Having Carefully Surveyed (Step Eight continued)

Having carefully surveyed this whole area of human relations, and having decided exactly what personality traits in us injured and disturbed others, we can now commence to ransack memory for the people to whom we have given offense.  To put a finger on the nearby and most deeply damaged ones shouldn’t be hard to do.  Then, as year by year we walk back through our lives as far as memory will reach, we shall be bound to construct a long list of people who have, to some extent or other, been affected.  We should, of course, ponder and weigh each instance carefully.  We shall want to hold ourselves to the course of admitting the things we have done, meanwhile forgiving the wrongs done us, real or facied.  We should avoid extreme judgments, both of ourselves and of others involved.  We must not exaggerate our defects or theirs.  A quiet, objective view will be our steadfast aim.

So it is again with great alarm that I saw when I turned the page that there are only a few more sentences left of this step.  I’m still just not feeling it resonate.  I went and quickly glanced at Step Nine, and I think that what I will do is skip to Step Ten.  After 24 years of sobriety, I’m really glad I don’t feel I’ve surged like a wrecking ball through the lives of other people in the recent past.  I think the daily inventory will be much more applicable.  If after I work through Step Ten I’m still at a loss, I’ll rethink it.

So I’ll write here the last paragraph of Step Eight, and my next step work will be on Step Ten.

Whenever our pencil falter, we can fortify and cheer ourselves by remembering what A.A. experience in this Step has meant to others. It is the beginning of the end of isolation from our fellows and from God.

That helps.  I began a long time ago.  I hope I’ve gotten better at it through the years.

Such Gross Misbehavior (Step Eight continued)

Such gross misbehavior is not by any means a full catalogue of the harms we do.  Let us think of some of the subtler ones which can sometimes be quite as damaging.  Suppose that in our family lives we happen to be miserly, irresponsible, callous, or cold.  Suppose that we are irritable, critical, impatient, and humorless.  Suppose we lavish attention upon one member of the family and neglect others.  What happens when we try to dominate the whole family, either by a rule of iron or by a constant outpouring of minute directions for just how their lives should be lived from hour to hour?  What happens when we wallow in depression, self-pity oozing from every pore, and inflict that upon those about us?  Such a roster of harms done others–the kind that make daily living with us as practicing alcoholics difficult and often unbearable–could be extended almost indefinitely.  When we take such personality traits as these into shop, office, and the society of our fellows, they can do damage almost as extensive as that we caused at home.

This is rough!  There are times, at work and in other places, that I set out on purpose to be nice and good and agreeable and helpful.  To let insults and slights pass (and to remember often the person insulting me doesn’t mean to). Because in general, here and now and there and then, things are basically very very good in my life.  It can be like the revelation that, when calling people who are trying to help with the phone or the cable or the internet or the car insurance or credit card bill, being pleasant almost always makes the person more helpful and the interaction less frustrating.

And again, after all these years of recovery, I don’t generally feel that I indulge in these bad habits to an extreme.  Almost any amount is too much, but I hope those words don’t really describe me very well.  Miserly, irresponsible, callous, cold, depressed, self-pitying.  I hope not.  Minute directions for how my family should live, those I do give often.  But not constantly.  This paragraph does say practicing alcoholics. Thankfully, I’ve quit practicing, finally convinced I will never get it right.

I don’t want to short these ideas, but right now they seem to me to be of the daily inventory variety, not huge character defects that I need to have removed.  Though of course I need to have them removed.  I’m clear as mud on this.

We Might Next Ask Ourselves (Step Eight continued)

Before opening the book, I went to my prayer list and opened a word document and listed the people I have troubling relationships with, or that I have so much contact with, I surely have harmed them.  I came up with 15 names, although I have one client standing in for all the clients I work with, and one good staff person who I very much enjoy standing in for all good staff people.  Other than those there are my immediate family members, close friends, and people I work with who I have trouble with.  One of those is someone I like, admire, and love, and the others are people in my daily work life who I resent and feel anger towards, and administrators I don’t have much contact with, but who I blame, in a way, for what’s gone wrong.  Anyway that’s it – I’ve made the list.

We might next ask oursevles what we mean when we say that we have “harmed” other people.  What kinds of “harm” do people do one another, anyway?  To define the word “harm” in a practical way, we might call it the result of instincts in collision, which cause physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people.  If our tempers are consistently bad, we arouse anger in others.  If we lie or cheat, we deprive others not only of their worldly goods, but of their emotional security and peace of mind.  We really issue them an invitation to become contemptuous and vengeful.  If our sex conduct is selfish, we may excite jealousy, misery, and a strong desire to retaliate in kind.

