Does anyone know where Bill’s adomonition to us is written? The one that tells us “First calm the disturbance”. The BB or the 12&12?
I was thinking about this this morning. My sponsor would often repeat this to me. First calm the disturbance. Whenever I was upset or angry or just restless, irritable, or discontented, he would tell me this. Often it was in relation to my loss of temper. He would instruct me to do whatever it took to get to that place of inner peace, where I could at least pray. Something which was impossible to do before I talked to him.
Without knowing it, when I talked to him, I had taken the first step to calm the disturbance. After a while in this program, I began to recognize that it was always the first step to calm. Talking to another alcoholic about what was bothering me. For an intellectual genius like myself, that was quite a revelation. Why couldn’t I think of that myself?
Probably because I was too disturbed to think of anything.
A problem shared was a problem cut in half, he would tell me. Whenever I did this, I would discover that I was on the road to recovery once again. I was closer to the solution to what bothered me. I now had elbow room, where I was once too crowded in my head to move one way or the other. I could now pause and ask my higher power for help.
First things first we’re told. And one of the first things is to calm the disturbance, whenever one of my character defects
has me so embroiled that I cannot think straight.
Anyway, this is what I was thinking about this morning.
Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! – their life, your story.