Read from the bottom of page 65 to the top of page 67.
We’re going to look at forgiveness.
There are some readings and things to listen to or watch, then some things to do. Gradually work your way through them and stay in touch during the process.
With the materials below:
Read the reading(s). [Watch the video.]
Make a list of major points of identification.
Make a list of new beliefs, thinking, and behavior to adopt on the basis of these. Make a list of any questions you have.
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Dennis F: Tradition Three: The only requirement for AA membership is the desire to stop drinking’
For last week’s homework, we suggested making a list of expectations or requirements we have in life beyond sobriety. My list reads like this:
1. Financial and musical success
2. Happy family
3. Tennis success
I am going to tear up the list.
The only requirement I am supposed to have in life is a desire to stay sober. All else will be added to me as long as I keep this as my only goal.
You might say that the homework assignment was a way of exposing to myself how complicated and self-seeking I make my life when I get away from keeping it simple by only pursuing sobriety. I need have no fear of loneliness, financial or other problems if my goal in life is only to pursue sobriety. I can express the essence of the meaning of my life today to myself in just five words: I grow or I drink.
I grow in AA by working the principles of the steps, traditions, and concepts of service in my life a day at a time.
I work the third tradition in a personal way by eliminating all my desires in life other than pursuing sobriety.
There is nothing wrong in wanting emotional and financial security. However, I make obsessions of these goals rather than seeing them as the by-products of giving service in working a program whose goal is to pursue sobriety.
Whenever I complicate my life by having any goal other than pursuing sobriety, I notice that I become ungrateful and take it for granted.
Thus, the beauty of the third tradition is that it restores perspective through an attitude of gratefulness for the miracle of my sobriety.
I keep perspective when I remember that a financial problem is only a financial problem. It is not the serious problem I have. It is not a drinking problem. If I keep sobriety first and not relationships or the lack of them in my life, I can live to love someday.
I like the perspective of Allen McG on the third tradition when he says that sobriety is an end in itself. We don’t stay sober in order to be rewarded with relationships or financial success.
If we stay sober for rewards, we might drink when we get them because we have no more reason to stay sober. Or we might drink if we don’t get them, when we say, ‘What’s the use?’ We don’t stay sober to be virtuous. We stay sober to survive. We place sobriety first because we must in order to live! This is the theme of the third tradition.
The relationship of the third tradition to the third step is a profound one. The third step poses the question: What do I need to do in order to turn my will and my life over to the loving care of God as we understand him?
The tradition answers the problem posed in the third step. The only requirement I need to fulfill in order to turn my will and my life over to God’s loving care is a desire to stop drinking. It is unbelievable that all the power of the universe is available to care for me if I only have one desire: to stay sober.
How can I maintain a good relationship with God and other people? If I have no demands on God except a desire to be sober, I can turn my will and my life over to his care. If I insist on financial success or a soul mate first, then I can’t turn this area over to God because I am running the show by placing these demands on him.
God is a loving God and he will not keep mine from me as long as I place sobriety first. As I grow in sobriety, all else will be added to me.
My relationships with others are a reflection of my relationship with God. If I have poor relationships in life, it means that I need to straighten out my relationship with God by only seeking sobriety.
A desire for emotional and financial security is not the requirement that makes God’s projecting power available to an alcoholic. Therefore I need to rid myself of these demands or any other that I have placed on my relationship with God. I need to make amends to God for trying to manipulate him to suit my desires and to tell him I only desire to stay sober and am grateful for my sobriety.
The desire for sobriety is the basis of my relationship with God. He gives me the power of sobriety and the freedom to grow and do his will as I understand it.
When I first got sober, God looked at my desire for sobriety and rescued me.
I need to be the same to other alcoholics in carrying the message. If a person expresses a desire for sobriety, I need to be willing to go to any length to help him or her just as God helps me. I am not put off by other desires a sick and suffering alcoholic might have as long as the desire for sobriety is present.
