…Until Storms Yield to Healing Rains

We alcoholics can also work Step Four from a non-self-help, let-God-change-our-brain perspective—which means that while we do the personal work (taking action in specific ways that AA literature suggests) we also ask God to work on us. And we trust that he does so.

That has been my Step Four experience. I let go, allowing God to transform me into a new person by his methods of changing the way I think (a practical, layman’s translation of Romans 12:2). That initial process spanned a two-year period in my life; a more mature process continues to this very day. Specifically, I worked steps one through four during my first months in AA, stayed sober, but got drunk on St. Patrick’s Day 1999. Again I tried the process, this time remaining sober for five months while working the fourth step, and again I drank—this time the night before I departed for Louisville and my first-ever experience with rehabs.

During both attempts, I withdrew from my first AA sponsor, Jack. I feared placing the process within God’s protection and care, so I worked alone on the steps. Both times I did Step Four as if working a crossword puzzle—alone, objective, detached, putting pen to paper—and each time I drank again. The popular self-help, change-our-lives approach only led me to relapses.

The third time, however, I worked steps one through four as part of a committed, fifteen-man step-study group. I shared with my AA sponsor, Jim, everything that I wrote or thought in the steps. My times with Jim were strictly confidential, one-on-one encounters. Nothing in AA literature endorses doing painful, spiritual work publicly in any type of group therapy, at AA meetings or in rehab.

The earnestness of my third attempt paralleled the intense work that I did, years earlier, with a first-rate analyst in Lexington. The only differences—at last in 2001, I remained abstinent, and I prayerfully asked God to work on me while I did my part. God did, and over time I realized that it worked. Grace sobers.

Now, before we turn to AA’s Fifth Step, let’s consider relapses….

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

Tweet No. 56: From Stepsfoundation.com

We let God “demonstrate, through us, what he can do. We ask him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have us be.”

Seeding Clouds of Anger, Fear….

Step Four (among the twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous) states that we “made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Details about this stage of recovery appear in:

• Alcoholics Anonymous, which describes Step Four on pages 59, 63-71.
• Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which describes Step Four on pages 42-54.

And why should alcoholics of our type bother with this step? Because it helps us face the need to change our thoughts and behaviors. Even if we work Step Four from popular self-help, change-our-lives perspectives (instead of from spiritual slants), making an inventory works effectively. The experience is like an end-of-the-year accounting of goods, which is one way that the Big Book describes Step Four. Actually working the step parallels psychological techniques that help us combat alcoholic thought distortions, triggers and cravings—as do the very practical exercises found in chapters two and three of Healing the Addicted Brain by Harold C. Urschel III, M.D., or in other good books that approach alcoholism in holistic ways.

Specifically, Step Four begins with our resentments (our so-called ”grudge lists” against people, places, ideas, etc.), and the step uses these lists to reveal our failures, sins, liabilities (apply whatever label that works best for you). Second, the process leads us into breakthroughs about how, when and where we were responsible for thoughts, feelings or actions that led to our resentments. Indeed, Step Four exposes how we alcoholics typically blame other people, other influences—even alcohol itself—for our problems.

In addition, Step Four helps us understand how anger, fear and misdirected instincts—even soul sickness—can intensify our alcoholism. Said differently, Step Four has spiritual value, as described by The Life Recovery Bible: “This will teach us humility as we uncover our sins and faults. It will also help us develop a grateful attitude toward God as we discover the many gifts he has given us.”

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

Tweet No. 55: From a Songwriter

“Healing rain is a real touch from God. It could be physical healing or emotional or whatever”—Michael W. Smith

The Healing Rain Unleashed by the AA Steps

It’s not always the latest thinking that reveals truth—sometimes, it’s old thought—and I found an article like that, which was published years ago. “Patience, grace, prayer, meditation, forgiveness and fellowship are as important in many of our health initiatives as medication, hospitalization or surgery,” Dr. David Aldridge observed in 1991. He served on the faculty at a German medical school, and he says confidently: “In the face of suffering, our spirituality may help us to find purpose, meaning and hope.”

This scholarly but powerful article was first published in The British Journal of General Practice. It cites medical studies that affirm intercessory prayer is beneficial, based on responses from a large study population in the late eighties. “In one study in a coronary care unit, patients in the prayer group had an overall better outcome, requiring less antibiotics, less diuretics [etc....],” Aldridge reported. “For renal patients, prayer and looking at the problem objectively were used most in coping with stress.” He related these findings to the treatment of alcoholism, which he said has historically included “spiritual considerations,” and he described alcoholism treatments as using psychological methods, social methods of group support and “spiritual techniques of prayer.”

