by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
I was reminded at a meeting the other night about the two-part communications plan that lies at the heart of my sobriety. It’s highlighted in AA’s Fifth Step, “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” The step describes the need alcoholics have to quit living by themselves with those “tormenting ghosts of yesterday,” and outlines a methodology to surmount the “mysterious barrier” that has always seemed to separate them from others.
For me, the following quote summed things up pretty nicely:
“When we reached AA, and for the first time in our lives stood among people who seemed to understand, the sense of belonging was tremendously exciting. We thought the isolation problem had been solved. But we soon discovered that while we weren’t alone anymore in a social sense, we still suffered many of the old pangs of anxious apartness.”
And then came the zinger:
“Until we had talked with complete candor of our conflicts, and had listened to someone else do the same thing, we still didn’t belong. Step Five was the answer. It was the beginning of true kinship with man and God.”
As one who had always considered himself to be a communicator, it was only in sobriety that I could actually see how bad at it I really was. I suffered from a number of critical flaws when it came to communication, flaws that were not helped in the least by regular drunkenness. On a purely physical level there was the slurring, and the nonsensical arrangement of words that I thought was expressive of the poet within, while others found it actually incomprehensible. Sitting at the bar, holding forth, I was an engaging orator and people would actually listen for a while, falling momentarily silent when I finished. Then, quizzically, they’d turn to the person beside them. “What’d he say?” they would ask.
On a broader scale, I also suffered from the unconscious notion that I shouldn’t have to speak at all, that others should simply be able to read my mind.
These were definitely bars to communication and I recognized when I got sober that I needed some work in this particular area. Speaking honestly – with “complete candor,” as it says in the quote from Step Five – was not something that came easily to me. It was something I had to work on over time, to catch myself in the little white lies that seemed to pop up involuntarily, habitually, almost every time I opened my mouth. I wasn’t used to telling the truth, but speaking honestly about my powerlessness over alcohol and the unmanageability of my life was a meaningful start.
I had spent so much time saying things I didn’t believe, whether out of arrogance, fear, or anger, that I wasn’t entirely sure what I did believe. So, the first new rule of sober communication was clear: Say what you mean. Oddly, this new rule was easy enough on the surface, as I found myself getting more and more comfortable saying what I meant to telephone operators or grocery store clerks, but I found it considerably harder the more intimate the relationships got. The habit of saying one thing and meaning another was very hard to break.
The second rule of sober communication was essentially the alter ego of the first: Hear what’s being said. I discovered I had the unique ability to listen to someone’s words going in one ear, and by the time they came out through the other ear, they had been totally changed. This became painfully clear to me when my first girlfriend in sobriety tried to break up with me.
“I don’t want to be with you anymore,” were the words she spoke, and the words that first entered my ear. However, like some kind of freakish appliance being assembled on a conveyor belt, when the words came out the other side, they were virtually unrecognizable. I had such a built-in editor that when she said “I don’t want to be with you anymore,” what my conscious mind ultimately heard was, “She’s a little upset right now and thinks she doesn’t want to be together anymore, but I know this feeling will soon pass and everything will be the way it was before.”
This was all a process that went on internally as I would sit calmly, nodding my head in agreement, her thinking I was hearing one thing and me quietly assenting to another. It was no wonder she was surprised when I showed up unannounced at her doorstep or called her numerous times throughout the day just “to talk.” In retrospect, she couldn’t have put it more clearly, yet I was unable to hear what was actually being said.
So, those two elements hinted at in the Fifth Step – talking with complete candor and listening to someone else do the same thing – have helped me to formulate the two-part communications plan that has been the basis for my sense of belonging in sobriety: Say what you mean and listen to what is said.
It’s a simple plan, but eminently hard to maintain.