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, 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 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 dependency" 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 real 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.
Bill W.
SECTION ONE
A New Perspective
"Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and
the result was nil until we let go absolutely."
– Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58
Old-timers sometimes say, "Staying sober is simple: Don't drink and change your whole life." The willingness to let go of old ways of thinking and behaving seems to be what emotional sobriety is all about. Once sober, we begin to let go of resentments and fears, self-pity and anger. We try to replace regrets about the past and worries about the future with faith in AA and AA's Twelve Steps and a power greater than ourselves. We used to see problems as insurmountable; now we take responsibility for finding solutions. And we find that, slowly, we can claim moments of real peace — "a quiet place in bright sunshine," as Bill W. puts it in the essay that gave the impetus to this book. For alcoholics, this is a true spiritual awakening.
Growth
June 1976
A NEW THOUGHT has been forming in my mind (now that the AA program has put it in working order). I believe that an element most important in building our sober lives is what is left out.
Several months ago, my husband and I enrolled in a beginners' art course. We didn't become great painters, but both of us now see things, such as leaves and blades of grass and shadings of color, that we weren't aware of before. One day, the instructor showed us a Picasso drawing of the artist's daughter. It pictured her in profile, and it consisted of only three lines. What was left out dramatized what was there. We learned also that in shading a tree, what is left out is as important as the pencil lines, for the blanks create sunlight on the leaves.
It seems to me that I achieve growth by leaving things out — when I don't say the cross word, when I don't answer sarcastically. If I can delay only one second, maybe two, I have time to ask myself, "Do I really want to say that?"
When I wrote down my list of people to make amends to, it was made up mostly of family. I wasn't just thinking of the things I had done. I also remembered the many things I should have, would have, might have done had I not been drinking! The things I had left out ranged from the nice bouquets I could have given, and didn't, all the way to downright neglect.
I used to tell all! To anybody who would listen! And things were going to be my way, too. "Self-will run riot!" Now it's becoming easier to spot ego, and I work at getting the big Me out of the way.
I have discovered a new way to learn — by shutting my mouth and listening. Again, it's not so much what I'm doing as what I'm not doing. I'm not talking. So I'm open; I'm teachable.
I used to like to direct my children's affairs, offering advice when it wasn't wanted and commanding activities and behavior. I'm more secure now. I've thrown out my director's chair. Now, when I see one of my children heading on a certain course and I question the outcome, I keep my mouth shut and practice the Third Step. Whenever there's a problem and I'm involved, I look to see what part of the problem I am causing (as one of my sponsors advised). I'm usually about eighty percent of the problem — well, maybe sixty percent, but the major part, you can bet on that. If I leave out the largest percent (me), there is hardly any problem at all!
I'm becoming so secure in AA, I've even discarded the cute, funny, phony me my civilian friends used to know. I don't have to dance with a rose in my teeth; I can just dance. And I don't have to be the only girl at the picnic who can swing Tarzan-style from a rope into the river. I can swim calmly, like the forty-year-old