The Second Road Family » Let’s Get Personal.

Let’s Get Personal.

Tonight, my students are learning about how to write personal narratives. I’ve sent them on a mission to discover a few great examples of personal stories, and one of the places I sent them was to the online version of the Big Book. I asked them to take a look at the stories that follow the original text and to analyze the structure.

The Big Book tells us that the way to tell our recovery stories is to describe what we were like, what happened, and what we’re like now. I thought it would be a great assignment for my students…

In Dave B’s story of “Gratitude in Action,” he explains:

I believe it would do me good to tell the story of my life. Doing so will give me the opportunity to remember that I must be grateful to God and to those members of ALcoholics Anonymous who knew AA before me. Telling my story reminds me that I could go back to where I was if I forget the wonderful things that have been given to me or forget that God is the guide who keeps me on this path.

It’s always been one of my favorite things about speaker meetings…watching the ways that people realize the significance of their own stories. Their lives become meaningful as the speakers relay the sequence of events, which are frequently disastrous and shameful and embarassing and full of weakness, that brought them so low that they had no choice but to recovery. For me, it’s a powerful testament to the elegance of the steps and the life lived along spiritual lines, but it’s also a testament to the power of stories.

And man, have recovering people got stories! I thought my own must have been completely crazy and original, but when I started writing about this stuff and attending meetings, I realized that my story was so common. It is unique in the way the various characteristics of the addiction dance come together at my house, but it is far from original. It’s a story that is as old as marriage, in many ways…and it doesn’t stop fascinating me.

I hope that my students will find the experience to be as potent as I’ve found it…

Tags: addiction, recovery, writing

Stumble it! Delicious Facebook

July 4th, 2009 at 4:34 am
Eli Hornby

I used to feel like the stories at the end of the book were kind of a waste of time. Likewise for the stories at the end of the SAA book. But like you, I’ve really come to see the power in those accounts, and to see the similarities in my own life. It’s the “shameful and embarrassing” parts that make them so compelling, and offer me the most encouragement as an addict.