Three Simple Rules: Uncomplicating Life in Recovery - Softcover

Graubart, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616497769 ISBN 13: 9781616497767

Publisher: Hazelden Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Recovery is hard, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

If sobriety were easy, everybody who wanted to be sober would be. And especially for those who are just starting out in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or another Twelve Step program, the prospect of trying to change drinking, using, or other harmful behaviors can seem overwhelming. The good news is there are just three key things we need to focus on. Trust God. Clean house. Help others.

Three Simple Rules offers a new take on this valuable slogan and explains how these rules can help anyone find fulfilling recovery. Author Michael Graubart also knows that those six short words are packed with meaning and may not sound so straightforward. Luckily, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. Michael uses wit and wisdom gained in more than twenty years of Twelve Step recovery to explain what worked for him so you can figure out what works you. In Michael’s experience, if you follow the Steps, and focus on the three simple rules, you’ll be changed by the process.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Graubart is a New York Times best-selling author who penned Hazelden Publishing’s Sober Dad: The Manual for Perfectly Imperfect Parenting and Step Up: Unpacking Steps One, Two, and Three with Someone Who’s Been There. He writes under a pseudonym to maintain his anonymity and speak frankly about his experiences in recovery. Stay in touch through his website MichaelGraubart.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 
Three Simple Rules
Michael Graubart

