The Goal Is A Quiet Place In Bright Sunshine

This is derived from a writing of Bill W.’s that I’ve referred to before;

“The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety”

Since I seem to have always had a difficult challenge with the subject personally and so many I’ve known share the challenge, I look for an answer. This writing of Bill’s comes from “The Language of the Heart” and I originally found it by looking through the book’s index for “Love.” Go figure…

If you’re an alcoholic like me you never stop loving those with whom you’ve “fallen in love.” And, if you’re like me, you share the continuing, apparent, failure, to achieve and maintain a relationship based in love.

Companionship. Love. The desire to procreate. All natural and gifted to us by God as I understand Him. Truly, I’d rather avoid taking this emotion to the extreme I’ve taken it to in my past yet I continue to be driven for the end result without let up.

I draw no hope from the beginnings of Bill’s writing. He says: “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.” Well, screw you Bill!

He goes further to say: “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!” Well, dammit Bill, Lois never left you did she? Ohhh – and I’m wrong again eh? – “Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional roller coaster.” Not simply wrong, awfully wrong!

The Problem Of Life Itself

“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 our affairs.”

“Even then… peace and joy may still elude us.”

I’ll be an SOB!!! No? Really???

“How shall our unconscious – from which so many of our fears, compulsions, and phony aspirations 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.”

Aw hell, more work…

Then, a revelation. The “formula” was in the St. Francis Prayer. Only, it wasn’t working. I have a basic flaw. 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.”

Fatal dependencies. Absolute dependencies. They’ve got to go if I want to be happy. This is truly a challenge.

“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 whatsoever. 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 relation in life.”

This is going to sound arrogant (because it may be) but I believe I am much further along than Bill was when he wrote this. Which makes it all the more frustrating. Not having achieved perfection by any stretch, but having had concrete results based precisely in these principles. Yet, the results remain the same.

Now, after very brief investigation, this I definitely have – “For my dependency meant demand – a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.”

It is very subtle. Inside my instincts. Not an outward display through actions but a constant instinctual force driving me each day. I know it is also true that there is an answer in what I am reading.

“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.”

At depth? And I want to ask “How damn deep do I have to go? I’ve already gone damn deep!” Then it rings out loudly in my mind’s eye – “What are you willing to do to stay sober?” The answer to that is the same – Anything!!!

Bill offers an example of a 6 month sober member Twelfth Stepping a brand spanking new person. “If the [new person] 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.”

Therein lies a challenge – I twelve step someone and they wind up happy and I’m sad? That’s screwed up. So… I pay attention to what follows;

“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 dividend of giving without any demand for a return.”

There it is – coming home to roost again. This damned reward system I somehow learned to live by.

Speaking of his experience, very similar to my own, Bill says: “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.”

Sponsoring people for the last eight years here in Savannah has been a long string of lost souls. Some have gone on to get sober thankfully. I am happy that they did. But I am reminded of a specific situation. Yes, I loved her then and do now. For the longest time I tried to help her. She came and went. Challenged me. Didn’t/doesn’t feel the same. But the day came when my frustrations had reached an extremely high level and I sat with my God and Patty P’s tape. I listened to Patty talk about shortcomings. The Seventh Step. Asking God to remove them. I didn’t know where I was wrong but I was willing to look because I was suffering. After much time it just suddenly dawned on me – I was helping expecting love in return. I asked God to remove it. Then I found my old high school sweetheart. Coincidence? I think not…

Unfortunately, that has died too. And here I sit. I want what Bill found;

“Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity, or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.”