Boundaries — when we were using we had none. As we recovered we learned to set them and we also experienced them being set around us.

A former therapist explained boundaries this way: Imagine yourself as a house. If the house across the street burns down, you feel bad, but you have not burned down. But if your roof leaks that is your issue. Similarly, if the house next door gets remodeled, you can be happy, but that’s not yours to brag about or take credit for. Similarly you get to decide who gets to come into your yard, who gets to sit in your living room and who gets to see the bedroom. Having good boundaries means having people where you want them and not where they want to be.

You get the idea.

It also applies to emotions.

For years I kept a sticky note on my calendar that said: “If it doesn’t have your name on it, don’t pick it up.” In early recovery that meant don’t snoop in other people’s medicine cabinets or file drawers. But later, and still now, it means that I should not pick up other people’s fears, worries, or emotions of any kind if they don’t have my name on them. And almost none do. I don’t have to fix anyone’s life, and I can’t fix anyone’s problems. If someone has an addiction or a problem behavior, that is his or her property, not mine. Yes, this takes discernment. I can care, and I can offer resources, and I can always offer my experience, strength and hope, but other people’s emotions are not mine to fix.

Good boundaries are the best way to prevent resentment.

Recently I heard a spiritual teacher say: “Being compassionate requires strong boundaries.” It makes sense. When a person has good boundaries you know that their “Yes” is really a yes, and their “No” is really a no. That makes it possible to ask them for help, because you can be sure that if they give it there are no strings --and no guilt --attached.

Image courtesy of anankkml/freedigitalphotos.net.

I remember, early in recovery, reading the Hazelden pamphlet “Transferring Addictions.” It was scary, but it was also helpful because it let me understand that my long recovery — and I wanted it to be long — was going to have a lot of layers.

I also heard early on. “We will give up our addictions in the order in which they are killing us.” That is why some people enter recovery first for food issues and someone else for alcohol or drugs, and another person enters to deal with family or relationship problems. But after many years, we are sitting in the same chairs and saying things that are remarkably similar.

My entry into recovery brought me face-to-face with transferring addictions. Before I came to AA, I was dealing with problems with food and relationships. So I went to OA and Alanon. Then I began to notice that my romances that went bad had alcohol in it. My food stories did, too. I told myself that I was “just having dessert.” But I was “eating” Irish coffees and anything with sugar and cream and alcohol. I always had a spoon in my hand. It was the perfect denial. How bad could it be? You didn’t see drunks with whipped cream mustaches did you?

So, I had to deal with food and men and booze. Under it, of course was a messy family history of still more addiction and abuse, but that took years to accept.

In recovery from food addiction we use the analogy of owning a tiger. It goes like this: A recovering alcoholic has to put their tiger in a bottle, put the top on it and keep it there.  A food addict, on the other hand, has to take their tiger for a walk three times a day.

That was my experience. When I took the booze away and took the sugar addiction away it got harder to delude myself that certain other behaviors were still OK. And without the alcohol and the food, the hole in my heart showed and my bargain basement self-esteem gapped open. I needed soothing.

Here is a place we get into tricky territory and where the best advice is “Check your motives.” Lots of people in recovery become physical fitness nuts and most of them do it for all the right reasons.   But another group of us take up exercise in the same way and for the same reason we used booze: FIX MY FEELINGS.

This requires discernment. This is also why at a certain point in our recovery we need to find meetings where we can talk about a wide swath of topics. It doesn’t help my growth if I am only attending meetings where the leader says, “We only talk about alcohol here.” By year 10 we might be far from our last drink but we could be killing ourselves with food, gambling, workaholism or a sex addiction. We have to do more than just stop drinking. That can make recovery feel pretty hard sometimes. But we have all seen the old-timer with 30 years who is smoking, eating a plate of cookies and talking angrily about a miserable marriage.

Can we ever get to the bottom of addictions and compulsions? Will we ever know what’s under it all? As someone said when I was newly sober, “If you want to know why you drank, just stop drinking and you’ll find out.” It was good advice. Stop the addictive behavior and the source will reveal itself.

Image courtesy of 89studio/freedigitalphotos.net.

Today in my morning prayer time it hit me: One of the women that I sponsor is struggling and I thought, “She needs more prayer.” Things are not going her way, and she’s mad. I thought, “OK, how do I explain to her that it’s going to be a lot easier to surrender sooner rather than later.” Then I thought, “OK Diane, can you take your own advice?”

Note to me: More prayer.

It seems so obvious, but now I also know why the “Twelve and Twelve” says “We should not be lax on this matter of prayer.” It is like that old juice commercial that reminds, “I could have had a V-8.” So often after struggling, musing, wondering and making myself miserable trying to control something, I think, “I could have prayed — or maybe prayed sooner.

Put prayer first.

Yesterday I had a cranky day. Not quite relaxed, not quite working, slightly bored even though there was plenty to do; it was just an off day. When I did my 10^thstep at night (I use the Ignatian Examen as my Step Ten format) I realized that I had skipped my morning prayer time, and from there the day was just unsettled. Note to me: Put prayer first.

