Posts
My last post, about “Control, Anger, Depression and Faith” is about my experience of being blocked from the sunlight of the Spirit over the last few months. In my post I was examining my pain and the beginning of seeing some evidence of its source(s).
In Dave's response he rightly points to resentment as a major source of my spiritual problems. I'm not sure if he intends to say that it is the only source. If he does, I would have to disagree. Unless one expands the definition of 'resentment' to the point where it becomes almost meaningless, I cannot accept it as the sole source of spiritual problems in general or mine in particular. Egotism and attachment spring to mind as other major players, and they are not alone. But, that said, I have to face the fact that resentment is a major problem at this point in my life and that it is a major force in blocking me from the faith I was mourning in my last post.
There is no doubt that I harbor more resentment than I was conscious of toward my last job and some of the people in that company. I have let that experience and those people define me, shape my self image to a toxic extent. Who you are is something that is between you and whatever you accept as your Higher Power(s). Allowing other people to control your self image is a formula for disaster – and for resentment. Clearly, I have to find a way to reject a self image defined by others and let go of the corresponding resentments.
But if resentment is such a major part of my problem, why have I not seen it more clearly before now? It's easy to say that alcoholics are experts at self deception and denial and that I should have been making more use of my sponsor and other trusted AAs as reality checks. All those things are true, but they are a little too broad, too generic to be of much use. I have to apply them to my situation. I have in fact looked at the experience of that job and I have discussed it with trusted AAs, especially Dave, who has knowledge of the situation. Yet I still missed seeing my feelings about that job and the people in it as a serious spiritual problem.
I think part of my problem has been my convenient misunderstanding of the program's concept of 'resentment'. In our discussions, at least as I have heard them (which may not have much to do with their actual content) I think we tend to focus on resentments that require amends. I have very often heard people say that your 4th step resentment list is the core of your 8th step list and I think I have used that partial truth to avoid recognizing some resentments. “Well, I certainly haven't done anything to Ignatz that requires an amends so I mustn't have any real resentments towards him.” Obviously, that ain't necessarily so. To use extreme examples in the interest of clarity, the victim of ethnic cleansing, the person wrongly convicted of a crime, the victim of a mugging, the worker whose job has been shipped overseas (OK, that one falls a little closer to home) – none of those people owe amends to anyone but they can harbor deep resentments that can spiritually harm them.
Ironically, this is a subject I've devoted a lot of attention to (see my posting on Tolerance and Forgiveness) but I failed to apply it specifically to my resentments and the damage they do to me. In other words, when looking at myself I held on to a truncated definition of resentment that allowed me to hide from mine. Neatly and very alcoholically done.
So, as always, there's work to be done.
Reading both Brian's posts on the difficulties of connecting with faith, my impression led me thinking along different lines than have been pursued in this discussion thus far.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was that while resentments certainly form part of the background, they do not seem to me central to the dynamic in question. On the contrary, my sense was that the willingness to consider seriously, and to lay bare those resentments, suggested a fairly thorough acceptance - and, indeed, a working through - of them. My second thought was that the work-related pains Brian discusses as being so closely related to this loss of connection with faith make more sense to me in the broader context of the last 10 years of Brian's overall trajectory - including, but by no means limited to, the professional / work worlds.
Two things in particular strike me.
First, those of us who - once sober - take enormous leaps of faith, such as Brian did in starting his artistic enterprise (a leap of faith - but also an indication of the willingness to follow a more authentic calling than most of us are capable of even perceiving - to say nothing of pursuing, while we are still drinking) ... those of us who take these leaps, in taking them, exhibit a profundity of faith I've rarely seen - in or out of AA. As I understand Brian's story, it was not just a leap of faith, but a willingness to risk all in the interest of seeking what Bill Wilson so often calls on us all to do - to build our lives *outside* of AA so as to find the joy of living as flawed and imperfect, but redeemed (because now sober) human beings capable of living full lives.
This in itself is laudable. But it is all the more so because society in general does not condone the rejection of the secure and the sensible in favor of the insecure and the seeking - if I may express it in unconventional terms. In other words, this leap of faith strikes me as having reflected *both* a rare maturity in sobriety *and* the willingness to take steps that many might call "un-sober." (You just don't quit one job until you've found another; certainly you don't do this if you're financial intertwined with and partly responsible for another person, as Brian is/was.)
When you take this step, you risk social skepticism, if not condemnation; and you also engender - here I speak from my personal experience - not a little envy on the part of those who recognize and admire your answer to authentic calling, but lack the courage to answer their own (but that's a topic for another line of thought). When, having answered the call, the project you set out to establish in the endeavor does not pan out the way you'd hoped it would - when you are forced to abandon, or significantly downscale it - then you risk the "I told you so's" ... perhaps not in the form of direct expressions of Schadenfreude, but still, we know it when it's there. More to the point - we feel it acutely - probably in far greater measure than it actually is there ... because we have all been conditioned to understand such "failures" as having resulted from bad decision-making in the first place. Not so - of course - at least not necessarily so, but that's how we experience it.
