I Never Knew I Could Live Without an Iron Lung
I was in my early fifties, nine years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, when I began to suspect that what I thought to be my strongest personal asset—that I was a loving, caring man—had always had a component in it that was turning this asset into my greatest liability. At the time, I was two years divorced from my wife of nearly 28 years—M.—whom I loved dearly, or thought I did—the mother of our several children. I had just moved out of the house of a woman— A. —whom I loved dearly, or thought I did, with whom I had been living for fifteen months.
My life was really a shambles. I was unemployed. My only possessions were a beat-up car, some decent clothes, a few looks, and a little money as a result of some consulting work that had just ended. Nine years before, when I had come into A.A., I owned a nice home and a couple of cars, belonged to the local country club, was sending our kids to private schools and had all the outer trappings of “success.” In A.A. I kept hearing, “Don’t drink, go to meetings, and your life will get better.” In the next nine years, I didn’t drink, went to well over two thousand A.A. and Al-Anon meetings, worked to the best of my ability on the Twelve Steps, and my life just kept on unraveling. I thought I had hit my bottom in my seventh year of sobriety when, just for openers, I went through a divorce and bankruptcy and nearly died from an infection of an abscessed tooth.
I had moved to the opposite end of the country, gotten a job, met A., moved in with her, and for a while my life seemed to be working again. And now here I was, all but broke, out of work and once more alone. I could see that those fifteen months with A. had been a condensed replay of my twenty-eight year marriage. I began to admit that there might be. something terribly wrong—not with M.—nor with A.—but with me.
Looking back on my life, I could see that for as long as I could remember I’d had girls about whom I had had romantic or sexual fantasies. From puberty on I’d always had girl friends, and if I didn’t have one, the most important item on my agenda was to find one in a hurry. I could see that my major identity had always been determined by the relationships in my life and my role in those rela¬tionships. I was Thy parents’ son, my siblings’ brother, M.’s husband, our chil¬dren’s father, A.’s lover—but who was I all by myself? I had never found out. As an adult I just didn’t know who I was without a lot of emotional, mental and physical involvement with women. I was a loving, caring man alright, but that loving and caring had to have its focus on a woman who fed the loving and caring back to me in the framework of a sexual relationship. Without that I was, figuratively, a polio victim without an iron lung. A major reason for the breakup of our marriage was that M. finally got tired of being that iron lung.
But I soon found another iron lung in A. I was totally oblivious to the reali¬ties of the job I held while living with her. It was a Mickey-mouse job with a mouse-mouse company, but it gave me a legitimate front, a place to spend the day and an adequate income, while my real career was playing house with my new love. A. finally wised up in much the same way that M. had, and our rela¬tionship ended.
I knew something had to change, and knew that something had to be me. But how? I just couldn’t imagine my life without a primary relationship, just as nine years before I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol.
Something outside my conscious awareness—call it the grace of God, my guardian angel, my deep unconscious yearnings, a higher Power—led me into contact with the only S.L.A.A. group in the country at that time. I think I am the fifth or sixth member of our fellowship who came and stayed.
I stayed, but it was, and is, a struggle. I tried just about everything imaginable not to have to face what I had to face. Long-term dependent relation¬ships seemed to be what was causing me the most pain. I had long since learned that for me one-night stands, pick-up bars, prostitutes and the like were all bummers, but I still hoped there was a happy middle ground in a liaison of a few months’ duration with no real commitment. So I tried a couple of those and they just turned out to be elongated one-night stands. I tried living as a housemate with a woman who was an old friend and that was the end of the friendship: we each became the dumping ground for the other’s unresolved anger. There was a positive fallout, however, from what was otherwise a disastrous few months. I could no longer deny that I did have a huge amount of unresolved anger, very subtly hidden, and unless I got it out I would eventually be destroyed by it.
I had finally just had enough; enough of anger, enough of dependent rela¬tionships, enough of inner turmoil, enough of one-night stands, long or short. What I wanted more than anything else was freedom from the internal fetters that had bound me all my life. I’d hit a “bottom” and something within me just let go and said “yes” to whatever it was going to take to be a free man. I knew the first thing it was going to take was to live alone with no sexual contact.
