A longtime member shares his journey of buried wounds and the importance of getting outside help
There’s an amend I owe that I hope someday I get to make face-to-face. It’s to another AA member who sat in front of me in a clubhouse meeting and told me how he’d been abused by one of his parents.
My insides tightened when this person talked to me. My mind went on high alert and my response was not good. “Do you have a sponsor?” I asked him. “Work the Steps,” I said. I had stronger words for him too. My words were harsh and landed on him like an attack. I could see it in his eyes. I haven’t seen him since.
Around that time, my own trauma had started surfacing and I was having great difficulty understanding why—after more than a decade of sobriety—I had ended up so close to suicide, by the bottle or in some other way.
Could it be a lack of sponsees in my AA program? Was I not giving enough back? Part of me hoped there would be some standard AA answer. But the issue was more complicated than I knew because I had no clue what to do about buried trauma, all these memories I’d been “treating” by telling myself to stop being so self-centered.
Thank God, as I understand God, that it is a few years later now and I have gained some tools to deal with these thoughts. And here is the odd thing that’s happened: These tools have been passed along to me by friends who have long-term sobriety. In discussing ways to treat psychological trauma, they made statements like, “This isn’t really AA,” and, “I had to look outside AA to get the help I really needed,” and “I was told by some people in AA that I was whining by talking about these things.” They helped me understand that it’s OK to seek help outside AA for trauma and other issues. It helped explain my difficulty in dealing with my own trauma in the rooms.
Yet it sometimes felt like I was experiencing the same judgment from AA people that I had given to that man in the clubhouse. Some of it even came from people who had shared with me about their own trauma. I felt like I had been given an emotionally painful “talking to,” more like an attack. Part of me hoped I was simply in need of an “ego-deflation” of the sort I had given that man.
Prayer, personal inventory and some research helped me see that I was probably being hit with someone else’s unresolved, untreated trauma. And sure enough, I heard “I don’t do therapy now, just AA”—as if it wasn’t part of the program. Maybe these members weren’t aware that many of us in AA have these wounds that can rise to the surface the longer we’re sober and which can cause harm when we don’t seek treatment for psychological issues.
A lot of sober alcoholics have, I believe, a useful tendency to stick with what we’ve been told to do in this program and pass to that on to others. But my experience teaches me that I need a deeper, more emotional recovery than others. Maybe we naturally fear going deeper and our disease says, “Just stick with what used to work.”
Well, that won’t work, not for this alcoholic. Our literature shows me that working the Twelve Steps includes healing from the wounds of abuse and other forms of trauma and that may require help from sources outside AA.
As a growing body of scientific evidence reveals the relationship between trauma and substance abuse, I hope more love and tolerance will be shown when trauma’s wounds are exposed in the rooms. Unhealed, these wounds can warp a sober alcoholic’s priorities, which means they can kill. I can’t consider that an outside issue anymore. Trauma might be the “elephant” in the rooms that we need to talk about.
For my part, if I see the man I harmed at that clubhouse through shaming, I hope to express to him something like this, in words or actions or both: “I’m sorry for not helping you to share what you needed to, my friend. I didn’t know that I’m wounded in the same ways. I’ve found that, for me, getting the help of a therapist is part of working our Tenth Step. Please feel free to share what you need to share, with me and with others.”
And I hope to give him the gift I got this week from a long-time sober friend who’s in trauma therapy too. It’s a gift that helped me let out deep, real tears and sobs that got stopped in me at a very early age—those dammed-up emotions our cofounder Bill W. wrote about. It was a kind, real smile, eyes and all.