The Recovering by Leslie Jamison

Author:Leslie Jamison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology / Psychopathology / Addiction, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Body, Mind & Spirit / Healing / Prayer & Spiritual, Literary Criticism / Modern / General, Biography & Autobiography / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

That first winter of my second sobriety, my sponsor gave me a chart to fill out for my Fourth Step, which involved making an inventory of all my resentments.

“Just that?” I joked. “How long do you have?”

She smiled patiently and said: “Trust me, I’ve seen worse.”

My sponsor—Stacy—was a funny, generous woman who’d gotten sober before she was legal. She was nothing like me, except that neither of us had ever wanted to drink any other way besides a deep dive into drunk. She was matter-of-fact about her own experiences, and listened patiently to my rambling, comprehensive monologues, nodding but not particularly impressed, often distilling them to their core urgencies: So you were afraid of being left? Her distillations weren’t reductions. They captured something it was useful for me to see starkly, without the webbing of so much language. Every time I thanked her profusely for taking the time to meet with me, she told me the same thing: “This keeps me sober, too.”

When I first got into AA, I had been told to choose a sponsor who “had what I wanted.” I sensed this didn’t mean a Pulitzer Prize. I eventually chose Stacy not because she reminded me of myself, but because she didn’t. She moved through the world with assurance—helpful without seeming righteous, humble without excess apology. It felt viscerally good to be around her ease, like silk against the skin. She was not ashamed to confess the size of her love for her Pomeranian. We shared a sense of humor, both laughed at the part of Bill’s story in the Big Book where he said he’d never been unfaithful while he was drinking, out of “loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness.” We liked that he confessed the less-than-noble reason, too.

Stacy and I had worked together before my relapse, and when I decided to get sober again, she and her fiancé had taken me to my first meeting back. “Thank you for giving me another chance,” I’d gushed, thinking it was all about our connection.

“Of course,” she’d said. “That’s how the program works.”

When it came to my Fourth Step, I was anxious about the format of the list—a spreadsheet with extremely narrow columns—because I wasn’t sure how I’d tell the full story of each item I was listing. “Some of my situations are pretty complicated,” I explained.

“So are everyone’s,” my sponsor said. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

The Fourth Step was supposed to include all my “harms and resentments,” but I asked Stacy if I was supposed to list people I resented, even if I hadn’t caused them any harm. She smiled. I was clearly not the first alcoholic who had asked this question. “Anyone who gives you a knot in your gut,” she said. The chart had a column asking me to link each of my resentments to a motivating fear—fear of conflict, fear of abandonment—and I filled it out dutifully, always a model student. (Fear of inadequacy.) I hadn’t done an inventory during my first sobriety, and it was part of my attempt to do things differently this time around.

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