Addiction, Treatment and Recovery

 The theme of gratitude is familiar to those of us in 12-Step recovery programs.  I imagine that all of us – at one time or another – have heard from a tough sponsor, “It’s time for you to write out a gratitude list.” The symptoms for which this is the treatment are: self-pity, whining, grousing, complaining, and general snarliness. The little action of writing the gratitude list, or what my grandmother called “counting your blessings,” has some psychological heft behind it.
Viktor Frankl, the great Viennese psychiatrist and death camp survivor, is frequently quoted with this line:  Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. 
To choose one’s attitude, to choose gratitude. Another writer puts it another way, “Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.” To choose gratitude, another pair of glasses, is not just to see four ounces in an eight-ounce glass as “half-full.”  It’s to see the glass as full and running over.
If you were to create a gratitude list focusing just on life in your workplace, I wonder what you’d put on it? We had a counselor once in the Betty Ford Center Family Program who frequently (and annoyingly) reminded us: “Our most difficult patients are our best teachers.” But she was right. The patients teach us that we are not God, and remind us that they have the dignity and right to make their own way.
I have a vignette which may help you to explore more gratitude in your own life.  I recently took some time off and stayed around the desert, listening to the rain and waiting early for the spectacular sunrises that go with clouds here. I happened to be hiking toward one of my old haunts, Pushawalla Canyon.  Part of the six-mile walk is rather uninteresting, a lunar-type landscape. In my head, I was trying the practice of “Bruha,” which a Jewish friend had taught me, that is, saying 100 blessings a day. For example, “Thank you for this trail and the people who created it.” Well, that particular part of the trail was so dull, I was having trouble getting beyond about 23 blessings.  Then the trail, a different one from what I had remembered, headed off in the wrong direction. Ten minutes of “wrong direction” later, I was about to walk back; then I saw a horse, and next to it, a beautiful woman chopping away at the trail with a hoe.
 The horse nudged her as I approached, and she turned when I greeted her. It was quickly apparent to me that she was deaf. I realized this was going to be interesting as I launched into the half-witted performance I habitually do with deaf people; start talking with my hands even though ignorant of sign language. Fortunately she read my lips, and what I learned was that she had spent two hours a day for two years, clearing a trail in the desert.  I also learned she was more than a little peeved about the recent rain gutting out some of the path.)  The trail she had carved led me to an area I had never seen called Hidden Palms, a little oasis fed by ground water along the San Andreas Fault. I thanked her, waving my hands about, for creating this beautiful new trail. She went back to her hoe and I walked on.
 This lady gave me more than a new trail to walk; she gave me Bruha material for the rest of the walk – lots of blessings: thankful for people with different abilities; thankful for other examples of courage and perseverance; thankful for my own hearing, even when I choose not to listen; thankful for our patients and families who come to us with their own disabilities but willing hearts.
A program of “rigorous gratitude” seems to lead us right to our Higher Power. Maybe the ultimate thing any of us can put on a gratitude list is that God is really OK being God without any help from us. Grateful that the power of recovery is like a river that takes us where it will, not where we will. Sometimes, as with Step 11, it is soul-refreshing doing nothing more complicated than choosing to breathe in the presence of God as we understand God. Just breathe in the presence.