Gratitude and Compassion.

I read this ages ago, and I keep a sticky note in my planner that says, “Pray for a grateful heart and a compassionate heart.” It’s a great piece of guidance and an all-purpose solution to things that bother me. Gratitude shifts my attitude. Gratitude reminds me of the good. Gratitude shows me that there is growth, change and recovery in my life when my feelings try to convince me otherwise.

A compassionate heart softens me. Compassion helps me to see other people — even people who I think are bad or wrong — are mostly broken or troubled people. And often they are broken or troubled in ways that I am too or that I have been. Having a compassionate heart slows me down. I am more inclined to practice “restraint of tongue and pen” when I have a compassionate heart.

But to get there: More prayer.

Years ago I thought that people who had years of recovery must be doing all the right things, all the time. But I don’t; we don’t. But we do have a couple of things that come with time. One is good recovery habits. So I pray each morning and I do a 10th step at night that closes with a prayer. If I skip either one I feel crummy, kind of like not brushing my teeth. So even if I’m rushed or even not feeling very sincere I’ll get on my knees and read the Third Step Prayer. I say the words out loud. Even if done without complete sincerity, it helps.

The other thing people with long recovery have are stories. We have our own stories yes, but even better; we have other people’s stories, too. If you go to meetings for years you accumulate stories. So when times are hard I can lean into someone else’s story. I can recall what they said about the time they prayed; the time they yelled at God, the time a prayer was answered in a miraculous way; the time they let go of what they wanted and got something so better instead. 

And each time the reminder is this: More prayer.

Courtesy stock.xchng.com

The first thing I learned about baseball is this: If you raise your hand a man will bring you food. I learned this at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and in my first year as a fan I spent most of the game facing the wrong way. Raise my hand; get ice cream; raise my hand; get popcorn; raise my hand; get peanuts.  It was 1958.

Two years later, I understood it was a game. On summer afternoons I’d beg my brothers to take me with them to the ballpark. I was falling in love with baseball.

John Gregory Dunne wrote, “Baseball is the couch on which we examine our psyches.” George Will said, “Baseball is the universe.” And catcher Wes Westrum said, “Baseball is like church, many attend but few understand.”

We have these sayings and many more because baseball is one of the greatest sources of metaphor in American life. Maybe only Twelve Step recovery has more sayings and code words than America’s Game.

You may not think you are a fan of the sport but listen to how you talk about your life. Listen to others share in meetings.  Have you ever said: “I’m still in there pitching.” “You can’t even get to first base with him.” “She’s out in left field.”  We talk baseball all day long.

Baseball is one of the few sports that remain timeless. In this one area of our lives, we surrender the clock to the event.  But there is something else in this game that asserts the spiritual: In baseball we begin and end at home. The goal is to get home and to be safe. That’s also the goal for us in recovery, too. We drank because we thought we’d be safer socially or we’d be more comfortable. Then alcohol turned on us and we were out in left field feeling unsafe and we feared we’d never ever get home again. Then each of us experienced the miracle of recovery. Something happened. We found our way to a meeting. Many people say that when they came to their first meeting they knew they were home.

We all want that. Home implies safety, accessibility, freedom, comfort. Home is where we learn to be both with others and separate.  We crave this in baseball. We experience it in AA. We are keeping the faith.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng.

After many years of sobriety I can feel shame when I do this. It happened again this week. A man in my home group celebrated six months and he was glowing. His life was transformed, he had found a deep faith in his Higher Power, his surrender was complete; he had completed his step work and was quoting the Big Book. His “share” was more lecture than personal story, but I bit.

I was jealous.

I know better. I knew better. But I could feel myself become envious and annoyed. I knew that I should be happy for his pink cloud and changed life but my own smallness reveled my envy. After all these years and all this work—I’m still trying to surrender, have absolute faith and be a perfectly perfect person.

I know, I know.

These are the moments I wish for a meeting for people who have ten or 15 or 20 years. Not to leave behind the other meetings but so that I can say, “Does anyone else feel like this?” Is anyone else with long recovery secretly ashamed of their own petty reaction when someone with a year or so tells the group how perfect their life is and how they have incorporated all of the wisdom of the 12 steps?

I know better. I really do. But still.

I’m sure I did this too. No, I know I did this. I was the girl carrying AA literature home to family holiday dinners and passing it around like hors ‘dourves. I was the one who lecturedevery friend about the “principles of the program” and yes, I was the one blowing my anonymity hither and yon because I was so wise, so very wise.

So you’d think I’d have more compassion.

And in my heart of hearts I do. I much prefer that this new man be here and feel the guru than be out there drinking his life away. And I’d rather he lecture us in AA than his own family—which only delays their ability to hear about this marvelous thing we have. It’s just that when I look at my own “progress not perfection” life, and I see the intractable character defects and the amount of fear that is still underlying so much that I do I have to fight my snarky inner commentator who wants to say to the perky, pastel-hued newcomer, “Oh, just wait.”

