First Year Sobriety by Guy Kettelhack

Author:Guy Kettelhack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hazelden

Hanging On to Let Go

There are so many paradoxes in recovery. When asked by a newcomer in Twelve Step recovery, “What do I do to stay sober?” recovering addicts and alcoholics often feel reduced to repeating, “Don't drink, and go to meetings” because it's so hard to “explain” the magic of how recovery works in any more detailed way. One of the many paradoxes that most seems to frustrate explanation is what I've just told you my friend said: Sometimes you need to hang on to let go. This paradox has much to teach us about feelings—that you can tolerate them, that they don't have to “force” you to do anything self-destructive, rash, or irrevocable.

Matt, a twenty-five-year-old recovering crack addict and alcoholic, sheds some light on what this means. “I kept hearing ‘Let go, let God’ when I first came into the rooms. I thought this was great. ‘Easy does it’ was terrific too. It meant I didn't have to do anything, right? Just kind of, you know, lie back and let things happen. I could get into that. In fact, I'd been into that my whole life! You know, take a snort of something and let 'er rip. …”

However, Matt soon realized that “letting things happen” was pretty different from what Twelve Step people meant by “Let go, let God.” He realized this when he “let go” and experienced a huge craving to go back to crack—and gave into that craving. “What happened?” Matt says he asked when he ended up in detox for the second time. “I thought I was just doing what NA and AA were telling me to do!”

Matt was “pissed” at AA and NA—and also convinced that, while they might work for “lesser” addicts, they could never work for him. “First I told myself that Twelve Step programs just weren't powerful enough to deal with crack. I mean, when Bill W. and Dr. Bob started AA, there wasn't any crack around. Shit, man, I've been drunk. I used to love to get drunk. But it was nothing compared to crack. Nothing brought me that rush, not booze, not other drugs. I felt superhuman on that stuff, man. Happy forever. Until, of course, it wore off. Which it kept doing.”

Matt was going to a community college in Los Angeles when he got into crack. “I wasn't one of your usual fucked-up crack addicts, not like the press makes them out to be. I didn't come from the ghetto. I'm middle class—okay, maybe you'd call it lower middle-class, but my parents were pretty normal. I grew up in a house, got my meals. My dad drank some, but at least he was there. And my mom's okay. …”

Matt makes it clear that a lot of people he knew, even so-called nice people, did crack; in fact, that's how he got into it. “It was people in college who turned me on to it, not some sleazy drug addicts from a bad neighborhood. I thought, hell, if these guys could handle it, go to school, and get good jobs, it couldn't be that bad.

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