Sorry that I didn’t get this off to you on the same day you called, but Fathers’ Day had its own busy-ness.
What you and I were talking about is in the eighth step. The step tells us that we have things, which happened way back when, which are below the level of conciousness that we need to take care of. It says that opening old wounds may seem like a useless piece of surgery, but it’s not. Sooner or later we are forced to find out what our character defects are and be able to name them in the seventh step. What are we really asking God to help us with? If we don’t know, we end up just blowing them off and hoping for the best. Like they used to tell us; we have to do the footwork.
I know what part of my problem was, laziness born of fear. Fear of what I might find out. Just maybe I wouldn’t like it. And it kept me chained down to repeating the same mistakes over and over again. I constantly forgot to ask both man and God for help. I was afraid to tell anyone what was going on with me.
What I discovered, after I finally became willing to do something about this stuff, was that a lot of my past was determining my future. A wonderful old priest talked about this very stuff. He said that we had these things about us, which he called “our emotional program for happiness”. He said that whatever it was that happened to us determined our actions. Some feeling or emotion would come up, which was familiar, and we would react in certain ways everytime. We unconciously act in a way, which we always feel will get us what we want. But in the end it would blow up in our face.
Some will act out in anger everytime. We think that will get us the reward we’re seeking. Inevitably people respond in kind and we end up miserable. Bill says that we step on the toes of others and they retaliate. Others become a patsy. They are seeking affection, which was denied them, when they were young. They want everyone to like them. They bend over backwords to please. They end up being taken advantage of and they end up in misery.
Why even investigate this stuff? Because sooner or later, if we continue down this road of emotional programs for happiness, we can end up drinking again. Like the sixth step says in the 12&12, delay might be fatal. But there is a solution. We can bring the full force of this spiritual program, the spiritual principles into action. We have to stop seeing things as problems we have to figure out ourselves. My way never worked. Why am I surprised by something I already know?
Carl Jung and a host of psychologists and spiritual writers, including Bill W., have been trying to warn us against not looking in the right places for the cause of our difficulties. Not paying attention to them and their causes can lead to them coming up and biting us in a very uncomfortable area of our anatomy.
I always think back to the case of the judge in NYC, who, at a relatively advanced age, was imprisoned for stalking a woman. Here was a very famous barrister, well known nationally for his writings on the law, and he one day gets so obsessed that he ended up in jail himself. Robert Johnson said he failed to take care of things he should have been paying attention to.
We’re told that if we rest on our laurels in this spiritual program of action we’re soon headed for trouble. What is this spiritual program of action? The steps. All of them. Including the eighth, which helps us open up the door to find out what’s wrong with us. It’s part of the program to help us achieve the manageability we’re seeking.
M. Scott Peck wrote about some of this. He talked about the mother, who could not love her children or show any affection. The affect on the children was long lasting. Long beyond memory, it becomes lost in the fog of life and slips into our unconcious, affording us the opportunity to act out in inappropriate ways in the future. Like the judge. Father Keating gave the example of the mother, who told her young children that God was watching them, if they took a cookie from the cookie jar. A crippling view of God and guilt…and fear.
All this so that I won’t have to drink again. Clear away the wreckage of the past…but maybe the first on the list of the seven deadly sins, pride, will cause me to stumble and say, not me, I don’t have to.
The wonderful thing about this program is that I only have to do anything one day at a time. I don’t have to do it forever. But, I have to get a start.
Sometimes, when I act as if and act differently, it loosens things up and the answer begins to come into view.
Just some thoughts. Ned