C's chair last night was enlightening as well as her usual entertaining quirks.
And she talked about becoming aware of her quirks. I have quirks that are destructive and some that are just delightful and harmless. It's those that are OK to keep but my destructive quirks need to go, with God's help.
Humility. C referred to Bill W's quotes on humility and I wanted to take a note of them since she had done some research and noted them down. What a pity I don't have her phone number.
Eeew I felt discomfort when P talked about the P and pointed at me. Only very few people in those rooms know what I do as my work and where. But then the pride part of me was all sort of fluttered and flattered. Just as M intimated with his body language to describe that feeling of flattery and pride. But to then hand that over in the way he did in the meeting, to make it light-hearted and recognition of pride was release in itself. And I can do that. Laugh with others at the pride itself. As if people knowing what I do will make me any less of an alcoholic or a somebody. Oh no no no. I am fully aware that any good that comes from the work I do is all thanks to God and nothing at all to do with me. I am merely a channel.
Here is a letter that Bill W wrote to a friend and was later published in Grapevine apparently, January 1953.
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 (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
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 and 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, 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 of our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may 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 รข€˜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, 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 act of circumstance whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself to 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 dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute dependence" 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.
If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent 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 gain 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"
Bill Wilson
Attitude is Everything
This letter is meaningful to me. I particularly relate to the unhealthy dependence upon people places and situations. I depend upon people being nice to me to feel OK. I depend on money to buy things to feel satisfied, as if a holiday is going to be the only thing that could make me feel better. I think I was bodily craving warmth and sunshine though, so thank you God for this last week of sunshine. Maybe this is enough right now, you'll know best. It was chilly walking just now but sunny enough. I can depend upon external things to give me everything and yet I need to let go of that dependence without though letting go of dependence all together. I depend on the FA fellowship to support me in maintaining my strength. I need FA fellowship. I can depend on God to be there all the time and every time I reach out to God. I cannot do anything without the fellowship and without God. But when expect then to start providing, then that's unhealthy dependence.
I was also realising that I could slip so easily into despondency when my unhealthy dependence lets me down. I think it's the external that has let me down but actually it's me that's let me down by being needy. So if I let go of that unhealthy dependence I regain my independence and can not be let down externally or by myself. Then I can stay away from feeling a victim or deprived and thereby stave off despondency (when it attacks from this particular direction, being mindful that it can manifest in many shapes and forms).
Despondency brings me to despair and hopelessness. And then I usually have given up and eat. When I eat these days there is no high anymore. From the first bite I feel even more despondent and this descends into a deep gloom and depression. I am usually then not wanting to live. I isolate, I feel miserable and everything appears to be bleak and benighted, as Bill says.
Of course there is still a feel good factor of using relationships and sex. But I also know that this quickly stops working these days and filters rapidly into the same black hole.
I raise this as it's crucial for me to be recognising my thoughts about G and P and D. My first thoughts are not literally but around the subject of potential. "Oh could this be a relationship?". Each of them offers something different when in fact I am not attracted to the whole of them. D is attractive physically and has a shy vulnerability that can appear attractive, something that can be rescued and nurtured. I can be the one to bring him out of this. G is funny and intelligent even if not cultured or maybe educated although he seems somewhat educated and there is something physically attractive about him. P has money but there is no physical attraction, he is the least attractive of the 3. But oh my gosh it's surely possible simply to be friendly and not try to go down the flirtatious route. The best think I can do is nothing. I am talking with them as and when they approach me and not pursuing my pursuit thoughts. Last evening I knew I could end up talking with P and did. I was thinking I would enquire if he's going to the convention he mentioned and could I go with him. Uh uh! No way Jose. It's not the right thing to do. Staying quiet about it and waiting was the break I needed to make. Thank you God. God please help me with this. I would like to be in a loving and lovely and comfortable relationship. I trust that if that's what you think is the right thing for me it will happen. In the meantime I am committed to no relationships until after my AWOL is completed. Wow! That seems such a long way away.
So you see this men thing can still appear to offer fun and lift me away from despondency.
I live on the edge of despondency. It seems to be a default setting still. I can feel a tangible pull. It would be s much easier it seems to give in to it and stay home, not facing the world and all the difficulties that the world and it's ways present to me. It is stepping out of taking responsibility for myself and can appear to be so much easier. And yet it's painful. It real has a physical pain and an interminable feeling of fight and draw on every ounce of energy.
So for today I am stepping aside of it. Every so often that feels difficult because the pull is alluring. Doing nothing at all, not having to deal with people, places and things. On the other hand I know that I can deal with any situation and pray to God that I will not feel fear in any situation. There is nothing to fear so long as I stay close to God. Thank you God for removing my fears and guiding me through any situation I am faced with. Somehow everything will be OK even though I have no idea how sometimes. Things always seem to work out just dandy.
There is also a grieving. letting go of despondency and depression. I have a close relationship with these twins.
I'm not sure I've written really about humility. Perhaps it's because T had asked me about despondency and the letter seemed to correspond across both topics. Humility is something to consider further from this point.
Well I need to phone my friend JB. I wrote to him yesterday expressing my thoughts of being boring to him. I wonder if he read my email hence the text to speak this morning. Well lets see.
