“Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“Our actor is self-centered—ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays. He is like the retired businessman who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“Should his own image in the mirror be too awful to contemplate (and it usually is), he might first take a look at the results normal people are getting from self-sufficiency. Everywhere he sees people filled with anger and fear, society breaking up into warring fragments. Each fragment says to the others, “We are right and you are wrong.” Every such pressure group, if it is strong enough, self-righteously imposes its will upon the rest. And everywhere the same thing is being done on an individual basis. The sum of all this mighty effort is less peace and less brotherhood than before. The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
This is how ‘self’ develops in me:
- I harbour self-centred interests.
- I resent anything that appears to threaten them.
- I fear what might threaten them.
- I scan for and select evidence that supports the resentment and fear.
- I reject evidence that denies or mitigates the resentment and fear.
- I discount any evidence of good or progress.
- I identify people I believe are against me
- I identify conspiracies against me.
- I adopt the baseline that others are corrupt, dishonest, stupid, and malevolent.
- I consider myself honourable, honest, smart, and good.
- I fantasise that everyone would be better off if they were like me.
- I perceive others as fundamentally untrustworthy.
- I construe others’ actions as motivated by ill intent towards me.
- I trust my own perceptions and interpretations implicitly.
- I reason from emotion not evidence.
- I prefer preference for a simple, entirely bleak picture over a complex, nuanced, and balanced picture.
- I treat groups of people as homogenous entities characterised by isolated negative features of individuals.
- I generalise unreasonably.
- I react strongly to single datapoints and build pictures based on them.
- I never lose an opportunity to have an overheated emotional reaction to a datapoint.
- I use single datapoints to re-activate whole narratives.
- I obsess about narratives.
- I recruit people to co-sign my narratives.
- I mentally and verbally attack others.
- I demonise, ostracise, and scapegoat.
- I construct my life around defending against others.
- I construe my attacks on others as defence.
- I construe their defences as evidence I was right all along.
- I act out the above as I extend the ‘I’ to the ‘we’ of any social group I belong to.
The solution per the Big Book:
“He was on a different footing. His roots grasped a new soil.” (Chapter 1, Big Book)
“For we are now on a different basis; the basis of trusting and relying upon God.” (Chapter 6, Big Book)
This is how the above sequence is altered:
- I seek the good of all.
- I trust God.
- I get on with being useful.
- I don’t take myself so seriously.