So - first, leap of faith accompanied by skepticism and, after apparent failure of the project in question, self-condemnation. We are, after all, human.
AND,
ReplyDeleteThe second piece of the context that seems to me important here is the simple fact that Brian's current experiences occur against the backdrop not only of recent unemployment (another “failure”), and musing over the earlier "failure" of the leap of faith to "pay off" as we all would have hoped, but also, importantly, his tenth anniversary in AA.
Anyone who's not just a little antsy at ten years has to be a little complacent. Because here again, the social pressure is to have accomplished - and to be able to show material evidence of accomplishment - of significant "progress" over the past decade. On the face of it, Brian - leap-of-faith "failed" and now again unemployed - does not look like 10 years of sobriety have been accompanied by "things getting better" in the way we conventionally talk and think about them in AA as getting better, almost inevitably, at least over the long term (with ups and downs over months or years, but certainly not with an overall downward trajectory over 10 years *sober*).
It's hard to be ten years sober, no matter how good things look on the outside. It's especially hard if you have more internal growth than external accomplishment to show for it.
When I'd been sober for 10 years I began rereading everything every written by our AA authors, and lots of stuff written about AA more generally, and seeing problems everywhere. The AA literature *is* in large part (though not exclusively) didactic and directive, though it claims to be all about suggestions. It *is* exhorting us in most places to adopt a fairly specific, often outright Christian version of God, even when termed "Higher Power". True, it's riddled with contradictions, and there are plenty of places where it emphatically asks us to define a power greater than ourselves however we want to ... in places, Bill W. goes so far as to say that unless we do this, we are sunk. But the overall tone, as we all know, is more consistent with the theme presented at the end of the Big Book’s chapter "We Agnostics," which ends with the assurance that if we "thoroughly follow our path" we will come to know God "and call Him by name" - in other words, we'll abandon our agnosticism.
How could any intelligent being, seeking to find her way more deeply into faith through AA, fail to be confused, at best, or to develop some serious (one hopes temporary) chips on the shoulder about the AA doctrine?
What more is needed to explain a crisis of faith at this moment in our sobriety?
This failure to feel comfortably connected with faith, which Brian describes, is over-determined. Resentments about old work situations may well play a role. But, and here I offer another divergence from the theme as yet developed in this thread - but: what is interesting here is Brian's effort to unpack them and understand them in context, NOT that he's still harboring some of them.
I offer these comments with more than a little vehemence of tone, in part because my situation has been, and currently is, in many respects similar to Brian's (though at the moment I'm not experiencing this difficulty in connected with faith). To try to understand and address such profound and painful matters with too narrow a focus on the concepts and formulas AA offers is to risk missing the point, to prolong the period of spiritual dislocation. As such, I find this approach to be not only unhelpful in going to the matters Brian raises, but possibly dangerous: it is side-tracking at a moment when core-finding is especially important - maybe even to Brian's (certainly, to the extent that my story at the moment is similar to my) very sobriety.
Not to get too heavy, but let's keep this in broader perspective. Broader perspective is what attracted me to this forum in the first place. Thanks to Brian and everyone else for helping to create the space for allowing us jointly to develop and peruse it.
Funny, I have also heard that in the program resentments are things that eventually have to be made amends for, and that our 4th Step list is our 8th Step list... yet I guess I never bought in to that fully myself.
ReplyDeleteSure I agree that many things on our 4th Step list are things that we need to make amends for, yet there are a great many that I never for a minute felt I should make amends for.
I notice in the directions for the 4th Step list it talks about "the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real", and it makes me think that the founders had just as much of a problem keeping their mind-reading skills from blossoming and dragging them down. But should I be making amends for the fact that I think my boss hates me because she didn't return my call? I can only imagine how my life would go if I made it a practice of approaching everything who's mind I had been trying to read, and then apologizing for it. I can imagine I would look as sane as the woman in "The God's Must be Crazy who approaches a man and asks "Does the noise in my head bother you?"
Anyway, my point is that many, many times in sobriety I have had to deal with very deep seated resentments that do not require an amends for a variety of reasons. But ultimately my acknowledging these resentments only really means that I have come to realize that I have some spiritual illness that needs tending, and as an alcoholic in recovery I need to do something about it.
And so I open my toolkit. Sometimes I take out the "sick man prayer". Sometimes I work with another alcoholic. Sometimes I make an amends. Sometimes I make a phone call to another AA member. And sometimes I go to a meeting. But I know I can't sit there and do nothing, because it's the resentment that rots my soul and I am incapable of handling resentments for any length of time.