Sobriety in Stumptown www.pdxaa.org Portland Area Intergroup January 2017 www.pdxaa.org 825 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR 503-223-8569 Volume 10, No. 1 January Stories and Art and Tradition One by Eric K., Sobriety in Stumptown Editor This month s newsletter submissions are focused on the First Step and First Tradition, and a section for art, inspired by the Big Book and the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, in the chapter on Step Six, our co-founder Bill W. writes that is the only one we work 100 percent. The others are, he says, ideals to aim for. That is obviously paraphrased and not quoted out of the book but I think it gives an idea of it. I find that I do not work even 100 percent; 99.9 percent of the time, I am 99.9 percent convinced I am powerless over alcohol. But every now and then, that one tenth of one percent sneaks in and I get the idea, just for a moment, that this time I could handle it or that this time no one would know or whatever other idea. And 99.9 percent of the time I am 99.9 percent sure that my life is unmanageable. But every now and then...well I think that portrays the situation pretty well. Fortunately I know where that kind of thinking leads. And I know where the ensuing action would lead, and more or less promptly I get my thinking back on track. The fact is that I don't do anything 100 percent. I never do the best I can. But I know that about myself and so when these thoughts come up I try to do a little bit more, a little bit better. Even is only an ideal I can strive for. 1
by George D. from Portland, OR I knew that day I looked into the trunk of my car seeing that six pack of Strosh beer that already I had a problem. It was the 70s, what a great time to be a teenager; sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and as I like to say, not necessarily in that order. Life in fact seemed like it couldn t be better. I was older than most of my classmates, as I had been held back in the 3rd grade. It seemed I was unable to pay attention and was always too hyper to sit still. I m pretty sure ADHD played a significant role in that event, long before ADHD was considered a medical diagnosis. Being older, I had my license and car by the start of my sophomore year. As I drove up to school that day, I felt no less glorious than Caesar s triumphant return to Rome. I felt powerful and certain that at last I would fit in. All I ever wanted was to fit in, to be one of the cool guys and hoped that the pretty girls would like me. Neither that nor the beer would ever fill that void that was deep within, and I knew that this void that would never go away. That was in the 70s and it wasn t until the age of 55 on the day of 12/13/14 that I finally quit! I quit the running, I quit the crying, and I finally gave into my innermost self, that which everyone was saying and what everybody was seeing; that in fact I was an alcoholic and that my life had become unmanageable. This was the beginning of my fellowship with alcoholics anonymous, and my daily reprieve from alcohol. by Mike B. from Portland, OR Happy New Year everybody. At every meeting I attend, I'm made aware of the newcomers, since we ask about who's new and who's got early milestones. So when I share, I try to be "relate-able" to folks in early recovery. The first step is the great equalizer; it levels us all. For me it was waking up in a jail cell not knowing how I got there. It was learning through the courts what I had done in a night of blackout drinking, realizing that nobody had done it to me, that I wasn't a victim. I was the guy who committed the assault; I was the guy who fought the cops. But this was only the climax to a long, crazy career of creating wreckage in relationships, hurting my loved ones, DUIIs, and getting fired from jobs. The common factor, the one constant, was the relationship between me and the bottle. The slave and his master. Something had to change. Something fundamental it was obvious and I couldn't NOT face it. And here is where I found that surrender was a win! It was a blessing! I had to get out of my own way; I had to get over myself. The last twenty-four years of growth and selfawareness have brought blessings that I could not have imagined before I found the program of AA and the twelve steps. Tradition One by Riley S, Portland, OR Without an AA group, I have nowhere to go. In Portland, I understand we re lucky with the number of groups we have, and the diversity of groups we have. If I don t like one group of 2
