Twelve Step Telephone Meetings

Twelve Step telephone meetings are a lifeline for me, an opportunity to listen and learn and sometimes to share and do service work.  Lately I have been struggling to get myself to share my story and/or current situation.  My social and emotional anorexia block me.  Last week I did get up the courage to share for about three minutes on a women's meeting for Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous.  I shared that I had been in a domestic violence/love addicted relationship.  I shared that I suffered from schizoaffective disorder.  I had a desire to be transparent and direct and so I was, but then I have not shared again yet.

My next challenge is to take one or more of the numbers I've written down of women willing to connect and be recovery partners and text or call.  When I turn away from that challenge, I am thinking to myself that I'm not good enough to offer friendship to someone new.  I self stigmatize myself as mentally ill.  I am mentally ill but I need to be proud of how far I've come and how sincerely I want to recover my sanity.  I do have a lot of faith that sanity/health is possible for me and those who seek it.  But faith needs the footwork and too often I find myself lying down, too much in my head and not enough in my heart.

Right from the beginning of entering into acute psychosis in the spring of 1998 there was a desire in me to connect with others, to make friendships, to take on more responsibility.  But desire led to delusions.  Delusions led to reaching out in sickness and desperation.  There was the threat of Hell if I didn't, but only after I had visited a Hell on the kitchen floor of my ex-boyfriend's apartment.  I had had an idealistic vision of joining some kind of artistic group filled with possibly higher purposes.  My delusions showed me a sick group, a group I did not want to join.  But reality did come through when I went to see a therapist and committed to Al-Anon and a domestic violence support group.  These were real people with real struggles trying to get and give help.  For a time, I joined them.

The people I'm listening to on the telephone lines are also real people with real struggles and also real successes.  It is hard to be vulnerable, open and direct, but over and over that's what I hear in these telemeetings.  A lot of the meetings have been getting hacked with people breaking into the calls and often saying or implying obscene things, or just making noise, or even adding reverb to whomever is speaking making it very hard to concentrate.  One morning I was on an open Sex Addicts Anonymous telephone meeting for the study of AA's Big Book and it was being hacked.  We happened to be reading this paragraph:  "We realized the the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.  Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick, too.  We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended we said to ourselves, 'This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him?  God save me from being angry.  Thy will be done.'" (pp 66-67 - The AA Study Edition)

By the end of that meeting it was clear that everyone on the line was practicing faith and tolerance and it felt good.  I felt respect for those who read and shared on that phone call, but I feel respect just generally for anyone trying to seek help for themselves.  Still, it's not enough to feel respect, I need to show respect for others by taking my seat and sharing, too.

Working Step One - Powerlessness & Unmanageability

This is how I have been rewording the First Step of the Twelve Steps to fit myself and my situation:  "We admitted we were powerless over social and emotional anorexia and poor self-care, that our lives had become unmanageable."

I have been working on Step One for over 6 months since I asked a friend to become my sponsor.  I've gone from support book to support book with my sponsor trying to move through the step and I have been getting repeatedly stuck.  I'm only realizing that what I've been coming up against is my own self-will.  Where there's self-will, there is no surrender and this step is about surrendering to the truth, becoming vulnerable.

My addictive pattern is one of avoidance.  Even as I do my best to confront the truth about myself or, at least, make a dent in my denial system here, I am still avoiding other responsibilities, such as - cleaning my home, paying my bills, washing my clothes, cooking, exercising, going out of the house, calling someone in recovery, calling anyone.  What I do here in reflecting and communicating is good and useful, but it is not enough.

I embraced Al-Anon years ago because I was living with an alcoholic who was abusive to me.  Through reading their daily readers, I began learning the Twelve Steps, the slogans and the concepts of the group.  I began to believe in something greater than myself.  I reached out for a Higher Power.  Eventually, I went to some meetings.  I got a lot out of those meetings, both comfort and insight.  But I did not stay and would return sporadically over the years.  I did not call people from the meetings and most of the time, most of my life, I stayed in isolation from others.

I began calling myself an adult child decades ago and I continue to be one.  I began an addictive pattern of self isolation decades ago and I continue to practice it.  My ability to care for my physical needs and home declined rapidly after I went into psychosis in 1998 and I continue with that addictive pattern today.  Intellectually I see the pattern, but without connection to my heart I don't really learn the lesson; I don't change.

Not changing and not only seeing it, but feeling it and labeling it "Addiction" is me moving towards the temporary completion of Step One.  (I believe the the Steps are meant to be repeated throughout one's life as a process of deepening one's understanding, highlighting insight and facilitating intuition from the Higher Power.)  I'm yearning to move on to Step Two - "Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."  The truth is that I need to sit in awareness a bit longer.  I need to own the powerlessness and unmanageability of my life.

I need to do more Step work; I need to write it out and look at it, read it and review it.  I need to brand it into my mind, heart and spirit.