Last night was really a fantastic DA meeting. It didn’t start off that way. Someone shared at the top of the meeting about one of the things that every consumer goes through but that are problematic for people who spend to change how they feel; the get rich in real estate seminar. Pretty powerful stuff. Other people shared the “opportunities” they had nearly fallen victim to during the week.

It came my time to share and I shared that I had been presented with a real estate opportunity myself; not the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” workshop my friend bought (then returned), but a suggestion from my father that I start looking for property, what he called “the best way for us to work together to increase [my] capital.”

That prompted something unusual in this meeting; the person that brought the topic up ‘double-dipped’ to share the rest of the story. They got really honest. And that, that honesty, is where the magic lies in recovery.

It’s also where the really funny stuff is hiding, deep inside the stuff we want to hide. I know it’s been prompted in part by the fact that I’ve asked my AA sponsor to take me through the DA steps too, but Joe has decided to go through the DA steps from scratch himself with a new sponsor. Then he shared more about why.

It seems that on a recent trip with his grandson to London the only recreational spending he did was to buy a pair of Paul Smith socks at Harrod’s. Paul Smith socks are fabulous, and fabulously expensive. And in London everything is twice as much as it is here. So he got home and wore the groovy black and green striped socks, reminicent of the Wicked Witch of the West and everybody noticed them. More people commented on the coolness of his socks than anything he’s bought in years. So he’s surfing the internet, with intention, obviously, but not consciously, when he stumbles upon Paul Smith socks on sale for only $18 a pair, less than half of what he paid at Harrod’s. Naturally he bought 10 pair. Shipping was $25.

Then he put a new roof on his house. Because he didn’t like the color of the shingles.

“I think I did better when I didn’t have money because I always had to place my reliance on my Higher Power. And even with the money (he inherited a meaningful amount of money by any measure several years ago) I have done really well as long as I’ve used the tools in the program. But the minute I put that down, the minute I start running the show, I do astonishing, absurd things like this. So I’m getting a first step again, and I’m starting over again, and thank God it was just socks and a roof because left unchecked, left without God in my life and the tools that are specific to DA I spend my way down to zero every time.”

Zero to him is not the same zero I have. Where he is you can’t really get to the principal, only the income. Even so, I love him because he gets it and because he’s willing to grow toward the solution.

After that, his sponsor and my long time friend shared. She talked about the way she is always on to the next thing that is going to make her life great and how since she’s been in DA she’s learned to not act on those ideas immediately. A week later most of them disappear. If they are still there after two weeks she’ll think about adding them to her spending plan.

And I know that it is working for her. I know it because she owns a home now. In a great neighborhood. I know it because we saw the film Adaptation together six years ago and orchids became the next great thing that would make her complete. A year later, I saw her at her crappy apartment, sitting on the floor, watering her 400 orchids, and weeping. “Honey,” I said. “AA worked for you. Have you thought about Debtors Anonymous?”

And it only took me five more years to ask myself the same question. Pretty good for me. (Now about those socks. . .)