AA Sponsorship

     What is sponsorship?

     Is it approaching some newbie at an AA meeting and telling them that they need a sponsor and that you’re the man to do it? Is it then dragging your sponsee to AA meetings day after day after day? Is it calling your sponsee on Saturday night to make sure he isn’t drinking? Or is it fielding frantic and desperate phone calls from your sponsee as he teeters on the edge outside of a bar? Is it providing a social structure for your sponsee by taking him out for dinner, a movie, or some bowling? Is it telling your sponsee where to work, who to be with, or what friends they should have? Is it getting all militant and beating the shit out of him? Better yet, is it telling your sponsee what kind of clothes to wear? Is sponsorship determining what colored socks to wear on Monday? Sure that may sound ridiculous, but it’s just as ridiculous as all the other useless actions I just mentioned.
     Sponsorship is NONE of the above. Watered down, modern AA has spawned all sorts of new ideas and norms about what sponsorship is. Hollywood has well-defined the slew of AA cliches – the meeting room, the sob stories, the group prayer, and the sponsor who calls you when you’re in trouble. Sorry to say that none of these things have much to do with Alcoholics Anonymous, which was originally nothing more than a series of spiritual actions designed to restore the addict to sanity by accessing the power of God, or Spiritual Power, if you like. It is a way to God – nothing more, or rather, nothing less.
     The 12 Steps was the sole program of AA – a rigorous and life-changing set of actions to heal ourselves from deep within. An enormous amount of work is necessary to extract the life-destroying character defects that sabotage all good things in life. The work continues as we make amends to all who we have harmed. We take Steps to prepare us for our new life of purpose, the purpose of helping others who still suffer. If all we did was to sit there in meetings, make some coffee, be the treasurer and pass out sobriety coins, we remain untreated, insane, and a threat to every newcomer who walks through the door. Why suffer? Why struggle through each day when there is a solution?
     Sponsorship is very simple. It is one person who has taken Steps and recovered taking another addict through the Steps as they are laid out in the Big Book. That person must be willing to change and grow along spiritual lines. Our job as sponsors is to hook the sponsee up to God and then get out of the way. Nothing more. I take them through the first 7 Steps, guide them with their first few amends and then they should be on their way.
     It is not my job to be their friend or to listen to them blab on all night about their feelings or struggles, allowing them to validate themselves as some sort of victim. It is definitely not my job to call them. If you want to get better, then it is you who have to call me and I’ll tell you what I did. And by the way, your feelings don’t matter. I don’t really care how you feel. Sound harsh? Well, it’s really not so harsh when you think that our pathological focus on ourselves and our feelings, our constant engagement with self-pity is the exact thing preventing us from getting better.
     Holding on by a thread is not AA. AA is a set of spiritual tools that we can use to build a foundation of strength, peace and freedom. We can be forever rid of the mental obsession, the insanity before a relapse. There are no such things as cravings. There are no such things as triggers. We are either okay or not okay, recovered or recovering, sane or insane. There is no in between. Same with sponsorship.

See: Meeting Makers Make Meetings

God, Make me a better man today…

Fearing God Isn’t Scary

     A few entries back, I opened with…

     The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

     A common criticism towards this language and type of relationship with God is that our Creator is some scary, punishing God – one to be ‘feared’. I get quite the opposite from this. Sometimes we addicts must step back and suspend all preconceptions… and also be sure not to robotically press the ‘PLAY’ button in our heads. We must stay open and educable.

     My translation:

     Be humble, and in a healthy way, fear doing the wrong thing for the effect it will have on self and others. To fear wrongdoing is wisdom, for we have been blessed with the knowledge of the certainty of cause and effect, a knowledge which better allows us to love ourselves, love others, and ultimately love God. To fear God is also to be vigilant not to become narrow and closed to new ideas and information. Remain a sponge, yet firm in our resolve that God Is. The boundaries of our knowledge rest in understanding and respecting where we come from.

God, please give me knowledge and wisdom, and instruct me how to better do Thy will and Thy work…

Damaged Person Glass Analogy

     Just heard this somewhere and thought it was brilliant. Wish I could give credit but just can’t remember. I think it was the radio, maybe some interview on WBUR.

     Take a person and see them as a piece of pristine glass.

