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 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 of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself of 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 dependency meant demand—a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words “absolute dependency” 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.
Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case 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. 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.
The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.
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.
Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy 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 Twelfth Step ourselves and others into 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 W.
SECTION ONE
The Great Balancing Act
Though balance is one of the most underrated attributes of all, being non-dramatic and low-key, we observe that the label “unbalanced,” applied to a person, is never a desired one. Balance is one of the gifts of long-term sobriety that seem to be appreciated later or, by the unusually mature, at any time.
From San José, a member describes balance to a “T” in 1976, after noting the faux ecstasies of his drinking days. “Today, by the grace of God, I strive for a basically bland diet. For example, on this day I've worked eight hours, washed my clothes, gone to a meeting, and written a poem about gratitude. Later, I'll meditate. Dull by my past standards, but pleasantly sane by my AA way of thinking.”
Before he discovered Step Eleven and meditation, Ken of Ames, Iowa, writes that he was powerless over unhappiness and his life was unmanageable. “Long before I was a binge drinker,” he adds, “I was a binge thinker. I tended to think incessantly.” His mind had no “off” switch, coming up with grudges, resentments, and so on, creating the state of imbalance, ripe for relapse.
When Jim of Largo, Florida's home group holds a workshop on emotional sobriety, he becomes convinced that time in the program is not enough to ensure it, and that certain emotions will remain deadly because they “block me from dealing in a mature, emotionally sober way, rather than just reacting.”
With his new sense of balance, Bruce H. of Arlington, Virginia, decides he doesn't have to memorize anything in the Big Book after all; neither does he have to arrange the chairs perfectly every time. And G.P. of Elbert, Colorado admits that when the pink cloud hit him, “I went insane. Quite starkly mad. … For one thing, I couldn't say no—a clear indication of insanity. … I accepted five full-time job offers, and was thinking of a sixth.” He also bought everything in sight.
Newly sober; deeply imbalanced.
“Thank the Higher Power,” he writes. “The malady doesn't seem to be permanent.”
By Our Attitudes
January 1950
A little clock in a jeweler's window stopped one morning at 20 minutes past 8. School children, noticing the time, stopped to play. People on their way to the train stopped to chat a little longer and all were late because one little clock had stopped. Never had these people realized how much they had depended on that clock in the jeweler's window until the day it failed them and led them all astray.
We AAs are very much like that clock. Day after day there are those who are looking to us for guidance and direction on the way of life. If our AA life is functioning properly, we are faithful guides to all who observe us. But if something has gone wrong with our AA way of life, we are stopped clocks, and unfortunate indeed is the man who permits himself to be misled by our example. We who have been helped by AA are as letters of God addressed to our friends and fellow men. By our attitudes, our speech, and our behavior are we to show them the transforming power of AA's philosophy of life.
C.T.
St. Paul, Minnesota
The Golden Mean
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