Just writing this out now, I got a bit of a surge of something like joy.  It’s part of why I love this program and stay with it.  I had loved and forgotten that particular piece of wisdom – We really issue them an invitation to become contemptuous and vengeful. Yes!  We do!  I do!  Although I understand that each person is in charge of his or her actions and reactions, including and especially me, bad conduct on the part of one person (especially me) invites the other person to be bad back, in return.  When I behave wrongly, I’m asking the other person to somehow overcome their natural reaction and be kind and serene in spite of what I’ve done or said.

I don’t think I’ll ever be completely free from my friend, Justifiable Anger.  I’m hoping that if I try not to feed her, she’ll starve, and die.  By consciously turning away from it, I’ll spend less time with it, and maybe one day it won’t be an automatic reaction.

Looking up “harm” and then “injury,” I come up with words like hurt, damage, injustice.  I guess I need to go on with this, and to meanwhile keep that important phrase in the front of my mind.

While the Purpose of Making Restitution (Step Eight continued)

While the purpose of making restitution to others is paramount, it is equally necessary that we extricate from an examination of our personal relations every bit of information about ourselves and our fundamental difficulties that we can.  Since defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes, including our alcoholism, no field of investigation could yield more satisfying and valuable rewards than this one.  Calm, thoughtful reflection upon personal relations can deepen our insight.  We can go far beyond those things which were superficially wrong with us, to see the those flaws which were basic, flaws which sometimes were responsible for the whole pattern of our lives.  Thoroughness, we have found, will pay — and pay handsomely.

It’s funny that I should try at this point to see a “whole pattern” of my life.  I’ve written an extensive history right here.  It’s also interesting for me to think for a minute that my alcoholism could have been caused by my defective relations with other human beings.

In general, I choose not to go down the road of what caused the alcoholism of me or of anyone else.  I think that right here, right now, we don’t know.  Whenever anyone mentions some thing external that caused their alcoholism, I can point to uncountable numbers of people who went through the same or worse and did not become alcoholic.  I believe that once we are alcoholic, we cannot go back, and no amount of understanding the cause will allow us to undo it.  If it wasn’t for x, y or z, I would not have become alcoholic.  So what?  I am, and all that remains is what I will do about it, now and in the future.

I’m not really sure where to go from here.  I’m thinking of taking a list of character defects and trying to apply them to my relationships.  I feel like I should concentrate on the bad relationships, but probably not.  I think I’ll begin this on paper and see where it goes.

Very Deep, Sometimes Quite Forgotten (Step Eight continued)

Very deep, sometimes quite forgotten, damaging emotional conflicts persist below the level of consciousness.  At the time of these occurrences, they may have actually given our emotions violent twists which have since discolored our personalities and altered our lives for the worse.

I need to confess right away that I hate this stuff, and that I often don’t even believe in it.  I also understand that this may be a true and glaring weakness of mine, and that my disdain has more than a little to do with pride.  Since I first started to think about psychology, psychological illnesses and problems, and to some extent until now, I think that most of our misery is home grown, self induced, sniveling stupid and wrong.

OK?

I have used every tenant of AA and of Christianity that I can to prove my point, and I have also used it all to quickly and painlessly turn the subject away from “poor me” and what I may have had to live through.  I am (and I venture to say that you are) one of the most blessed and privileged of all people in the entire history of people, and of all the people who are living on this earth today.  My blessings are many and my problems are few.  I have never lacked any material thing and emotionally and (yes) psychologically I’ve been pretty well taken care of also.

So dear readers who have followed by journey this far, and dear people who know me in real life and know my history and may even know my mother, you all know that my father died from alcoholism when I was just a wee thing, six years old.  You know that my mother married someone I haven’t spoken to since I was 9, that she has abused a substance or two in her life, that she was pretty neglectful as far as setting standards or boundaries and so at 16 I was a victim of abuse in the form of the lecherous neighbor.  You know that I struggled long to get sober, and that I was a fairly saturated drunk.  That I moved all over the country against my wishes, that childbirth was traumatic for me, that I was left to fend for myself (with a good education and lots of family support) and my two little ones.

Violent twists to my emotions?  I just don’t see it.

