LMS Ep 5 Step X Step

The speaker discusses their experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous, dissecting the 12 steps humorously. They highlight the spiritual aspects of the program, emphasizing the importance of recognizing powerlessness over addiction and seeking a higher power for recovery. The steps are described as a form of cognitive behavioral therapy with a spiritual component. The speaker delves into each step, emphasizing the need for honesty, self-reflection, and making amends. They stress the significance of humility and letting go of control in the recovery process. The narrative also touches on societal addiction patterns and the role of spirituality in overcoming addiction. Welcome back, my beautiful disasters, to another plunge into the beautiful wreckage of my existence. Please feel free to take my thoughts and use them as your own, but don't forget, I'm only your host, speaking to you from the other side of a 30-year haze. Today we're performing surgery. I'm dissecting the 12 steps, because nothing, and I mean nothing, is more ripe for comedic autopsy than the beautiful, maddening, life-saving clusterfuck that is Alcoholics Anonymous. I did those steps about 12 times over two decades. Twelve. Twelve times. I was like a spiritual hamster on a wheel of good intentions and spectacular failures. Each time I was convinced that I was different, special, that I could outsmart a program designed by a stockbroker who talked to God during his delirium tremens. For those who don't know, DTs or delirium tremens, I apologize, is an uncommon but severe complication of alcohol withdrawal. It occurs in approximately 5% of people who experience alcohol withdrawal after chronic heavy drinking. Among individuals with alcohol dependence, the lifetime risk of developing DTs is estimated at 5 to 10%. For the general population, the risk is much lower, since not everyone with alcohol dependence undergoes withdrawal, and not all withdrawal cases progress to DTs. And that is according to Golden Gate Recovery, Medscape, and Wikipedia. I try not to make things up. Here's the big cosmic joke. Bill W.'s spiritual awakening was probably just his brain cooking itself dry after years of gin and grandiosity. The man was seeing pink elephants and calling them angels. But you know what? Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and sometimes the most profound truths come from the most absurd of circumstances. Let me paint you a picture of normal society, because that's what I'm supposedly trying to join, right? The normies. Watch them sometimes. Really watch them. And if you're already in there, if you're one of them, stop and take a look around. They're standing in line at Starbucks, tapping their phones like prayer wheels, mainlining caffeine, They're standing in line at Starbucks, tapping their phones like prayer wheels, mainlining caffeine and sugar while discussing their cleanse. They're addicted to shopping, to social media, to the adrenaline of manufactured outrage. They're popping Xanax at Tic Tacs and washing down Adderall with energy drinks. The only difference between me and possibly you and them and how socially acceptable is your drug of choice. Carl Jung understood this. He wrote about the collective unconscious, that shared pool of human madness that we all swim in. He knew that every addiction is just a misdirected spiritual longing, a soul trying to fill a God-shaped hole with increasingly inadequate substitutes. The craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness. Carl Jung said that to Bill W. in a letter. And for you true beginners out there, Bill W. is Bill Wilson, the imperfect founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. So think about that. The Swiss master of the psyche telling a drunk that his disease was actually a spiritual emergency. It's kind of beautiful, right? Let's get real about these steps. People act like they're written in Sanskrit by enlightened beings, and they're not. They're cognitive behavioral therapy with a chaser of God, any God. The founders were undoubtedly Christian, but any power greater than yourself will do. And it can't be a light bulb or a teddy bear. Those things are not beyond comprehension. They don't inspire awe in billions of people. You can't expect something without that kind of strength to be able to relieve you of the misery that you've been soaking in for however many years you've been doing it. You need something that is truly powerful, more powerful than your own ego. Religion has no place in AA. That's what I think. But spirituality is the key ingredient. So basically the steps are stop lying to yourself. Stop lying, period. Take a close look at your thoughts and actions that keep you trapped in your misery. Don't look at the actions of other people because they just aren't your business and they're out of your control. Clean up your own mess. Help others whenever you can and apply these things in every single moment of your life. And the substances or behaviors that are ruining your life will fade away because there won't be any more reasons to do them. And that's it. That's the whole program. Everything else is just literary decoration and committee recommendations. That's my opinion only. I'm going to