Slogans and Self-Talk for Recovering People

I've read the famous quotation from Greek philosopher Plato: "The life which is unexamined is not worth living." It is written in praise of self-examination, self-awareness, and self-knowledge. All of those are usually of value. In addiction, all these forms of insight are of limited value until we stop using alcohol and drugs, and start to live. Only when our minds are clear of chemicals, and both our minds and bodies come back to life, do these tools do us any good.

While we are still drinking and using, any intelligence we have is hijacked and put into the service of the disease. The more intelligent we are, the more sophisticated our defenses against recovery become. People who are newly in treatment sometimes notice this and say, "My best thinking got me here."

I was identified while I was still in elementary school as having a high I.Q. Even though I was on sedatives and painkillers all through high school, I still was able to slide through the classes and make the honor roll, even when I added alcohol to the mix. I was so drunk and high that whatever had just happened to me was lost in the fog. I wasn't really living my life; I was just letting it happen to me.

Intelligent people have a harder time getting sober than normal people. This is because we spend too much time trying to examine life and not enough time living it. I've spent lots of time trying to figure out whether there is a God. Is God going to help me? Is God going to give up on me after a certain number of failures? Does God ever leave us to our own devices? Is God all loving, or is there some duty to justice that limits God's love? While I was drinking I could come up with an infinite number of vexing questions.

One day I suddenly realized that I didn't ask these kinds of questions about my drugs and alcohol, only about God. I never asked if Johnny Walker was a real gentleman. I didn't ask whether Jack Daniels still lived in a remote hollow in Tennessee, and what his relationship was with Lem Motlow. I never questioned anything about my drugs; I only raised exquisitely complex questions about God.

In the Harvard University longitudinal study of alcoholism, researchers found that men with high school educations recovered better, over many years, than men with college educations. I'm not surprised. On page 39 of AA's Big Book, it says:

"But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize, to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience."

By going to meetings and listening, I have been able to benefit from the bitter experience of others, rather than having to make every error myself. I still hear from friends who are frustrated with the simplicity of AA and Narcotics Anonymous. They find it hard to believe that a program simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker could actually help someone as brilliant and complex as we are.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying my sober life. Now I'm living my life, not just following it around, hoping it will get better. Now, at last, I can bear examining it.

John MacDougall, DMin, is the director of Spiritual Guidance at Hazelden in Center City, Minn. He will be leading a retreat on Relationships for Couples, with his wife, Priscilla, at Hazelden's Dan Anderson Renewal Center on April 10-13, 2008. He may be contacted at jmacdougall@hazelden.org.

Published in The Voice, Winter 2008