JW48 - Counting Clean Time After a Slip
Counting Clean Time After Slip
[The Podcast version of this commentary is at Video Version ]
Hi there. I'm Jason Wittman. I've been at this a long time. I just got a couple of comments here. I just finished reading a Facebook entry in one of these sober groups by somebody who had about. I think they said nine months clean and sober. And then they went and used very briefly. And now wondering, what do I tell my home group?
Do I tell them that I use and now I'm starting at day one? Or do I, uh, say I have nine months and. I am, with just one little slip, and all this is just pure nonsense.
The matter is, and this is what I say to everybody with not much time or who, no matter how much time they have, if they end up using again, is it you're not starting all over again. I. This is pure nonsense. Whatever amount of time you had clean and not using is experience, so you're not starting all over again.
You might start counting all over again. But the truth is, it's not like you just started. The first time, if you can remember, the first time you walked into a meeting or you decided not to use, you didn't know if you could put two minutes together, no less a day, no less six months or nine months, or a year of 40 years, you have no experience. But now. You had some experience, and you ended up taking another educational move by, uh, reliving some of your past by using one of your goodies again, and you got a result. That's probably pretty familiar, was the good result. And so you're back. So now you might start your days over again, but you have all of that experience of what works for that period of time.
The only thing you have to really figure out now is what is it that didn't work? What is it that you forgot? What is it you didn't do? Like maybe your fourth step, your fifth step which is usually the reason why people use again, is because they've been dicking around with, oh, I'm still working on my third step, six months, a year later, instead of doing the fourth and fifth step and starting to have good feelings.
Like all the rest of us, instead of sitting there seeing us feeling real good and feeling inside like, this isn't working well, sure it's not working. You haven't done the work. So here you are with zero time today, but a lot of experience. For as long as you were clean and sober. So now get busy again.
Learn that lesson, do whatever it is you didn't do the last time, and move on in October of this year, which is a couple of months away. I will have 48 years of not using anything. Now, after three years of not using, I went out and drank for two weeks with my Irish foreign student friends at Cornell. And,I had the experience of. After three years of being clean and sober, I didn't like that feeling of not being on top of my game. So I stopped, and three years later, because I didn't have the courage to ask somebody to go have sex with him,
I went and got stoned. I still didn't ask and decided that was pretty stupid. And uh, that was the last time I ever used anything. So I had three years of abstinence, and I used for two weeks, and then I had three more years and used for all of one evening. One time on alcohol, one time on marijuana.
That doesn't mean I now have the I, I personally believe that my count started the next day after my smoking dope.
The fact that I. Have six more years of experience. So what? It's good, it's good for me. I probably wouldn't have 40, almost 48 years, 47 years plus of clean time. Now, if I hadn't had those experiences, which taught me a lesson, alcohol wasn't working. Pot wasn't working. So as far as I'm concerned, you know, stop all this drama of, oh, I had this clean time and I lost it, and now I'm starting all over again. Bullshit. You're not starting all over again.
You have experience and more experience than you had to begin with. And now you can do it correctly. One last thing here. The first step says that you know what you would do and wasn't working. That you're powerless over those things, whatever the hell that means, and that your life would become, manage manageable.
And I guess you know that, but truly, the first step. What it means is my best thinking wasn't working, so now maybe I ought to follow somebody else's best thinking, which obviously has worked, which in this case for you would be to follow your sponsor and the 12 steps and get back on track, period. End of game.
No drama in that. If you do a really good first step, you become teachable. And when you become teachable and you do the work that the teachings prescribes to do, you too. One of these days will say I have 47 plus years, so there, that's it.
Have a really great day. Just know there's not a shred of evidence that says life is supposed to be serious. So smile, say one nice thing about yourself, and get on with life. And that's it. Have a great day. Make it a great day.
©2025, Jason Wittman, M.P.S., LAADC, CATC-IV
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