But what I know is that life happens to all of us, and that we need those pink clouds and happy days to give us the ground under the harder parts of our recovery. The pink cloud days help us to make friends with other newcomers so that we have a gang to hang out with, which means we’ll have peers to call when the harder parts of recovery inevitably happen.

My red-faced humility is this: When I hear those newcomers speak of their transformed lives and the perfect peace that AA has given them I still want what they have. So, I keep coming back.

Self-help reading sometimes takes a beating in AA. But I’m ever grateful for self-help books because that’s how I got here. Even before I stopped drinking I knew something was wrong with me. I read advice columns and self-help books. I know now that self-help isn’t much help if I am numbing my feelings with any substance, but I look back at my younger self with compassion. I was stumbling around trying to figure it out.

Courtesy of stock.xchng.

After many years of recovery I still depend on sources far outside the “conference approved literature.” In fact I owe my recovery to a self-help book: “Women Who Love Too Much” by Robin Norwood.

Robin Norwood’s book led me to AA, OA, ACOA and Al-Anon. In that book about codependent relationships I recognized myself. And so did many other people in my life, who knew nothing about my drinking, but they handed me copies of the Norwood’s book.

That book was so singularly important to opening my eyes to my addictions that I use this shorthand for the title: “WWL2M.” That book, ostensibly about relationships, also contained this challenge: “If you find yourself connecting to the ideas in this book you may also have a problem with alcohol, drugs, food or other substance addictions.” Robin Norwood gave the 800 numbers for all the anonymous groups. I qualified for many of them. And I made the phone call.

I still keep my first copy of WWL2M in a place of honor with all of my AA literature.

But we do hear people say that no one gets sober because of a book and that is, I think, only partially true. Many years ago a very smart therapist helped me understand the value of reading about personal growth this way: Some of us need to sneak up on ourselves in order to make major changes. We may need to go into difficult places in our psyche and we may need to swim in some troubling emotional waters in order to heal. By reading about these things, while we work on them, we are building a “cognitive life raft,” an intellectual base, on which to safely travel the challenging emotional waters that lead to growth.

So yes, books — lots and lots of books, and lots and lots of reading as part of a joyous and continual recovery.

I also find writing and keeping a journal a crucial part of recovery. It was another book, “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron that led me to daily writing as a recovery habit. Cameron uses some recovery concepts to talk about freeing our creative selves and it’s a perfect way to work through the steps as well. My copy of “the Artist’s Way” like my copy of WWL2M is scribbled in, dog-eared and worn out.

I carry a small journal with me all the time and I keep a bigger one on the table where I do my morning prayer and meditation. Sometimes when I can’t feel a connection with my Higher Power I write my prayers. And, just recently, I’m back to writing my Tenth Step every night as well.

So, though we don’t talk about it so much in meetings, I think that reading and writing are crucial to recovery. So please share: Do you read and write as part of your recovery? What books helped you?What books do you recommend to friends?

I consider the following to be quite telling about my own personality: I never believed in Santa Claus. I never, even as a little kid, imagined or believed that a man would go house to house in a red suit and bring toys to boys and girls.

I did, however, believe—until I was 10 or maybe even older—in the Easter Bunny.  In my own defense I have to explain that we lived near the woods and I saw all kinds of rabbits, little baby bunnies and distance-covering jackrabbits, all the time. But more importantly I had two older brothers who, as only big brothers can, facilitated my belief in The Easter Bunny. Bert and Larry would talk just slightly out of my earshot about The Bunny. “Don’t let her see him,” and “Did you see the basket he left next door?” They also, to make it more convincing, put bite marks on the handles of our Easter baskets.

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng.com

My brothers died when they were 42 and 48. Now, I’m the oldest. At Easter I miss them. I miss having an Easter basket from Lar who—even as an adult—made me one that included the bunny’s teeth marks to remind me just how naïve I had been. And I miss our sibling tradition of finding the family “King Egg.” As Easter approached we would each decorate our own hard-boiled egg, fortifying them with dye and crayon and competed (Bert and Lar were both went on to become engineers) by ramming our colored eggs together to see whose broke first.

I also miss dressing up for Easter services, complete with new dress and corsage. The three of us continued to go to church on Easter even when we had walked away from organized religion. We kept this holiday because we all liked the uplifting Easter hymns like “Up From the Grave He Arose.”

I kept going to church on Easter even as, and after, Bert and Larry were dying because those Easter hymns gave me a weird hope.  It was not a hope of miraculous recovery for either brother, or necessarily for a reunion in the “Great Beyond,” but hope for my own  “arose” from the heartache of losing my brothers, my playmates, co-conspirators and occasional torturers.

One of my final conversations with Bert was about my car. I was 40 years old and well into my recovery but still easily defeated by car worries.  Larry, who was then sick, was caring for Bert who was dying, and I called their house in tears to report the impending death of my car. Larry, who was on the phone with me, relayed the mechanic’s opinion to Sig who was lying in what would soon be his deathbed.

