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"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 and 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 of 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, 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 act of circumstance whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and
instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of
having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each
relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself to 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 dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and
control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute dependence" 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.
If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will
find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent
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 gain 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 Wilson
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