Category: Recovery From Addictions

I have yet to meet someone that hasn’t come to a recovery program for the sole purpose of trying to find healing from an addiction. Whether it’s AA, NA, OA, SLAA, CA, Al-Anon, CoDA, or any other program that was formed based upon the 12 Steps, there is a common language used in each of them to guide a person to that healing. And one of the greatest things a person finds in all of these programs as they begin their own path of recovery is something called “The Promises”.

The following is the list of the promises as they are laid out in just about all 12 Step literature:

1. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

2. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

3. We will comprehend the word Serenity.

4. We will know peace.

5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

8. Self-seeking will slip away.

9. Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change.

10. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.

11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

For the longest time, I thought these promises were bogus. I figured they were just some type of mumbo-jumbo that were written tons of years ago and held no purpose anymore. I often heard many people in meetings read and talk about them and how much their lives have actually changed to match what those statements were saying. What I didn’t realize is just how true each of those 12 promises were until I began to really do the work in my own recovery.

Looking back I realize now there was a gateway I had to pass through to begin to see these promises coming to fruition in my own life. I always had the key to this gateway, but I was too afraid to use it. It came down to a decision I continued to make on some level in my life of following self-will versus God’s will.

Living in self-will is what led me to all of my addictions in the first place. It’s what got me in trouble all the time. It’s what caused me fights, anger, and rage. It’s what disrupted my entire life. And for most of it, I tried to maintain at least a certain percentage of it because I was too afraid to allow a Higher Power the ability to run the show.

It took a lot more of me getting broken before I was finally able to say I was done. But when I did, and when I finally admitted my own self-will had gotten me nowhere, I sought out in every way I could in my own life how to live in God’s will. Since then, it’s like I suddenly have understood the language constantly being spoken at all of the recovery meetings I attended. It was almost as if I had a universal translator that helped me to really get why recovery works. And the more that I have stayed with God’s will and done my best to remove my own will, the more I have found these Promises to be coming true.

By living in self-will I remained addicted to so many things and because of that I couldn’t find any new freedom or happiness in life at all. I still regretted the past and wasn’t able to shut the door on a single thing. I was anything but serene and peaceful and continued to go down and down on the depression scale. None of my experiences were helping anyone and instead were causing pain and hardship for those around me. I felt useless and lived in self-pity constantly. I was extremely selfish and self-centered and had no interest in anyone else but myself. I became self-seeking to the max with everyone and everything as I developed a ‘life sucks’ mentality along with a very bleak outlook on just about everything. My fears grew everyday of what people thought of me and eventually I became jobless and directionless. I fell into the same pitfalls again and again and soon I was doing nothing more than trying to play God rather than seek God.

I do my damnedest today to live differently by seeking God’s will instead. And it’s working. Every one of those promises seems to hold some level of truth now in my own life and it’s getting better everyday. Because of this, I can say today that I know 12 Step Recovery really does work and the promises can and will come true. It just takes work. It takes removing self-will. And it takes walking through fear and trusting that God’s will is a whole heck of a lot better than any second I might have ever lived in my own self-will.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

For the longest time, I have desired to sponsor someone again in AA using the 12 step recovery process. The last time I tried to help someone through them was over several years ago prior to my whole world being shaken up. At just about every meeting I have attended lately, my hand has been raised or I’ve stood up when it was asked who was opened to helping someone walk through the 12 steps and be a sponsor.

While my sobriety began on June 11th, 1995, my recovery didn’t begin until I went through the 12 steps myself beginning in October of 2007 with my first sponsor. In 2008, that sponsor encouraged me to start reaching out and helping others by sponsoring them like she was with me. Unfortunately, every time I was asked by someone, I became more interested in making friends with them and drawing a closer relationship than I was in going through the work like my own sponsor had done.

I had social get togethers with those I sponsored. I took them out for coffees and dinners. I hung out at their homes shooting pool and watching movies. I had them over to my sister’s house to go swimming. I even took a sponsee once to Florida for a vacation! If I had to make a gander about how many people I tried to sponsor this way the first four years of my recovery from addictions, it would probably be somewhere around 16 people. Sadly, only two of those have remained sober to this day. While I don’t blame myself directly for all of those that relapsed, as ultimately I know that I’m not the one that forced them to pick up a drink or a drug again, I do believe today that I contributed to it indirectly. The way I was trying to sponsor all of them was unhealthy for both me and them as I was more concerned about growing my friendships than I was in helping them to grasp their own recovery.

There were plenty of lessons to be learned through all of that type of sponsoring. But the biggest lesson took several years later for me to figure out and it was during a time where I sponsored no one and was focused only on healing me. Over those years, I began to realize I never had any healthy boundaries and if I did ever try to set any, I never kept to them. In the case of trying to sponsor someone, I never garnered much respect from any of those I was trying to help. Because I spent so much time on the social level with them, the times we got together to do the work ended up becoming more “fun time” than anything. In simple terms, to them, I was just “one of the guys to hang out with.”