     Some of us are smudged, some of us are cracked, and some of us are shattered.

     Great analogy, to say the least. Let’s elaborate a bit for fun.

     Smudges are easily manageable. Cracks can also be undone with some effort. But if we are shattered, there is virtually no hope, barring divine intervention.

     I believe most addicts are simply cracked whereas, say, a narcissist or a sociopath (both the same really) are shattered.

God, help me to love those who are shattered, those who hurt others with no remorse…

Spiritual Debt

     Just like our economy and supposed ‘recovery’ is fake – driven by the false prosperity of debt, consumption, government intervention, accounting fraud and false data – as opposed to savings and production – and will inevitably come to screeching halt or a slow painful death…

     …so too the drug addict is fake, driven and fueled by the false solution of drugs and the accumulation of spiritual debt – and will also inevitably come to a screeching halt or a slow painful death.

     Spiritual debt, i.e. the accumulation of various forms of poison such as fear, anger, resentment, self-pity, ego, pride, narcissism, dishonesty and immorality, must be eliminated and a replaced with a spiritual surplus of honesty, courage, strength, tolerance, patience, willingness, selflessness and love.

     Special bonus tonight: Please have a look at Aristotle’s criteria of a tyranny (and more specifically a tyrant) in his timeless work, Politics, and tell me if you don’t see a frightening correlation to what we have developing today, especially under the current regime. Just sayin’. Aristotle – Politics (See Book Five – esp pages 127-8, 133-135.)

     But times have indeed changed a bit since the days of Aristotle. The financial system is a complex ticking time bomb filled with trillions and trillions of worthless paper money, trillions in hypothecated and re-hypothecated securities, trillions in leveraged derivatives, and market rigging of the entire world’s interest rates, market rigging of stocks, bonds, commodities, elections, everything.

     So what else do governments and central banks do when they are completely bankrupt, totally corrupt, and have no intention of ever repaying their debts? They find creative ways to confiscate the wealth of their citizens and then hire the media to lie about it. Wait, let’s get this straight – I mean even more money than the trillions they already stole from the American people during the planned financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent bailouts, which, despite popular belief, was the antithesis of capitalism. We don’t have anything close to free markets.

     ZIRP (our current Zero percent Interest Rate Policy) is nothing but an ongoing bailout for the biggest banks (which are insolvent), allowing them to borrow from the federal reserve at 0% while crushing savers, senior citizens, and creating asset bubbles from a misallocation of capital, of which average Americans are always the victims as they are for the most part clueless about the way our financial and monetary systems work. And now we have stagflation coming to melt away what little savings the middle class has left. Good job, central planners. You have completely and utterly broken the markets and destroyed the American economy.

     QE (Quantitative Easing) is nothing but an ongoing bailout of the federal government as well as the banks, as it simply amounts to the fed printing money to buy our own debt (debt monetization), as well as to buy the worthless mortgages on the banks’ balance sheets. It has nothing to do with creating jobs or helping Americans. Nothing. The federal reserve serves their member banks, as does our government. They couldn’t care less about you except to make sure you are kept blind from the fact that you are a financial serf, to be sheared regularly, but kept alive, numbed and dumbed down such that you can continue being milked without protesting too much.

     But since we are beyond broke and will never grow our way out of this increasingly unstable volcano of national debt, QE and ZIRP are necessary and will never end until we either default or hyperinflate it away. Since there is not enough foreign treasury demand to satisfy the government’s profligate spending, they are just idiotically printing money and lending it to themselves. That’s called counterfeiting, and it robs the purchasing power of the dollars you are working so hard for. Wages flatline but prices go up. Inflation is a hidden tax. It is theft. It is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the rich. These policies are dramatically increasing wealth inequality, especially since 2009, even though most people have been somehow led to believe the exact opposite.

     As financial slave-master, Amschel Mayer Rothchild, revealed long ago, “Give me control of a nation’s money supply and I care not who makes the laws.” Not only does a private cult of bankers control the money supply, but through QE they have been actively buying our debt – mortgage debt and treasury debt. The fed owns your house and your nation, which they seek to dissolve, and with plenty of help from Washington. It is purposeful. If you want to control or own people, all you have to do is lend them money or buy their pre-existing debt. So, you see, we still have slavery – it’s just carried out through debt and other financial weapons of mass destruction.

