All the folks who need meetings and can’t get them have really been on my mind, due to social distancing and the current health climate.
I’ve always been a fan of the twelve-step slogans and found them to be my way in to grasping the principles of the programme. Here’s an excerpt from Many Brave Fools regarding my absolute favourites.
Through “sharing” (for lack of a better term) with Roisin, I found a way to feel not-so-bad about stopping the ride that night. Oh, I still fought against the sincerity of the twelve-step program, much in the way I constantly questioned the way the ladies in all the books I read bonded with their horses. It just didn’t seem very “real world” to me, all the sharing and the slogans. Mind you, I could get behind “This Too Shall Pass” because I could see it work. Things did pass, things like pain and fear and sadness. As trite as I considered “One Day at a Time” to be, it certainly made it easier to manage that pain, fear, and sadness. I didn’t have to get rid of those feelings I dreaded all the time, I only had to let them go for a day—for twelve hours, even. Just the daytime hours. I could do that.
Listening to people share their stories busted the myth of terminal uniqueness that plagues addicts and codependents alike. One of the reasons I loathed the Little Blue Book—entitled One Day at a Time, in fact—they distributed in Al-Anon, was because the words within perfectly expressed my experience. I didn’t want to be one of those people, those helpless people. Up until that point, living with another’s active addiction had been only my experience, and I got a charge out of that. But here was a book full of others (365 others, as there was a reading for each day of the year) who had similar challenges. If I wasn’t the only woman suffering from this kind of havoc, then, actually, maybe I could feel less like a fool.
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Many Brave Fools: A Story of Addiction, Dysfunction, Codependency… and Horses is AVAILABLE NOW.
Order your copy today:
> In the US, click on over to Trafalgar Square Books’ site.
> In the UK and Europe, visit Quiller Publishing’s page.
MANY BRAVE FOOLS 