Lar said to me, “Bert wants to talk to you.” I was surprised because Bert’s speech had become painful and very difficult for him. I waited until Larry positioned the phone for Bert to talk.

“Here’s what you tell them …,” he began, and he proceeded to dictate a set of car repair instructions to convince any mechanic that I knew a nut from a bolt, and that this girl had a brother who would not see his sister taken for a ride.

Apart from any theology, and because of years in recovery have let me see so many lives saved, Easter lets me believe in the resurrection of my family, of my all too gullible girlhood self, and in a life that rises, falls, rises and dies over and over as we each cycle through layers of loss and gain.

Over and over, almost like a mantra, so many of us are saying, “I need to balance my life.” Toward that end we fill our calendars outside of work with quality time with loved ones, and commitments—sometimes against the grain—to meditate or do yoga, to take classes or to volunteer. So many of us find ourselves doing little bits of lots of things and not feeling good about much of what we do.

I realized this week that “Balance my life” is just another item on the big to-do list in my head, and it’s another thing nagging at me that I should do.

Well, I’ve decided that balance is overrated.

Think about it. People we admire, those who have made a difference or a contribution or who have a clear vocation lead remarkably unbalanced lives. Consider the greats in any field: Einstein? No balance at all; he was actually quite a weird guy. Thomas Edison? He never left the lab. Ditto for Marie Curie. Venus and Serena Williams? Tiger Woods? For serious athletes their entire family has to live on a tilt-a-whirl.

It’s true for creative types too. Emily Dickinson? Edna St. Vincent Millay? We love their poems, but look at their lives. And statesmen? Saints? You get the idea.

So while in early recovery we needed to get some balance—we ere seriously unbalanced in a bad way—in later recovery we need to find the good unbalance that celebrates who we relay are and what matters in our lives. It might be home and family or a big career, or our creative work—the things we could never have done when we were using, or in early recovery when we were unbalanced in favor of learning this new way of life. But now, with spiritual and psychological ground under our feet we get to find our true place.

The theologian Fredrick Buechner—who had a seriously unbalanced life—defines true vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the worlds deep need.” Now it doesn’t make sense that deep gladness will come from ticking off a long to-do list or that the world’s deep need is met by doing tiny bits of this and that like rote do-gooders.

But the idea of balance so appeals that we run faster and faster to balance our social and emotional portfolios; we take yoga and meditate, try to eat well, call friends, see the latest play, buy if not read the latest bestseller, attend the school play and send emails from the car and leave voice mail at midnight.

How much energy we waste striving to balance our lives.  What if we celebrated a tilting life, one in which we gave a primary commitment to kids or a job we love or making art or seeking spirit?  We do have to make choices but they are not for all time.

I don’t think it’s balance that we really want at all. What we want is to feel good and to have peace, and that mostly comes from feeling well used by life. That doesn’t happen when we are running around doing little bits of many things.

Here’s a radical idea as we move into spring: Give up balance; don’t go to any store, party or event unless you really want to. Read what you like even if it’s not “good” books, and choose the couch over the gym, and the woods over the party if that is what your soul craves.

Stop and look into the world’s deep need that’s in your community. Find the source of your deep gladness that runs near by. Allow yourself to lose your balance. And just fall in.

Photo courtesy of SXC.com.

This week I had a bad attack of resentment. The good news of longer recovery is that I have more skills to keep it under wraps and so I mostly just think nasty things and not say them. But the other side of having these feelings in later recovery is the awful feeling of “What is this yucky stuff?” and the shame that I add on to feeling bad by feeling that I should be “over that by now.”

But though it is “progress not perfection” and also “welcome to the human race” as my sponsor says, these feelings are real so I set out to dig under them.

That is the good thing about having gained some time in recovery. We certainly are not saints, but we are experienced. I know that uncomfortable feelings like the ones that glommed onto me this week are not forever, and are not the real me; they are material to mine for new growth. Always, always, if I do the work, the feelings will resolve and will resolve in a way that helps me to grow. Sometimes the work I need to do is reading AA literature, sometimes it is talking to a sponsor or other women in recovery, and sometimes—most often— it is prayer and listening to God. (I always tend to pray like mad but forget the listening part.) Sometimes it is all of those things plus time with a therapist or counselor.

I love that at times like this a slogan will flash into my mind. This week while grumbling in the car and talking to people who were not there with me, I heard this lesson from Alanon: “Holding a resentment is like giving someone rent-free space in your head.” Oh, yeah. Later I remembered that, “Resentment is like setting yourself on fire and hoping the other person dies of smoke inhalation.” (I really love that one, don’t you?)

Those slogans gave me the slightest bit of humor for my situation. But I still felt very stuck. There were two people I could not shake. They were both part of my work life so I needed to be careful with how I proceeded. A great lesson I got from my very first sponsor was, “Don’t do anything you are going to have to make amends for.” I love that one too—having just enough pride in this situation I knew that the only thing worse than what I was feeling would be the additional agony of having to make amends to someone I already resented.