The next year was one of real growth for me. I entered therapy with real commitment. The therapist and the therapy turned out to be just right for me.
Ever since I had first studied the Twelve Steps of A.A. ten years before, I had known that there was more implied in the Fifth Step than a simple confes¬sion. I had taken the Fourth and Fifth Steps several times over the years to the best of my ability, but always knew I had not yet gotten to the “exact nature of my wrongs.” Finally, after better than a year of therapy, I was able to fully understand and internalize what that exact nature was.
As a small child, long before conscious memory, I’d had to learn to cope as best I could with a headstrong, eccentric mother who had troubles of her own and a hard-drinking father who loved her dearly and put up with her eccentrici¬ties. While there was no economic deprivation, I received some severe emotional and physical battering. The result was that I emerged from early childhood with a lot of unmet emotional needs and buried feelings of fear, anger, resentment, helplessness, and confusion. T deal with these unmet needs and unresolved feelings, I had developed a coping strategy.
This early coping strategy was at the very core of my adult personality—it had carried me straight through my growing-up years and on into my adult life. To use an analogy, if I was a computer then that early coping strategy was my basic hard-wired program. The adult manifestation of that hard-wired program was a pervasive pattern of compulsion, addiction, and dependency, covered over by various strategies to hide the pattern even from myself. The heavy drinking was just the tip of a very large iceberg. It was just one manifestation. When I stopped drinking, other manifestations took over, even when the conse¬quences were the last thing I consciously wanted to see happen. Who in their fifties wants to be alone, broke and unemployed? I was truly powerless. The huge amount of guilt and self-recrimination that occurred hardly needs telling. Twice I had seriously examined suicide as an alternative, the last time being in that seventh year of A.A. sobriety.
Since becoming sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I had read enough philosophy and psychology to understand most of this intellectually, but it was only through therapy that I was able to deal with the hard-wired program at a deep emotional level. I had to look at those early coping strategies and learn to watch myself act out their adult manifestations. Once I could do that, I came to realize that I indeed did have a choice over whether or not I would continue to act out, and thereby gained some conscious control over my behavior.
There is one experience relating to my therapy which shows how resistant I was to examining that hard-wired program. After about ten months of one or two sessions a week, my therapist detected enough chinks in my armor to tell me exactly how things really were with me, which she proceeded to do. As she talked, I knew she was right on target, but that was just while the words went by. Those words simply went in one ear and out the other, and when she stopped, I couldn’t have told you a thing she’d said. I was, however, taping my therapy sessions, and in the next few days I listened to the tapes three or four times. The words still would not stick, so I sat down and transcribed the tape on a typewriter—four pages of it. By the time I had done this and then read it over ten or fifteen times, I was finally able to “hear” what she had said.
The reader may wonder, as I did, why I was so resistant to this first real look at the hard-wired program. I’m convinced it was because that program,that outgrowth of the early coping strategies, was so deep in my nature I thought it was me—I thought it was my basic identity. If it was my basic self, then there couldn’t be anything behind it to look at that basic self with if I pulled out. Yet here I was, looking consciously at what I had thought to be my basic identity with yet another part of my “self.” A conscious part of me was now able to watch what I had thought to be my basic self. So what I thought to be that self wasn’t me after all—it was only my program. Of course, I had known a lot of this intellectually, but to actually experience it was for me the difference between life and death—literally.
I think the most significant words in the book Alcoholics Anonymous are in the fifth chapter— “the results were nil until we let go absolutely.” “Abso¬lutely” for me finally came to mean everything—the last to go being the hard-wired program that I thought was me.
Thanks to an upbringing in one of the more rigorous religious traditions, I had bought what has aptly been called the “Judeo-Christian guilt trip” —judgment and condemnation, guilt and punishment, heaven and hell, purgatory and penance. I’d bought these things, but I didn’t have to keep them. I could now wrap all this garbage up in a package and take it to the dump. The “exact nature of my wrongs” was not wrong at all. There was no judgment, no condemnation, no guilt, no punishment, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no penance: just the adult manifestations of the coping strategy of a small child trying to survive as best he could in the situation in which he found himself.