 
An Invitation
Rules.
They’re everywhere.
From morning until night, from cradle to grave, our lives are bound by rules.
Rules from our parents. Rules from school. Rules from our siblings. Rules from the government. Rules from our religion.
It’s amazing that any of us can move a muscle given the sheer number of rules, regulations, laws, statues, ordinances, and cultural cues to which we must adhere.
I’m not saying that rules are entirely unnecessary. Imagine driving somewhere without speed limits and stop signs.
(Actually, that just sounds like Boston, where I live.)
Seriously, we couldn’t have a society without rules.
The problem is that we spend almost all of our days following rules and placing rules on people around us. Rules about what we can do. What we can say. Where we can go. What we can spend.
Sometimes it seems like that’s all life has become—we don’t have room for anything else.
As a result, we can forget the very essence of life.
Spending every day making sure we’re following every rule obscures the really important questions.
Why are we here?
What are we supposed to be doing with our short time on Earth?
How do we live fulfilling lives?
How can we harness the gift of recovery to become the best versions of ourselves?
In order to reach our highest potential as human beings, we need to stop thinking, at least for a moment, about the thousands of rules laid out for us each waking moment.
If we truly want to have enjoyable, fruitful, spiritual, meaningful, and sober lives, there are just three key rules by which we need to live.
Three simple rules.
Those three simple rules come from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and go like this:
Trust God. Clean house. Help others.
That’s it. The key to a happy, useful life in six short words.
Now, just because these rules are simple, that doesn’t mean they’re easy. Mastery of the rules takes a lifetime. And just offering my interpretation of them will take up this whole book.
In particular, you may already be apprehensive about that first rule. Especially that word God.
Maybe because the word God implies too many rules!
Seriously, for many people, just the mention of God conjures up feelings of shame and judgment for not being able to live up to countless laws, commandments, and customs. How can such a loaded concept be part of a set of simple rules?
We’ll get back to that question.
But, with the purpose of making this book useful for everyone, I’m going to make a couple small changes to the way we’ll talk about the rules here.
First, let’s change that “G-word” to another term. One that you’ve likely heard before if you’ve ever been to a Twelve Step meeting: Higher Power.
Then, I’m going to rearrange the order of the rules slightly.
So, now, they look like this:
Clean house. Help others. Trust your Higher Power.
Eight words instead of six. But still. The simplest possible recipe for a happy, useful life.
We’ll tackle cleaning house and helping others first, then get back to the big one.
Now, it’s important to point out here that I’m not trying to change tradition or claim that I know a better way to write these rules. Quite the opposite, I’m happy to call myself an “old-timer” in recovery. The rules “Trust God. Clean house. Help others,” in that order, with those words, is what has saved my life and has saved the lives of countless other people in the program.
The point is, I want as many people as possible—including you, dear reader—to be able to know what that’s like. I also recognize and respect that understanding and internalizing what it means to trust a Higher Power is often a lifelong process. Doing the work of cleaning house and helping others is often needed to get there.
So, if you’d like to tackle these in the traditional order, go ahead and read chapter three first. That’s your call—you bought the book, after all. Maybe you’re “old school” about recovery, the way I am! Otherwise, we’ll start our journey through these rules from a place that might be more approachable for people coming into recovery today.
So, where in the Big Book can we find these rules?
There are two pieces to that puzzle.
The first can be found in the foreword called “The Doctor’s Opinion.” Back in 1939, the authors of the Big Book realized that the readership may be suspicious of a new and barely proven approach to recovering from alcoholism. So, they thought hearing from a doctor with a history of treating alcoholic and addicted patients would help legitimize the whole thing.
Also, the initial primary audience for the book was doctors. The Big Book’s authors figured that doctors would read the book and then “prescribe” it for their alcoholic patients.
The doctor they chose was Dr. William Silkworth.
In Silkworth’s foreword, he says “once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules.”[1]
Sounds like a good deal, right?
He doesn’t name those rules, however. For the text of the three rules themselves, we need to turn to chapter 7, “Working with Others.” There, trust God, clean house, and help others are all introduced as central tenets of the program that should be explained to newcomers who are just starting out.[2]
Who is the genius who first pulled all of these concepts together into the rules as we know them? Not sure. But it wasn’t me.
So, what do I, and this book, have to offer you?
This book is an invitation to a better understanding of the three simple rules that come to us from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. But, more importantly, it’s an invitation to simplify your life and your recovery.
These rules, by the way, are useful to everyone, not just recovering alcoholics or addicts. So if you’re a “civilian” or “normie” (as we like to call non-addicts) reading this, welcome! This is an invitation for you, too.
“But Michael,” you may be asking, “don’t Twelve Step programs have, well, twelve rules?”
Kind of. There are, indeed, Twelve Steps.
In recovery, of course, taking the Twelve Steps is the foundation of everything important—preventing relapse, understanding ourselves, developing spirituality, and learning to live comfortably in our own skin.
In a perfect world, newcomers would get into the Steps at their very first meeting.
Unfortunately, today, newcomers sometimes have no exposure to the Steps, or avoid the Steps, or sometimes are even told not to start with the Steps for a period of time.
Then, when they finally do get to them, the Steps can seem confusing and overwhelming. So the question becomes, how can you make a start in recovery before you really get to the Steps? Or, how can you simplify your experience taking the Steps by focusing on the “big picture” of recovery?
That’s where the three simple rules come in.
And that’s where this book comes in.
The amazing thing is, the core concepts of those Twelve Steps can be found in—you guessed it—the three simple rules!
The first three Steps basically boil down to “Trust your Higher Power.”
Steps Four through Eleven are really about cleaning house.
And Step Twelve is about helping others.
Am I suggesting that you can ignore the full Twelve Steps? No. Please do still work a program to the best of your ability! But, if you find yourself (reasonably) confused or overwhelmed by all of those Steps, if you’re stuck on a particularly difficult Step, or if you seem to be losing focus of what the program is really about, the three simple rules are there for you.
I’ll admit, there is some irony in quoting “rules” from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
As any recovering alcoholic or addict will tell you, recovery is not about following rules or placing rules on people—it’s about offering and accepting suggestions.
When you give someone a rule, you are saying, in effect, “I have the power. I know better.”
By contrast, when you are offering a suggestion, you are saying, “Try this if you want. It worked for me. It might just work for you.”
So it wouldn’t make much sense for me, as a recovering alcoholic, to go around telling everyone else which rules to follow.
Instead, I want to offer my own thoughts (and suggestions) about what it means to live by those three simple rules and how they have helped my recovery and my life. How applying these rules, even before you completely understand them, changes you from the inside out.
When you apply these rules to your life, your relationships get better, starting with your relationship with yourself.
Your external life gets better, because you become a much more attractive person to hire, to marry, to be friends with, to have kids with, and so on.
Your internal world changes radically, because you become the spiritual being you were always meant to be.
And all you have to do is follow three simple rules.
Ready for the journey of a lifetime?
Then let’s begin!
 

