From pages 32-33 in the 12&12;

“To clergymen, doctors, friends, and families, the loveaholic who means well and tries hard is a heartbreaking riddle. To most L.A.’s, he/she is not. There are too many of us who have been just like him/her, and have found the riddle’s answer. The answer has to do with the quality of faith rather than its quantity. This has been our blind spot. We supposed we had humility when we really hadn’t. We supposed we had been serious about religious practices when, upon honest appraisal, we found we had been only superficial. Or, going to the other extreme, we had wallowed in emotionalism and had mistaken it for true religious feeling. In both cases we had been asking something for nothing.”

Interested? Curious? Loveaholic?

“The fact was we really hadn’t cleaned house so that the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession.”

Are you obsessed with another person?

“In no deep or meaningful sense had we ever taken stock of ourselves, made amends to those we had harmed, or freely given to any other human being without any demand for reward.”

Think about this. Are you interested in helping a member of the opposite gender? Are you “all about” helping that person you so deeply care for? Why? Once you’ve done a bit of digging, do you find that you’re helping with the hope of having your help “returned?” Or, can you honestly say that you’re helping strictly for the welfare of the other person, expecting nothing in return?

“Few indeed are the practicing loveaholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality, can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves ‘problem loveaholics,” but cannot endure the suggestion that they are in fact mentally ill.”

Co-Dependents Anonymous is a wonderful fellowship. They even have a program of recovery!

“They are abetted in this blindness by a world which does not understand the difference between sane loving and loveaholism. ‘Sanity’ is defined as ’soundness of mind.’ Yet no loveaholic, soberly analyzing his/her destructive behavior, whether the destruction fell on the dining-room furniture or his/her own moral fiber, can claim ’soundness of mind’ for him/herself.”

“God will restore us to sanity if we rightly relate ourselves to Him.”

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The Loveaholic and Step Two

The sentence that ends page 32 and begins page 33 in AA’s 12&12 would no doubt have pi**ed me off had I read it when I was drinking.

“Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality, can bear to face it.”

Call me an irrational alcoholic? Oh heck no! I might have been willing, as it says, to term myself a “problem drinker,” but the suggestion I was mentally ill would have sent me over the top. Add to it that my family was not equipped to say more than I might have a problem with booze, for which they got denial in return, and there was nothing to offer any solution to me. I was doomed. Sane drinking had been eliminated and insanity was firmly in place.

I no doubt would have also rebelled at the thought of “sanity” being defined as “soundness of mind.” I would like to think that if someone had added the fact that soundness of mind meant not picking up the first drink because that was the one that got me drunk, I might have listened.

I wouldn’t bet on it…

Sanity = Soundness of mind = Not picking up the first drink.

Therefore I don’t get drunk nor do I black out. And, no, it isn’t the seventh, or the twelfth, drink that gets me drunk. I’ve lost the power of choice regarding the consumption of alcohol.

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Restored To Sanity

1. We did not need to consider another’s conception of God. (46:2)

2. God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him. (46:2)

3. We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God. (46:1)

4. The Realm of Spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive; never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men. (46:2)

5. As soon as a man can say that he does believe, or is willing to believe, we emphatically assure him that he is on his way. It has been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully effective spiritual structure can be built.* (47:2)

6. In the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the total failure of their human resources, they found that a new power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them. (50:4)

7. When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did. (52:3)

8. Deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. (55:2)

9. If our testimony helps sweep away prejudice, enables you to think honestly, encourages you to search diligently within yourself, then, if you wish, you can join us on the Broad Highway. With this attitude you cannot fail. The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you. (55:4)

10. He has come to all who have honestly sought Him. When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us! (57:3)

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There Are Ten Second Step Promises

I first published this two years ago and I’d like to refer to it again. It feels very appropriate considering some of the folks who’ve displayed their own recently…

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It surprised me when I discovered how defiant I had been toward God in my drinking days and for quite some time after He helped me sober up.

Small, simple things like, “no, I’ll do it my way, thank you.” Do you have any idea how often and to what degree we do this?

There’s an old “story” I wish I could relate about someone demanding a sign from God while they’re standing in the middle of a field. They dismiss a soft breeze, a butterfly and a couple of other signs because they misperceive them and leave discouraged.

I really like what it says on page 31 in the 12&12 – “When we encountered A.A., the fallacy of our defiance was revealed.” I like it today, I didn’t quite like it when I was a green pea. I didn’t want to be considered defiant. I’d been told that throughout my life – “You’re so defiant Mark.” I can hear my mom now. It was my ego and pride – I really didn’t want to be wrong in yet another way.

