Step Two - Healing starts here and without shame.

Evaluate, reflect and seek to redress imbalance in unhealthy elements in every relationship. Focus first on yourself.

I feel REALLY strongly about this step. It might be the best and worst step. It's also the one where I think I most diverge from the AA steps, but like the others, take the bits you like and ignore the rest. This is you recovery and your journey and much like the reasons you arrived here are unique, so is your path through so remember it’s important to just keep going one day at a time. Most of these steps can be done simultaneously and some will be repeated so don’t think of this like a tick list, more like a pattern of growth that you might need to revisit every few years or months.

If you are doing the 12 steps, following the AA programme, that’s amazing. WELL DONE. If it’s working for you keep at it, what I will say is knowing that in every town in every corner of the world there is a group of people you can go to who will listen, not judge and try to support you is quite something. Use it if you need it.

As a high functioning alcoholic it’s likely your stories will be quite different from others, because you are quite different. You will have significant relationships you have been maintaining, you may be quite emotionally intelligent and able to function socially with varying levels of success all whilst hiding your addiction. To a certain extent you have made your drinking part of who you are, but it no doubt comes with a whole barrel of shame and guilt and remorse. So the idea of my 3 steps, and this one in particular, is to remove the negative emotions but to learn how to incorporate your drinking self into a positive image of yourself. You cannot carry on drinking, I am not saying that, what I am saying is that I do not believe it is healthy to completely divorce yourself from your drinking life because you need to learn to accept and love even that part of your self.

AA appears to me to continue the spiral of shame by making your drinking something you need to apologise for, to make reparations and to take a moral inventory of yourself. It also draws a huge black line between drinking and not drinking - which you will need as an addict but only in relation to your drinking.

If you are going to embark upon a significant journey of change and challenge, I do not believe you need to be "broken down" to be built up. Instead I believe you need to be built up with even more love to have everything you need to succeed. Just like a child learning a new skill there are significant bodies of evidence to show now that beating them into it won’t work – instead using nurture, love and support will get the job done.

Evaluation Time

So, how do we do this, first we evaluate with a sober mind the state of our relationship with our most useful ally – you. There are a million ways you can do this, I need not point you in any one direction, but a guiding principle of this evaluation and reflection period must be to constantly love yourself and your actions. Even the awful ones okay. Believe me I am fully aware of how hard this is going to be to do, but what we need to do here is both a removal and an attachment.

· We need to remove blame, shame and guilt from your drinking behaviour and self.

· We need to attach love, forgiveness and growth to your journey now.

If you want to do a Myers Briggs to see who you think you are, or keep a journal whatever works, but be truthful and kind. You must do this exercise with love in your heart for yourself. If you have a counsellor they can help, and you will need to revisit this step time and time again during your recovery.

I wrote lists, I still do, I had a rainbow colour notepad and I allocated colours to things I feel good about, things I feel sad about, and things I hoped for – I had a rule that I had to write something in each category every time. I could not just fill up the yellow section, (sad) it had to be balanced.

You also need to start investing in yourself – maybe you’ve stagnated a little, but you need to replace your drinking time and behaviour with something for you that makes you feel positive about yourself. Again, I don’t need to point you to things – bath, gym, cooking, reading, Netflix whatever. But you need to start balancing the scales of behaviours and interactions you have with yourself so that you begin to be reminded of what an outstanding individual you are.

It will be necessary to think about some of your actions and behaviours, and to provide some context to them. You will also need to start on the journey of discover about how you got here – this might take months or years to uncover but if you do not do this critical work you will never resolve those underlying issues and be able to fully function as part of society. You will need help for this – counselling is expensive I know but it might just save your mental health. The NHS does offer it, you can try that, or you can find a good friend, priest, anyone actually who wants to do the work with you.

REFLECT

You have completed evaluating your drinking life, you have a sense of the good the bad and the ugly, now you need to frame those in terms of perhaps 3 categories:

o Ditch it – this person or action or behaviour is not relevant.

o Fix it – this niggles, and I would like to try and work out how to have this settle in my mind.

o Leave it – I cannot deal with this right now.

The tricky part here is that even if you can categorise, it’s not going to be up to you in the end. This is going to be tough because you are going to have to make some decisions right now which will either help or hinder your progress and then, unfortunately, not have any control in the final outcomes.

Right now – sod everyone else okay. Right now continue to exist in your relationships in whatever state you can, if you want to tell people you can but here is one of the biggest issues with high functioning drinking that I have found, and still find today. When I tell people here are some responses I might get:

· What, you have a drinking problem. I don’t think so, we all like a drink.

· Okay, great, but I have this XXXX going on and it’s more important than your latest issue.

· Right, well keep me out of that, sounds messy.

· Shall we go for a drink to discuss it? (I’m not joking, I literally had this about 5 times).

