The Higher Power crux; recovery through pain; Getting In Touch (Gately)

pivotal · ~May-July YDAU

• When: the Braintree Commitment ~July YDAU; the memory-surfacing ~May-June YDAU (Gately at ~8-10 months clean, near the end of his Ennet residency / into staffing)
• What: The thread's open spiritual crux, stated by Gately from the podium of the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group: at ten months clean he still has no understanding of "God as you understand Him"; the rote knees-down A.M./P.M. Please and Thank You gets him through the day, but when he reaches for a real Higher Power he feels only "an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with." (Boston AA falls all over itself to Keep-Coming him for saying it — publicizing the fuck-up is itself the medicine, and "the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.") This is the thread's canonical open Higher-Power crux (its answering beat at event 22). Two further recovery mechanisms land here: that the way it gets better "is through pain" (not around it), and "Getting In Touch" — buried memories bubbling up in sobriety (his alcoholic mother, the M.P.'s beatings, Sir Osis of Thuliver), the generational transmission of the Disease (the inheritance premise of event 2, surfacing from the recovery side). Bob Death's "how's the water" fish parable glosses the unconscious immersion recovery tries to make visible. Higher-Power understanding is recorded open, as printed. See the Gately timeline (his biography at depth).