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Bill Writes on Love:
The Next Frontier by Bill
Wilson Emotional Sobriety
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.
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 or 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, its 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 our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace
and joy will 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 [several years back - ed.] 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 whatever.
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
relationship 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 possessions 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 divident 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.
from: The Language Of The Heart
William Griffith Wilson was born in East
Dorset, Vermont
November 26, 1895 to January 24, 1971
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