If you are sowing (planting) seed, you expect to reap a harvest at some point.  But if you are not careful where you plant the seed, you might not see any growth.  The seed represents what you are doing with your life.  The place you plant the seed represents where and how you live.

At your lowest point your seeds may have been falling by the wayside – somewhere like a sidewalk – where nothing can grow.  Birds would eat the seeds and you would never see any growth.  Your life was nearly pointless and you did not produce much of anything good.  As you began to recover, perhaps you found stony ground – like a gravel pit – where you might see a little progress here and there, but eventually you would go back to where you were with your life a mess.  Seed among thorns is like trying to live around those who are not helpful – who do not understand your addiction and are not helpful to your recovery.  This can be a friend that encourages you to abuse, or even a well-meaning family member that simply doesn’t understand why you don’t quit.

Perhaps you have run this course backwards and are now at the wayside.  But there is hope!

Find the good ground – that place where you can live out your recovery.  If you keep visiting that liquor store, or keep hanging around those streets where drugs and/or sex are readily available, you are still sowing in bad ground, and the wayside is your ultimate destination.  But if you can find the good ground – understanding friends, good family, books and other helps – you can begin to sow seed that will produce real growth.  You can grow in your recovery – so find that good ground!

I realized shortly after I arrived (still in a bit of a stupor after having gone on quite a bender) that I had been stuck in an AA program. After several hours of being angry about that, I thought, “What the hell!  I’m going to just try this out and see if it works.”  I was assigned a counselor, and I slowly began to meet the other people in the program.  There were something like 50 to 75 people in the program at any one time.

We had daily small group meetings where we were encouraged to share.  It was a strange mix of kindness and brutality, most of which was based on the whim of the counselor that was moderating the meeting of 5 to 10 people.

We were told, “You are no different than anyone else in here.”  That did not turn out to be true at all, and was one of the first things I began to notice.  Most of the people there were blue collar types (I am white collar).  Most did not have a lot of college education, whereas I do.  Many were in trouble with the law, some of them very seriously.  I was not.  However, these were just the surface differences. What about the “disease” of alcoholism?

Probably the most noticeable differences involved cravings and the delirium tremens, also known as the DT’s.  People would talk about cravings for a drink in much the same way a smoker would start wanting a cigarette.  I never had any such cravings.  I asked a man who said he had cravings to describe them to me one day.  After a minute or two of fumbling around with his words, a large drop of sweat formed on his forehead.  He said, “Can we not talk about this anymore?”  He was clearly in some sort of mental/physical distress. Again, I never had any such thing.  He and others would also regularly get the shakes by just thinking about a drink.  I never did this either. Lastly, there were only a small handful of us that strictly drank alcohol/wine/beer.  Everyone else combined it with prescription drugs like Xanax, or illegal substances like pot, meth, cocaine and heroin.

So I knew that somehow I was different, and it wasn’t just because of surface reasons.  My alcohol problem was very different from most others.  Yes, perhaps still at the core there were similarities, but one path doesn’t work for everyone, and one way fits all is what they taught at rehab.

Here is the methodology in a nutshell (for alcoholics, that is – substitute your favorite drug for alcohol and change AA to NA – Narcotics Anonymous).  You must do, accept, believe, the following:

• You must call yourself an alcoholic.  Otherwise you are in denial. You will have to call yourself this the rest of your life. You will never not be an alcoholic.
• You must start attending regular AA meetings.  Once out of rehab, you should try to attend 90 meetings in the first 90 days.
• There are 12 steps in the AA program.  You must work through all 12 steps, including things like making retribution for your past mistakes.
• You must get another alcoholic from an AA meeting who has been sober for a long time (we heard, 2, 5 and 10 years), to be your sponsor.  Your sponsor will help you work through the 12-steps of the program and will also be available 24/7 to call when you are tempted to drink.  Your sponsor should be of the same sex unless it is absolutely impossible for some reason (e.g., you live in some tiny town and the only person there is of the opposite sex).
• Alcoholism is a disease, sort of like an allergy to alcohol.
• The only way to stay sober is to have a higher power to help you with it.  The higher power cannot be yourself.  It can, however, be anything else in the world (or out of this world).  It can be a paper clip, a doorknob, your deceased parents, the AA meeting group itself, a unicorn, Jesus, Buddha, or Santa Claus. Even if you are an atheist, you must make up a god and pray to it.  If you refuse to do this, you will never get sober.
• You can never disagree with the Big Book, the antiquated writings of AA that date back to the 1930′s, because once Bill W. discovered AA and wrote it down, it became like the Bible.