But still, I wanted the feelings to shift and I was doing everything: writing in my journal, texting my sponsor, admitting my ugly thoughts to a close friend, reading the Big Book like it was the I Ching with a secret message for me. (I was literally clicking through The Big Book on my Kindle like a maniac—I know the answer is in here. Where is it? What step? What story?

No relief.

Then someone said, “Acceptance” and I thought, “Do I have to accept these people? Or these feelings?”

But here is the gift of making AA a habit: I kept doing what I know to do. I drove to my home group meeting. In the car I prayed, “Please let me hear what I need.” At the meeting I raised my hand several times but didn’t get called on. Instead of resenting that I thought, “OK, this means that I’m supposed to listen.” So I listened and I heard “defiance,” and “ego-maniac with an inferiority complex” and I heard “alcoholics struggle with authority.” And I heard a big “click!” inside of me.

I was struggling with having things my way. I was resentful that someone else was getting attention. I was afraid that I wasn’t important. I was afraid that I wasn’t respected. I was scared. I was just really scared.

And I knew then that my prayer could change to, “Help me to feel safe and to feel loved,and please God, help me to be of service.”

And the crazy, mad feelings began to melt.

Though we talk about AA as a spiritual program, we don’t often talk about spiritual direction in our AA meetings. But outside of meetings, people with many years will talk about their retreats and experiences with a spiritual director. After all, when you have 10 or 15 or 25 years you “get it” that this is a spiritual program. How many people reading this blog have tried spiritual direction?

Image courtesy of razvan ionut/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In early recovery the rules of relationships are pretty clear. Not that we follow them necessarily. We all know the stories that are funny when told years later. The ones that begin with, “My sponsor told me not to date in my first year, but…” That “but” is always a prelude to some disaster or heartbreak. Later we understand why “no relationships in the first year” makes sense. It turned out to be much better to not date or marry or maybe even get divorced in that crucial first year. But we moved on.

Image courtesy of Tina Phillips/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I wake up in the night and listen. The reassuring rumble tells me that the furnace is still on. It’s good news and bad. It means we have heat but at this hour I visualize the dollar bills that might just as well be fuel. I don’t fall back to sleep easily. I have a glass of water and check on the dogs, curled like Danish pastries on their pillows; I’m awake and afraid in the cold night.

Image courtesy of Maggie Smith/FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

My favorite bumper sticker has always been, “I didn’t quit, I surrendered,” and I loved sayings like, “Give time time” and “Trust the process.” But now, at 25 years sober, I feel a kind of sadness that time has indeed passed and that the doors that opened so widely and generously years ago to welcome me into AA now open again and deliver me—sober, sane, healed and still healing—back into the world. It’s like one of those elevators that open on both sides, you get in, and it goes up but you have to turn around and face the other way to get out. This is what it feels like to be a sober woman who is in recovery more than ten years.

There is, and this is the nice part, an ease and grace to it. It’s what the newcomers mostly see when they say, “I want what you have.” Not that there aren’t days that I hurt like hell, or act like a brat or can still find myself breathless with emotional pain. The difference is that on those days—like when my brother died or when I learned that my husband was very ill—even then, crying and lying on the floor, there was a part of me who could watch and say, “Go ahead, cry, it’s OK; you’ll be OK.”

Another plus of having longer recovery: I no longer automatically assume that when something bad happens—and recovery doesn’t stop life from happening— that I did something wrong or that I am being punished or that God is testing me.

Years ago, before I came into these rooms, when something bad happened it was very likely that it did have to do with something I had done. I drank to excess, lied about it, made crummy decisions about everything and drank more to tolerate the shame and guilt. On top of that, I swung back and forth between compulsive work and sloth, tried bulimia and compulsive eating, got into fits of financial trouble and made a mess of most relationships. My first attempt at fixing what ailed me was men. I tried hard to make people love me. But even love and romance were of little comfort.

I remember going to see a therapist in those painful days just before I got sober. She listened to me pour out my pain, asked a few questions and then looked me in the eye and said that I would need to do a lot of work. She thought I ought to be in therapy twice a week and maybe for about five years. I left her office in tears. Something she said did get through my defenses but I was hopeless with her prescription. I thought I might as well just die because I couldn’t possibly do anything for five years. Five years? Just shoot me.

Then one day at work I heard some women gossiping about a board member, a woman I admired. I didn’t know her well but she seemed smart and kind and had a refreshing sense of humor. The gals at work were whispering, “Well, you know she goes to AA.” I know they thought they were saying something awful about her, but I thought, “Oh my God, she goes to AA, she goes to AA!” It was my first experience of “If you want what we have…” I wanted what she had and I hadn’t even been to a meeting yet. I think of that experience whenever I hear someone say, “You may be the only Big Book someone reads.” It was a gift. I was Twelve-Stepped by gossip!

And so I went to my first AA meeting. In a church basement, of course, and the rest is history. My history, actually. I remember how in those first months I would hear people with three years and five years talk about their lives and “working a program.” I could see that they had so much that I wanted: they smiled and laughed and told stories about themselves.

