... most of the time is that I am thinking about myself. Negative or positive, about myself. Even my gratitude is thinking about myself. I'm involved.
What does Step Ten say?
Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them. ... we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help.
The solution to these is not doing another step four, writing inventory, talking about my 'problems', going to a new fellowship, going to meetings to talk about myself, making outreach calls to talk about myself, praying about my problems, meditating about my own thoughts, going to 'therapy' to talk about myself, lying awake at night to think about myself, and certainly not figuring out what I'm feeling and what I think about what I'm feeling.
Here's the answer. Stop thinking about myself and think about I can help others. What do I do when I have done that? I get on with something practical.
What about in-between times, when I cannot perform useful actions, e.g. when I am walking between sites or doing housework? Audiobooks. Learn Japanese. Whatever.
I had to face a horrible truth a while back: I was unhappy not because I didn't have a solution but because I did not like the solution. I did not like the idea that I was not to think about myself, that I was to disappear completely out of my life, that I was to cease existing as this suffering thing. Suffering requires a patient. In linguistics, a patient is someone who has something done to them, an experiencer is someone who is experiencing something, and an actor is someone who is doing something.
The Book does not tell me to be a patient or an experiencer. It does say this:
Each person is like an actor ...
So the solution is to act.
Elizabeth Berg:
There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if many of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.