Couple thoughts

[gimmeid]

I struggled with my temper ever since sobriety, and recently put my daughter out of my care over it, then drank again, after a year and a half.
I have been sober again a week now, and it is a miracle.

I am absolutely sure that my daughter and me being separated was necessary not just for her well being, but for me too. It got us both out of a bad situation that was beyond either of our control. I believe the whole thing was in God's hands the entire time, Who will deal with me as gently as possible, but unfortunately has 10 inches of human skull to work with.
My oldest sister has raised my oldest daughter from an infant, and I attempted to raise my youngest after my wife left and I sobered up.

What I can say is it was there all along, to see my older sister doing something for my oldest daughter, which I knew she had to have and I could not provide, and the ugly, horrible truth, bit by bit, month after month started seeping in that the same was true of my youngest.

I fought until I found myself once more in the gates of insanity and hell, which is where, unfortunately for me, things often finally begin to come together.

And where I found the first step, the nuclear bomb of our program, once more.
Like peeling away the layers of an onion, my sponsor once commented.

It came to a head when leaving the jobsite 2 days sober, ran into a bunch of wannabe 'thugs' had the street barricaded like this was Somalia or something.

Before I hit those guys, I mustered everything in me to handle it well. Like a drunk swearing himself to sobriety 5 minutes before pulling into the liquor store.

"These are sick people, and I have to handle this good.", I told myself.

And this is the culmination, not just this one situation, but of all these struggles, my best efforts, my attempts, my prayers, all my best ideas. I crashed right into them, and it felt good. And God used that incident to open my eyes, and I saw myself.

All these things that needed to change, this temper I needed to control, these 'situations' with my daughter, all this "stuff" I needed to 'learn' to handle, wasn't the problem. It was me all along. I am the problem. I am what must change.

And begging, pleading, cursing, what help does God give me, until I once again reach for the bottle.

If God was going to save me, He would have already done so, and He can't, because it would make Him wrong for not helping earlier, is the gist of my twisted thinking.

I wonder how countless many drunks down through the ages such deep, unexplainable, unsalveageable by any human means, spiritually sick and twisted thinking has ushered to the grave.

And the miracle, the point of this post, and a source of my newfound hope, is to know now, today, alive and sober, what I very well would have only found face to face with Him to give account. His help has been all around me, piled higher than I can reach, dumped over me by the bucket full, poured out like a flood, and I have been literally swimming in it, not seeing the forest for the trees. AA, church, friends, counseling, work, just life in general, is chalk full of more 'help' than I could ever humanly hope to fully utilize.

I worked the first five steps, the 'tough' ones, not counting amends, and found the promises come true. You are as sick as your secrets. The release, looking the world in the eye, free from a lifetime of fear and misery, was so miraculous and so much different than what I lived in my entire life, that I stopped. And stayed sober a year and a half.

There are twelve steps, not five.

I really believed, that I had been cured, at least of the drinking part, and the worse of my problems. And I slowly forgot what the problem really was, me, and slowly stopped living in the solution.

And I wouldn't have admitted it, but formally working the twelve steps started looking more like something I needed to do, to help the quality of my life or something. Like one day I need to save more, or eat better, or stop smoking, all this other 'stuff' I ought to do.

Wrong.

I have a fatal, incurable disease, and If I stop taking the treatment God provided, it begins to reassert its self.

Many people with far less to work with tackle this program and start getting better simply because they see it working for someone else.

I am shoved along as if by the very Hand of God and shown the way in absolute miracle after miracle, and I will still touch, taste and feel my very death and destruction to budge a d---d inch.

Sorry if I ramble. I'm starting to feel of this world again.



Something my sponsor once said -

"When I was fresh sober, I had a problem with the second step, this 'restore to sanity' deal.
I figured it was stuff I did when I got drunk, you know, dumb stuff everyone does, crazy stuff I thought, that made me insane.

Today, I now know the most insane thing I ever did;

I did stone cold sober.

It was picking up another drink, thinking this time, it would somehow be different .

[gimmeid]

And since I never did a darned thing with all that help but squander it, guess I oughtta start looking to give it all away.
Sure beats sitting around drunk.

[best]

We have to give away all to gain.
Letting go brings it all back to us.