So yes you need to work with these people, if they are going to stay with you, but right now focus on the one in the mirror in the morning. If your recovery is anything like mine you will have about 100% more energy, better sleep and begin to remember things about you that you didn’t even know you’d forgotten. I’m quite witty, but I had been in such a haze between drunk and hungover that I quite forgot all about it. I could follow along at work, remember names again, complete cross words. My first 3 months of sobriety were like no other in my life – the potential I felt was immense and overwhelming. If you can, enjoy it.

Work out the areas of your life that you enjoy and can invest in, and those which you do not think are bringing you anything positive. Whilst you may need to make some tweaks to your existence eg avoiding nights out, for now you don’t need to make any huge changes. The method I am proposing here is about learning to exist in your life, as you were, just without the drink. It is not about carving out a whole new experience and life because the one you had might have been just fine.

I remember the strongest feelings I had during this time where when people who did support me told me they thought I had changed so much. I felt so angry at that because in my mind I hadn’t changed, I had emerged. I was the same me I was at 18, at 23, but I had since been covered in a layer of Chablis, Rioja and Vodka, she was still under there and I was just letting her out now. I didn’t think I was changing, I suppose that’s why it’s recovery although as a friend told me recently resurgence is a better word – I was finally becoming the adult version of myself which I could learn to love.

So now is the time to decide and cement in who you want to be and how you want to exist in the world post drink and believe me that can be ANYTHING you want it too – no rules. But use love and forgiveness here, you need to forgive yourself for not always making the best mistakes. Forgive yourself for the one night stands, for the broken friendships, for letting yourself down. It’s okay. It’s okay that all of things happened, you didn’t mean for them too, you have been really unwell and now have the energy to try and get yourself well. I love you. You deserve love.

IMBALANCE

I recoil at the idea of having to apologise for your behaviour whilst drinking, given we now know that those with an addiction are suffering from a mental illness or instability. We don’t ask depressed people to go around apologising when they feel more able, or those with Bipolar to write a bloody list of everyone they might have been rude too. SOD that I say. I have not deliberately apologised to anyone as a result of things I said or did when I was drinking. And I certainly would not have done it as part of my recovery.

If we continue down this path – if we reinforce the message that you have something to make up for, or be sorry for, we reinforce the message that your drinking self is someone separate and distinct from yourself. It may be painful to read this but you are one and the same, drunk or sober. Yes you will have said things, yes you will have done things, and in truth some of those might have happened without the drink. But you have been unwell, you have been suffering from an unresolved issue within your mental well being which has led you to this place. You did not design to become an alcoholic, you have been led here through no real fault of your own and are now taking an immense steps to try and get well. So, you apologise to your girlfriends about that time you ….whatever….and they don’t care, or worse, they hold on to the anger and hurt they feel. What then for you.

My approach goes something more like this – review your evaluation and reflections steps.

1. Are there people with whom you think relationships have suffered – people who’s trust you might have abused, or kindness you might have taken advantage of at certain moments?

2. Is it important that these people remain in your life?

3. Do you know that no matter what the outcome of any conversations with them your recovery will continue apace?

If you get a full house of yesses then start some conversations, not apologies. It might go something like this:

I may not have always been the best friend, wife, colleague over the past few years. I am working through the causes of this, including limiting my alcohol intake. I am keenly aware there have been times I have hurt or upset you whilst being under the influence of alcohol, and our relationship has suffered as a result. Know I am sorry for the part I played in those instances and that my focus right now is on supporting myself through this immense period of change I am undergoing. I really hope our friendship survives as I believe we can achieve a balanced respectful relationship when I am fully sober and well again.

If they do not want to be part of that journey with you that’s fine, you cannot force people, nor can your apologising guilt them into it. You are already a high functioning highly intelligent and socially confident person. You don’t need others approval, forgiveness or gratitude to feel good about yourself and if you continue to hold on to the thought that you do, your recovery will be wholly hampered by those around you.

I realise this is like I’ve said don’t apologise and then apologise but I think it’s the emphasis with which this apology happens and the way in which you approach this element of your recovery. You are not coming cap in hand to people apologising for some bad awful thing you did, you are acknowledging you were not in the best place and that affected your behaviour and you would like to make amends for any wrong doing. It’s really important to hold this in your mind, going to people and apologising and seeking their forgiveness puts the journey of your recovery in their hands and it is not. It is in your hands and yours alone. Even if family cut you off, even if people you went to school with, grew up with and have made lives with cannot move on from your behaviour, or worse, who want you carry on being the down trodden misbehaving element of the group, YOU MUST move on.

I’ve lost count of the people I offended or upset when I was drinking, I made amends with those who meant something to me and who wanted to be on the journey with me. The rest I forgot.

It’s not that the AA has it wrong, you do need to make amends, but first you need to do this from a solid foundation of love and understanding of your addiction and your journey. Your addiction is not something to be ashamed of, sorry for, or apologetic about it is, much like the colour of your hair or the foods you like to eat – PART OF WHO YOU ARE.