people or the way they conduct their meeting, I can find a different group. It s interesting to me to look back over the different groups I ve gone to over my two years of sobriety. Although I ve settled on a few groups that I like, there s a few groups that I have gone to, and then decided for one reason or another that I don t like the group anymore. I decide that something they are doing doesn t sit well with me, and if they only did it this way or that way, then I d be happy. It s quite ridiculous, because at one time the group suited me quite well, and something in the group would give me comfort and a reprieve from my alcoholic thinking. Then my own alcoholic thinking overpowers that sense of well-being and I find a reason to move on. Now if I lived in a small town, say, Hood River, OR, I d be in trouble with my current modus operandi of going to a group until I get upset. There are less than a dozen meetings a week out there. I say all this because I m currently going through an upheaval in terms of which group I ll be going to. I recently stopped going to a group that I went to for a long time, and then because of school, I ll have to cease going to my home group for a few months. On top of that, with school starting up again after the break, I must be conscientious of the groups I go to because of time commitments. I can t just haphazardly fit in meetings when I have a chance; otherwise I ll do what I did last term and get down to only two or three meetings a week. The first tradition says to me that wherever I show up, my job isn t to try and fix the meeting or to judge the meeting. It s simply to see if the meeting works with me where I m at, and to then let the meeting do what it s supposed to do: namely offer a venue to make 12th step work possible. I ve learned through my home group that having a service position and attending the business meetings is important. Whether I like or agree with everything in the meeting isn t important, what s important is that I put the group s needs first, and help wherever I can or am obligated to. I don t need to do more than is required of me, and I don t need to get hung up on things which irk me, if the rest of the group doesn t have a problem. It s miraculous to watch groups take shape, especially after seeing groups fail to take hold. The fact that a bunch of alcoholics all agree to show up to a certain place at an agreed upon time, and then follow a set of guidelines without making a fuss is something more powerful than any of us. All I have to do is get out of the way. Tradition One by Kate C-F, Portland, OR After celebrating my 30th year of sobriety, I felt a calling to do something more to find another way to give back to the program that has afforded me this amazing life. I decided to jump into area service for the first time, and became my home group s GSR. Although I have always been a vocal proponent of the traditions, as GSR I have now become the steward of those traditions for my group. The first tradition has always been the foundation for the group, and I have seen it called upon many times to refocus our vision when we get too far afield with personalities, outside issues, and internal struggles. In breaking down the first Tradition, we get two parts that are interdependent, meaning each part is vital to the whole. In my sponsorship lineage, we look up words from the text in order to get a more complete understanding of what the author meant. Common means of or relating to a community at large and welfare refers to the health, 3
happiness and fortunes of a person or group. Therefore, the phase refers to the fortunes of a community and the Tradition states that this common welfare should (an imperative) come first, or above all else. Bill W., who wrote these traditions, often used a process of statement/explanation, or question/answer directly or by inference. So, looking at the two phrases of this Tradition, we can see a statement ( Our common welfare should come first ), and then an explanation of why this should be. Our personal recovery (our sobriety, our welfare, our community s health) depends ( contingent upon ) AA unity ( a condition of harmony ). In other words, our very lives (our recovery from a deadly disease) is dependent ( relying on one another for support ) upon our group being a unified body. Our individual strength and success is directly correlated to the strength and success of the group. What this tells me as a new GSR, is that my job in service to my group must include an acute awareness of what must come first in maintaining the health of our group: UNITY the quality and state of oneness. In any discussion our group will have during my tenure will include the foundational understanding that we must become ONE, and we may learn how to do so by following the next 11 Traditions. by Kate C-F, Portland, OR If the first Tradition is the foundation of why it works, the first Step is the foundation of how it works. In my experience, if someone does not have a complete