Bliss
XX
And she talked about becoming aware of her quirks. I have quirks that are destructive and some that are just delightful and harmless. It's those that are OK to keep but my destructive quirks need to go, with God's help.
Humility. C referred to Bill W's quotes on humility and I wanted to take a note of them since she had done some research and noted them down. What a pity I don't have her phone number.
Eeew I felt discomfort when P talked about the P and pointed at me. Only very few people in those rooms know what I do as my work and where. But then the pride part of me was all sort of fluttered and flattered. Just as M intimated with his body language to describe that feeling of flattery and pride. But to then hand that over in the way he did in the meeting, to make it light-hearted and recognition of pride was release in itself. And I can do that. Laugh with others at the pride itself. As if people knowing what I do will make me any less of an alcoholic or a somebody. Oh no no no. I am fully aware that any good that comes from the work I do is all thanks to God and nothing at all to do with me. I am merely a channel.
Here is a letter that Bill W wrote to a friend and was later published in Grapevine apparently, January 1953.
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 (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
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 and 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, 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 of our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may 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 รข€˜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, 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 act of circumstance whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself to 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 dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute dependence" 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.
If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent 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 gain 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"
Bill Wilson
Attitude is Everything
This letter is meaningful to me. I particularly relate to the unhealthy dependence upon people places and situations. I depend upon people being nice to me to feel OK. I depend on money to buy things to feel satisfied, as if a holiday is going to be the only thing that could make me feel better. I think I was bodily craving warmth and sunshine though, so thank you God for this last week of sunshine. Maybe this is enough right now, you'll know best. It was chilly walking just now but sunny enough. I can depend upon external things to give me everything and yet I need to let go of that dependence without though letting go of dependence all together. I depend on the FA fellowship to support me in maintaining my strength. I need FA fellowship. I can depend on God to be there all the time and every time I reach out to God. I cannot do anything without the fellowship and without God. But when expect then to start providing, then that's unhealthy dependence.
I was also realising that I could slip so easily into despondency when my unhealthy dependence lets me down. I think it's the external that has let me down but actually it's me that's let me down by being needy. So if I let go of that unhealthy dependence I regain my independence and can not be let down externally or by myself. Then I can stay away from feeling a victim or deprived and thereby stave off despondency (when it attacks from this particular direction, being mindful that it can manifest in many shapes and forms).
Despondency brings me to despair and hopelessness. And then I usually have given up and eat. When I eat these days there is no high anymore. From the first bite I feel even more despondent and this descends into a deep gloom and depression. I am usually then not wanting to live. I isolate, I feel miserable and everything appears to be bleak and benighted, as Bill says.
Of course there is still a feel good factor of using relationships and sex. But I also know that this quickly stops working these days and filters rapidly into the same black hole.
I raise this as it's crucial for me to be recognising my thoughts about G and P and D. My first thoughts are not literally but around the subject of potential. "Oh could this be a relationship?". Each of them offers something different when in fact I am not attracted to the whole of them. D is attractive physically and has a shy vulnerability that can appear attractive, something that can be rescued and nurtured. I can be the one to bring him out of this. G is funny and intelligent even if not cultured or maybe educated although he seems somewhat educated and there is something physically attractive about him. P has money but there is no physical attraction, he is the least attractive of the 3. But oh my gosh it's surely possible simply to be friendly and not try to go down the flirtatious route. The best think I can do is nothing. I am talking with them as and when they approach me and not pursuing my pursuit thoughts. Last evening I knew I could end up talking with P and did. I was thinking I would enquire if he's going to the convention he mentioned and could I go with him. Uh uh! No way Jose. It's not the right thing to do. Staying quiet about it and waiting was the break I needed to make. Thank you God. God please help me with this. I would like to be in a loving and lovely and comfortable relationship. I trust that if that's what you think is the right thing for me it will happen. In the meantime I am committed to no relationships until after my AWOL is completed. Wow! That seems such a long way away.
So you see this men thing can still appear to offer fun and lift me away from despondency.
I live on the edge of despondency. It seems to be a default setting still. I can feel a tangible pull. It would be s much easier it seems to give in to it and stay home, not facing the world and all the difficulties that the world and it's ways present to me. It is stepping out of taking responsibility for myself and can appear to be so much easier. And yet it's painful. It real has a physical pain and an interminable feeling of fight and draw on every ounce of energy.
So for today I am stepping aside of it. Every so often that feels difficult because the pull is alluring. Doing nothing at all, not having to deal with people, places and things. On the other hand I know that I can deal with any situation and pray to God that I will not feel fear in any situation. There is nothing to fear so long as I stay close to God. Thank you God for removing my fears and guiding me through any situation I am faced with. Somehow everything will be OK even though I have no idea how sometimes. Things always seem to work out just dandy.
There is also a grieving. letting go of despondency and depression. I have a close relationship with these twins.
I'm not sure I've written really about humility. Perhaps it's because T had asked me about despondency and the letter seemed to correspond across both topics. Humility is something to consider further from this point.
Well I need to phone my friend JB. I wrote to him yesterday expressing my thoughts of being boring to him. I wonder if he read my email hence the text to speak this morning. Well lets see.
Bliss
XX
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