But because it is in the book and in the step and because I have chosen this path of recovery, I will try to see if there’s anything there.  The first thing that comes to mind is the separation anxiety I had as a child, which was huge.  I was really quite an old child when I was still being afraid that my mommy was not returning.  I think we can all agree that this was to be expected, given the fact that my father died when I was very young.  I have to say though that it hasn’t really followed me into adulthood.  I find myself very able to separate from my mother, my children and my wife for long periods of time, if necessary.  I have a harder time leaving the dog, but that’s another subject, I think.

So now that I’ve spilled all that out, I have to say I can’t find anymore.  It is quite possible that these events have been “quite forgotten,” and that they are still “below the level of consciousness.”  I can’t channel them.  I feel like this post is really a confession, because I just absolutely am not relating to this even a little bit.  I see clearly that I may just be protesting too much.  But that’s all I have right now.

I’ll continue on with the step and see if this gets any clearer.  I also want to record that I know for a fact that people really do suffer from things that happen to them, that they witness, and as a result of the way they are treated.  I can see this from one extreme to the other, where people I know who have mental retardation will take any food they can get their hands on because in the distant past they were actually starved, all the way up to gay people not wanting to come out because of their actual upbringing or because of what they perceive in society, or I don’t even know why.  I’m in no way saying these things aren’t real, I’m saying that IF I suffer from them, I just cannot see it at all.  That, and I do want it to be possible for the occasional person – someone, somewhere – to not have suffered much at all.

January 15, 2009 (This Day)

Two things are dominating my world.  One is the very cold coldness.  Two is my monthly “friend,” who has been here for over a week, and who I didn’t want to see in the first place.  Menopause-I am waiting for the pause.  And trying to be patient.  And trying not to take drugs or have surgery.  Over the past three years, I can see that it is diminishing.  I have to remember and accept that when I’m into my second week like this.  This is worse than anything that happened in all of 2008, so most likely it will stop soon.  And if not, I’ll go to the doctor and decide if treatments are worth it.  I think too of all that is available to me, more than most women through all time ever had.  I can be brave.

The cold isn’t too bad, either.  It’s too cold to walk the dog, and that causes me lots of stress.  I’m stressed walking her and I’m stressed not being able to walk her.  And I’m working on my stress over the dog issues.  The cold is also making most of my skin hurt, and making driving difficult at times.  Yesterday, the ride that usually takes 45 minutes or a bit less took me over two hours because of snow.  The most stressful part was worrying about the dog.

I also took my prayer binder back to the staff meetings and I added several people to my list – people I resent at work.  My list is looking rather yucky and I dread finding out if these people need to be on my amends list.

I’m writing while waiting for Erika to call.  She’s having Carole and I over for dinner for the first time, and we will also get to meet her cat.  Erika is 23, and at that age I had a cat and her.  Yet I seriously worry about her ability to take care of herself and a cat.

All this sounds like tons of worrying for me, and it is true that I worry too too much.  But it doesn’t dominate my days.  Mostly I’m so glad Erika’s here and wants to see us, that we have good dog sitters and good dogs (the furniture wasn’t eaten after our lengthy absence yesterday), a warm house and a warm place to work and a car that will start in the cold.  Roads that are fairly decent.  In a way I really prefer the cold to the heat.  Though neither are great, heat makes me feel like I’m going to die, whereas cold just hurts.

This will be my second full week of work and my second week of you know what.  Monday I have off for Martin Luther King Jr Day, Tuesday I took off to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama.  We’ve invited some people over and I don’t know if anyone will come, but I’m trying very hard to get over the Rick Warren thing and be happy, happy, happy.  Hillary was confirmed as Secretary of State.  Roe vs Wade seems safer.  I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in a dog’s age for gay rights, education, the environment, health care – really for the whole world.  This was a good day and it seems it will be a good night too.

Though in Some Cases (Step Eight continued)

Though in same cases we cannot make restitution at all, and in some cases action ought to be deferred, we should nevertheless make an accurate and really exhaustive survey of our past life as it has affected other people.  In many instances we shall find that though the harm done others has not been great, the emotional harm we have done ourselves has.  Very deep, sometimes quite forgotten, damaging emotional conflicts persist below the level of consciousness.  At the time of these occurrences, they may actually have given our emotions violent twists which have since discolored our personalities and altered our lives for the worse.

A really exhaustive survey.  I guess I will make a list and check it twice.  Really, it should include every significant person in my life, ever.  In each case I think I know, but I know I should give it more thought, that every character defect of everyone ever has played itself out in my relationships with others.