In my new-found sobriety I started doing some things I had never done before—just for me. I bought a good camera which I had wanted for years, and I really enjoyed using it. I bought a bicycle on which I commuted every day to a job I didn’t believe two years before it was possible for me to hold. I went skiing for the first time in six or seven years. I took some painting classes at a local gallery. And most important, I found I could do all these things and more all by myself, or with friends, without the help of the “iron lung” I always thought I had to have. With this came a tremendous sense of freedom that I had never before experienced.
But one thing came very hard—emotional withdrawal from my ex-wife. M. and I had had, looking back on them, many happy years. Ours was a monoga¬mous, committed relationship for more then twenty of those years. Our divorce, while painful, had been without acrimony. We now lived at opposite ends of the country, but we were seeing each other briefly a couple of times a year, and I was in the habit of calling her on the phone every couple of weeks. Our children were supportive of us both. The divorce didn’t seem to destroy the sense of family we had all experienced over the years. It was just that Mom and Dad weren’t married any more and lived 3,000 miles apart.
I had thought that through time, the S.L.A.A. program, and the psychotherapy, I had let go of M., but I realize now that I had always been holding onto the shred of the fantasy that somehow, sometime, we could reestablish an intimate relationship. My withdrawal, therefore, was not uncon¬ditional. In it was a hidden agenda that read, “If I really clean up my act and live an independent life, then maybe M. and I can get back together in a new way.”
This was brought home to me near the end of my therapy when M. and I spent four days in the same city, visiting each other, some of our children, and friends. At the end of those four days I realized that getting back together with her in any form just wasn’t going to happen. Within the next week, after eleven months of celibacy, I found myself in bed on two occasions with two different women. I honestly wasn’t consciously looking for it, but a couple of women happened to come my way and I responded. I’d heard in S.L.A.A. that we are always tested when we are the most vulnerable. I was vulnerable; I was tested; and I flunked. No judgment or condemnation, no guilt or punishment, no heaven or hell, no penance or purgatory—just a little kid coping with feelings of anger and frustration by going out and getting laid.
Sexual and emotional sobriety are self-defined in our fellowship. Of course, jumping in bed with two different women because of anger and frustra¬tion over my ex-wife’s attitude did not demonstrate emotional and sexual sobriety on my part. But what would? Did I need to step up the level of my activities: put in longer hours at my job, set up a darkroom and develop my own pictures, join a bicycle club, go skiing more often, sign up for another art class? These are all “worthwhile” activities that I enjoy. But if I was using involvement in such activities as a mask for my own negative inner feelings of fear, anger, resentment, dependency, or loneliness, then these activities are not really so different from the destructive strategies I had used in the past. The basic motive, though not necessarily the conscious one, was the same. What I really needed was to just take it easy and experience my feelings as they really were, face them square on, and deal with them on a day-to-day basis, avoiding behavior that I’d come to identify as troublesome.
This latter approach seems to me the path to the ultimate freedom of not being driven to do anything—of acting from choice rather than from compul¬sion. The real key here is “a day-to-day basis.” One day at a time. The past is gone, the future isn’t here yet. Be here now. This theme is at the core of any recipe for happy living. It involves, however fleetingly, the experience of a total trust, a total faith, that basically everything is just as it should be at this moment, including my desire for it to be different in the next moment.
I cannot overemphasize here the important role that hard, repetitive work on the Twelve Steps (both in Alcoholics Anonymous and as adopted in the S.L.A.A. fellowship and other Twelve Step fellowships) has played in my ongoing recovery from life-long patterns of multiple addiction. My therapy was really nothing more than necessary professional help with the Fourth and Fifth Steps. But for “hands-on” experience of feelings without taking any measures to avoid them, for disciplined practice of “be here now’ there is nothing that takes the place of regular disciplined meditation as suggested in the Eleventh Step. I have engaged in this practice for several years and consider it as of equal importance in my recovery as attendance at meetings and therapy. It is a vital part of my life.