The third tradition also takes care of my perfectionism. My desire to be perfect is a reflection of my desire to be God in my own life, the exact nature of my wrongs. I am reminded by the third tradition that the only desire I am to have is to stay sober, not to be perfect.
The opposite of perfectionism is unworthiness. I would frequently bounce around between the two extremes. I would want to be perfect in my work and get upset at myself when I wasn’t. Then I would feel I was unworthy of significant achievements in my life and people please to combat my unworthiness.
Perfectionism and people-pleasing, superior and inferior, arrogance and unworthiness, are all sides of the same coin. I try to be God in my own life and when I see that I am failing at it, I people-please in order to try to find some worthiness to assuage my crushed ego at not being God.
The only leveling attitude to these desires is to get back to the simplicity of the only desire I am to have in life – a desire to stay sober as expressed in the third tradition.
This tradition also guides me in my relationship with you. I am not to judge you or have any demands or expectations of you. We share a desire to stay sober and that is our bond. I don’t try to manipulate you for any desire, emotional or financial.
The third tradition states the similarity that binds us together despite our various drinking backgrounds: high bottom or low bottom; skid row or college professor; periodic or daily drinking. We all belong because of our desire to stay sober.
The most startling thought to me in our reading of the third tradition in the ’12 & 12′ is the one question that puts to rest any problems I have about what I should do. The one question that immediately gives me proper perspective any about any problem is: ‘What would the Master do?’
Just as this question straightened out the controversy limiting the membership of AA to alcoholics only, it straightens out my self-centered perspective when I ask it of myself.
When I am not sure what to do, I ask myself. ‘What would God do?’ and all of a sudden I know what to do, I have not yet had a conflict that this question has not resolved correctly. God only looks to my desire; he does not judge me.
May I not judge the motives of others, but only be sensitive to their desire to grow in sobriety. I consecrate myself to this end.
Working a step, tradition, or concept to me means that I am willing to take written inventory and allow it to surrender something within me. The third tradition suggests to me that that I surrender all of the requirements and expectations I have in life beyond sobriety. Emotional and financial successes are the result of being of service. But when these are things that I demand in my relationships with God and others, then I have lost the simplicity and perspective envisioned in the third tradition.
The only requirement I have to turn my will and life over to the care of a loving God is a desire to stop drinking. Other requirements ruin the relationship.
Let us prepare to write inventory by asking ourselves in meditation if we are anxious about anything at all in our lives. Do I have any requirement of God in my life beyond looking to him for sobriety only? In silent prayer let us make amends for these demands and purify our motives by asking only for sobriety. God has only one requirement to take care of me. Am I content to be grateful for sobriety? Let us purify and simplify the basis of our relationship with the Almighty!
Fear as activator
‘The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands. The difference between a demand and a simple request is plain to anyone.’
Discipleship (from The Way To Love)
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
—Luke 14:
Take a look at the world and see the unhappiness around you and in you. Do you know what causes this unhappiness? You will probably say loneliness or oppression or war or hatred or atheism. And you will be wrong. There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. Because of these false beliefs, you see the world and yourself in a distorted way. Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way. There is no way out, because you do not even have a suspicion that your perception is distorted, your thinking is wrong, and your beliefs are false.
Look around and see if you can find a single genuinely happy person—fearless, free from insecurities, anxieties, tensions, worries. You would be lucky if you found one in a hundred thousand. This should lead you to be suspicious of the programming and the beliefs that you and they hold in common. But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into your by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion. And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs. What makes it even worse is the fact that most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are—like the man in a dream who has no idea he is dreaming.
What are these false beliefs that block you from happiness? Here are some examples. First: you cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to and that you consider so precious. False. There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy. Think of that for a minute. The reason why you are unhappy is because you are focusing on what you do not have rather than on what you have right now.
Another belief: happiness is in the future. Not true. Right here and now you are happy and do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt, and a host of games you are programmed to play. If you would see through this you would realise that you are happy and do not know it.
