Everytime I think or speak the word “feelings”, I get this picture of Carol Bunett in my head. I can see her moaning the song, Feelings, which was popular at the time. I’m sure her parody of the song struck mixed thoughts and feelings about her rendition.
My sponsor Tom hammered me on this very word, over and over again. Later on, I could see why. How very dangerous our feelings can be to all of us. They can betray us in such a way as to be fatal. That part I didn’t see in the short term. I just took it as a matter of course that I was to get the upper hand over my feelings.
Last night I was reading more of Ebby’s biography and this came up. It turns out that Ebby was frequently a victim of his feelings. After his first go around with sobriety, around nearly three years, he drank again. When he came back, he commented that it was so difficult to grasp sobriety again, because he couldn’t recapture the feeling he had, when he had that intitial “awakening”, which got him started. So, he relapsed again and again.
“I” over “E” was the formula given to us a lot back then. Intellect over the emotions. Or, as Tom said, Think with your head and not your heart. Stop leading with your chin was another. Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, he told me. Often he would tell me to use my head.
When I read Ebby’s reaction, I understood all that I had been taught. Maybe not for the first time, but in a more profound way. It caused me to stop and reflect on the perils of letting our feelings and emotions take the lead and the awful consequences which often follow.
Take for instance anger. I’m sure that was one reason Tom was so tough on me. I had a hair trigger temper, when I came in. Many of us, I believe, suffer from the same problem, when we first arrived. I’ve heard it expressed over and over again that we knew two emotions early on in our sobriety; fear and anger. So did I. But my anger, born of fear, got me in a lot of trouble. Fortunately, Tom insisted that I practice the tenth step and make amends as quickly as possible. For me it was a journey of repeated humiliations. Reluctantly, and stalling as much as I could, I began to follow his directions. Thank God I did. I know it saved me from a lot of disasters down the road. Maybe even relapse and a sure collapse into death.
There was one other thing that Lois W. observed about Ebby. She said that she thought that Ebby’s sobriety was always conditional. She said that he often remarked, and it was borne out in his writings, that he had “fallen off the wagon”. That’s a thought, which expresses what a lot of us drunks went through before we came in, when we swore off the booze over and over again. Ebby it seems was trying to do it himself. That’s what I took from it. We all know where that leads. Sounds like he missed the solution. Second step.
Just reflecting.