I look at my friends today. So many years later I am gifted with a group of women friends who are all in the 20 to 30 years of sobriety class. Sometimes when we have dinner or take walks we talk about the changes, the tools we still use and those we depend on less now. We talk about what stays the same and what doesn’t.

I notice how subtle recovery can be. After a period of ten years we really are different people. Sometimes we tell stories about the things we struggle with today—yes; struggle remains as long as our commitment to growth remains. I laugh about how shopping has replaced all other drugs. I see that my ways in the workplace still have the echo of the addict. The big glaring chunks have been removed, shifted and rearranged.

What remains? Questions. There are still so many: how do we keep growing? The good news and the bad is that with double-digit recovery there is a lot less pain. The bad news is that pain has always been what motivated me. Motivated me to change, toward truth, to spiritual growth and motivated me to just plain cut out the crap. So when we get better, and life is easier, and there is less pain, we just might drift in a way we might not have done in early recovery.

There is also the subtlety of separating what we know from what we feel or believe. It’s very easy for me to think on a given day that I am “over” my shame or guilt. I certainly have a lot more knowledge about it now. I’ve read so many books and spent time in ACOA and Al-Anon—and I did way more than that original five years of therapy that sounded impossible 30 years ago. I have a good understanding of the difference between guilt and shame, and humility and humiliation. But I forget—and I get caught in this trap so often—that just because I understand something doesn’t mean it no longer affects me.

In earlier stages of recovery our shifts of mind and attitude were mirrored by external changes. We saw people gain or lose weight or cut and color their hair. We dressed differently, dated differently, took jobs, quit jobs, changed fields, got married and got divorced and sometimes got married again. Change was obvious and dramatic. If you laid the photos of our first year next to the photos from year five and seven you could see that growth and change had taken place.

In later recovery the work we do is less obvious from the outside. In a sense we find our stride and our style, but if we could X-ray the mind, heart and soul of a woman in later recovery we’d see that dramatic change still continues and now more than ever, it’s an inside job.

Maybe this is a recovering woman’s issue. Or maybe men have a version of it and I don’t yet know about it. What I do know is that throughout my recovery, I’ve had a running internal debate that goes something like this:

Voice One: I’m becoming a spiritual person now so my clothing and make-up and hair color does not matter.

Voice Two: But I’m a happier person now, too, because of recovery and I’m confident and I’m feeling good about myself, so I want my outsides to match my insides.

Voice One: But God doesn’t care about your hair color ...

Voice Two: God does care about beauty and happiness so if being a blonde or having “warm” highlights makes me happy, what’s the big deal?

Even after 25 years this internal debate continues. And throughout my years of recovery I’ve tried following each voice ... each to an extreme perhaps … and then let the appearance-pendulum swing the other way.

In my first months of attending Twelve Step meetings I went shopping for “meeting clothes.” I had this idea that I needed “outfits” for meetings. All of my life I had medicated with substances—food, booze, drugs and every relationship required a corresponding adjustment to my appearance, so why wouldn’t recovery need its own attire?

Over the years I have met women who began AA in areas where sponsors told sponsees to dress up to go to meetings— “suit up and show up” was the slogan. They were taught to “comb your hair and put on lipstick” when you go to a meeting” —to work recovery from the outside in.

I suspect that for the addicted woman who got to the stage of never bathing or leaving her sweats, that’s a good suggestion, but I was of the breed overly invested in my appearance. So rather than learning to “suit up and show up,” I really needed to experiment with “come as you are” and even “come at your worst” and to see that I’d still be liked and accepted.

In very early recovery, on my pink-holier-than-thou cloud, I decided to give up all make-up and hair color, shop at thrift stores as some weird penance or way to reveal the “real” me. Luckily I had a sponsor who spent the equivalent of my weekly salary on her hair each month. When I professed my spiritual breakthrough of giving up self-care she said, “I don’t think so … you didn’t get sober to wear sackcloth and ashes. Go make an appointment for a haircut.” Oh.

Then, a few years later I was in the throes of some success at work. Promotions came and I was in a good job and enjoying secular success as well as success in sobriety and recovery. I spent some big money on a personal shopper who advised that I needed a power suit, a silky red dress for dating and who went through my closet with me in a kind of sartorial personal inventory. (I did get to tell her all my clothing stories and it was a kind of closet catharsis.) But after buying all those shiny new clothes I felt a bit too exposed and well, too shiny, and found that those new items belonged more to an idea I had about myself than to the real self standing in front of the mirror. So the pendulum swung again.

Back and forth it’s gone over these recovering years. I have a great wardrobe and now most of it looks like it belongs to the same person … the stages of rock star, tweedy intellectual, corporate power leader and cute girlfriend have gradually integrated into a closet that—for the most part—reflects who I really am 90 percent of the time.

The hook is still there though. My first thought when I contemplate an inner change is always to wonder what the external equivalent would be.

