Fear, Love, and Fitrah

By pure chance, I recently spoke to two sober alcoholics within a short time span, each in two very different stages of recovery. When this happens I usually take it as a sign. Conversations with folks in recovery are spiritually meaningful to me in some way. The first guy I talked to was a newly sober individual. Fresh off some DUIs and dealing with a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. He told me about his weekly attendance to twelve step meetings, about the friends he’s made so far. He’s stayed sober for a few months, and has found it to be a helpful lifestyle change. Stopping drinking is often a helpful lifestyle change. When I asked if he’d started “working the steps”— AA-speak for the actual pen-to-paper execution of the twelve steps, he said no. For someone newly in recovery, sometimes stopping drinking is hard enough. To then muster up the courage to ask a sponsor to help you through the steps can seem even harder. Lots of newly sober people stop drinking and then wonder why they even have to do all this other stuff too. Unfortunately for many, relapse is likely if the actual work of recovery is not undertaken. So as a graduate of the school of recovery, I shared with him my experience. I could see the gears turning in his head as I shared my story—my failures and my successes. As he listened I saw myself ten years ago absorbing and reflecting the harsh reality of my situation: Change or die. There was an urgency to this and it was scary. I was terrified of going back, but I was also terrified of changing. The only way forward was through. In the end, no one individual has the power to get anyone sober. All we can do is share our experience in the hope that they will take something from it.

Less than twenty four hours later I spoke to another guy in recovery. One who’s been sober for as long as I have—ten years. Unlike me, this fellow is still in the program. He is a regular at meetings, he has sponsees, he volunteers and he does all the things a good AA-er should do. As we talked I also saw myself in this fellow too. I immediately recognized the anxiety around recovery that a lot of longtime meeting-goers feel. The feeling of peril that undergirds their recovery. It’s the narrative that says: unless I do all these things I will slide back into my default state—a defective state of selfishness, self centeredness, and discontentedness. When one believes that your default state is a defective one and that the cure is constant adherence to a program, a new anxiety forms. It was this anxiety that made me eventually leave the program myself. About three years into diligent attendance and volunteering, I realized that I had simply replaced the God-sized hole in my soul with something else: AA.

Obviously going to meetings and practicing the program of AA is better than drinking. Indeed, the world needs good folks in recovery to be at the meetings to help newcomers. It was exactly these people who helped me. Still, if the goal of the steps is to free people from addiction, twelve step programs need to look beyond just replacing one addiction with another. The truth that a lot of longtime folks in recovery don’t want to hear is that at a certain point you have to move on. In my understanding of the early history of AA, the program was designed to help men get sober and then to go back out and live their lives. You’d come into the program, work the steps, and then go back out into the world a changed man. Over the years, as AA grew, AA became a place in which sober people could spend the rest of their lives in. Instead of working the steps and getting sober and then going back out into the world, sober people could find a new all-encompassing home to stay in. As a result of its size and ubiquity, AA can become for many, a place to stay indefinitely.

As I spoke to this fellow, I saw who I would have become if I had stayed in the program all these years. Constantly ill-at-ease, constantly holding at bay what I believed was my default state: a defective one. A state of being that needed constant attention. I was lucky that I had found a group almost ten years ago that had coalesced around a radical idea: that actually your default state is not a defective one. That the program and its steps are actually meant to return you to, and connect you to a state where your’e not self-centered and disconnected from the divine. The steps as such are intended to remove, not add, things that obfuscate your connection to your higher power. In this narrative, you are not fundamentally wretched but rather fully connected to your higher-power and fully capable of living your life free of crutches—twelve step programs included.

Our little group didn’t last long, nor was it widely attended. Partly because what we were saying was so anathema to the mainstream view of AA. Mainstream anons hold a deep suspicion of anyone who says you don’t need to be involved in the program in perpetuity to stay sober. In their view it’s only a matter of time before you relapse if you’re not involved in AA. But this view only serves to perpetuate the program, not to actually liberate the soul from the clutches of addiction. I still very much practice the principles of the twelve steps in my life and have been this whole time. Meditation and prayer and service to others is fundamental to my sobriety after all these years. It’s just that my definition of meditation and prayer, my conception of a higher power, and the way in which I serve others are not strictly within the walls of AA.

I’m acutely aware, more than most, of the nature of addiction. Not only when it takes the form of chemical addiction, but also to religious and doctrinal addiction. Some may see my Islamic practice as merely another foray into the same old thing. The distinction I want to draw is this: AA relies on the narrative that our natural state as “alcoholics” is a broken one. One that needs constant vigilance lest we relapse into a state of selfishness, self-centeredness, and discontent. Before recovery, alcoholics sooth this inherent state of discontentedness with alcohol. After recovery, we sooth it with programatic and disciplined adherence to principles. I reject the idea that I’m fundamentally broken or that without a program I will relapse. This is a narrative of fear. Islam requires programatic and disciplined adherence, no doubt, but I do it out of love for Allah and because that is what I believe Allah asks of me not out of fear of relapse. This is a narrative of love. Interestingly enough, even though my little heretical home group was decidedly not-religious, what was being discussed unknowingly was the Islamic concept of Fitrah—that the original, innate nature of every human being is one where you start whole oriented toward God, and then life—upbringing, trauma, sin, addiction, distraction, layers over that natural state and obscures it. The work of spiritual practice isn't to constantly be patching holes; it's to strip away what's covering up what was already there.

I will forever be grateful to AA and all the people in it that helped me. I will also never tell anyone to not practice the program. My dedication to the program in my early years of recovery was essential to my recovery. However I believe that AA has to also give space to people and encourage people to then go out and live their lives and move on from the program. I’m not in the business of telling people in recovery what they should do but if I were I would tell the newly sober guy to practice the program and get into it—his life depends on it. To the guy who’s been in the program for ten years, I’d tell him to move on—his life depends on it.