the respectable Christian folks. I was blues guitar player and I liked to use multi-syllabic obscenity.

At 34 years old I hit bottom in my sex and love addiction.

That was so painful that I began to take my recovery seriously and do whatever was necessary to find God.

God, I have found, is kind of like a combination lock.

There are a series of things that will open the lock. No one thing will do.

You know the litany:

Willingness to be abstinent

Meetings

Sponsorship

Step work

Reading the literature

Service

Prayer and meditation

Daily inventory

Anonymity

I don’t often perceive God as a person, although I have from time to time, and that has been delightful.

But a more reliable source, for me, is the sense of joy, health and freedom I experience, when I do this litany.

It’s like the wind blowing in the trees.

You can’t see the wind, but you know it’s there because the branches are swaying.

God is not the tools, but simply the presence I feel when I work the tools.

If that is true, and I am not feeling God’s presence, then I have to ask myself:

Am I working all the tools…fully?