Bluntly Said

One of the most amazing, frustrating, uplifting, infuriating aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous is dealing with the new person.  When you get down to brass tacks the magic of recovery occurs when we pass the message along - it is our Twelfth Step for good reasons.  Bill W, alone and beginning to rationalize a "normal" drink outside a hotel bar during a failed business trip far from home, saved his own ass by calling churches until he found another floundering drunk he could talk to.  I watch new people swirl in and out of The Rooms, mostly swirling out and staying out but sometimes coming in and sticking around until the miracle happens and they find the relief they were looking for in The Bottle.

At my meeting a 65 year old man is currently working on his sobriety.  He laughs a lot but he's clearly pissed off deep down inside and clearly defiant.  He's not a guy I would tell what to do - that would be looking for a pointless argument.  He's not going to do anything anyone else tells him to do.  I personally approach this type of hard head with a pat on the back and some vague, positive noises, then stand back and see if they began to stop the destruction they're causing to their own selves.  I find my message is best received when it's delivered in the  "this is what I do and you can do whatever you want because I got no fucking idea what you should do."  While I do have a fucking idea what they should do if they want to get sober I honor each person's path to recovery.  In my mind we all have to drink until we've had enough to drink, until we're not thirsty anymore.  Telling someone to stop drinking may not be the best message to someone who isn't done drinking.  All I can say is that when I was ready this is what I did.  Fuck if I know what you should do.

One of our treasured long-timers offered to be this guy's sponsor.  He's pretty doctrinaire about his recovery - never a drug user, just a drunk - so when the new guy said he was smoking some weed - California Sober! - the sponsor suggested he reset his sobriety date which understandably pissed him off.  While this was going down another one of our treasured long-timers - one of the valuable members who's a little more willing to call things as he sees them in an unvarnished way - offered the new guy some work at his house, and doing their conversation the new guy started in on his idiot sponsor and then veered off into some political stuff that the long-timer found offensive.  This was not in a meeting but on the phone so there was some flexibility in how to handle the screed.  That being said the long-timer finally had enough and pushed back which really pissed off the new guy, so much so that he didn't come to a meeting for a few days.  Luckily and hopefully he has returned but there's a little conflict hanging in the air.

That defiance can really be a killer.  The long-timer called me to go over his conversation.  I was very supportive and very complimentary.  Sometimes our message needs to be blunt.  I don't do blunt very well but I really appreciate it when some members deliver the message bluntly.  Sometimes saying "You are acting like an idiot" is more effective than saying "This is what I did when I was tired of acting like an idiot."

Stay tuned to find out who the idiot is.