Yet another belief: happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world. If changing the world is your vocation in life, go right ahead and change it, but do not harbour the illusion that this is going to make you happy. What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well search for an eagle’s nest on the bed of an ocean, as search for happiness in the world outside of you. So if it is happiness that you seek you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your baldness or build up an attractive body or change your residence or job or community or lifestyle or even your personality. Do you realise that you could change every one of these things, you could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy? And deep down you know this is true but still you waste your effort and energy trying to get what you know cannot make you happy.
Another false belief: if all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure, and fearful. Make a list of all of your attachments and desires and to each of them say these words: “Deep down in my heart I know that even after I have got you I will not get happiness.” And ponder on the truth of those words. The fulfilment of desire can, at the most, bring flashes of pleasure and excitement. Don’t mistake that for happiness.
What then is happiness? Very few people know and no one can tell you, because happiness cannot be described. Can you describe light to people who have been sitting in darkness all their lives? Can you describe reality to someone in a dream? Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.
If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed. Second, because they are scared to lose the only world they know: the world of desires, attachments, fears, social pressures, tensions, ambitions, worries, guilt, with flashes of the pleasure and relief and excitement which these things bring. Think of someone who is afraid to let go of a nightmare because, after all, that is the only world he knows. There you have a picture of yourself and of other people.
If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life, and to take leave of all of your possessions. How? Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.
So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.
Father and mother: nightmare. Wife and children, brothers and sisters: nightmare. All your possessions: nightmare. Your life as it is now: nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot be happy without: nightmare. Then you will hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even your own life. And you will so easily take leave of all of your possessions, that is, you will stop clinging and thus have destroyed their capacity to hurt you. Then at least you will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or uttered—the state of abiding happiness and peace. And you will understand how true it is that everyone who stops clinging to brothers or sisters, father, mother or children, land or houses … is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life.
Anthony De Mello
The Extra Mile (from The Way To Love)
And if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
—Matthew, 5:40–41
If you take a look at the way you have been put together and the way you function, you will find that inside your head there is a whole programme, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be, and what you should want.
Who is responsible for the programming? Not you. It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes. It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, your past experiences that fed the operating instructions into your computer. Now, however old you are or wherever you go, your computer goes along with you and is active and operating at each conscious moment of the day, imperiously insisting that its demands be met by life, by people, and by you. If the demands are met, the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy. If they are not met, even though it be through no fault of yours, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer.
For instance, when other people don’t live up to your computer’s expectations, it torments you with frustration or anger or bitterness. Another instance: when things are not under your control or the future is uncertain, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, worry. Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions. And you generally cope by expending more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met. If that happens, you will be granted a measure of precarious peace; precarious because at any moment some trifle (a delayed train, a tape recorder that doesn’t work, a letter that doesn’t arrive—anything) is going to be out of conformity with your computer’s programming and the computer will insist that you become upset again.
And so you live a pathetic existence, constantly at the mercy of things and people, trying desperately to make them conform to your computer’s demands, so that you can enjoy the only peace you can ever know—a temporary respite from negative emotions, courtesy of your computer and your programming.
Is there a way out? Yes. You are not going to be able to change your programming all that quickly, or perhaps ever. And you don’t even need to. Try this: imagine you are in a situation or with a person that you find unpleasant and that you would ordinarily avoid. Now observe how your computer instinctively becomes active, insisting that you avoid this situation or try to change it. And if you stay on there and refuse to change the situation, observe how the computer insists that you experience irritation or anxiety or guilt or some other negative emotion. Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realise that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realise that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: the only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programing. Observe all of this from the outside, so to speak, and see the marvellous change that comes about in you.
