Freedom From Bondage

If you’re having a difficult time finding the wisdom in the stories in the back of The Big Book this is one you might seriously consider giving your focus;

Freedom From Bondage

If, for nothing else, how to be rid of a resentment.

This story, and the wise counsel of the oldtimers who were in my life at a time I needed them the most, went a very long way to helping me understand it is better to be about love than to be about hate!

A small bit of wisdom first – offering a dictionary definition: “Rationalization is giving a socially acceptable reason for socially unacceptable behavior, and socially unacceptable behavior is a form of insanity.”

From page 551 (4th ed.);

“As I said earlier, self-pity and resentment were my constant companions, and my inventory began to look like a thirty-three-year diary, for I seemed to have a resentment against everybody I had ever known. All but one ‘responded to the treatment’ suggested in the steps immediately, but this one posed a problem.”

As I continued reading I identified very strongly except that mine was a father rather than a mother.

“This resentment was against my mother, and it was twenty-five years old. I had fed it, fanned it, and nurtured it as one might a delicate child, and it had become as much a part of me as my breathing. It had provided me with excuses for my lack of education, my marital failures, personal failures, inadequacy, and, of course, my alcoholism. And though I really thought I had been willing to part with it, now I knew I was reluctant to let it go.”

My resentment towards my father was almost identical in the fact that it was a bullet-proof vest to wear to excuse away my failures and alcoholism also! But an oldtimer fortunately pointed out to me that my father hadn’t poured not one single drop of alcohol down my throat, not one…

“One morning, however, I realized I had to get rid of it, for my reprieve was running out, and if I didn’t get rid of it I was going to get drunk – and I didn’t want to get drunk anymore. In my prayers that morning I asked God to point out to me some way to be free of this resentment. During the day, a friend of mine brought me some magazines to take to a hospital group I was interested in. I looked through them. A banner across one featured an article by a prominent clergyman in which I caught the word resentment.”

Yep! No coincidences there right?

“He said, in effect: ‘If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.”

The most traumatic circumstances of my life, those that caused me the most emotional upheaval, have lost their bitterness because of this wisdom from a person I can so deeply identify with when she says (speaking about her childhood);

“I concluded too that if I never allowed myself to love anybody or anything, I could never be hurt again. It became second nature for me to remove myself from anything or anybody I found myself growing fond of.”

Ironically – today’s struggle… though the bitterness towards my father and my ex has disappeared, today I find I am able to move on and away from intimacy with “great aplomb.” (sarcasm)