Our book goes on to say – “At no time had we asked what God’s will was for us: instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be.” I thought “how had I been telling Him what it ought to be? Consider that all, ALL my prayers, revolved around getting something I wanted or not losing something I had. “Please, please God, do this for me.”

God had other ideas… I wasn’t very accepting of God’s other ideas. When He didn’t deliver I became angry and hurt. I developed a manner of thinking that God didn’t love me because he never gave me what I wanted. Ever…

Then A.A. tells me “No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too. Belief meant reliance, not defiance.”

Oh heck, I’m done… but wait!

“In A.A. we saw the fruits of this belief: men and women spared from alcohol’s final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate.”

There’s hope in those words! Maybe I’m not done after all?

“This was not only faith; it was faith that worked under all conditions. We soon concluded that whatever price in humility we must pay, we would pay.”

All Conditions!

From the previous page – “Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so far as faith was concerned.”

Self-righteousness undid me and was phony!

Humility!

Post from: Blisstree

The Fallacy of Defiance

From The Language of the Heart, page 270;

“It is always worthwhile to consider how grossly that good word acceptance can be misused. It can be warped to justify nearly every brand of weakness, nonsense, and folly. For instance, we can ‘accept’ failure as a chronic condition, forever without profit or remedy. We can ‘accept’ worldly success pridefully, as something wholly of our own making. We can also ‘accept’ illness and death as certain evidence of a hostile and godless universe. With these twistings of acceptance, we AAs have had vast experience. Hence we constantly try to remind ourselves that these perversions of acceptance are just gimmicks for excuse-making: a losing game at which we are, or at least have been, the world’s champions.

This is why we treasure our Serenity Prayer so much. It brings a new light to us that can dissipate our old-time and nearly fatal habit of fooling ourselves. In the radiance of this prayer we see that defeat, rightly accepted, need be no disaster. We now know that we do not have to run away, nor ought we again try to overcome adversity by still another bull-dozing power drive that can only push up obstacles before us faster than they can be taken down.”

Frustrated over not winning a useless argument? Not at all… the twistings and perversions of power drivers are simply not that important.

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The Serenity Prayer – Treasured

Page 418;

“I can do the same thing with an A.A. meeting. The more I focus my mind on its defects – late start, long drunkalogs, cigarette smoke – the worse the meeting becomes. But when I try to see what I can add to the meeting, rather than what I can get out of it, and when I can focus my mind on what’s good about it, rather than what’s wrong with it, the meeting keeps getting better and better. When I focus on what’s good today, I have a good day, and when I focus on what’s bad, I have a bad day. If I focus on a problem, the problem increases; if I focus on the answer, the answer increases.”

And then I have the Second Step. When I find myself questioning another human being’s sanity, I recall that it is not up to me to make that person sane, if they weren’t.

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What Is Your Focus?

Why don’t I tell you the truth? If I told you the truth you’d feel angry at me. Your feelings would be hurt and I’d be the one who hurt them. You wouldn’t like me anymore. I need to be liked. My insides are judged by your outsides. You don’t like me therefore I’m no good.

So I tell you you did a wonderful job with your drug talk in AA.

Thanks to Robyn, there is a very clear explanation of it which I will quote partially;

“In the past, I would have been more comfortable to welcome this non-alcoholic addict and attempt to sponsor him in AA. It makes me feel better to be all-inclusive, to say all are welcome, to play the good Samaritan to one and all. I would have chosen my comfort over his welfare and the welfare of AA.”

Do we all get that? I am actually choosing my comfort over someone else’s welfare.

I’ve seen it happen. An AA member strongly (sometimes obnoxiously) suggests to someone with a drug problem that they go to Narcotics Anonymous – and a few of us take offense! How dare they do that?

Because its the best thing for that person! Now they’ll be able to identify and understand. Now the help they receive will be rightly targeted.

It will work the same way for any other Twelve Step need.

Here is another quote to pay very strong attention to;

“AA is not all-inclusive, nor was it ever intended to be. We developed from a narrowing of the broad objectives of the Oxford Group to focus on helping alcoholics only. We are still strong, the Oxford Group is not.  Many fine organizations have come and gone because of their inability to stick to one thing they do well. Many organizations have failed because they lacked the humility to realize their limitations. Tradition Three states “our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism.” Members may have as many “related disorders” or problems as they wish, but to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, one must have alcoholism and a desire to stop drinking.”

The Oxford Group? Who knows of an Oxford Group meeting anywhere tonight? Do we understand now???