Once you have understood this truth and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions, you may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person; or you may try to change them; or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected; you may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your action will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotion it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words: ‘If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him two.’ For it will have become evident to you that real oppression comes, not from people who fight you in court or from authority that subjects you to slave labour, but from your computer whose programming destroys your peace of mind the moment outside circumstances fail to conform to its demands. People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated. Only then will you experience that inner freedom from which along all social revolution must arise, for the powerful emotion, the passion that arises in your heart at the sight of social evils and impels you to action, will have its origin in reality, not in your programming or your ego.
Anthony De Mello
#Rabbi Shais Taub: You Ruined My Life! Getting Over Resentment
https://www.chabad.org/1780349
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qyZSE82PI3n-hSTFRr1GEDM5qQWcx8mB
Video or audio
Jonah 3 and 4
Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time:
“Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city–a visit required three days.
On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.”
The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.
When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.
Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink.
But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence.
Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.
But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.
He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.
Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
But the LORD replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”
Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.
Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine.
But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered.
When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”
But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight.
But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
The Case of the Mistaken Identity
The Case of the Mistaken Identity
First of all, a chassidic tale:
“Reb Yitzchak of Vorki had a friend who was a rabbi of repute, but a great antagonist of Reb Yitzchak’s rebbe [spiritual leader], Reb Simchah Bunem of Pshischah. The friend always had hard words to say about Reb Simchah, even in the presence of Reb Yitzchak, who never answered a word.
This attitude astonished Reb Yitzchak’s followers, who asked him how he found it possible to hear such harsh language about his rebbe, and yet to hold his peace.
“I will tell you about an incident that happened to me,” replied Reb Yitzchak, “and then you will understand. I was once travelling in a certain city when a stranger approached me, looked at me for a moment, and exclaimed: ‘That’s him!’ A second man did the same thing soon after, and then a third, and I had not the slightest notion what it was all about. Then I was approached by a deserted woman in need of a bill of divorce, an agunah, who was accompanied by a noisy little group of men, including the three who had approached me earlier. All in a chorus they showered me with curses and abuses, the gist of which was: ‘You are the man who all these years has left this poor woman as an agunah!’ They were so convinced that they knew who I was, that no amount of explanation on my part could convince them that I was not the irresponsible gentleman they were seeking. In the end I had to go along with them to the local rabbinical court, which accepted my evidence of identity.
“Now while they were busy abusing me I was not in the slightest angry at them, because I knew that it was not at me that they were directing their complaints and their curses. They thought I was her husband, and had they known me better they would not have abused me. In a word, whatever they did, they did to someone else.
“So, too, with this rabbi. When he says unpleasant things about my rebbe, Reb Simchah Bunem, I don’t get excited, because I know that he talks this way only because he doesn’t know my rebbe. If he knew him, he wouldn’t say a thing. In a word, he talks about someone else, not about my rebbe.”
When I first approached Step Four, I was frightened of all of the terrible things I would have to write about myself. I was sure Step Four was about finding out “who I really was”. Some Step Four methods even anticipate and try to counteract this by suggesting that we write out assets as well as liabilities.
An inventory is different: we are the shop, we are interested in the ‘stock-in-trade’ (p. 64:1, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’). Is a shop its stock-in-trade? Is the shop so identified with the old stock it cannot sell that it refuses to part with it? No! It may acknowledge its poor judgement in the past for investing in the wrong stock, but it will get rid of it promptly and without regret (p. 64:1). And what if the shop is inherited? It will have even less remorse about the stock that won’t shift—after all, this stock was acquired, not chosen.
What I find in Step Four is not me. It is what I’ve been play-acting, and the thinking and behavior that has flowed from that play-acting. And all of that was inherited, taught. Get rid of everything I’m not, and who I really am will show up.
Page 68:2 tells me that I am “in the world to play the role He assigns.” Let’s say I’m assigned the role of sponsor. Let’s consider, also, that what has “caused our failure” are the manifestations of self (p. 64:2).
