Having lost faith in everything, he needed a starting-over point
You might say I had trust issues when I came into AA. Early in my life, I was kind of a normal kid. I got through grade school all right with mediocre grades, but I had a pretty nice time. After grade school is when things started to go off the tracks. I had expressed a little interest in attending a religious boarding school that prepared young men for the ministry and or teaching. Well, my parents ran with that and the next thing I knew I was on my own in Milwaukee learning Latin and religion as well as other subjects.
I started to run afoul of the faculty when I started to ask questions in religion class. At that time this particular denomination brooked no dissent. By my junior year they were getting pretty tired of my questioning the tenets of their religious beliefs. My attitude earned me a trip the school president’s office. I naively thought that he just might be able to explain things to me in a way that I could believe. I soon found that this was my exit interview as he was telling me not to return for my senior year. Oddly, as I left his office, I got an overwhelming feeling of freedom. I knew that religion could not be trusted, and I wouldn’t darken the doorstep of a church ever again. So religion was out.
I returned home for my senior year of high school. During this time my cousin lost his father to a heart attack. My cousin was over at our house one day and he and my dad and I were talking. My dad proceeded to tell my cousin that he could count on my dad and come to him if he needed help or advice. I was aghast because my father never gave me any help or advice. I was truly hurt and I vowed not to trust him again. So family was out of the picture.
After working for year, I joined the Navy. It was during the Viet Nam conflict and at the time they needed lots of help. I did all right in the service and advanced in rank, but still found time to enjoy myself. I thought that I knew how to drink and party, but the Navy honed my skills considerably. As I came to the end of my enlistment after about four years, I could see that we hadn’t made hardly any progress in the war. It just looked like we weren’t in it to win it. I lost faith in our leadership and decided to leave the service after my enlistment. It didn’t look as if government could be trusted, and I resolved to be skeptical when it came to politics.
Like most of the guys leaving service at that time, I eventually found a nice job and started in on the rest of my life. Soon enough I fell in love with a woman and was just beginning to think that just maybe we could build a life together when I found out that she was seeing someone else. As I was drinking a lot now, I decided to drink even more to blot out the pain of this failed relationship. I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t trust anybody or any institution ever again. I kept everyone at arm’s length.
What followed is what usually happens to us alcoholics. Detoxes, treatment programs, depression and infrequent bouts of AA were my life. I just couldn’t let down my guard to become an involved member of AA. Until that day finally came when I couldn’t drink any more—but I couldn’t not drink either. I thought about killing myself, but eventually pulled myself together enough to go to one more AA meeting. It turned out to be a Saturday morning meeting at the local men’s recovery house. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the meeting was centered on those guys with the least amount of sobriety and with two days dry I certainly qualified.
I for once let down my guard and told those forty or fifty guys at the meeting how badly I was doing and that I could really use some help. After the meeting I asked one of those guys to be my temporary sponsor. He just smiled and handed me his business card and said to call every day.
Trusting a complete stranger with my innermost secrets in the course of my Fifth Step was almost more than I could do. But before I started, my sponsor told me some things about himself that were less than flattering. I knew that my sobriety and even my life depended on my being honest in this endeavor.
After that beginning, I chipped away at my lack of trust. I really appreciated that AA didn’t tell me what to believe, but that it was up to me to find my own spiritual path. Nobody seemed to want anything from me in AA. More than that, they seemed to want to help me. I loved the way AA was organized or rather the lack of organization. Where most organizations try to gather money and prestige, the Traditions specifically warned about accumulating too much money and prestige.
I had finally found something that I could believe in and trust. With these simple beginnings I started to find a new life, which I needed, because I seemed to have skipped the growing up part of my life.
I read someplace that Bill Wilson called AA “a spiritual kindergarten.” That’s just where I needed to start.