Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2023

[bluidkiti]

November 13

Quote of the Week

"The secret to my recovery is no secret."

When I was new to recovery, staying sober—even one day at a time—was occasionally a seemingly impossible task. Old triggers lurked around every corner, and feelings descended on me without warning. While I was in a meeting I was okay, but in between them, while out in the real world, it was touch-and-go. When I saw people celebrate a year of sobriety, I wondered with awe how they were able to hang on that long.

As I got past ninety days and the fog cleared a bit, I began to acknowledge that there were people who had seven, fifteen, and even twenty years of sobriety and more! This was unfathomable to me. How could they not drink through all those New Year’s Eves, weddings, and tragedies? When I asked my sponsor what their secret was to long-term sobriety, he told me it was simple: “You don’t drink or use, one day at a time.” I came to find out this was the basics of it, but there was more to the secret. . . .

In over twenty years of recovery now, I’ve learned that in order for me to not take a drink, I had to have a spiritual experience. And the way I did that was by working the Twelve Steps of the program with my sponsor. By doing this, I’ve developed a relationship with a Power greater than myself, and as a result, the man who writes this quote today is a very different man from the one who crawled into the rooms all those years ago. My secret to recovery is the same as all the others: I still go to meetings, I still work the Steps, and I still don’t drink, one day at a time. As anyone in the program can tell you, the secret to recovery is no secret.