“What I say at an Al-Anon meeting should not be a recital of the details of someone else’s faults and actions. I have come to get knowledge of how to deal with my frustrations and difficulties, and to impart what I have learned in Al-Anon to the others. Personal problems can be discussed with my sponsor or another Al-Anon friend.” (ODAT, 24 November)
My unhappiness—when I have one—is never caused by others’ acts of omission or commission. Even ‘old ideas I learned in childhood’ were offered to me but not forced upon me. Heaven knows how many things in childhood I rejected, and how the ideas I ‘learned’ were often opposed by other ideas circulating in the home, in school, on TV, on the radio, in books, in music, with friends, and acquaintances. I was ‘taught’ numerous good lessons of religion, which would have sorted my life out from the get-go, but miraculously managed to avoid taking any of those on board. I had either idea. Bad lessons were not foisted upon me but eagerly taken up as welcome components in the structure of responsibility-avoidance, blame, self-pity, and righteous indignation that my personality was composed of—Frankenstein’s monster-like—an electrified pseudo-person, with vinegar running backwards through my veins. I feel pity and compassion for that person, because it’s true, I didn’t know that I was doing all of this to myself until I got to Al-Anon and had the truth unveiled; one can even pray for that prior incarnation (which can have an apparently retroactive effect, because of the paradox that God is outside time and space). But back to the topic: my topic in Al-Anon is me, not them.
I can’t blame anything on anyone, so there’s nothing to say about anyone or anything except me, solipsistic as that might sound.
Other people were the props for the action, but the action was mine.
My job in Al-Anon is not to reinforce the narrative that I came to Al-Anon with but to share the victory over it.
When I lapse back into believing that anything outside my consciousness is affecting anything within my consciousness, that’s a good time to stop and read, listen, write inventory, share inventory, make amends if necessary, pray, meditation, contemplate, and help others. External events are the opportunity and the occasion, but not the cause. So the focus of the work is on me, not the events.
And when I’m done with that, I can share about that.