At the two D.A. meetings I regularly attend, we spend a lot of time focusing on the "Step of the month." I don't know if those A.A. guys planned it this way, but I find it both convenient and satisfying to study one step a month for an entire year and then begin the cycle again. January, then, is for studying Step One. Today it sounds fresh and new. By the end of January, I will be thoroughly sick of Step One.
Step One, for those who might not know, goes like this: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable." (You can find info about the A.A. program here.) D.A., like many Twelve-Step groups, has permission from Alcoholics Anonymous to adapt the language of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions to accommodate our specific affliction. Therefore, instead of claiming powerlessness over alcohol, I substitute the word debt. When I "take" Step One, I admit that I am powerless over debt and my life is unmanageable.
Step One is the foundation from which all recovery grows. According to the Twelve-Step model, some people are afflicted with a compulsive behavior—drinking, for example, or borrowing money, or eating too much, or gambling ... you name it, really. If there is a behavior that humans can do to excess, there is probably a Twelve-Step program to address it. By definition, a compulsive behavior is something we feel compelled to do. In my case, it was using credit cards, which caused me to incur "unsecured debt." Unsecured debt is debt that is not secured with collateral.
I went to my first D.A. meeting on January 15, 1995. I know this because I recently found a journal entry stating this fact. I had actually learned about D.A. about six months previously, from my dear friend who eventually took me to my first D.A. meeting. We had been meeting weekly over dinner to "do our money," a process I don't remember now, except that it involved studying a book (not published by D.A., but written by a controversial member of D.A.) about how to work the D.A. program. I am guessing that at some point it became clear, to my friend if not to me, that I was going to need more help than a weekly meeting with a friend would provide.
Joining D.A. was not easy. A few months after my first meeting, I wrote this in my journal:
I've been skulking around the edges of this group, terrified that someone will notice me, and terrified that no one will notice me. I want to be a part of the group, but I resent all the rules and rituals. I want you to accept me as I am, a tall order when I can't even accept myself.
In the early days, I was not ready to admit powerlessness over anything. Admit utter defeat? Not likely! The thought of admitting to anything but being utterly self-sufficient made me furious. I didn't want to belong to a Twelve-Step group. I wasn't against recovery: I just thought it wasn't for me. No, let me be honest: I thought I was too good for Twelve-Step recovery. I thought I was smart, special, privileged, and exempt. I thought I could just breeze through, pick up a few money management tips, get out from under my $20,000 mountain of debt, and be on my way. None of the rules applied to me. Certainly not Step One.
Never in my dreams did I imagine I would still be in D.A., twenty years later. But here I am.
My abuse of credit was driven by a deeply rooted and grandiose belief that I deserved to have what I want, right now, without earning it or paying for it. What's more, I believed the world owed me because I was special, unique, and exempt from things like holding a regular job.
Oddly enough, I also believed that I deserved nothing, not even space on the planet, and that I should have been killed at birth. A deep self-hatred lurked underneath my grandiosity.
How these two opposing views could occupy space in the same brain is just one of the bizarre paradoxes of Twelve-Step recovery. It doesn't really matter. What is clear is that both viewpoints are equally insane and based on self-centered fear.
Now I choose to believe that I have an "allergy to money," like alcoholics have an allergy to alcohol. No matter how much I try to control it, manage it, hoard it, or figure it out, money makes me do the emotional equivalent of sneezing, coughing, dripping, and hacking. My brain stretches the same $10 bill twenty ways, trying to force it to meet all my needs. I'll hoard a bit of cash as if money has abandoned me forever, or I'll quickly spend all I have in a frenzy of retail madness. There are no red cones to keep me in line when it comes to money, no boundaries, no limits, no rational guidelines... when it comes to money, my brain is trying to kill me.
That is why I need Step One. I'm normal in many ways, but not with money, not with debt. I can't control money. I can't manage it. I can't borrow like a "normal" person. There is no normal for me when it comes to debt. I can pretend, but sooner or later, my true colors appear. I'm a debtor, a compulsive debtor, and no matter how hard I try, if I incur debt, my life will be completely unmanageable by me. I am powerless over debt.
Another paradox of the Twelve-Step world: admitting my powerlessness opens the door to a new power. What a long strange journey.
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