first step experience, their chances of recovering from this hopeless state of mind and body are very slim. Our basic text, the Big Book, has 113 actual pages which outline our program of recovery (The Doctor s Opinion, Bill s Story, There is a Solution, More About Alcoholism, We Agnostics, How It Works, Into Action and Working With Others). While the other chapters contain much good information, these aforementioned chapters outline the actual recovery program. Therefore, it is quite telling that out of 113 pages, fully 53 pages are dedicated to the First Step (The Doctor s Opinion through page 43). In these pages, the three parts of our disease the physical allergy, the mental obsession, and the spiritual malady are outlined beautifully as those factors which make us alcoholics bodily and mentally different from our fellows. The Doctor s Opinion, through page 23, describes in detail the physical part of our disease which makes us powerless once we take the drink, and pages 24-43 describes the mental obsession that tries to bring us back to the drink. The spiritual malady, which I have come to believe is the state of profound aloneness, is described throughout these pages in the experiences of the Doctor, Bill W. and the people who are featured. Through information, experience and example, our founders and Bill W. lay out the hopelessness and fatality of our disease, to convince the real alcoholic that their life is truly at stake. This is what I try to relate to the newcomer to give them a fatal dose of alcoholism so that they may come to realize if they are an alcoholic of my variety, they are in the grips of a progressive, fatal disease and have little to no chance of recovering on their own. 4
Until the newcomer feels the true hopelessness of their disease and their powerlessness to overcome it without help, they will not be willing to even consider the next 11 Steps. Utilizing the text as well as my own experience, I share with them how I came to realize that my human power would not relieve my alcoholism, and that the life I spent trying to do so was completely unmanageable. There is no good news in a 1st Step experience, but this tearing down of my will, my self-reliance and my ego is necessary for me to be willing to accept help. Once the newcomer begins to see the futility of trying to manage their life and disease on their own, I begin to share with them the hope and the promise of the next Step in which they will begin to access that power which will help them to recreate their lives. It is only though the process of breaking down in Step 1 that we are afforded the experience of being catapulted into that fourth dimension Bill describes as, I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes. by Luke F, Portland, OR Sobriety Date: 2/14/72 I have been in groups where, whenever a newcomer appears, the meeting is suddenly devoted to STEP ONE. It is often said in AA that this is the only step that one must do perfectly. I don't know about that. At this point in AA history, it is believed that the average person coming into AA can expect 4 major relapses before it finally sticks. Something is not quite right and if you are not careful, you can believe that AA is losing its grip on getting people sober these days. Perhaps the matter is a little bit more complex than it looks. is in two parts: An admission of powerlessness is the first element, and a further admission that an individual's life is unmanageable. In my opinion, most people arrive and have nailed one of these, in many cases. Perhaps a person's out-of-control drinking has convinced him or her that they need help, and that it seems impossible to quit on their own. Others get a DUI and realize that their spree drinking is beginning to cause issues they never believed would happen, so they attend AA for understanding, and to make sure they are NOT in fact an alcoholic. Whatever side of the fence a newbie finds himself, before long, the nagging doubt that perhaps their initial "panic" was unwarranted begins to creep in. They often find themselves listening to others whose situation was much worse than theirs, and it becomes even easier to believe that perhaps now is not the time, but armed with this additional information, they can continue to drink until matters get much worse, and THEN they might consider "additional measures." So the Step must be considered in both parts and just because you may not think your life is particularly unmanageable at this time, do you really want to continue doing something harmful until your life does become out of control, and you begin to lose jobs, relationships and selfesteem because it seemed that you weren't quite ready to throw yourself into the whole package? I worked at a DUI school decades ago for Level II offenders who had multiple arrests and I would see men and women arrogantly proclaim that their arrests proved nothing. It was a matter of bad luck and awful timing. I saw people in the late 70's with 2 arrests to as many as 27! (That 5
