The unexpected consequence

It has been my experience in AA that whenever someone relapses and comes back to a meeting, they always tell the same story.  I've heard it again and again.  They always say I stopped praying and I stopped going to meetings.  It's pretty simple really.  I've never heard someone say I prayed every day and I went to a meeting and I drank anyway.  I can't say it never happens that way, but in my experience, if you do those two things, you stay sober.

I have to tell on myself and admit, if it hasn't been obvious from other posts, that I don't really go to meetings anymore.  And I don't pray either.  I can tell you with pretty much certainty that I'm not going to drink.  It is the furthest thing from my mind.  But I would be fooling myself if I didn't realize that what I'm doing by not going is dangerous.  In particular with all of the stress that has come into my life with moving to New York and starting over.  There are consequences to not going to meetings besides drinking.  You get a little crazy in the head.  Your whole attitude and outlook shifts from the positive to the negative.  You are suddenly ungrateful.  You lose the peace and serenity that you worked so hard to gain.  I know because I have experienced all of these things by not going to meetings.

It is true there are days, most days, when I feel completely fine without going to meetings, but recently I experienced what I can only describe as the way you feel in early sobriety.  I felt such overwhelming stress and anxiety and it led to old feelings of desperation.  Desperate not to feel what I was feeling.  I went to a meeting in the hopes of getting some relief.  There are only two ways I know of to get that kind of relief.  You could drink yourself into not caring, or you could go to a meeting.  There are three ways actually.  You could pray for relief.

I always had really strong faith in a higher power.  It was not difficult for me to get step 2.  It was easy because I had always believed in something greater than myself.  I just never had words for it until I had AA.  Over the course of my first year of sobriety, I had been through so much - surviving breast cancer and all - my faith grew to be almost unshakable.  People talk about having "God" stories or moments.  I have those stories.  Things that are simply unexplainable.  My faith was very important to me and very important to my program.  I prayed every day, twice a day, at least.

Although not going to meetings has not led to me drinking, I have experienced the other consequences from time to time - the crazy in the head and the lack of gratitude, among other things, like life just being plain difficult to tolerate.  But I realized just the other day the real consequence of my not going to meetings.  I have lost the very thing that meant the most to me.  I lost my faith.