Finally, the European physician cites a 1989 study—one in which 160 physicians believe that “religion has a positive effect on physical health, that religious issues should be addressed and that older patients may ask the physician to pray with them.” Aldridge’s article concludes that “both medicine and spiritual healing can bring about the conditions under which healing can occur.” For some of us alcoholics, our spiritual healing (which readily embraces medical and/or psychiatric care) includes the healing rain unleashed by AA’s steps–particularly the Fourth and Fifth Steps.

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

Tweet No. 54: From Spark, a Book by Dr. John Ratey

In a 1999 study called SMILE … researchers at Duke University concluded “exercise was as effective as medication in lowering depression.”

Where Body, Soul and Alcoholism May Meet

Now let’s explore a clever website. Please click here to go to Learn.Genetics™, a creative resource developed by the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. If you will, keep that web page open in a separate browser window, then return to this blog.

If the above link does not take you to a web page entitled “Beyond the Rewards Pathway,” then find the Learn.Genetics™ microsite entitled “The New Science of Addiction: Genetics and the Brain.” From that page you can launch into a wide range of informative audiovisual resources about addiction. For example, if you want elemental neuroscience about how the brain processes feelings of motivation, reward or behavior—which alcohol directly affects—then explore interactives under the subhead “Drugs Alter the Brain’s Reward Pathway.” The most vivid selection is actually a teaching tool for children, “Mouse Party,” a cartoon-like audiovisual that specifically demonstrates alcohol’s impact on minute neurotransmitters and receptors, as well as on larger regions of the brain that form memories, make decisions and control impulses (By the way, “Mouse Party” also traces the effects of drugs like cocaine or meth). Other interactive visuals show, for example, how PET scans measure brain activity.

Now click on (or return to) the subhead, “Beyond the Rewards Pathway,” and let’s study the text and graphics for Dopamine, Serotonin and Raphé Nuclei pathways. The latter is one brain area where drugs like alcohol co-mingle with disorders like depression to affect sleep, moods, appetite, pain and body temperature. Such brain pathways may even be where body, soul and alcoholism meet.

In any case, these pathways imply: that alcoholism is a disease; that mind-altering drugs clearly damage the brain; that there may be brain areas where the soul (or psyche) intersects with both the disease of addiction and its impacts on our brains and bodies; and that, yes, for those of us with faith, there may even be science-based parallels here to spirit-based healing. Said differently, our genes are not strangers to grace. Why should we be?

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

Tweet No. 53: From an African-American Spiritual

“The Holy Spirit revives my soul…./ There is a balm …to make the wounded whole;/ There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Healing the Hardware of the Soul

Do we change our lives and, thereby, change our brains—or do changes in our brains help to change our lives? These are not academic concerns. They matter to us as alcoholics. Our addicted thinking affects every aspect of our lives—indeed, as Alcoholics Anonymous affirms: “The main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body.”

If you want to keep up with first-rate brain research, one first-rate source is the nonprofit Dana Foundation, which connects Web browsers to a wide range of resources about neuroscience. Other options are for-profit resources by brain specialists like Daniel G. Amen, M.D., a Christian psychiatrist whose bestselling books include Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and Magnificent Mind at Any Age. 

Amen has also appeared on a series of PBS broadcasts. His 2002 book, Healing the Hardware of the Soul, details how “a proper understanding of the brain should actually encourage people to get in touch with their souls and, in so doing, to heal them,” says Richard DeGrandpre, Ph.D., a freelance science writer, editor and respected author.

Yet DeGrandpre cautions those of us who pursue brain research in search of hope for personal healing: “Differences in the brain are not reducible per se to illness. What Amen and others see as brain pathologies are likely, in fact, to be the brain’s normal responses to pathological conditions, not in the genes or the brain, but in one’s life, family and society.”

Even so, DeGrandpre confirms that the second half of Healing the Hardware of the Soul espouses: “You must turn outward and change the way you live your life. [For if] you change your life, you will, in time, most certainly change your brain.”

Now let’s try something interactive….

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

Tweet No. 52: From What Recovery Teaches Me

AA healing “is practiced in meetings, over coffee, through …close bonds with others in recovery and by helping others achieve sobriety.”