I said at the start of this that I thought I loved M. and thought I loved A. I cannot define love. All I do know is that in my relationships with these two women I experienced a different dimension than I’d experienced in any others. I think that the difference came from the level of my commitment, which in both cases was total and unconditional. Both relationships had rich rewards. Both ended with acute pain for me (and the women) because of my iron-lung syndrome. I have nonetheless experienced the unique joys of an unconditionally committed relationship, and I know those joys to be real joys.
The commitments I’ve made in my life, including those to M. and A., have all had that same quality of gut-level, emotional response as the commitment I described earlier to do whatever it took to be a free man. As such, they have had a compulsive element in them—I had no choice but to say “yes.” I now find I have increasing strength to say “no” to situations that I know are inappropriate and will lead to behavior I know from experience to be ultimately self-defeating, and to say “yes” to various other invitations from the circumstances of my life that I feel will be self-sustaining and self-freeing.
I now spend a lot of time in solitude—which I enjoy, even relish. Mixed with the solitude are experiences of loneliness in varying degrees. But as I observe the lives, the marriages, the relationships of many if not most of my contemporaries, I find an excellent antidote for the occasional twinges of self-pity that come my way. There is no one I really envy.
With the solitude has come an increasing sense of my human dignity, of my self-worth. All my life I’ve had a sense that way down deep I was a fake. In many ways I was a very good fake. I could almost succeed in hiding the fact that I was a fake, even from myself. But underneath I always knew.
I now know I am for real. That feeling alone has made it all worthwhile. None of us are ever completely free in this life, but those internal fetters that had me bound tight are loosened, if not completely fallen away.
I now feel I would like to share this freedom in a fully committed relation¬ship with a woman who is also real and free—to have a sharing, growing part¬nership in freedom. It will happen when it happens, if it’s supposed to happen; and I am willing, if not yet completely able, to accept the fact that it might not. I can look for a parallel in my personal life for what has happened in my busi¬ness life. There was just no way to get from where I was when A. and I parted to where I am three years later.. .just no way. But here I am, and it is real. It isn’t fake. Whatever happens in my personal life will be just as real and just as rewarding, providing I stay real.
And so my life unfolds—one day at a time.
My life was really a shambles. I was unemployed. My only possessions were a beat-up car, some decent clothes, a few looks, and a little money as a result of some consulting work that had just ended. Nine years before, when I had come into A.A., I owned a nice home and a couple of cars, belonged to the local country club, was sending our kids to private schools and had all the outer trappings of “success.” In A.A. I kept hearing, “Don’t drink, go to meetings, and your life will get better.” In the next nine years, I didn’t drink, went to well over two thousand A.A. and Al-Anon meetings, worked to the best of my ability on the Twelve Steps, and my life just kept on unraveling. I thought I had hit my bottom in my seventh year of sobriety when, just for openers, I went through a divorce and bankruptcy and nearly died from an infection of an abscessed tooth.
I had moved to the opposite end of the country, gotten a job, met A., moved in with her, and for a while my life seemed to be working again. And now here I was, all but broke, out of work and once more alone. I could see that those fifteen months with A. had been a condensed replay of my twenty-eight year marriage. I began to admit that there might be. something terribly wrong—not with M.—nor with A.—but with me.
Looking back on my life, I could see that for as long as I could remember I’d had girls about whom I had had romantic or sexual fantasies. From puberty on I’d always had girl friends, and if I didn’t have one, the most important item on my agenda was to find one in a hurry. I could see that my major identity had always been determined by the relationships in my life and my role in those rela¬tionships. I was Thy parents’ son, my siblings’ brother, M.’s husband, our chil¬dren’s father, A.’s lover—but who was I all by myself? I had never found out. As an adult I just didn’t know who I was without a lot of emotional, mental and physical involvement with women. I was a loving, caring man alright, but that loving and caring had to have its focus on a woman who fed the loving and caring back to me in the framework of a sexual relationship. Without that I was, figuratively, a polio victim without an iron lung. A major reason for the breakup of our marriage was that M. finally got tired of being that iron lung.
