Here are two more books especially for the one early in recovery, but good to revisit often.
"The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions." This book came my way as a gift while I was in county jail.
It came from a high school and college friend and roommate who died suddenly very soon after I received the book and had begun absorbing it and marking up every paragraph as I journaled through it, connecting it to my life up to that point. I don’t think my friend ever knew what a gift it was, or that he was. I guess we rarely know that, what a difference our life makes for ill or good, maybe especially for the good. It is so easy to focus on the harm we cause. I never got the chance to thank him or to find out if he had any personal connection with the book or just knew from others how crucial it could be. We hadn’t talked in decades, but when my secrets became public he responded not with words of his own but only with this amazing book.
This book allowed me to get into what real recovery would require and could mean. It was like daily meetings with a sponsor. My main takeaway, an understanding I have noticed missing in those early into recovery, is the difference between being abstinent and being sober. In my recovery group we often share our “sobriety date” as the date from which we most lately have abstained from our inner circle behaviors that most keep our addictions active. You might see it as the date from our last relapse—and we work for it to really be our last relapse. But abstaining launches us on sobriety; it does not equal true and lasting sobriety. Being abstinent is what enables me to become sober; it is the fuel for the journey of shifting my life from being lived in my middle circle triggers into my outer circle markers of my sobriety.
I journaled on each of the steps and traditions as discussed in the book. It points out what led me to where I was behind bars. It lifted up what I was lacking. It also helped me to see during that crisis point why it was that I was gravitating so much toward steps 3 and 11 in recovery. How each day in my anxiety for the future and my living daily in an unsafe place, I needed to reaffirm Step 3’s redirection from my will to my Greater Power’s will and care for me. And how I could follow up on this attitude shift by daily becoming active with the Step 11 disciplines that would help sustain that shift—the prayers, the meditations, the reading and writing, the finding ways even then and there to help others. All this began to give me the strength of character I needed to let go—or at least to diminish—my fears and dread for the day I was in and the days to come.
My current list of outer circle healthy behaviors still draws heavily from this book. In fact, my
final element of my list is to “Trust God. Do physical and spiritual housecleaning. And help
others.” Those come almost word for word from the book. The “12 and 12” gave me part of the routes, a map, for what would help bring balance to my life. For me it was also a little more updated than the Big Book, and a kind of consolidation.
Before I was transferred on to prison, I passed my heavily marked up copy on to another hungry for recovery inmate who was in my AA and NA groups. He was someone who had been struggling with recovery and had been in and out of incarcerations for decades and was also near my age. He saw himself at a last turning point too. I hope there is a chance, or so I tell myself, that the book might today all these years later still be passed around the jail pods keeping the spirit of recovery, and of my late friend, alive.
“Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves of Life" by Father Richard Rohr. Rohr
is an author and Franciscan priest who began a center for actionand contemplation in New
Mexico. For years he worked with prisoners. I was given this book while I was still in jail. It
came from a former colleague who visited me there and became a temporary de facto recovery sponsor. Rohr’s many books have helped shape my progressive protestant Christian faith. His books somewhat marked key moments in my incarceration. Falling Upward at the beginning; “Breathing Under Water: On Spirituality and the 12 Steps” in the middle; and in the halfway house toward the end it was a blessing to make friends with a new arrival who saw me reading “The Universal Christ.”
Sometimes, recovery can be summed up as “Grow up.” Falling Upward helped me to see how I had not grown up wholly even though I was 62. As I have said elsewhere, addiction keeps a part of us stuck at a much earlier emotional age. His counseling with prisoners taught him how the hard lessons of life can lead to a greater life, how our adolescent drives, the false-immature self, lingers on into much of our adult life. It can be hard-wired by addictions. And he writes of how what we once thought was a successful life (what the writer David Brooks calls life lived on the first mountain, in his book The Second Mountain mentioned in our book and media review section) leads to various failures of life. And yet how out of all of that a new better and deeper life can emerge. He looks at how we are able to change the narrative of our lives, not for self-promotion, but for the opposite—how denial of that false self is our salvation.
I could certainly see as I read his book how my seeking to avoid the hard times in life had led me into an even harder life. But the hope was there too. If I faced clearly this harder time of my life, and looked for what I could plant in it for a new self, then that even greater self would emerge, as I believe it has.
So much of recovery is about being counter-intuitive to our normal ways of thinking and living. So it is with that wonderful phrase “falling upward.” It is said that what goes up must come down. When it comes to pride, that’s certainly the case. But what falls down may also rise up even higher than the place from which we fell. In truth, falling down might be the only way to be raised up.
A few favorite quotes from this book:
“The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.”
“If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name.
There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.”
“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.” And “The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid". Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.”
One final reflection on my receiving these two books. I had been in recovery for nine months
before I was jailed. I had kept that entering recovery news to only immediate family. After the arrest and my struggles became widely known, I began getting so much support as evidenced by these books and more resources and letters that came. I wonder if I had widened the circle of those I told about my addiction upon entering recovery, if I might not have encountered all this support and resources during those months in recovery while I was free and unaware I was going to be arrested and as I struggled alone except for close family and my recovery group and therapist. It might have lessened the shock for some that came from my arrest. It might have helped spur me on to deeper commitment to recovery in that first year (though the jury is out, of course, on that, as the resistance to change is so strong). My point is that you might want to risk widening your circle of disclosure. It is a conversation I think worth having.