     Folks, this is the end game of the current climax of government corruption and our mathematically unsustainable debt-based monetary system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter who you vote for since the Left/Right paradigm is just a hoax designed to fool you into thinking there are two different sides when, needless to say, there aren’t. Save for a few social issues, when it comes to economic and foreign policy, they’re both the same. They are puppets, owned by the corporate/banking elite and the oligarchs. They do not serve the people, the middle class. So that won’t solve anything.

     This is a moral issue, a moral issue regarding the future of our children, of which there will be none if we remain blind and passive. So please, dear voters, stop voting for these jokers. They have no clue what they’re doing. Is it not time we get these war-mongering, surveillance-obsessed clowns and their collectivist debt state out of government and let some sane adults take over? Debt and war are crippling America and our insolvency will force them to confiscate as much of our wealth, wages, property, privacy and freedom as humanly possible. We don’t want our somewhat free republic devolving into a totalitarian banana republic.

God, please teach me that hard work and honesty is what changes me, builds character, and leads to success…

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

      I am generally at a loss for inspiration during the summer when I take care of the turnover and maintenance on our rental property. Summer heat + physical labor + baby + dog = no good blog posts. So at times I’m reduced to re-posting older entries like this one about the modality of choice for your average therapist or addictions ‘specialist’.

                                                        *  

     Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is what the “experts” and the taxpayer-funded (immorally funded) addiction programs have to offer, besides doing skits, writing down triggers, or just sucking on Methadone wafers for the rest of your life.

     CBT – identify the faulty belief, change the thinking, then change the behavior. Ahhh, we’re talking about alcoholics and drug addicts here – pathological liars with twisted, deranged minds. So forget about the fact that most addicts cannot recover without spiritual help, CBT isn’t gonna cut it. After using for 15 years, my brain is so destroyed that I can’t possibly think straight. My sponsor said it one night at this old meeting we used to have.

     “If I can’t think my way into right action, then I have to act my way into right thinking.”
     Sometimes we’re so messed up that we just need to start taking right action and then the mind follows.
     I used to see this therapist in Boston. Totally useless. Good guy, though. I think he was reasonably genuine and wanted to help. All we did was talk.

     “Hmmm, so Charlie… why do you think you use? Maybe we should dig into this family stuff and that might tell us why.” 
     You gotta to be kidding me. Yeah, buddy, it’s my crazy family… that’s why I use. Newsflash: Nothing in our lives is responsible for making us use and become addicts. But I’m sure glad my poor Dad paid the guy every week because he gave me some top notch excuses to get hammered.
     Drug addicts are completely nuts and, by the way, nobody can help me unless they ARE me, unless they use the way I do, unless they feel the way I do, unless they just happened to be recovered and living a fulfilling life – unless I want what they have, so to speak. Therapists try and tell you what your problem is. Guess what? I already know what my f’ing problem is. The problem is that I have no idea what to do about it. I need a solution. I need tools. I need someone to lay out exactly what I need to DO to recover.
     But what do we do in therapy? We get the therapist to tell us what we want to hear. Now I can walk out of the office and justify my drug use. Yup, he told me I’m depressed and I’ve been abused and I have anxiety and bipolar 1 or 2, 2a or 3c, or some other ridiculous diagnosis… and that’s why I use. Let me help out the Docs a bit: the diagnosis is addiction. But instead they give us justifications and excuses.
   
     “Sorry I just stole a hundred bucks from your wallet and totalled your car on my way to see Pablo, Dad, but it wasn’t my fault, you see… It was the bipolar’s fault!”

     “Sorry I just called you a stupid bitch and slammed the door in your face so I could go get jammed out of my skull, honey, but you see, it’s really not my fault… it’s the horrible depression I have!”
     
     No, no, I got it… “It’s my parent’s fault!” Yup, that’s it. Perfect. “Those assholes!”
   
     Um, yeah, okay. As if I have the right to use because of somebody else. Bullshit. I made myself a drug addict. Nobody else. We should be fully accountable for our actions.
   
     Bottom line: I need a real solution and sorry but talking is not a solution. Besides, all alcoholics and addicts do anyway is talk. We just talk, talk, talk… haha, like me. Ridiculous.
God, please give me the power, strength and willingness to stop talking and take action…