was possible then, but not anymore; society has learned to protect itself from the alcoholic, but the alcoholic has yet to protect him or herself from their disease.) There are ways to protect the newcomer from his madness and I would suggest the following: If you are working with people currently who are having relapses, make sure that they can admit to both parts of step one. Be patient and tolerant, and know that we are all human and our ability to see our faults is not something that comes easy. While AA is a lot less confrontational than it was in the past, a tough love approach is not any more successful unless someone is ready to hear it. I don't discourage someone after a relapse or use lots of paperwork to keep them busy at supposedly discovering the "reasons why they drank again. Writing down a lot of circumstances might keep a person temporarily grounded in AA literature, but there is a foolproof method of showing a newcomer just how messed up his thinking is. Take him or her to some meetings at DePaul, Hooper Detox or City Team. Why? Because we can see in others that which is so difficult to see in ourselves. My first sponsor in AA got me involved in a skid-row meeting in the city where I sobered up. It was only a once a month commitment, but I had to find a few people who were as new as me or newer and take them on a panel. They and I got to see denial from a new perspective. I was amazed to discover that those lost souls on skid row often had no more idea than I initially did that their REAL problem was drinking. What? Well, what did they think they were doing on skid row, you ask amazingly, they had health and financial reasons which always, in their opinion, were the real cause of their desperate situation. has always been tricky for alcoholics, at least in the time I have been sober. And if, buried in your own psyche, you find yourself occasionally wondering if you were REALLY that bad? Know that you have the disease and pray that it is under control. : A.A. LAUNCH PAD by Rick R., Portland, OR I was sitting at a meeting recently when I heard a very young, and very sincere, single mother of two, sharing that her first experience in A.A. was the thought of having to do all this stuff for the rest of her life, and she didn t find it too comforting. It sounded to me that, from her perspective, she knew that she had to do it, but it wasn t going to be easy or fun. I admired her for her courage and conviction and I tried to encourage her by explaining things that I had experienced when I was faced with the life changing challenges of sobriety. I was the father of a boy, I was in the Navy at the time, and was divorced. It was a difficult time but I had to go through it, drinking or not. I began the process of recovery in a slow, methodical and thorough way, and I came out a stronger person for it. I likened it to the first Apollo space mission to the moon. It goes something like this: When you first see the size of this space craft and consider the amount of energy it would take to put it into space, it is hard to fathom. After the countdown is complete, the engines fire and a tremendous amount of flame and smoke engulf the entire area, and in a few moments, it slowly starts to lift off. As it lumbers its first few hundred feet, it is expending a tremendous amount of 6
fuel. Slowly it starts to gain momentum and pick up speed, still shuddering along. Soon the booster tanks are depleted and they are ejected and the main tanks begin to propel it further along the flight path with even more thrust as it is reaching for orbit. Next, the main tank is depleted just before orbit and is ejected. What is left is a very small portion of what left the launch pad. Soon the craft leaves orbit and heads toward the moon and something else happens that sometimes goes unnoticed. Somewhere between the earth and the moon, the gravitational pull of the moon has more influence on the craft than the earth s has, and it is gently drawn along its path. Very little energy is needed at this point except for minor course corrections. In A.A., when we first get started, it appears to be an insurmountable task and it requires a tremendous amount of effort just to get off the launch pad. Not every launch is successful and some of us don t make it the first time, and we have to exert all that energy in each successive attempt. As we do get on our way, it starts to get easier as we increase our momentum. Much of the burden falls away as we make progress, and the going gets easier as we head