do an episode on each of the 12 steps individually. I'd like to do one a month, but I encourage you to take a look on your own. Focus on the spiritual principles that go with each step if you're trying to get sober. For instance, acceptance is the spiritual principle of step one. And it also happens to be today's sponsor. What luck. I'm going to do an episode on each of the 12 steps individually. I'd like to do one a month, but I encourage you to take a look on your own. Focus on the spiritual principles that go with each step if you're trying to get sober. For instance, acceptance is the spiritual principle of step one. And it also happens to be today's sponsor. What luck. Step one says, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable. Translation, I'm fucked and I know it. This step sucks because it asks people to admit defeat. But here's what 30 years of research has taught me. You can't defeat an enemy you refuse to acknowledge. I've spent decades trying to manage my drinking, etc. Mostly etc. Like a financial portfolio. Actually, instead of a financial portfolio. I'll drink beer only on the weekends. Or I'll switch to wine from rum. Or I'll just snort coke instead of smoking crack. You get the picture. Meanwhile, I'm stealing copper wires by brillo pads and wondering why my strategic planning isn't working. If you got that joke, you got that joke. But if not, my point is that for a lot of us moderation just is not a thing. No matter how hard we try or how loudly we beg the universe, we're hooked. And there is no getting off a bath hook. If you can moderate, God bless you. If you can't, just admit it and take the first step towards peace. The normies do the same thing. They're managing their social media addiction by switching platforms. They're controlling their shopping by using different credit cards. They moderate their workaholism by taking working vacations. It's the same dance, different demons. Some obviously more corrosive to social fabric than others. But they're all detrimental. Steps two and three are where people really get their spiritual underpants in a twist. Number two is came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And number three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. God as we understood him, not God as Pastor Bob understands him. Not God as the big book describes him, as you understand him. And if pronouns are getting you down, you know, I agree in society at large. It's something that we need to take a look at, and it is slowly changing. And I applaud people who are, you know, I hate to say woke because I don't like woke. But people have the right to be whoever they want. This is not one of those times where you need to take a stand about pronouns. If you're willing to die over the gender of somebody else's higher power, then you are a goner. I don't know how else to say it. The him doesn't matter. It can be anything you want. It could be Buddha. It could be the universe. It could be the life force that turns acorns into oak trees. I knew a guy who used gravity as his higher power. It worked great for him. He'd say, I can't see gravity, but I can trust it to keep me grounded. You know, brilliant. Kind of terrible, but brilliant. The point isn't theology. It's humility. It's admitting that my brilliant mind, the same one that convinced me that smoking in class in high school was a good idea, might not be the best CEO of my life. Emily Dickinson wrote, I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell. They'd banish us, you know. That's step three in a nutshell. Embrace your nobody-ness. Stop trying to be God. And maybe don't quote Emily Dickinson. It's a little pretentious. Step four, make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. This is where the rubber meets the road, folks. It's time to excavate the archaeological layers of your bullshit. And everybody's got layers to their bullshit. The normies just hide theirs better. I watched a buddy from AA Road Rage at the Teenage Driver once screaming at a girl like she'd personally cancel a Christmas. And then he posted on Facebook about choosing God-ness later. We are all walking contradictions. Step four is all about being honest about your hypocrisy, about the things that we've done that hurt others and ourselves. The deeper this thing is buried in our minds, the more important it is to uncover and make peace with. The inventory isn't about self-flagellation. It's about pattern recognition. Why do you keep ending up in the same situations? Why do you attract the same types of people? Why does your life feel like Groundhog Day directed by Edgar Allen Poe? I don't know. For me, it was always about control. I'd rather be miserable and in control than happy and vulnerable. So I chose substances that gave me the illusion of control while systematically destroying my ability to control anything. Steps five through nine are the cleanup crew. Admit your shit to another human being. Get ready for change. Ask God to remove your defects. Make amends. People overthink all this stuff. They want to know the exact procedure, the perfect words, the foolproof formula. They think – sorry, I should say I used to think that the steps were these obstacles that I had to jump over, hoops to jump through. And