“There are many fine Twelve Step programs out there whose singleness of purpose makes them best equipped to help the non-alcoholic addict, gambler, co-dependent, etc. My failure to realize this and direct these persons to the program they need is selfish and ego-rewarding, choosing what feels good to me over what is right for them.”

Post from: Blisstree

Selfish and Ego-Rewarding

When we were drinking (or using or whatever) and we prayed, how often were our prayers answered to our satisfaction? Now that we’re early into recovery, without having practiced the Twelve Steps, how much do you think our praying has changed?

So, if you’re feeling disconnected after a few months, or feeling restless, irritable, and discontented, and think that prayer is the answer, think again.

Oh no! I said prayer isn’t the answer… Well, not right now because of the way we pray when we haven’t learned how to pray rightly.

Rather than praying “Grant me my wishes” we ought to be praying “Thy will be done.” How many know how to do that? Plus, how many of us realize what placing demands upon God really are? Why? Simply because “we discover that we do receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent that we stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms.”

Heck, we don’t even realize we’re requiring God to cough up our desires as we wish them to be. We think we’re actually praying and will thus receive what we want.

How discouraging has it been for you to realize that sometimes God’s answers to our prayers is “no!” Or “not now.”

Folks, the easier, softer way out of our troubles is to change through the Twelve Steps, not to simply ask God to remove our troubles expecting Him to fulfill that request because we asked.

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God Is Not A Puppeteer

The Tablemate was an early A.A. set of beginners lessons entitled ‘Alcoholics Anonymous: An Interpretation of the Twelve Steps,’ put out in the form of a little pamphlet. It was (and still is) the most successful set of A.A. beginners lessons ever devised.

And I’m drawing content from the Hindsfoot site, laboriously prepared by Glenn C. and others… We now move into Discussion No. 2: The Spiritual Phase

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Step No. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Our drinking experience has shown:

1. That as we strayed away from the normal social side of life, our minds became confused and we strayed away from the normal mental side of life.
2. An abnormal mental condition is certainly not sanity in the accepted sense of the word. We have acquired or developed a mental disease. Our study of A.A. shows that:

a. In the mental or tangible side of life we have lost touch with, or ignored, or have forgotten the spiritual values that give us the dignity of man as differentiated from the animal. We have fallen back upon the material things of life and these have failed us. We have been groping in the dark.

b. No human agency, no science or art has been able to solve the alcoholic problem, so we turn to the spiritual for guidance.

Therefore we “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” We must believe with a great FAITH.

Step No. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

In the first step we learned that we had lost the power of choice and had to make a decision.

1. What decision could we make better than to

a. turn our very will over to God, realizing that our own use of our own will had resulted in trouble.

b. As in the Lord’s Prayer, you must believe and practice thy will be done.

2. God as we understand Him.
3. Religion is a word we do not use in A.A. We refer to a member’s relation to God as the spiritual. A religion is a form of worship – - not the worship itself.
4. If a man cannot believe in God he can certainly believe in something greater than himself. If he cannot believe in a power greater than himself he is a rather hopeless egotist.

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The Tablemate – Discussion No. 2 The Spiritual Phase

I didn’t see it, they did. And they told me. When they told me, it pi**ed me off. Then I became more defiant. Eventually, some mere mention of it would twist my gut into instant anger.

Had they also mentioned that I was defying God I think I might have really lost it. He was my last and only hope – but – He never delivered what I so desperately wanted, what I kept asking Him for.

I arrive in AA and within a very short time I learned that I had been defying Him. I still didn’t quite understand how but I had become open-minded to its possibilities.

Today I read page 31 in AA’s 12&12 and there is no confusion, no doubt, no misunderstanding. It’s clear as a bell.

“As psychiatrists have often observed, defiance is the outstanding characteristic of many an alcoholic. So it’s not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself. Sometimes it’s because God has not delivered us the good things of life which we specified, as a greedy child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus. More often, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and to our way of thinking lost out because God deserted us. The girl we wanted to marry had other notions; we prayed God that she’d change her mind, but she didn’t. We prayed for healthy children, and were presented with sick ones, or none at all. We prayed for promotions at business, and none came. Loved ones, upon whom we heartily depended, were taken from us by so-called acts of God. Then we became drunkards, and asked God to stop that. But nothing happened. That was the unkindest cut of all. ‘Damn this faith business!’ we said.”

Now, despite years of practicing “Thy Will, Not Mine, Be Done,” I continue to live in my world where all, except being an active drunkard, remains a fact of my life. I struggle with this – a lot. Yet, there’s no alcohol on my breath.

What’s the difference from then to now?

Post from: Blisstree

Clearly Defiant