Now some chapters of AA might be a little lenient on some of the points.  Most groups claim that the only thing you need to be a member is a desire not to drink today.  But almost no one in the meetings will think you have any chance at sobriety unless you do the above things.

I do not begrudge anyone who goes to AA, and anyone who claims that the program works for them.  Good for them!  But it did not work for me.  And I just can’t be that intellectually dishonest with myself.  The entire time I’m making up a god to pray to, the other part of my mind is saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”  So I have to be true to myself.   Doing AA is not being true to myself.

But the good news is that there are many other ways to get sober. Not to mention the least of which is not buying any more liquor! That has been the only thing so far that works for me.

Do you feel strong? You are. You are stronger than you ever imagined. No one can enter your home, your personal life, and spoil your “goods” unless they first come in and tie you up. But if you are in recovery, you know how it feels to be “tied up”.

You may feel defeated today, and that is understandable. You’ve been tied up for a long time. You let a friend into your home, and unsuspecting to you, this so-called friend tied you up when you were least expecting it. You had been having a good time with this friend – alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or whatever – but one day you awoke to realize that you had been tied up and were no longer in control of the situation. You were once strong, but you were taken advantage of by someone stronger. Now you feel weak, foolish, and betrayed.

But the good news is that today you can be the strong one again. You have the capability to throw off those shackles and kick this imposter out of your life. Be strong for today and begin to repair the damage. The spoiling of your home and your life may have been extensive, but the only way to begin repairing or rebuilding your life is to remove the one who tied you up from your life.

You can do it, as have many before you. Why not start the rebuilding today?

New cloth and new wine. Sounds like an alcoholic’s dream, doesn’t it? Fresh clothing and a bottle! But this story is not really about cloth and wine. It is about newness.

The old garment and old bottles are your old ways. If you keep your old ways while attempting to try something new, you are likely to fail. You must turn from the old ways – wrong attitudes, bad influences (like friends who encourage you to abuse), unwise associations and habitats – and instead turn to new ways. Then, when you try new things to help you in recovery, you will be ready to accept them.

Andy was in recovery but kept seeing a friend that encouraged him to drink. He also kept going to the same bars where he regularly got drunk. He’d say, “I’ll be the designated driver. I’ll just have a ginger ale.” But it almost never worked. His new attitude of not drinking conflicted with his old habits, and he usually ended up having a relapse.

He later realized the problem and slowly began to disassociate himself from those old friends and old haunts. It became easier and easier to not drink – and to stick to his new attitude of not drinking – now that he was removed from the temptation.

What are your garments and wineskins today? Are they new or old? Are they compatible with your new cloth and new wine?

Remember, I’m not worth a damn to anyone if I don’t take care of me.

Even tempered – having a chip on both shoulders.

Keep your own side of the street clean (don’t worry with everyone else, just make sure you stay sober).

I have to be me – everyone else is already taken.

Recognize that you can begin to lose your sobriety long before you ever take a drink. There is usually plenty of time to a) talk yourself back to sanity, b) call someone that will help you.

That really doesn’t need much explanation. Just think about it. Resentment will eat you up and I know for myself that it has led me to drink a number of times. Write down everything you are resentful of, then throw it away, burn it, whatever. Those are your feelings about what someone else has done. You are in control of those much more than you might think. But you are not in control of what the other person does (any more than they are in control of you). The anger and resentment will just cause stress on your body and it can even incite you to drink (notice I didn’t say cause you to drink – only you can pick up that first drink).

If I react with anger in the short term because of what someone says or does, that is perfectly normal. If I am still angry or resentful days, weeks, or years from now, it has completely become my problem.

Get rid of your resentments and anger before they kill you.