I don’t walk around screwing with people, I really don’t, and I never have.  Mentally, I just can’t draw any kind of meaningful line.  It seems to me that one of the most important and most painful lessons I have to learn as I go on and get better is that I cannot weigh, prioritize or judge sins of mine and sins of others and say which is worse, which is better, which hardly needs to be counted and which cannot ever be forgiven.  It’s difficult to think about without going overboard on both sides of the pride line, judging myself to be better than most or worse than most and never really getting close to the universal truth of us all being equal.

Things from the bible come to mind.  The plank in my own eye makes me incapable of seeing the splinter in the eye of someone else.  I might burn the wheat with the chaff.  Don’t judge others and I will not be judged.  If my right eye offends me, I should pluck it out.

I’m not a heavy duty Christian, and I recognize that those are one rendition of sort of universal truths.  They are very useful to me because I’ve been exposed to them over a very long period of time.

I think that what I’ll do is attempt a list, keep it as a draft, and see where it goes and what I want to do with it.

I am not looking forward to this AT ALL.  I was just reading a newly begun recovery blog where the author is hoping that after 20 plus years of sobriety, he wouldn’t use this fact as a defining element of his life and self.  I’ve written about it before, but to me part of the miracle of 12 step recovery is when it actually becomes something you do want, that you do value, that you wouldn’t trade for anything.  After 20 plus years of sobriety I have a life worth living and more than I ever could have imagined for myself.  After 20 plus years of sobriety I’m again looking at doing something hard and painful and unpleasant because I have seen the results, and the payoff in my life and in the lives of others.

No pain, no gain.  That’s true, and things that are worth having are worth working for.  And “life ain’t no crystal stair” (Langston Hughes).  And fortunately, or unfortunately, I am driven largely by the pleasure principle, and I would not continue if it wasn’t worth it.  AND each day from May 1, 1984 until now is a gift to me from the program.  I would not have them had I not had it.  And 20 plus years from now I hope it is still the defining factor of my life.

And (note to myself) I need to come back and write about violent emotional twists before I move on.

Some of Us, Though, Tripped Over a Very Different Snag (Step Eight continued)

Some of us, though, tripped over a very different snag.  We clung to the claim that when drinking we never hurt anybody but ourselves.  Our families didn’t suffer, because we always paid the bills and seldom drank at home.  Our business associates didn’t suffer, because we were usually on the job.  Our reputations hadn’t suffered, because we were certain few knew of our drinking.  Those who did would sometimes assure us that, after all, a lively bender was only a good man’s fault.  What real harm, therefore, had we done?  No more, surely, than we could easily mend with a few casual apologies.

This attitude, of course, is the end result of purposeful forgetting.  It is an attitude which can only be changed by a deep and honest search of our motives and actions.

As for the time of my actual drinking, most of the people I hurt are far in my past.  My mother would have to lead this list.  I did all of my drinking while I lived with her and she was supporting me.  I made her worry, and then some, and I wasted much money, education and opportunity.  I wasted the time of those in class with me, and of my teachers.  In addition to that I risked the safety of everyone who shared the road with me.  And there was tons wrong I did with my relationship.  That kind of hurt ended 24 years ago.

Now.  I’m aware of the daily inventory, and that when I’m wrong, I need to promptly admit it.  I’m also aware that every day, I hurt just about everyone I come in contact with in at least some small way.  Religiously, I know I fail to give as much as I should and take care of others and the planet and share as I should.  I know I have failings as a mother, wife, worker, neighbor, friend.  What to do with this, I’m not sure.  I can’t see sitting my sobriety babies down and apologizing for my shortcomings as a mother, but maybe that’s what I should do.

As to the people at work, the ones I have the most trouble loving, I’m even less clear there.  The damage I’ve done has not to do with drinking, thank goodness, but maybe damage is damage.

On with this, I’m hoping that more will be revealed.

We Got a Pretty Severe Shock (Step Eight Continued)

When listing the people we had harmed, most of us hit another solid obstacle.  We got a pretty severe shock when we realized that we were preparing to make a face-to-face admission of our wretched conduct to those we had hurt.  It had been embarrassing enough when in confidence we had admitted these things to God, to ourselves, and to another human being.  But the prospect of actually visiting or even writing the people concerned now overwhelmed us, especially when we remembered in what poor favor we stood with most of them.  There were cases, too, where we had damaged others who were still happily unaware of being hurt.  Why, we cried, shouldn’t bygones be bygones?  Why do we have to think of these people at all?  These were som of the ways in which fear conspired with pride to hinder our making a list of all the people we had harmed.

