- Alcohol
- Faith
- Friends & Family
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Kemper likes to recognize, as an alcoholic in recovery, that alcohol was always his primary substance of addiction, but there is really nothing that he hasn’t tried in his past. Due to the fact that alcohol was always so readily available, he always fell back to it and it always brought him down. Amazingly alcohol was not the first substance he started with. He was already around 21 when he drank the first time, but had already used LSD, mushrooms and more since he was 17.
He also knows what relapse is like. His first excursion into sobriety happened at age 34. He managed to stay 4 1/2 years sober, but didn’t like to go to support meetings or work steps, and he especially had trouble turning over his will and his life to something he didn’t believe in at this particular moment in life; God. Much later he came to sobriety after an even harder time. “Some of us hold on to the old ideas way too long. That was me. I didn’t believe that I needed help and that I needed to change anything,” Kemper says. He was 46 when he finally got into long-term recovery.
Kemper’s recovery was initiated once he spent a significant amount of time behind bars. He was going out, then doing it again, and going out, doing it again and so on for a long time until he found out that with increasing age a new start each time doesn’t get easier. One time he was out of jail and decided to go straight to a meeting. He had to panhandle money at a fast food place for a bus. He had walked as far as he could and still had a way to go.
He made it to the meeting club and was greeted with, “You look like you are lost. Welcome, get a seat.” He stayed the entire day. Some days later one group took a collection and the chairman gave him $17 after the meeting. He went back to the fast food place to eat and back to the meeting. But the one man at the fast food place remembered him and said, “Hey, we thought you were dead by now” and asked him to stay and got him a bed for that night.
“If you are like me and you lost the power of choice, there is only one way out of it, which is to find a spiritual way of life.”, Kemper says, “The 12 steps helped me to do that. I still had resistance to believing in God, but the 12 steps allowed me to believe in a God of my own understanding. Finally I was okay with the belief that there is a spirit that is continuously watching over me, otherwise I should be dead by now.”
Kemper is telling young people in addiction not to sell themselves short and that life has something in store for them. Today he still maintains 2-3 meetings a week, but in early recovery it was important for him to go to as many as possible, which was easily over 15 a week while he was on a job. Those meetings not only gave him the spiritual insight he needed, but he also engaged in a lot of activities that were offered through the club. He also learned again how to communicate and how to build relationships. It was a much needed feeling to learn that people actually started to trust him again.
He adds that he understands that there are many ways to achieve sobriety in life, but for him the 12 steps were the only way at this time. Treatment is good and necessary for a lot of people, but at the end you need something to maintain your recovery, and for him it was and it is the connection to the spirit. Kemper is working today with young men in recovery. He owns a treatment facility, which is specialized in embedding adventure and outdoor experiences to young men into the recovery process. Kemper mentions, that a connection with nature helps to connect with the spirit.