What does a sober, sane, happy woman look like? I think she mostly looks like herself and her best self. And sometimes that could mean high heels and great hair highlights.

Even after all these years of recovery I catch myself having expectations for Valentine’s Day. How many resentments it has caused. Dates, boyfriends, husbands. Even knowing that Valentine’s Day is a commercially created day, the cultural pressure exists.

How do recovering people practice loving kindness for ourselves and others on Valentine’s Day? How does sobriety guide me into making a Happy Valentine’s Day in or out of a romantic relationship? What does love really mean in the context of recovery?

One of the joys of sobriety is watching other people grow. For me, it has been particularly moving to observe sober men as they change their lives and beliefs.

Early in recovery—just shy of two years and at that point where the fog is clearing—a man named Fred who was in his early 60’s came to my home group one morning. It was his first day out of treatment and he was in pain. His “bottom” involved devastation at both work and home. He hurt. I listened as he spoke and I recognized his grief. After the meeting ended, I watched as the men in our group surrounded Fred, gave him phone numbers and insisted he came to breakfast with them. I watched as the men gathered around him, taught him and loved him.

Even though others in the group had done that for me, too, it was then, with Fred, that I was just sober enough to understand that I was seeing love in action. I hold that moment as one of my sobriety treasures. It was the day I could also see the love that surrounded me and I felt my heart open enough to want that love to surround another person.

Maybe it’s because one of my own wounds is about my father that this touches me so deeply.

This morning at my home group I heard men talk about how recovery changed their lives. Tough guys were softened, fathers recommitted, lost men were found, partners tried again, new romances began and they were trying to do it all differently.

It makes me happy to see men change. To know that under different circumstances my father and my brothers might have changed, too. To know that there is an endless supply of love in these rooms and that we are changed by that love.

In early recovery I used to hear, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” It felt like a puzzle, a bafflement. I didn’t think you could love someone into change. Hadn’t I tried that all those years before with disastrous results? I know now that I didn’t really love; I was just trying to control someone or to make him take care of me. In romantic relationships, and sometimes as parents, we mistakenly try to love people into changing. It generally doesn’t work.

But in AA it does. We can be loved by our AA fellows until we can love ourselves. And when we have learned to love ourselves, we can then truly love others.

Here is one of those changes that happen when recovery becomes long-term: Many of us go to—or go back to—Al-Anon. Sometimes it’s a sponsor who sends us or maybe we see men and women who have as many years as we do but they seem to struggle less at home or at work or with themselves. And then we find out that they are “double-winners”—people who practice the AA and Al-Anon programs.

There is a funny thing about recovery in AA. In the early days we had to learn to be less selfish. We learned to consider the impact of our behavior on other people. We laugh at the Big Book story of the man who comes out of the storm cellar, surveys all the damage and declares, “Look Ma, ain’t it grand the wind stopped blowing.” We laugh. Oh yeah, no one—especially those near and dear—is applauding that we simply stopped drinking.

So we learn to listen, to consider the needs of others, to concede, to compromise.

But then, if we keep at our recovery, we reach a point where we actually have to learn to be selfish again. You may hate that word and prefer “self-caring,” but really, being selfish can be a good thing. It’s almost like we have to go back over the old ground again and say, “So what do I want?” and, “What do I need—even if it makes someone else unhappy?” And now, with some sober time, we can learn to take care of ourselves and let other people be unhappy—or deal with their own feelings. Yes, it’s another one of those paradoxes in the program.

And when we find that it’s hard to know what we want, or to ask for what we want, someone near us—maybe a sponsor or a friend in our home group—notices. They see that we don’t take care of our needs and we are invited—or sent—to an Al-Anon meeting.This is another reason why we want to keep going to meetings even after years and years of recovery: We want to keep growing in all the ways that—on the surface—have little to do with consuming alcohol, but which have everything to do with living a sober life.

And this too: After many years in AA most of us have friends and probably partners who are, yeah, alcoholics—they may be sober but it’s our thinking as much as our drinking that keeps all of us coming back.

The rules for beginners in Al-Anon are the same as those in AA: Try six meetings, try different meetings, raise your hand, listen to the people with experience, read the literature and even do service. And try not to compare. It’s hard to be a beginner again, but the payoff is that there’s a real multiplier effect from working both programs.

It really is the best of both worlds: To be able to care for yourself and for others with honesty and peace. Detaching with love. Continuing to grow. One day at a time.

When we were “younger” in recovery, we heard the disclaimers about length of time. Things like: “The person who got up earliest this morning is the one with the most sobriety,” or “All anyone has are these 24 hours.”

We were cautioned to not be fooled into false security based on the number of years sober. They said, “While you’re in meetings, your addiction is over in the corner doing push-ups,” or “The longer you are sober the closer you are to a drink.”

These sayings are intended to remind us to not take stock in days or numbers. We were warned against hubris and pride. So why make a point of the ten-year mark in recovery? Why a special blog for men and women who’ve been sober ten, or 15, or more years? Because while the basics remain: “Pray,” “Don’t Drink” and “Work the Steps,” some things, after ten years, really are different.