There is nothing wrong with being a sponsor. In fact, it’s a great job, a privilege, and a joy. So far, so good. Where things start to go awry is that my ego attaches to the role and decides that ‘sponsor’ is no longer just a role assigned, like being assigned a role in a play by the director, but my very identity. The ego, of course, is not satisfied with being just any sponsor. I have to be the ne plus ultra of sponsors, the tippest of the top, the apex, the summit, the zenith, the acme. And this is the ‘being’ I take into the world.
“What usually happens? The show doesn’t come off very well.” (p. 61:1)
First of all, the sponsee may decide that I’m a terrible sponsor and say, “screw you” (first bullet in the stomach to the stage character—third column: “pride”). I internalise that and conclude I cannot live up to my own job description (second bullet in the stomach—”self-esteem”). He then ‘sacks’ me (which is not how you treat the ne plus ultra of sponsors—”personal relations”). And what will everyone else think about me if they knew I was sacked by my sponsee, who obviously has very good judgement (“pride”)? And who am I if I’m not a sponsor? (“Security”—needing to be ‘someone’ to be OK). And so it goes on.
And what do I end up? An actor dressed up as Hamlet trotting round London months after the production has closed, still in costume, still in make-up, perhaps a little dishevelled, but desperately clinging on to something he longer is. If I cannot let go of the role when it is attacked or taken from me altogether, I will die with the role.
And this is repeated throughout the whole of my Step Four. My life up to Step Four was a huge case of mistaken identity!
So, if all of these things I’ve been doing and being (student, teacher, son, brother, sponsor, sponsee, friend, boyfriend, husband, lover, neighbour) are just roles that I get to play, sometimes well, sometimes badly, and I am not these roles, where does that leave me?
“If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or colour, are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms.” (P. 28:2)
That is who I am: child of God. I do not have to do anything to deserve God’s love; I cannot do anything to shed myself of it. I am of infinite value, simply by dint of being. And if this is true for me, this is true for you.
There is no need in Step Four to write about assets: we write about the illusions, and the pure asset that we are will become revealed as these illusions are shed. And this pure asset should not be boxed inside little words (“kind”, “nice”, “thoughtful”). This is just another set of illusions. We’re infinitely more than a list of pleasant qualities, just as God is infinitely more than any words we could use to label Him.
If anyone has a problem with me, they don’t really. They have a problem with their image of me, floating like an avatar above my head. That’s who they are shooting: they’re shooting the role, the picture, the stage costume and make-up—the cloak falls to the ground, and there’s nothing there.
Similarly, if I have a problem with someone else, I don’t really. I have a problem with my image of them, floating like an avatar above their heads. I am not seeing who they really are; I’m seeing only my image of them. The role I think they should be playing, because, after all, I see myself as the Director, not the actor, and we’re back to me playing God, once more.
Someone once said to me, “if the knowledge that we are all children of God could go from your head to your heart, you’d never have a problem with another human being again.” Step Four starts that journey.
The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety
by Bill Wilson
Copyright © AA Grapevine, Inc., January 1958
I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA —the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance —urges quite appropriate to age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.
Since AA began, I’ve taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.
How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living—well, that’s not only the neurotic’s problem, it’s the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That’s the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it’s a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious—from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream—be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden “Mr. Hyde” becomes our main task.
I’ve recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones—folks like you and me—commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back— ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I’ve had with depressions, it wasn’t a bright prospect.
I kept asking myself, “Why can’t the Twelve Steps work to release depression?” By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer…”It’s better to comfort than to be the comforted.” Here was the formula, all right. But why didn’t it work?
Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence—almost absolute dependence—on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.
There wasn’t a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.
Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself of God’s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn’t possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies. For my dependency meant demand—a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words “absolute demand” may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.
This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God’s creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can’t flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.
Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says “To the devil with you,” the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn’t feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn’t feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product—the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.
The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.
In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn’t a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.
Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God’s help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.
Of course I haven’t offered you a really new idea—only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own “hexes” at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.