But I soon found another iron lung in A. I was totally oblivious to the reali¬ties of the job I held while living with her. It was a Mickey-mouse job with a mouse-mouse company, but it gave me a legitimate front, a place to spend the day and an adequate income, while my real career was playing house with my new love. A. finally wised up in much the same way that M. had, and our rela¬tionship ended.
I knew something had to change, and knew that something had to be me. But how? I just couldn’t imagine my life without a primary relationship, just as nine years before I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol.
Something outside my conscious awareness—call it the grace of God, my guardian angel, my deep unconscious yearnings, a higher Power—led me into contact with the only S.L.A.A. group in the country at that time. I think I am the fifth or sixth member of our fellowship who came and stayed.
I stayed, but it was, and is, a struggle. I tried just about everything imaginable not to have to face what I had to face. Long-term dependent relation¬ships seemed to be what was causing me the most pain. I had long since learned that for me one-night stands, pick-up bars, prostitutes and the like were all bummers, but I still hoped there was a happy middle ground in a liaison of a few months’ duration with no real commitment. So I tried a couple of those and they just turned out to be elongated one-night stands. I tried living as a housemate with a woman who was an old friend and that was the end of the friendship: we each became the dumping ground for the other’s unresolved anger. There was a positive fallout, however, from what was otherwise a disastrous few months. I could no longer deny that I did have a huge amount of unresolved anger, very subtly hidden, and unless I got it out I would eventually be destroyed by it.
I had finally just had enough; enough of anger, enough of dependent rela¬tionships, enough of inner turmoil, enough of one-night stands, long or short. What I wanted more than anything else was freedom from the internal fetters that had bound me all my life. I’d hit a “bottom” and something within me just let go and said “yes” to whatever it was going to take to be a free man. I knew the first thing it was going to take was to live alone with no sexual contact.
The next year was one of real growth for me. I entered therapy with real commitment. The therapist and the therapy turned out to be just right for me.
Ever since I had first studied the Twelve Steps of A.A. ten years before, I had known that there was more implied in the Fifth Step than a simple confes¬sion. I had taken the Fourth and Fifth Steps several times over the years to the best of my ability, but always knew I had not yet gotten to the “exact nature of my wrongs.” Finally, after better than a year of therapy, I was able to fully understand and internalize what that exact nature was.
As a small child, long before conscious memory, I’d had to learn to cope as best I could with a headstrong, eccentric mother who had troubles of her own and a hard-drinking father who loved her dearly and put up with her eccentrici¬ties. While there was no economic deprivation, I received some severe emotional and physical battering. The result was that I emerged from early childhood with a lot of unmet emotional needs and buried feelings of fear, anger, resentment, helplessness, and confusion. T deal with these unmet needs and unresolved feelings, I had developed a coping strategy.
This early coping strategy was at the very core of my adult personality—it had carried me straight through my growing-up years and on into my adult life. To use an analogy, if I was a computer then that early coping strategy was my basic hard-wired program. The adult manifestation of that hard-wired program was a pervasive pattern of compulsion, addiction, and dependency, covered over by various strategies to hide the pattern even from myself. The heavy drinking was just the tip of a very large iceberg. It was just one manifestation. When I stopped drinking, other manifestations took over, even when the conse¬quences were the last thing I consciously wanted to see happen. Who in their fifties wants to be alone, broke and unemployed? I was truly powerless. The huge amount of guilt and self-recrimination that occurred hardly needs telling. Twice I had seriously examined suicide as an alternative, the last time being in that seventh year of A.A. sobriety.
Since becoming sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I had read enough philosophy and psychology to understand most of this intellectually, but it was only through therapy that I was able to deal with the hard-wired program at a deep emotional level. I had to look at those early coping strategies and learn to watch myself act out their adult manifestations. Once I could do that, I came to realize that I indeed did have a choice over whether or not I would continue to act out, and thereby gained some conscious control over my behavior.
