A Wrench for Every Nut

After 31 years of recovery, I’ve learned one thing: I need more meetings. “Why is that?” I asked myself this afternoon—on my way, ironically, to a lunchtime meeting in my neighborhood—and, as I sat there listening to other recovering alcoholics sharing their experience, strength and hope, discovered the answer: so I can hear the things I’m unable to tell myself, especially when I’m caught up in my own personal firestorm—that special swirl of negative emotion that hovers over my head from time to time like a dark and bilious cloud.

The meeting opened with a reading from AA’s book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. The selected passage was about fear, and it read: “The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands. The difference between a demand and a simple request is plain to anyone.”

As the discussion went around the room, I began to replay in my mind the argument I had not-so-unconsciously provoked with my wife the evening before—an argument that, like a fire, started from a spark and quickly consumed the entire forest. Standing in the ashes, I tried to convince myself that it was really all her fault—that if she had listened a little harder to what I was saying or put her own words a little more succinctly, we could have avoided the whole thing. But, I discovered the burnt-out remainder of a match clutched in my own hand.

As the meeting progressed, I came slowly to accept that I actually had been demanding that my wife understand and accept my position—without, of course, actually making that position clear.

When I was drinking, I was, as the reading puts it, “in a state of continual disturbance and frustration.” Much of this state was directly connected to the world’s inability to read my mind. Aggrieved at the prospect of having to explain myself, I often sulked and silently scorned those who weren’t swift enough to figure out what I was thinking and to act accordingly.

Unfortunately, some of those tendencies toward expecting the world (or at least my wife) to automatically understand what I want and to act accordingly, have followed me into sobriety. I haven’t been able to banish them completely and I find myself bushwhacked every so often by my own incessant demands.

So, there I was at the meeting, raising my hand to announce my 31st anniversary of sobriety and recognizing that I still have so very far to go.

I’ve often heard it said that the AA program provides a wrench for every nut, and, over the years, I have found more often than not that going to meetings seems to tighten things up for me, emotionally and spiritually. Like the wagon I used to pull behind me as a child, the nuts holding the whole thing together seem to loosen as I make my way through reality, with its unavoidable ups and downs, pressures and strains, and periodically, the wagon starts to rattle and it feels like everything is coming apart. 

In AA there are many cautionary tales, some of them based on real experience, some of them apocryphal, that deal with all kinds of situations in recovery. One of my favorites is the story of a newcomer who is getting sick of “all those meetings” he’s been going to and approaches an old-timer to see if it might be possible to cut back. “How many meetings a week do you need?” he asks, hoping for a more manageable number than what he’s already been told. The old-timer scratches his chin. “Only one,” he responds, to the newcomer’s delight. “But I go to seven,” he continues to the newcomer’s growing chagrin, “because I never know just which one it will be....”

Today was that one meeting for me, the wrench I needed to start tightening things up. Now, if I can just find a way to apologize to my wife, the rattling may stop completely.

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