Six years ago I walked into a Friday evening AA meeting in desperation hoping to find recovery from a life that had become riddled with various addictions. Although I had remained sober from alcohol and drugs for 12 years by that point, it had been achieved mostly through self-will and it showed. I learned a lot that night about what being in recovery meant and looking back on my actions I took during that meeting, it was pretty obvious that I had very little of that, if any at all.
All of this began that Friday evening when I walked in the door of the church where the meeting was being held. There I was cheerly greeted by one of the few friends who had remained in my addiction-filled life. As I hugged him, I knew he could tell how broken I was inside. The only thought I had in those moments though was that I needed to share what I was going through with everyone attending the meeting that night. When my friend informed me that wouldn’t be possible, I inquired as to why. He told me they had this thing called an incoming commitment where another group’s members came in to share their experience, strength, and hope in recovery. I had never heard of such a thing because I had rarely attended enough meetings to know such things existed. In fact, the few meetings I had ever attended were the ones that anyone could raise their hands and share whatever was on their minds. Upon hearing this new meeting format, my ego took over, which at the time was quite large. It was then that I told my friend I had a lot of experience, strength, and hope, even though deep down I knew I didn’t. I said it was a life or death matter for me to share and that I needed him to do what was necessary to have me be able to speak that night. After he saw that I wasn’t going to back down from pressuring him to do this, he gave in and went to speak with the chairperson of the incoming group. Sometime later during the meeting, I was called up to the podium by that chairperson where I stood nervously in front of over 100 people who were sitting there waiting to hear my experience, strength and hope in recovery. But what they got instead was a big pile of tears and a slew of experiences. What I didn’t have though was any strength or hope which was easily demonstrated by my torrent of tears that poured out of my eyes in front of all those strangers. So as I shared at length about the horror stories from all my addiction filled days in life, I didn’t discuss any of my efforts I had made or found toward true sobriety and recovery because I truly had none. All I really had to share that night was nothing more than a long drunk-a-log.
A drunk-a-log is really just a slang term used these days in most recovery meetings to describe a situation where a person shares and focuses solely on the days and experiences from their active addiction filled days. And this is precisely what I did when I stood at that podium on that Friday evening over six years ago. Unfortunately, in doing so, what I said had little to no benefit for anyone in attendance as it only solidified the fact that I was extremely miserable from all of my addiction-based experiences.
Today, I find it’s actually for the best to focus very little on these experiences as none of us are very different from each other when it comes right down to where our addictions took us. By choosing to share one addiction story after another, the only thing it really shows is how screwed up we all were from our disease of addiction. What it doesn’t show is a path to recovery for those still suffering from them. The only reason why I kept coming back to AA and other recovery meetings wasn’t because of hearing drunk-a-logs. It wasn’t because of listening to people share their “war” stories with addiction. And it definitely wasn’t because I heard some amazing experience about someone’s battle with addictions. I kept coming back because I heard people share about the happiness in their life that came from doing the 12 Steps and finding God.
Thankfully, I now practice the 12 Steps and maintain a close relationship with my Higher Power on a daily basis. This has helped me to be able to laugh now about the absurdity of my actions on that Friday night meeting all those years ago. I realize today that the only experience I really ever need to share in any meeting I attend is that I drank, I drugged, and I lost. I also realize that a drunk-a-log isn’t going to help anyone, especially a newcomer. As it is they, like I once did, who need to hear a lot more about the strength and hope in recovery and nothing else…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson