Dr. Bob explained the twelve step program in six words: Trust God, Clean House, Help Others. In his wisdom he realized the tremendous transformational power of the act of getting outside of ourselves and helping others. The very nature of our diseases of addiction is rooted in self-centeredness. This self-centeredness can kill us. Volunteerism is an antidote for self-centeredness. While we are working with others we experience a form of self-forgetting . Our own problems and difficulties become meaningless in the face of working with people with serious illness, poverty, pain and hopelessness. By volunteering we help others and paradoxically help ourselves.
My own personal belief is that the miracle that has occurred in my life is not that a seemingly hopeless and incurable alcoholic and drug addict no longer drinks or does drugs. The miracle is really that in my addiction I was dying from being self-centered in the extreme. Today I have the capacity to get outside of myself and care about others. This transformation took work like every thing else in our program and started with small acts. This is the true miracle and the one that has saved my life and made it possible for me to heal from this horrible addiction.
I have always felt, that given the time and money I could design a program that combined clinical therapy, a twelve step program, work, spiritual reading and volunteering. These important elements would go along way to satisfy the six words Dr. Bob used to describe our spiritual program.
Recently it has occurred to me that we can become very parochial in our recovery program. We have a tendency to think that our disease is of supreme importance in the universe. We are self-centered in our disease. We hang out with recovering people, talk about recovery, work in recovery, socialize in recovery and basically for those of us in South Florida live in a recovering community. But really we represent a small fraction of people in our society. There are so many others who need help that are not addicts or alcoholics.
I think I would refine my “perfect treatment program” volunteer component to insist that clients volunteer in an area that is not related to addiction. We spend so much time focused on our own disease of addiction that we have a tendency to not see all of the opportunities for helping others with problems other than alcohol or addiction. Some ideas are working with children, domestic violence, veterans hospitals, nursing homes, literacy programs, feeding the hungry, working for the rights of the mentally ill, and hospice care. There are so many opportunities to take our wonderful program, as expressed in our new way of life, out into the world. The spiritual awakening that we have found through our twelve step program can
be used to help people outside the program.
This page will be a regular feature and I will try to always have information on places that are looking for volunteer help. I would ask my readers to let me know of any organizations that can use help. Also write and let us know of your experiences working with others, inside and outside of the program. This month we have been doing some “surfing” on the internet for volunteer sites so I will include a list of web sites as well as a list of the names and phone numbers of local places that need help.