The Accountability Bond

Every Thursday we’ll post something having to do with relationships and/or emotions. Hope it helps.

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The Accountability Bond

Sometimes my accountability partner and I picture the doomsday scenario of a relapse. It’s morbid, imagining the ways we handle it if we broke our sobriety, and we shudder when we picture the outcome. Relapse is one of the worst types of nightmares, so at times we ward our fear of it off by joking about it, the way people sometimes joke about The Big One dropping – it could happen, but we’re not counting on it.

We consider the numbness we’d probably feel. It’s been twenty 26 years since I used or porn or committed fornication; just about the same time as my partner’s. So after such a long sobriety stretch, we’d go into shock.

Then there’d be our wives. What about coming clean to them? We both promise each other that we’d tell our wives if we ever slipped, but it would be a death sentence to so many things — Renee’s confidence in me, the exclusive bond we’ve shared, my credibility as a father and a husband. Thinking about it puts knots in my stomach.

Who else would we tell? We’re both in leadership, so there’d be repercussions if we admitted having a sexual fall. I get extreme at that point, telling him I’d just drop everything and go manage a doughnut shop, hoping no one who’d know me as a pastoral counselor would drop by for a cinnamon roll.

Then we get more realistic and ask the tough questions. Is sobriety all that defines us? Does one transgression undo years of learning and growing? Or do we make too much of our goal of “staying sober for life?” And inevitably, we decide that no, our sobriety is not all that defines us. We’re Christians, husbands, fathers, Americans – relapse wouldn’t undo these things.

But it would mar them, and that’s when sobriety takes on the right perspective. It isn’t everything, but it affects everything. Nor does it define our life, but it enhances it immeasurably. It’s like my country: not everything, but so much. And it’s certainly worth fighting for.

Then we smile, shrug, and he says, “So this, Joe, did you at any time —?”