There is one experience relating to my therapy which shows how resistant I was to examining that hard-wired program. After about ten months of one or two sessions a week, my therapist detected enough chinks in my armor to tell me exactly how things really were with me, which she proceeded to do. As she talked, I knew she was right on target, but that was just while the words went by. Those words simply went in one ear and out the other, and when she stopped, I couldn’t have told you a thing she’d said. I was, however, taping my therapy sessions, and in the next few days I listened to the tapes three or four times. The words still would not stick, so I sat down and transcribed the tape on a typewriter—four pages of it. By the time I had done this and then read it over ten or fifteen times, I was finally able to “hear” what she had said.
The reader may wonder, as I did, why I was so resistant to this first real look at the hard-wired program. I’m convinced it was because that program,that outgrowth of the early coping strategies, was so deep in my nature I thought it was me—I thought it was my basic identity. If it was my basic self, then there couldn’t be anything behind it to look at that basic self with if I pulled out. Yet here I was, looking consciously at what I had thought to be my basic identity with yet another part of my “self.” A conscious part of me was now able to watch what I had thought to be my basic self. So what I thought to be that self wasn’t me after all—it was only my program. Of course, I had known a lot of this intellectually, but to actually experience it was for me the difference between life and death—literally.
I think the most significant words in the book Alcoholics Anonymous are in the fifth chapter— “the results were nil until we let go absolutely.” “Abso¬lutely” for me finally came to mean everything—the last to go being the hard-wired program that I thought was me.
Thanks to an upbringing in one of the more rigorous religious traditions, I had bought what has aptly been called the “Judeo-Christian guilt trip” —judgment and condemnation, guilt and punishment, heaven and hell, purgatory and penance. I’d bought these things, but I didn’t have to keep them. I could now wrap all this garbage up in a package and take it to the dump. The “exact nature of my wrongs” was not wrong at all. There was no judgment, no condemnation, no guilt, no punishment, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no penance: just the adult manifestations of the coping strategy of a small child trying to survive as best he could in the situation in which he found himself.
In my new-found sobriety I started doing some things I had never done before—just for me. I bought a good camera which I had wanted for years, and I really enjoyed using it. I bought a bicycle on which I commuted every day to a job I didn’t believe two years before it was possible for me to hold. I went skiing for the first time in six or seven years. I took some painting classes at a local gallery. And most important, I found I could do all these things and more all by myself, or with friends, without the help of the “iron lung” I always thought I had to have. With this came a tremendous sense of freedom that I had never before experienced.
But one thing came very hard—emotional withdrawal from my ex-wife. M. and I had had, looking back on them, many happy years. Ours was a monoga¬mous, committed relationship for more then twenty of those years. Our divorce, while painful, had been without acrimony. We now lived at opposite ends of the country, but we were seeing each other briefly a couple of times a year, and I was in the habit of calling her on the phone every couple of weeks. Our children were supportive of us both. The divorce didn’t seem to destroy the sense of family we had all experienced over the years. It was just that Mom and Dad weren’t married any more and lived 3,000 miles apart.
I had thought that through time, the S.L.A.A. program, and the psychotherapy, I had let go of M., but I realize now that I had always been holding onto the shred of the fantasy that somehow, sometime, we could reestablish an intimate relationship. My withdrawal, therefore, was not uncon¬ditional. In it was a hidden agenda that read, “If I really clean up my act and live an independent life, then maybe M. and I can get back together in a new way.”
This was brought home to me near the end of my therapy when M. and I spent four days in the same city, visiting each other, some of our children, and friends. At the end of those four days I realized that getting back together with her in any form just wasn’t going to happen. Within the next week, after eleven months of celibacy, I found myself in bed on two occasions with two different women. I honestly wasn’t consciously looking for it, but a couple of women happened to come my way and I responded. I’d heard in S.L.A.A. that we are always tested when we are the most vulnerable. I was vulnerable; I was tested; and I flunked. No judgment or condemnation, no guilt or punishment, no heaven or hell, no penance or purgatory—just a little kid coping with feelings of anger and frustration by going out and getting laid.