 
Rule #1: Clean House [excerpt]
Okay, but which house?
We’re not talking so much about the physical home, house, or apartment in which we live.
We’ll get to that soon enough.
Right now, we’re talking about another home we have created for ourselves, or perhaps, have neglected for too long. That “home” is spiritual, and it is always with us everywhere we go.
Most of us are moving into the future carrying a lot of our past that no longer serves us.
Ideas, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, behaviors, habits, relationships, things. What patterns and behaviors did you cling to when you were drinking and using? How many of those are still a part of your life, your spiritual house, right now?
No matter what time of year it might be as you read this, it’s time for an internal spring cleaning! It’s time to clean house.
When the Big Book authors speak of “cleaning house,” they’re talking primarily about inventorying our attitudes, behavioral habits, thinking habits, and actions or inactions. If you aren’t familiar with the Steps, the basic idea is that alcoholism and other addictions are physical, mental, and (you guessed it) spiritual.
The physical part is the compulsion to drink or use. The brain disease.
This combines with a mental obsession, in which we think more about our drug of choice—whether it’s alcohol, cocaine, food, sex, spending, or whatever—than anything else.
Our addictive substances or behaviors ultimately become more important to us than life itself.
So comes the spiritual part.
The purpose of the Twelve Steps is to create a reawakening of the spirit inside the alcoholic or addict.
In other words, our spirit is still within us, but it has been buried under gallons of alcohol, ounces of cocaine, unavailing sexual relationships, and other forms of addictive or compulsive behavior. We have replaced our quest for meaning and fulfillment with a quest for more of those unhealthy things that have given us temporary relief or enjoyment.
We need to get that spiritual quest back on track.
The first three Steps are about understanding and accepting the need for spiritual help. We’ll explore exactly what that means and how to do it when we get to rule number three.
Then comes Step Four, which is the place where members of Twelve Step programs figuratively clean house, and that’s what we’ll focus on first.
Now, the Twelve Steps are complicated enough. The language of them isn’t exactly easy reading; they cannot be interpreted without written guidance from literature and lore from fellow sober alcoholics and addicts.
If you’ve ever seen the Marx Brothers’ movie A Day at the Races, where Chico is trying to tout Groucho onto a horse, and sells him all kinds of horseracing books, that’s what the Steps feel like to many.
Way overcomplicated.
So complicated, in fact, that they scare people off from working the program and getting sober.
When Bill Wilson, one of the cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote the Big Book, he said the Fourth Step was a place where we list our “grosser handicaps.”
In other words, anything that’s big and stands in the way of our spirit’s reawakening should be written down and put on the list.
Somehow, over time, the simplicity of the Fourth Step was lost.
In the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, the sponsor or mentor figure did the writing, because the newcomer’s hand was still too shaky to hold a pen.
The entire Fourth Step process only took about half an hour.
Today, the Fourth Step has turned into huge lists, essays, turn-arounds, and all sorts of other complications never intended by the founders of the program.
It can take years, and all too often, it never gets done. The newcomer is robbed of the opportunity to have the spiritual awakening promised in Step Twelve, and therefore doesn’t get the insurance policy against relapse that the program guarantees.
If you overcomplicate the process of getting well, you are going to make recovery all but impossible for large numbers of people.
So maybe the program needs to clean house a little bit, too, and get back to the simplicity of the original manner of taking the Fourth Step.
Here’s the proof: Somebody asked one of the companies that produces the chips or coins that are given out in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve Step programs, “How many newcomer chips do you sell, and how many two-year chips do you sell?”
The answer: “We sell twenty newcomer chips for every two-year chip we sell.”[3]
In other words, maybe one in twenty newcomers to various Twelve Step programs actually makes recovery stick.
This is compared with 50 to 75 percent of newcomers who got sober back when the program started. [4]
One key reason why: we’ve overcomplicated the process of cleaning house.
Who on earth would want to spend months rehashing and writing about all of the sordid, miserable, embarrassing, shameful things we’ve done?
The Big Book tells us, “We absolutely insist on enjoying life.”
It’s hard to do that when your head is stuck in the past, reliving all those nightmare scenarios.
That was never what the founders of the program intended.
Instead, cleaning house, at least on one’s first time through the Steps, was meant to be that simple list of things we did that weren’t really making us better people.
The Twelve Steps, as Bill wrote them, were too complicated even for AA’s other cofounder, Dr. Bob Smith. Dr. Bob, in Akron, published his own literature—not a book, but a pamphlet that laid out not twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but just four.
Dr. Bob really wanted things kept simple.
So perhaps we can use our simple rule as a guidepost to understand how to move forward in this area of our lives.
Clean house.
When recovering alcoholics and addicts do a Fourth Step, they learn that they have certain “defects of character.”
My sponsor, the late and beloved Milton D., never liked that expression. Who wants to think that he o...

Edition details

• Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1616497769
• ISBN 13: 9781616497767
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 136