for our objective. When we go through the twelve steps, we finally reach orbit. After we are satisfied that everything is in order, we can now set out for the moon. If we stay on course, the spiritual gravity of values we have adopted in the A.A. program will far outweigh the negative gravity of the past, as long as we eject all of the dead weight that held us down. As we continue to adjust the day to day, mistakes that we make, and adopt an unselfish approach to life, somewhere along the flight path, we will cross that line where we are drawn towards a life of peace and serenity that is hard to imagine when we are setting on the launch pad. The most important part of the journey is the lift off. If we can get through that most difficult time, it does get easier, and then we need only to stay the course. Art by Kari F, Portland, OR Monthly Business Meetings For details about monthly business meetings, contact the PAI Office at 503-223-8569. Or send your questions or concerns to: 1212@pdxaa.org 7
Portland Area Intergroup (PAI): Business Meeting, 2 nd Monday of every month, 7:00 PM, 4524 SE Stark St. (Unity of Portland), Portland. Portland Deaf Access Committee: Monthly, 2nd Sunday of every month, 6:30, The Alano Club, NW 24th & Kearney. Dist 9: 1 st Wed, 6:30 PM, 24 th and Kearney, Portland Dist 10: Last Mon, 7:00 PM, 12945 Beaverdam Rd., West Side Service Cntr, Beaverton Dist 11: Last Thu, 7:00 PM, URS Club, Portland Dist 12: 1 st Tue, 6:30 PM, 12x12 Club, 7035 NE Glisan, Portland Dist 15: 1 st Wed, 6:45 PM, 710 6 th St., Oregon City Dist 18: 1 st Sat, 9:30 AM, 215 N 6 th St., St. Helens Dist 23: 1 st Tue, 6:00 PM, Emmanuel Presbyterian, 19200 SW Willamette Dr., West Linn Dist 24: 1 st Thu, 6:00 PM, 5441 SE Belmont St., Portland Dist 25: 4 th Tue, 5:30 PM, Immanuel Lutheran Church, 39901 Pleasant Street, Sandy, OR Dist 26: 2 nd Sun, 5:00 PM, St Charles Church, 5310 NE 42 nd Ave., Portland Dist 27: 1 st Mon, 7:00 PM, 11631 SE Linwood Ave., St. Paul s Methodist, Milwaukie Dist 31: 2 nd Tue, 7:00 PM, 937 NE Jackson School Rd., Hillsboro Dist 34: 3 rd Sat, 5:00 PM, 485 Portland Ave., Gladstone Dist 35: 2 nd & 4 th Sat, 7:00 PM, 18926 SW Shaw St., Suite A, Beaverton Dist 36: 2 nd Thu, 6:00 PM, 2025 SW Vermont St., Portland Dist 37: 2 nd Tue, 6:30 PM, 29775 SW Town Center Loop East, Wilsonville Committee News We have several committee positions available. Portland Area Intergroup needs your help. Working on a committee is excellent 12th Step service work. If you are interested in being on any Portland Area Intergroup committee, send an email to pdxaa.org with "COMMITTEE INTEREST" in the subject field. Or, just click on Service on the Intergroup website. Intergroup committees carry the message of recovery to the still-suffering alcoholic. Please help yourself and others. Sign up. Thank you. Bridging the Gap (BTG): provides a one-time temporary contact for people transitioning from a treatment center to AA meetings. BTG meets the second Monday of each month at 6:30 PM at the Portland Intergroup Office basement, located at 825 NE 20th Ave, Suite 200, Portland. "We Bridge the Gap so alcoholics leaving treatment don't have to walk alone across that scary gap between the beginning of recovery in treatment and the continued recovery in AA. Please contact the PAI office via phone, 503-223-8569, or email 1212@pdxaa.org, if you are interested. AA Hotline: The AA Hotline keeps the Portland phone number for AA active 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The way this is accomplished is by volunteer support. Calls to the AA number placed after Central Office hours and redirected to volunteers phones, keeping the volunteer s number anonymous. A volunteer can elect to go on a 12th Step call or just provide the information the caller needs about meetings. Commitments are generally two times a month. In particular, if you re a night-owl, we d really appreciate your help. Call the Central Office for more information at 503-223-8569. Newsletter (Sobriety in Stumptown): The committee for the very publication you are now reading is looking for members. Send an email of interest to: newsletter@pdxaa.org 8
Events: The Events Committee needs committee members. Send an email to Events@pdxaa.org for more information. Get Published! If you have AA news, a meeting change, a big event, a story, a painting, a poem, or just a rant, Sobriety in Stumptown wants to hear it! Send articles of 1000 words or fewer to: newsletter@pdxaa.org Deadline for the February issue: February 1st. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable. Tradition One Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity. Serenity Prayer God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. -Reprinted with permission of AA World Services, Inc. 9