I don’t want to pass this off lightly, and I won’t.  The thing is I’m not quite sure what to do with this.  I understand that my first Step Eight happened long ago and far away, and that in going through the steps again, for the third time in 24 years of sobriety, I’m taking a deeper, better, newer look.  Hopefully I’ve made amends as I’ve gone through life for the past 24 years, sober in AA.  That’s the ideal and the plan anyway.

Coming at this from a new and present perspective, and listing the people I have trouble with at work first on the “list,” I’m pretty much stymied as to how to proceed.  I’ve known these people only in sobriety, and I really hope my behavior hasn’t been “wretched,” but I don’t want to gloss over it if it has been.

Food for thought, and I will continue.

When Listing the People We Had Harmed (Step Eight continued)

When listing the people we had harmed, most of us hit another solid obstacle.

I decided to write more on the eighth step, read the next paragraph, and took a shower and thought about it.  The paragraph goes on to say that the thought of facing these people face to face and admitting our wrongs stops us again.  I need to think about that, because I’m seriously considering how to go about this in the near future at this time in my sobriety.  However, there are things I need to record about the list itself.

It’s interesting for me to see what I have written, because now I know just how long I’ve been thinking about doing this or that, and what actually done about it.  I’ve been trying to improve and expand my prayer life, I’m afraid for probably ten months now.  In addition to needing to kick up the number and quality of prayers I say beyond my usual gratitude list and quick plea for help, I didn’t ordinarily pray for people.

It’s a common suggestion and so one I’ve tried many times, to pray for the person who is giving my grief for some minimum amount of time.  I’ve done that, and it hasn’t helped my feelings about the person, and it hasn’t helped me feel better, and I don’t like it.  I’ve pretty much discarded it as a strategy that will work for me, though of course as new situations present themselves, the good people of AA suggest it to me again and again.  And in theory I know they are right and that they have more knowledge than I do and that I only have to pay for the suggestions I don’t take.

I’ve even tried at times to list people in categories like they do in my church and pray for people who are sick, people who are unemployed, people who are trouble of whatever kind, listing the people I know.  I like that better, but still don’t like it much, and I never stuck to it.

A while ago, when I was writing prayers in difficult work situations to get through, I listed the people I generally would pray for or worry about, and decided to try paying prayerful attention to them one at a time, rather than in a list form.  There were ten or fifteen people on my list:  my immediate family and best friends, others in my daily life who are struggling with one thing or another. I changed the person every day or every other day, depending on how much time I had to spend on “prayer.”  Then I started listing the person in the sidebar of this blog, and that has helped me a lot.  A few times a day now I think of who is listed right now and what they need or what I hope for them.  I’ve even called the person or emailed or said “yes” when they asked me for something or in one case I just did a favor that I was able to do, without being asked and without giving the person any chance to say no.  I’m liking this a lot.

I’ve had two recent revelations regarding this list.  First, I realized a few days ago, while contemplating Step Eight and a particular problem someone in my life was having, I had failed to list the people who give me trouble. Not my family and friends who give me trouble.  Those very few people who I resent highly and for so very long at work.  I had not listed them.  I had not prayed for them.  While the two week thing that’s always suggested has not worked for me, I think that adding them to my list of regular concerns will help me, and surely it won’t hurt them.  So they’ve joined my list.

The second revelation happened this morning at work in the morning meeting.  I haven’t been bringing the prayers there with me because I’ve been doing much better with being happy and grateful and present lately, but yesterday and this morning were difficult, so I took the book with me.  I began to rewrite the prayer list as I had been doing frequently and thinking about if anyone needed to be added or dropped, and I realized that I don’t know who Heather is.  Or James.  Or how they got on my list.  Or why I put them there.

Of course I know lots of people named Heather and James, but no one I can consciously think of reason to pray for beyond the usual.  So I guess I need to be more selective about who I put on the list, and make sure I’ll remember who they are a few days later.

So this is not a list of people I have harmed, although maybe in a large cosmic sense I have harmed each one in some way or other.  But it’s a list, and it now contains the people I have the most trouble loving and accepting along with the others who are easy to love.  I’m sure that if I decide later with this step to make an actual list, my prayer list is where I will start.