History Lessons

Last week I talked about how, as a youth, my personal history intersected with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and how, at the time, it didn't have much of an effect on me. I believe history is important, as in the old saying, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
We had a young fellow in drug and alcohol treatment who seemed unreachable. For days on end he wouldn't speak up at meetings, kept to himself, and put up an invisible wall that we couldn't scale. One day, out of the blue, during a group meeting, he simply announced, "I shouldn't be here... I'm not insane!"....
We kept the 12 Steps of Recovery taped to the wall of the treatment center for everyone to see. It seems that Step #2 had been the stumbling block to this young fellow since day one. Step # 2 reads: "Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"....
It was obvious that the particular wording of the second step could have a double meaning. Most people would define insanity as a defect of brain function, which makes a person incapable of knowing right from wrong, or real from unreal, whether it's a psychological phenomenon or a problem with organic brain chemistry.
In A.A., the term "insanity" is given a different interpretation. It is described as: "Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results". What we are trying to do in A.A. is revisit "history", looking back at our actions and responses, particularly in the use of addictive substances, and seeing how the pattern of such use is affecting our lives. The insanity of alcoholism (or any addiction) is the inability to see how what we are doing by pursuing our particular obsession is ruining our chance at living a normal life. We, as counselors, are hoping that in the 30 day treatment program, there might come a moment of clarity....an "aha" moment when the light comes on and the person sees clearly, perhaps for the first time, that their drug use has blinded them to a whole new world. It may sound like a simple matter for most people (the unaddicted), but for the person who lives their life in an obsessive state, it's an earth-shattering event.
Once this young fellow actually understood what we were meaning by using the word "insanity", it became a door-opener for him. He finally understood what it might mean to revisit his "history" and see how doing the same thing over and over and over again would keep him in a life-cycle of despair and heartache.
Recovery is a life-long process, and , often along the journey, it is necessary to "play the tape back", or revisit our "history" to remind us of where we were, where we are now, and how far we have come. Sometimes it may seem like it's "two steps forward, one step backward"(or visa-versa), ...but it's ALL steps, and each one is just as important as the next. The important thing is to keep walking, keep believing, and to turn our mistakes into tools of learning... history lessons.