I believe my first sponsor had it right with me in the way she guided my 12 Step Recovery.  She didn’t hang out with me. She didn’t buy or treat me to anything except the very first coffee I had at our first meet and greet. She didn’t ask me to go out for social get togethers. She didn’t call me for a friendly chat about her own life. What she did do though was meet with me once a week for one hour where we would do the step work. I would see her and greet her at meetings and on speaking engagements and that was the extent of it. And she was the first person I ever felt enough motivation to fully do the 12 step process of any type of recovery program!

Today I have been setting and keeping to many different types of healthy boundaries. And just two weeks ago, after several years of not being asked to be a sponsor by anyone, someone finally stepped forward and said they wanted what I had and was reaching out for my help in their AA recovery.

Yesterday I sat down for the first time with this person at a local Starbucks and just like my original sponsor did, I bought him his first coffee. I then proceeded to lay out my boundaries and guidelines to him and indicated he would need to respect them or else I wouldn’t be able to sponsor him. Ironically, in doing so, he told me that made him want me to be his sponsor all the more.

So I guess it’s true that everything happens when it’s meant to. I have a good feeling this time around that I will help this person get much farther in the 12 steps then anyone else I’ve worked with. I think that’s because not only am I setting boundaries and keeping to them now, but I’m also much healthier today with God at the helm in my life and not in my backseat.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs…”

Sometimes I think people take this step too lightly. Maybe the reality is that for a long time I was the one taking it too lightly. There’s a joke in some of the recovery rooms that I’ve heard some people make when speaking at the podium. “Don’t you graduate once you reach the 12th Step?”, they say. For any addiction, recovery is a way of life and not a fad. It’s not something that once this step is reached that a person just moves on to the next thing in their lives. This step speaks directly to that issue.

By the time a person reaches Step 12 in their recovery work, it’s assumed that some level of spiritual awakening has occurred. In my case, that was true but not on the level it could have been. As I have mentioned in several other of my blog entries, I didn’t fully invest into Step 3 in the first several years of my recovery. I didn’t turn my entire will over to God. And I didn’t get the full spiritual benefit the steps are meant to bring because of it. This created a cascade effect in my life. Any message that I tried to carry to other addicts still had quite a bit of my own toxins and poisons involved in any help I offered. Much of the work I did with the still suffering addicts was tainted with my own selfishness and self-centeredness. As a result, I didn’t have much experience, strength, and hope to pass on to those that needed it. Even worse, what I was practicing in the rest of my life, even after doing the steps the first few times, was character defected driven and addicted related. This was all because I was unwilling to fully let go of my self will and trust in God’s will completely. That can’t be said though in the work I’ve done in my life these past 365 days.

A year ago on April 17th of 2012, I made the decision to turn my entire will and life over to the care of God as Step 3 stated. I decided it was time to try that path as the pain had become too great to handle in my life. I removed all the toxic people around me that didn’t desire a spiritual based life. I separated myself from those who were still living in addictions. I began a spiritual routine every day that involved more prayer and meditation. And I sought out greater help from a therapist and some holistic healers that got me on the track I could have been when I first got sober so long ago.

Something good happened because of that decision and those actions.

The spiritual awakening that so many had often eluded to in many meetings that I attended, started happening to me. I became less self-piteous and more positive in every area of my life. A large chunk of the selfish and self-centered ways I had been living in, slowly began disappearing. And my desire to help others started increasing on its own.

I employ this step today more naturally because of the way I’m now living with God at the center of my life. I go to detoxes, prisons, hospitals, halfway houses, and other venues to speak about my experience, strength, and hope in my recovery. I raise my hand every time I’m at a meeting when the secretary asks if anyone is willing to help sponsor someone. I make phone calls to the new people in my group to reach out and make them feel more welcomed. And I show up early and often leave last at my home group because I have found I enjoy setting up and cleaning up. There is one part of this step though that is important to highlight beyond the help I offer to other addicts today.

The 12th Step speaks of practicing these principles in all of our affairs. An easier way of understanding this is what do I do when no one else is paying attention to me? How do I carry myself in my personal life when I’m away from the recovery rooms? In the past, when I wasn’t turning my entire will over to God and not practicing the steps fully, I would gossip and backstab others because of it. I would drive recklessly and impatiently on the road all the time. I used people for what they had to offer me and rarely offered them anything in return. I hoarded greedily any money I had for my own desires. And I engaged in other addictions that weren’t alcohol or drug related but just as deadly to my mind, body, and soul. All that has changed today and then some. Who I am in the recovery circles has become the same as who I am outside of them. I realized that if I was to continue to have spiritual awakenings in my life and if I truly wanted to find inner peace, my life had to be fully vested into applying the recovery work both inside and outside the rooms.

My life is changed so dramatically now from where I was a year ago when the 12th Step didn’t mean that much to me. With God at the helm of my whole existence today, it’s become natural for me to carry this message to as many addicts as possible because I want to. It’s become natural for me to live spiritually all the time because I desire to. Because of this, it’s become natural for me to practice all of what I’ve learned in the 12 Steps, anytime, anywhere, and in any moment where God has me.

The 12 Steps of Recovery helped me to find God. They helped me to find myself. They helped me to heal. And they changed my life forever for the better. They can do all the same for you too.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson