At a recent meeting a friend picked up another white chip. It was painful to watch him shiver and shake, to hear the remorse in his voice as he recounted the latest in a continuing saga of relapses. There was a new resolve in his words for this time he had clearly looked at death as a possibility. My own discomfort was due to a strong identification with his feelings which were identical to mine when I first walked through the door. At that time I was convinced that I had nothing left. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had come into recovery with a wonderful gift, a gift that I was unaware of: the gift of desperation.

It took me a while around the rooms to understand how my desperation could be considered a gift. The very word desperation suggests negative feelings. The dictionary tells us that to be desperate is “nearly, hopeless, critical grave” , “in an unbearable situation due to  need or anxiety”, “extreme because of fear, danger and suffering”. Don’t all these definitions relate to our feelings before we enter recovery? How can this be considered a gift?

The answer lies in the ability of one in recovery to always remember the feelings that they had the day before they came to the program. The gift of desperation is this instant remembering that occurs right after the thought of, craving, or obsession for the first drink. Remembering, or as the program says “remembering when” is the remembrance of the desperation that we all felt in our addictions. This memory is stronger and more powerful than any drink or drug when combined with contact with a Higher Power. If we have and use this gift we can buy the time necessary to connect with our Higher Power, sponsors,   and programs, thus avoiding relapse. Each time we do this we become stronger and this gift of desperation becomes more precious.

Sometimes when negative feelings infiltrate my life in sobriety and the old menace self-pity rears its ugly head I go into a little drill.  I find a quiet place and open up the gift. In a short time my memories of the day before I entered recovery actually make me feel the way it felt back then. In a short time self-pity disappears, gratitude returns and sanity is restored.

Sometimes the gift is given by friends and strangers who come back to meetings after a relapse. In my friend’s case he has given me a gift by sharing his experience. With God’s help he will be able to see that he has received this gift of desperation and use it to achieve a lasting, permanent sobriety.