Those of us in “double-digit” recovery have learned that the Twelve Steps and a recovery program are part of a good life but that even these do not protect us from illness, job troubles, problems with kids and family, all manner of loss—the things that fall in the basket called “life happens.”

Plenty of “life” still happens to recovering people and sometimes, when you have a few years of sobriety, it can feel like life hits harder or hurts more simply because we have fewer “helpers” to ameliorate our pain. We also know, in our wiser moments, that not having painkillers—either the chemical or human kind—helps us get through things faster even though we can still hurt like hell some days.

What people in long recovery have, however, is a set of skills and a richness of sober experience to fall back on.

We recognize our patterns; we are able to cut through our defenses sooner; we learn not to fight the inevitable. We surrender when we see the wall approaching, instead of waiting, as we did in the past, to slam into it.

We are also able to see the things that happen to us with just a tiny bit more perspective. By the time we reach double-digit recovery, most of us have had at least one or two experiences of something we were sure wasn’t supposed to happen. And in many cases, we have the experience of finding that these turn out to be spiritual lessons or stepping-stones to something really great.

But ten-plus years can have glitches and questions. This blog is to help all of us compare notes, to see that there is common ground, and to reassure ourselves that there is no one right way to be recovering.

Some of us still go to three meetings a week while others go once a week or once a month, and yet others simply attend retreats a couple of times a year. For some of us meetings take place in new ways. Yes, that’s officially unofficial, but we know it happens.

Recovering folks meet for lunch or dinner or take walks together. While these gatherings lack the preamble or a prayer, the conversations offer the continuity of community with other recovering people.

But what about service? Giving back? All those things we did to get well or that we aspired to when we were “growing up” in AA?

Some of us do bake cakes and chair meetings for our home group while others have taken the slogan: “Service is gratitude in action” and extended it out into the broader community. The words and settings may be different and we may not read the steps out loud but when we teach adults to read or counsel teens after school or coach someone with mental retardation to compete in the Special Olympics, it’s still service and gratitude.

The God question, which was there on our first day in recovery, remains. We learned early on that we had to figure out who, or what, we were turning our lives over to. That desire has led us down some pretty interesting paths. You can find Twelve Step people in Quaker meetings, yoga classes, meditation workshops and in every kind of church or synagogue. We’re probably disproportionately represented in alternative forms of worship and New Age studies: we pray, meditate, chant and participate in rituals. We’ve taken many a road less traveled on our way out of the woods.

When we were new to recovery, we measured time much like parents do with a new baby. We gave our recovery “age” in numbers of weeks or months, and then we turned two and began to count in years. Very likely, in those “younger” years of recovery someone with more time said to us, “It will take three to five years to get out of the woods” and we wondered how we’d ever survive. As we closed in on that crucial five-year mark we realized that while we had more stability and a new set of habits, that “edge of the forest” we’d been hoping for was still a long way off.

In the five- to six-year stage we begin to understand that it actually takes five years just to get into the woods. At that stage we can start to tell “forest from the trees.”

The newcomer might be surprised to learn that “old timers” still have problems and struggles.

At the same time, our lives outside of AA grow. Our careers develop, we have kids, become better parents and reclaim relationships with family. We find ourselves welcome at holidays and sometimes we are even the hosts for special family events. Humor returns for us and for those around us. Enough of our amends are done so that we can laugh when we talk about the past with those who witnessed it up close. Our lives are rich and full.

Many of us change jobs and sometimes careers in these years. Going back to school is not uncommon. It’s a consequence of learning more about ourselves. We choose new careers—and new fields—based on who we really are and what we really like, rather than what would please or impress someone else.The day comes, however, when we realize that the world outside is as engaging as the one inside the rooms.

Our confidence in chairing Twelve Step meetings allows us to say “Yes” to chair the PTA or the Rotary. Our comfort at public speaking, developed from years of standing at the AA podium, has prepared us to speak at meetings and conferences of our professional groups. Our human relations skills, honed by dealing with so many different kinds of people in AA, allow us to rise as leaders in our business or community. Life gets bigger thanks to AA, but at the end of our first decade in recovery we use these keys, which we cut in Twelve Step rooms, to open the door leading out of them.

This is not an easy stage. But it’s important to remember that it is in fact a stage. We wonder if we’re bad or wrong. Certainly there are people in the rooms wonder: “Where are all the old timers?” and “Where are the people with ten or 20 years?”

When we hear those questions we wonder; we doubt ourselves; we feel shame. But when we look closely at our lives, we seem okay. It’s true we don’t go to as many meetings and we don’t make coffee at our home group anymore, but life is good. We want to be sure that we’re not kidding ourselves, that doing our recovery differently is a move toward growth and not toward denial or relapse.

This blog is for you—enjoying your recovery and the blessings it brings—but also enjoy the challenges of “practicing these principles in all your affairs” years later.

Join me at RenewEveryDay.com every week as I raise questions, share my story and ask for your wisdom on a life of recovery and What Comes Next.