Blog entry for:

on the group, by myself or other well-meaning members, is most often part of the problem and not the solution. if one are someone who reads this little diver into my thought process, one might get the impression that i not only desire, i actually expect certain behaviors and language to be part of every meeting that i attend. if my expectations are not met, that meeting sucks because of X, Y and Z and does not need to be graced by my presence there. yes my attitude often resembles a spoiled little child, who when he does not get his way, packs up his ball and goes home. i chide deride and generally disparage those who fail to live up to my exacting standards of behavior in a meeting and as i was sitting this morning, all of that became perfectly cl;ear, i am certainly trying to force unity through uniformity and that is far from the behavior that is needed to attract those in desperate need of our program of recovery. before i roll on, i need to do a call-out to someone i did not manage to chase away:

Kurt L
FOUR (4) years of doing each and every day.
Way to go, my friend and keep comin' back.

back in the here and now, what i feel and how oi behave are two different things today. i believe that ALL members, regardless of how long they have been clean or “around” the program, should use the language of our fellowship. to do anything less is a sign of ignorance and disrespect for the program. i believe that women should be able to express their feelings safely, without being swarmed on by a bunch of 13TH stepping resident creeps. i believe that carrying the message to the still suffering addict extends way beyond the newcomer, who may be the most important person in the room. i believe that when someone shares, they need to focus on what they do and did and not make general statements using “we” and “you,” as in doing so, one implies that there is a level of uniformity that does need to be addressed.
how often are my lofty expectations met? never 100%, but often not too far off the mark. is it really unrealistic of me to attend a meeting that has a busload of treatment denizens and expect hugely moving and spiritually motivated shares? of course it is, and over time, as i find myself finding less and less satisfaction at the meetings i attend, i begin to pull my head out of my a$$ and see that it is not the meeting that needs change, even if it is, it is me who needs to change what it is he expects to get from this group or that.
i often post about the feeling disrespected when the cross-fellowshippers start “slumming” in the meetings of the fellowship that has provided the means to be okay today. it feels to me, that they are often coming from on-high and trying to cram my fellowship into a box of derivatives, after all, they are here to carry the word from the original. what those well meaning but misguided members do not understand, that while this fellowship may have sprung from theirs, for the most part we have done away with most of the trappings and notions that those two white guys wrote down in the 1930s. all 12 STEP fellowships are not the same and the nature of recovery here, is way different than it is over there. in that fellowship i can have 19 years sober, even if i smoked , snorted, popped or shot something yesterday, as long as alcohol was not imbibed. it is all about a single drug and not addiction. where i go to meetings, i was taught that a drug is a drug and that i suffer from addiction, not that i am addicted to this or that. when i take out the notion that i am powerless over drugs and replace it with the fact that i am owned by addiction, the world of recovery opens up to me and i can seek a path to become more than i ever was.
so do i want everyone to see the light and walk the path i do? of course! do i expect them to? well based on what i heard this morning, i would say yes definitely and what i need to do, i come around to well maybe the best they can. after all, basing my contentment of the actions of others is bound to get me into some very dark places as they day go by.

∞ DT ∞