Guest Contributor – Charlee B.
One of my most favorite lines—of many—in the AA literature comes from the book Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions (or the 12&12, as it’s known), in the beginning of Step 2. It reads, “At this juncture, his AA sponsor usually laughs.”
Over the years, my sponsor has laughed at things I have said more times than I can count. Similarly, I laugh at things my sponsees have said to me. Laughing is one of the best parts of sobriety!
It took me a while to get the joke. In the beginning, when my sponsor would laugh—almost always uproariously—I would feel insulted and hurt. “Lighten up, buttercup. It’s not all about you,” Jane* would say (*not her real name). In those first few years of sobriety, I took pretty much everything too personally and heard this quite a bit. I didn’t get called on to share at a meeting by the DL (Discussion Leader)? Clearly, I had done something wrong to warrant being overlooked! One of my children was going through a hard time? I had a fantastic knack for making it about me! There’s a rule of thumb that you stop maturing at the age when your addiction begins, and so I was stuck at age 12–14 for those early years. I was an absolute pleasure to be around, I’m sure!
“Try loosening your grip” was another one of Jane’s sayings. Hearing that one was maddening, at first. Loosen my grip? For a good few years in sobriety, I had no idea I even had a death grip on things (all the things)!
One of Jane’s favorite expressions when I (or another member or sponsee) was spinning out would be to say, “Are you on fire?” Since the answer was no, it would snap me back to the present moment. Then, at least, I had a shot at lightening up.
The lightening up did work, eventually, but it was really masking a larger problem. What I wanted most—desperately—was to figure it out. And the ‘it’ was literally anything: work, kids, extended family, or the problem du jour. If I could just understand, make sense of, or plot it on a graph or spreadsheet (yes, I tried that), then I would <fill in the blank>. Basically, if I had all the data points, I delusionally believed I could solve for X. And then, I triumphantly thought, I’d know what comes next. And then, surely, I’d be ok.
Except that life is not graphable.
All the spiral-bound Day at a Glance planners I fastidiously used each year as a teenager, which were replaced by color-coded Google Calendar, still did not yield the solution for X. For decades, I’d tried to use starvation, running, drinking, or some combination of the three as a solution. But none of them could satisfy the anxiety brought about by NOT figuring it out.
“Stop trying to figure it out!” Jane would say. And off I’d go, trying to find An Answer. Every so often, I’d call her with a revelation, usually in the form of a book or discipline of psychology: Stoicism was the answer! Tao was the answer! Exposure-Response Prevention (ERP) was the answer! And they all can—and many do—help. But they are not The Answer. I’d excitedly share my solution with Jane, and she’d laugh and laugh. Because that was the point. I just wasn’t getting it. And until I could accept that, I’d be stuck with these eureka ‘aha!’ moments.
Much like drinking (or any other addiction), the relief I’d get from finding The Answer was getting more and more fleeting, too. Quite frankly, that was beginning to piss me off. “Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?” Jane would ask me.
It didn’t happen overnight. (Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly is an adage for a reason!) It wasn’t a burning bush moment, either. There was no rocketing into the 4th dimension. Instead, over the course of a few months when I was trying to (unsuccessfully) run several of life’s shows, it dawned on me that I was powerless over finding a solution to any of life’s situations. Moreover, I was frustrated enough with being jerked around like a puppet by my constant elation and then despair over figuring it out. That was the unmanageable piece.
So I made a decision—literally—to turn it over to my Higher Power. I’d remind myself I wasn’t on fire. And then I’d turn my attention to the present moment. Most importantly, when I forgot and found myself searching for a different answer, I would remind myself how fucking miserable I’d felt trying to run the show.
Looking back over the 10+ years I’ve been sponsored by Jane, I see a trend. The scenarios I’d share that made her laugh were things that I was on the cusp of loosening my grip on. Or, at least, they were things I could potentially loosen my grip on—if only I turned them over to a Higher Power.
Interestingly, the funnier the scenario, the more connected I feel with the person. I think that’s where the growth happens. In those moments when I am laughing with a sponsee at something they have shared or are going through, they realize that someone else gets it—really gets it. They can feel they aren’t alone. And that’s when the grip loosens.
My Higher Power is definitely right there in those moments, both when I’m on the sponsor or sponsee side of things.
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