Sexual and emotional sobriety are self-defined in our fellowship. Of course, jumping in bed with two different women because of anger and frustra¬tion over my ex-wife’s attitude did not demonstrate emotional and sexual sobriety on my part. But what would? Did I need to step up the level of my activities: put in longer hours at my job, set up a darkroom and develop my own pictures, join a bicycle club, go skiing more often, sign up for another art class? These are all “worthwhile” activities that I enjoy. But if I was using involvement in such activities as a mask for my own negative inner feelings of fear, anger, resentment, dependency, or loneliness, then these activities are not really so different from the destructive strategies I had used in the past. The basic motive, though not necessarily the conscious one, was the same. What I really needed was to just take it easy and experience my feelings as they really were, face them square on, and deal with them on a day-to-day basis, avoiding behavior that I’d come to identify as troublesome.
This latter approach seems to me the path to the ultimate freedom of not being driven to do anything—of acting from choice rather than from compul¬sion. The real key here is “a day-to-day basis.” One day at a time. The past is gone, the future isn’t here yet. Be here now. This theme is at the core of any recipe for happy living. It involves, however fleetingly, the experience of a total trust, a total faith, that basically everything is just as it should be at this moment, including my desire for it to be different in the next moment.
I cannot overemphasize here the important role that hard, repetitive work on the Twelve Steps (both in Alcoholics Anonymous and as adopted in the S.L.A.A. fellowship and other Twelve Step fellowships) has played in my ongoing recovery from life-long patterns of multiple addiction. My therapy was really nothing more than necessary professional help with the Fourth and Fifth Steps. But for “hands-on” experience of feelings without taking any measures to avoid them, for disciplined practice of “be here now’ there is nothing that takes the place of regular disciplined meditation as suggested in the Eleventh Step. I have engaged in this practice for several years and consider it as of equal importance in my recovery as attendance at meetings and therapy. It is a vital part of my life.
I said at the start of this that I thought I loved M. and thought I loved A. I cannot define love. All I do know is that in my relationships with these two women I experienced a different dimension than I’d experienced in any others. I think that the difference came from the level of my commitment, which in both cases was total and unconditional. Both relationships had rich rewards. Both ended with acute pain for me (and the women) because of my iron-lung syndrome. I have nonetheless experienced the unique joys of an unconditionally committed relationship, and I know those joys to be real joys.
The commitments I’ve made in my life, including those to M. and A., have all had that same quality of gut-level, emotional response as the commitment I described earlier to do whatever it took to be a free man. As such, they have had a compulsive element in them—I had no choice but to say “yes.” I now find I have increasing strength to say “no” to situations that I know are inappropriate and will lead to behavior I know from experience to be ultimately self-defeating, and to say “yes” to various other invitations from the circumstances of my life that I feel will be self-sustaining and self-freeing.
I now spend a lot of time in solitude—which I enjoy, even relish. Mixed with the solitude are experiences of loneliness in varying degrees. But as I observe the lives, the marriages, the relationships of many if not most of my contemporaries, I find an excellent antidote for the occasional twinges of self-pity that come my way. There is no one I really envy.
With the solitude has come an increasing sense of my human dignity, of my self-worth. All my life I’ve had a sense that way down deep I was a fake. In many ways I was a very good fake. I could almost succeed in hiding the fact that I was a fake, even from myself. But underneath I always knew.
I now know I am for real. That feeling alone has made it all worthwhile. None of us are ever completely free in this life, but those internal fetters that had me bound tight are loosened, if not completely fallen away.
I now feel I would like to share this freedom in a fully committed relation¬ship with a woman who is also real and free—to have a sharing, growing part¬nership in freedom. It will happen when it happens, if it’s supposed to happen; and I am willing, if not yet completely able, to accept the fact that it might not. I can look for a parallel in my personal life for what has happened in my busi¬ness life. There was just no way to get from where I was when A. and I parted to where I am three years later.. .just no way. But here I am, and it is real. It isn’t fake. Whatever happens in my personal life will be just as real and just as rewarding, providing I stay real.
And so my life unfolds—one day at a time.