Carrying the Message, Not the Mess

 

Recently, on a trip out east I attended a recovery meeting in a Veteran’s Center. As a veteran, I was eager to meet fellow comrades who are also ruck marching on the “road of happy destiny.” I arrived a few minutes late, but I quickly picked up that the meeting was being conducted by an outside group that had brought along speakers from their home group to share their recovery stories with the veterans. My fellow veterans and I were subjected to 45 minutes of drinking exploits and about five minutes of recovery.  Each speaker gave a long and graphic description of their drinking and then concluded with the phrase, “And then I started going to meetings and now I’m sober.”  I left there thinking that if any of the veterans in that meeting didn’t know how to drink alcoholically, they sure did now. Sadly, I’m not sure whether any of them learned how to stay sober. Granted, there is a huge therapeutic benefit in identification and the spiritual awakening that comes from the realization that “I drank like that too,” but a spiritual awakening without a plan to get sober is nothing more than a hallucination.   

Then, just a few days ago, I was reading online, and a person went into a long story about their drinking exploits. They used multiple paragraphs to describe the horrific ways alcoholism had destroyed their life. The person finished the story by saying, "then I went to recovery meetings, got sober and I have been ever since." 

I think we can all agree that going to recovery meetings and staying sober is great, but I'd like to hear how the person did it. Recall in elementary school when the teacher would say, “You’ve arrived at the right answer, but I need to see your work. Show me how you got that answer.” 

Speaking for myself, my drinking got me into trouble with the law, school, my family and friends. I was placed on probation; ordered mental health counseling and declared a juvenile delinquent. I wanted to kill myself. I was filled with self-loathing and fear. I wanted to stop drinking and drugging, but I didn’t know how to. I needed someone to show me the answer. I needed a solution to my life problem.   

Finally, I found the rooms of recovery through the suggestion of my probation officer. I went to a couple of meetings and then relapsed. I wasn't ready to give up the faces and places. I thought I had hit bottom, but I found that bottom had a basement. I went back into the recovery rooms and my sober friends and probation officer suggested I go to treatment. I followed their sage suggestion. 

When I got out of treatment I got right into the middle of recovery. I went to 365 meetings in 365 days. I got a sponsor, I worked all 12 Steps, and I started carrying the message to other teens who had a drinking problem. My sober friends and I focused a lot on having fun in sobriety and we held sober dances and sober parties. We were not a glum lot. I surrounded myself with people in the fellowship and I stayed very close to my sober contacts and sobriety sponsor. There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't talk to or see someone in the program. 

Because of the complete psychic change I experienced by putting the principles of recovery into my daily life, my family life turned around. I was no longer suicidal. I regained my self-esteem and self-respect. The phenomenon of craving left me and I was repulsed by the thought of alcohol like a hand to the flame. I read recovery literature on a daily basis, and I focused on my RPMS (readings, prayers, meetings and sponsorship). I abstained from personal relationships for the first year of sobriety and got involved in service work like coffee maker, meeter-greeter or group representative. This is how I got sober and stayed sober.  
 
In our common recovery program, we are given a formula for “Carrying the Message.” That formula is contained on page 58 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. There we find the phrase, “Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.” 

In a Speech class, the instructor would refer to that formula as the introduction, body and conclusion.  Any experienced speaker knows that the majority of one’s speech is spent on the body (what happened), and not the introduction (what it was like) or the conclusion (what it is like now). In a forty minute talk that formula might break down to something like the following: 10 minutes on what it was like, 20 minutes on what happened, and 10 minutes on what it is like now.  

When I’m doing public speaking on recovery, I make sure to stress how I got sober. I assume that my audience already knows how to drink and drug to the point of complete and utter demoralization. I remind myself that I’m there to carry the message of recovery and not the mess of the disease.