This is the first installment of my second book: "Landing and Launching: 101Checkin and Checkouts." Look here each week for new group entry and exit tools: Enjoy!
LAUNCHING
How are you feeling?”
“Good”
“No, how are you feeling?”
“Great.”
“No, boy, how are you feeling?”
“Fine”
I felt the large man next to me fidget and squirm. Bubba Washington was a former NFL football player who still carried the build and bulk of his former profession. Now, however, he was, like me a counselor intern at Recovery Northwest. After several trips through the Betty Ford Center he now had several years of recovery and was eager to impress upon young men the urgency of recovery, a life free of addictions. He had been raised partially in the rural South and the rest of the time in Harlem. His story included guns and gangs, opportunity found and then squandered and now a passion for Alcoholics Anonymous and a clean and sober lifestyle. He had little patience for young men who had difficulty identifying their feelings.
“Don't make come digging for those feelings, boy. We're not going to have to go through what we went through yesterday are we?”
The boy shuddered and stammered and went on to say that he felt like using, throwing his life away, that when he got out he had no place to go.
The rest of the boys in the group learned quickly that if you were in Bubba's group you'd better express your feelings. It was a 54 day inpatient program and many new arrivals went through the Bubba initiation.
Bubba had a gift for eliciting emotions and stories from people. When I was between girlfriends in early recovery and therefore homeless he offered his home to me. He was in transition also and the only furniture he owned was a camp chair, a carousel horse (don't ask) and a television set.. He sensed something restless in me and became an occasional sponsor. When he observed me stirring and drifting he would confront me in an only slightly less scary way.
“Jeff, I need to talk to you.”
“What's up Bubba?” (Sometimes he shared what was going on with him. He too was trying to stay clean..)
“Jeff, I'd like you to come sit in this chair.”
I had seen Bubba sitting in the camp chair by himself for hours just staring out the window. I hadn't thought much about it. It was just something he did.
“Jeff I'd like to suggest to you that you try sitting in this chair.”
“And then what?”
“Just sit.”
Just sit.?”
“Jeff, when I watch you I notice that you aren't even comfortable in your own skin. I'd like to suggest to you that you sit here until you are comfortable. Are you okay with that?”
Suddenly the chair shifted from being just an inanimate object to a vehicle for transformation. At that stage in my recovery I was open to all sorts of ideas. I had a stack of self help books and had even dabbled in vegetarianism. A chair seemed positively and delightfully simple.
The first sit was not easy. Nor was the 2nd or 3rd or 10th but somehow I did it and then of course like a true addict I became addicted to it. I couldn't wait to get to that chair. I became and still am a peace and serenity addict.
For addicts and alcoholics, expressing our feelings and being in touch with our feelings is not as some might think, an act of constant self indulgence. It is an act of self preservation and an art. Wallowing in self pity is a sure path towards self destruction as is being what I call emotionally constipated. Research is now beginning to reveal that even regular folks can benefit from releasing and expressing feelings on a regular basis. The consequences of emotional constipation can be severe and range from high blood pressure to strokes.
Daniel Goleman, building on Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligence, was perhaps the first popular author to identify this intangible esoteric quality he called “emotional intelligence.”.....
I never developed the skills Bubba had for eliciting emotions. I had to develop a variety of methods accessible for everybody from kinder gardeners to adults. This small book contains what I consider to be the best of 21 years of exploring feelings. I hope it provides a “landing and launching” for you. I highly encourage you to change and adapt every single idea to fit the needs of you and your particular population.
Although this book is divided into landing and launching, I have come to not believe in the concept of closure. I believe rather in that we help people reach a place of understanding. Nothing in this life is ever “closed.” We move on from events but like the hard drive in a computer, every thing we do and experience remains encapsulated inside our shell of muscle and bone. Closure, like the word deadline. contains within it the Western notions of linear time and space. What makes more sense to me is that we walk the great spiral. Things come round and round and each time if we have done our work we attain a new level of understanding...........
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