once I got through the twelfth one, I'd instantly be sober and my life would be perfect. Not the way it works. The founders of the twelve steps did all of them in 24 hours. Not because they were superhuman, but because they were desperate. And desperation is the mother of spiritual invention. The normies make amends too. They just don't call it that. They apologize to the kids for being on their phones too much. They promise their spouses they'll work less. They donate to charity to offset their carbon footprint. Same process, different wrapping paper. Steps 10, 11, and 12 are the maintenance steps. Keep doing inventory. Keep praying, meditating, connecting to whatever it is that you feel is bigger than your own ego. And help others whenever possible. It doesn't mean that you have to go out and spend all your free time helping people. You don't have to volunteer all the time. But if the opportunity arises to help someone, help them. Period. That's all. Especially if it comes to somebody struggling with the same things that you are. That's a big part of the reason why I'm talking into this microphone right now. I couldn't think of a better way to help people with the potential of reaching the most people that I could. And this is where the real magic happens. Not my podcast. But in the initial surrender. In the daily practice of not being a complete asshole. Of catching yourself before you spiral. Of choosing service over self-pity. Here's what I learned after a dozen attempts and 30 years of research. The steps aren't about perfection. They're about progress. And I didn't actually learn that over 30 years. It says it right in how it works. It just took me that long to understand what it means. They're about showing up to your own life instead of sleepwalking through it. The normies need this too. They're just as asleep. They're just as addicted. Just as spiritually bankrupt. Everybody is. But some people hide it better behind their mortgages in their minivans. AA meetings can be brutal. All that judgment disguised as concern. All those people who've confused the map with the territory. Who quote the big book like it's scripture instead of the rambling memoir of a dead stock broker. But here's the thing. You don't need to like the meetings to use the steps. You don't need to agree with every word in the big book. You don't need to drink the Kool-Aid to get sober. The steps are just a framework. Like cognitive behavioral therapy with the spiritual twist like I said earlier. Like what good people do naturally without even thinking about it. Tom Robbins, one of my favorite authors, wrote, The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in the fall and north in the springtime. That's the kind of higher power I'm talking about. The intelligence that turns seeds into flowers, wounds into scars, and sometimes, if we're very lucky, drunks and addicts into human beings. So if you're sitting there thinking about recovery, wondering if the steps are for you, here's my advice. Stop thinking and start doing because the steps aren't perfect. So if you're sitting there thinking about recovery, wondering if the steps are for you, this is my advice. And I try not to give advice, but I will give this. Stop thinking and start doing. Not because the steps are perfect, but because you're not. So if you're sitting there thinking about recovery, wondering if the steps are for you, here's my advice. Stop thinking and start doing. Not because the steps are perfect, but because you're not. Not because Bill W. had all the answers, but because you don't. The steps aren't the only way to get sober, but they are a way. They're a ladder out of the pit, rungs worn smooth by millions of hands reaching for something better. And to those of you who think you don't need recovery because you're normal, normal is just a setting on the washing machine. And to those of you who don't need recovery because you're normal, normal is just a setting on your washing machine. We are all broken. We're all addicted to something. We're all searching for meaning in a universe that seems designed by a committee of chaos theorists and MAGA. The only difference is some of us are willing to admit it. Until next time, this is Jason reminding you. Until next time, this was the Loudness Medieval Symposium. I am Jason. So until next time, this is Jason reminding you that recovery isn't about becoming perfect. It's about becoming human. And humanity, my friends, is a contact sport. So stay loud, stay honest, and remember, the only way out is through. Please don't forget that if you like this content to like, share, subscribe, whatever else you're supposed to do, tell your friends. If there's somebody that's suffering that you know, please send this along. Tell them about it if you think it could help. If you don't, that's cool too. I'm glad you listened. If you like what you heard today, please remember to like, subscribe, share, whatever else you're supposed to do. Please tell your friends. The most important thing for me is that if you know somebody who is struggling, let them know about this if you think it could help them. That is my goal, my only goal. And if you could do that, I would be very appreciative. Hopefully they will be too. See you next time.