Bedevilments AA
A cynical drunk arrives in AA.
My drinking was a lonely business. Before coming to AA, mine was an Oscar-winning performance for the role of the Lone Ranger. Unsurprisingly, AA has had a special place in my heart. Even though early recovery was a roller coaster ride of painful mood swings, putting down the alcohol was the best thing I ever did! I could never have stayed sober without the support of my fellow alcoholics.
Although I loved the fellowship, I didn’t like or agree with some aspects of AA. The first thing that put me off was the idea that the alcoholic needed to believe in God to stay sober. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what God or any higher power had to do with not drinking.
The second thing I didn’t like was the idea that alcoholism was a disease. As sick as I was, I told myself that calling it an illness was a cop-out. Did Bill W and Dr. Bob come up with the disease concept of alcoholism to take the moral stigma out of being a drunk?
The “juggernaut of self-will’” (12&12 Step three p.37)
Prejudice against the “God” word and a cynical attitude toward the disease concept of alcoholism prevented me from getting a sponsor and working the twelve steps. I floundered in AA for years, bouncing from one relapse to the next. Defiance and self-sufficiency were almost my undoing. I was just as crazy and self-destructive sober as I was when drinking.
“Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”
BB “More about alcoholism” p.30
Eventually and very reluctantly, I realized that, whether I was drinking or not, I was depressed and miserable. No amount of sex, power, money, or therapy kept me from picking up that first drink. It gradually dawned on me that I would have to change my attitude to the program. A hard-won acceptance of step one helped me become teachable.
Positive and negative higher powers
One of my early attempts to work the program was to join a Big Book study. About fifty AA members attended the group. The idea was to go through the first 164 pages of the Big Book. We were given written assignments on every step. For those of us who didn’t believe in God, AA itself was to be our higher power. In step three, the group facilitator suggested that we were merely making a ‘decision’ to persevere with the rest of the steps.
The assignment on step two was an eye-opener. First, we had to list all our negative and positive higher powers. The negative higher powers condemned us to continue living in our problems. Conversely, the positive higher powers helped us begin living in the solutions to our problems.
Bedevilments – First Exposure
The second part of the assignment refers to one paragraph of the AA Big Book. You will find it on page 52 of the chapter “We Agnostics.” Here, we see the eight bedevilments. What on earth were they? I had never heard of them in twenty-five years of going to meetings.
Despite remaining an agnostic, the bedevilments blew my mind. It turned out that they were a game changer in my recovery. I could no longer deny that in my prejudice to the “God” word in the Big Book, I frequently threw the baby out with the bath water. I began to discover many essential and valuable passages in the Big Book. The paragraph containing the eight bedevilments was one such passage:
- We were having trouble with personal relationships.
- We couldn’t control our emotional natures.
- We were prey to misery and depression.
- We couldn’t make a living.
- We had a feeling of uselessness.
- We were full of fear.
- We were unhappy.
- We couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people.
– was not a basic solution to these bedevilments more important than whether we should see newsreels of lunar flight? Of course, it was.” (BB p.52)
A double-take
When I first saw them, I had to do a double-take. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “these eight bedevilments are the story of my life.” Some of them were my reality before I even started drinking! I suddenly sensed that for the first time since coming to AA, I was onto something big. If someone came up to me and read me the bedevilments and then told me that they were an accurate description of my personality, I would think that they were psychic.
Each of these bedevilments was a 100% accurate description of my character. They were my reality, whether I was drinking or not. The facilitator of the Big Book study presented them as the symptoms of the illness. If it was an illness, could it be that the eight bedevilments were the “diagnostic criteria”?
Writing the second step assignment
All fifty of us went home and completed the second step assignment. It’s important to mention that I knew many of the participants of the Big Book study. Some of them had been my buddies for years in AA. Like me, they were all staying sober by going to meetings alone. Moreover, they, too, suffered from depression, anxiety, and an inner emptiness and loneliness that nothing could fill. Many were still unemployed and receiving social security benefits from the government. Again, like me, their lives were still too unmanageable to get a regular job.
The next time the group met, we discussed what we had learned from the assignment. Almost without exception, the eight bedevilments were still the dominant feature of our sober lives. It occurred to me that if we, as alcoholics, were all suffering from the same symptoms, could we all be suffering from a common illness? It began to look that way. After being introduced to the bedevilments, I began to warm to the idea that alcoholism was an illness. Our pathologies as dry alcoholics were all strikingly similar.
The spiritual malady (Big Book p.64)
I was now at a crossroads. Although I was open to the idea that alcoholism was a mental health issue, as an agnostic, I was unwilling to accept that it was a spiritual illness. At the time, I still believed that a spiritual awakening depended on a belief in God. Several things happened after that to help me accept Bill’s idea that, at its core, alcoholism was spiritual. Initially, the bedevilments struck me more as signs of poor mental and emotional health.
I read many books about New Age spirituality in my quest for answers. In them, I learned that a non-theistic spiritual awakening was just as valid as a theistic one. My problem was with the punishing God of the Old Testament. The books about modern spirituality explained that God was universal consciousness, not a vengeful Father God in the sky. I finally began moving in the right direction.
The clincher
Believing that recovery from alcoholism was purely a psychological process, I went into therapy to try and resolve my problems. I persevered with meetings and therapy for ten years. That combination did little to free me from relapse and the miseries of untreated alcoholism.
To the best of my ability, I went through the twelve steps with an agnostic-friendly sponsor. Step eight was so decisive that it was life-changing. I knew that I could never be the same person. I went into step eight, still very much a selfish and self-centered alcoholic, and came out with a heartfelt desire to practice love and service in AA. If that isn’t a valid non-God-centered spiritual awakening, I don’t know what is.
Another thing that led me to believe that alcoholism was not only an illness but a spiritual illness was logic. Ten years of psychological talk therapies failed to keep me sober and overcome the power of the bedevilments. Suppose the twelve steps, presented as a mechanism of a spiritual awakening, began to resolve the bedevilments. In that case, I must have been spiritually sick.
“When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.”
Big Book “How it Works” p. 64
In fellowship
Andy F
