Nobody warns you that one of the hardest years of your life might land after you get sober. You put the drink down, you get a sponsor, you start doing the work. Then something breaks that has nothing to do with alcohol at all.
That is where Curry N. found himself three years into AA. He walked in on New Year’s Day of 2019 figuring the worst of it was behind him, and by year three his marriage was ending.
Curry lives in McKinney, Texas, and his conversation on Episode 290 of Sober Speak is one of the more honest accounts of Step 6 and Step 7 you will hear. Not the theory of those steps. What they actually feel like when your life is coming apart, and you have to keep showing up anyway.
The Phone Call About His Character Defects
When things started falling apart at home, Curry called a friend in the program named Wayne H. He was looking for sympathy. He got a question instead.
How’s those character defects coming? How’s your six and seven looking?”
Wayne is a former Marine. The two of them had grown close during the year Curry’s father was dying of cancer, and Wayne had handed Curry his squadron coin the week Curry and his sister picked up their one-year medallions. That was the same week Curry’s dad passed away.
So the question landed. Curry wanted to wave it off and could not.
“Like a lot of us, we have these crises we can’t see past,” Curry said. “And I’m just like, no, no, no, I’m not talking about stepwork. I’m talking about real things that are going on that I need to resolve.”
Wayne kept steering him back to the steps anyway. That is what a good friend in this program does when you would rather talk about anything else.
What Divorce in Sobriety Showed Him About Harm
For years Curry had graded himself on a curve. He never yelled, and he never threw anything.
There were no screaming matches to point to, so by his own accounting his drinking had not really cost his marriage anything.
Sitting in the wreckage, he found out he had the whole thing backwards.
“I had a delusional belief that because I never yelled at anybody and I never threw anything at anyone, and we didn’t really fight or anything like that, that I wasn’t really harming anyone,” he said. “But that’s a falsehood. It’s an absence of presence and an absence of love and care and the things that you should provide in a relationship.”
Read that one twice if you need to. The harm was not in anything he did. It was in the years he spent not there.
If you are going through a divorce in sobriety, this is often the part that stings the most. The defects that hollowed out the marriage were not the loud, obvious ones. They were the quiet ones you never bothered to count.
Step 6 and Step 7 Are Quieter Than You Think
Here is what surprises people about Step 6 and Step 7. There is no ceremony to it and very little drama.
Curry kept going to meetings. He kept calling Wayne. He went back into the Big Book and did what the book plainly says to do: find a quiet place, look over what you wrote down, and ask a Higher Power to take what you cannot carry yourself.
That is the whole mechanism behind the title of this episode. God did for him what he could not do for himself, and it looked like phone calls, meetings, and a list.
He did not fight his way through the divorce. He worked his way through it, one honest day at a time.
He Came Out the Other Side Friends With His Ex-Wife
This is the part of Curry’s story that makes people stop and ask him to repeat himself.
“I love my ex-wife,” Curry said. “We have a very good relationship. We co-parent, I think, very well. We’re good friends. We see each other all the time. So it doesn’t have to be as bad as a lot of people make it out to be.”
When John floated the phrase “scorched earth,” Curry did not take it. “It ain’t war.”
If you are in the middle of a hard split right now, that probably sounds impossible. Keep it anyway. Somebody has already walked where you are standing and come out with a friendship on the other side.
The Richard Rohr Book That Walked Him Into the Rooms
What finally got Curry into a meeting was not a dramatic bottom. It was a book by a Franciscan priest.
A coworker handed him Richard Rohr’s Breathing Under Water, which reads the Twelve Steps as a spiritual path. Before that, Curry had spent years falling asleep on the couch with The Power of Now playing on Audible while he drank.
He did not know AA was a spiritual program until he read Rohr. Once he did, he listened to that book on repeat for a solid year before he ever set foot in a room.
The Deal He Made With His Sister on New Year’s Eve
The walk-in came out of a phone call. Curry’s sister was struggling too, and on New Year’s Eve they made a deal.
She would get to a meeting in her state the next day. He would get to one in McKinney. They have shared the same sobriety date ever since.
John called it the opposite of a suicide pact. A life pact. Two people agreeing to go live instead of agreeing to quit.
If Your Life Is Rearranging Itself Sober
The steps were never a promise that nothing else would ever go wrong. Plenty of people get sober and then bury a parent, lose a marriage, or watch a career come undone.
The steps give you something to do with your hands while it happens. A list, a phone, a meeting, a prayer you can say badly and still mean.
Curry had all of that when the bottom fell out of his marriage, and it held. It can hold for you too.
Listen to Episode 290 With Curry N.
The full conversation goes a good deal deeper than this recap. Curry talks about his father’s death, the year Wayne H. carried him, what it was like to listen to Rohr while still drinking, and what he came to understand about prayer and presence before he ever put the bottle down.
If you are going through something hard sober right now, give it the hour.
Listen to the full episode here.
For more stories like Curry’s, the Sober Speak newsletter goes out at soberspeak.com/newsletter.
This post is for education and personal reflection only and is not medical advice. If you are struggling with alcohol or other drugs, please reach out to a qualified professional or a local recovery group.
Sober Speak was founded by John M. as a place for honest conversation about recovery, the kind of talk that happens in meetings but rarely makes it online. New episodes drop every Friday, featuring people sharing their experience with the 12 steps, sobriety, and the work of staying well.
You can listen on Podbean at soberspeak.podbean.com, or find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.