How Do You Explain Recovery?

You start by what it's not.
If willpower were a requirement
the twelve steps would be relics.
If you've tried all the other options,
what we in OA call the diet and calorie clubs
and surgery and hypnosis and challenges,
rewards, everything any addict can list
ad infinitum...If you've given up,
decided to just stay an addict
and learned that didn't work either...
then you might wander into the rooms.

 

What Recovery is is the juxtaposition,
the melding, of three different truths.
The psychologist Carl Jung
worked with a rich young drunk
six months, released him,
and the man, Roland Hazard,
when he quickly came back,
having drunk again, heard Jung say
he was hopeless, beyond medicine's reach.
But! When Hazard asked if there was no hope,
Jung answered sometimes a
"vital spiritual experience"
solved the problem cases.

 

The second truth was a doctor,
ruined in the depression,
working in a center for alcoholics
identified two addictions,
the physical and the mental,
the mental being harder to control.

 

The third was spiritual values
inherent in The Oxford Group
striving for absolute honesty,
absolute unselfishness,
absolute love, and absolute purity.

 

When two men came together,
understand the blend of the three,
Recovery happened.
It's still easier to say what recovery's not
then what it is, staying true to the roots
will get you there.