But the following story illustrates how really important my drinking with her was to my now x-alcoholic wife. 

 "After about eight weeks in the program, working with my sponsor, I was wondering if my own drinking was offering a ready excuse for Deb. I discussed this with Scotty, and he said that this may be true. He remarked "...Why not just quit drinking with her and see if she responds?"

I really believed that she would not even notice. For example, I had started the process of stopping smoking earlier, and she didn't even seem to notice for weeks, so I really didn't know whether my drinking with her would be that important. So that weekend, while I did the yard work, I just left off the cold beer.

We had a fight that weekend, but I wasn't sure that the issue was whether or not I was drinking with her. We fought constantly anyway.

But to my amazement, when I started to leave early on Monday morning for a week of work in another city, I found a gift waiting for me on the kitchen counter. There, with a little note were six sparkling green bottles of Heineken beer, my favorite. The note said something like "a surprise for you!" There was even a little heart at the bottom!

I left the beer there, and when I returned the following Friday night I walked into a stinging hornet's nest. She had left the beer and the note there for five days, had looked at it every day, and had built up a rage that exploded in a well rehearsed verbal blast at me the moment I walked in the front door. We fought all weekend over whether or not I would drink with her. I guess my drinking with her was an issue after all.

Ken P.

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The wall that builds in time around the inner parts of a man make him more and more stagnant.

The word stagnant means "not moving, or stale." Water is a lot like spirit. Spirit that is not moving, like still water, becomes stagnant. Stagnant water and stagnant spirit stinks...maybe that is why we call it stinking thinkin'!

Lowering the walls that held in the stinking thoughts ...thoughts like resentment for hurtful words uttered by a drunk, or thoughts like self pity that we love to resort to because, well with self pity it feels like there is SOME sort of payoff...those walls, when they are lowered, allow us to drain the inner swamp.

Maybe we lower a wall on one side of our inner swamp with our first sponsor, and he allows the stinking dark thoughts to just dissipate away into the universe. Then we start going to meetings and we listen... a lot. That listening starts to bring in fresh water...fresh thoughts. We read our literature, and that brings in cool fresh water...new cleaner clearer thoughts.

Finally, we lower two more walls...the two most important walls of all. The first is the inner ring of walls that block us off from our own feelings. There is this little tiny compressed densely packed residue of true feelings. These are all that is left after we have stuffed them year after year. The wall has become like a tough seed coat around a pinto bean. Beans have to be soaked...sometimes for a long time, before they can take in water. Our beans have to be soaked in the spirit of the program. The softening of that hard seed coat is the toughest job a man will ever do, and I'll be honest with you. I have sponsored over 30 men over the years, an many men are simply are not able to do that softening!

But if they do, inside every seed coat is an embryo. The embryo is new life that, once freed can now begin stretching its roots into the moist nutrient-rich soil of this program.  Our new roots start pulling up rich stuff like wisdom, and laughter that we forgot we ever had, and just plain old love.

Please, if you are a man hidden deep inside a hard seed coat that is safely buried behind a thick wall of denial, get yourself to a local Al-Anon meeting, start to trust another man, and begin to sprout. You have so much to offer the universe...why not let it out?

Call 1-888-4AL ANON or go to www.al-anonalateen.org

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