“But not so with alcoholics. When AA was quite young, a number of eminent psychologists and doctors made an exhaustive study of a good-sized group of so-called problem drinkers. The doctors weren’t trying to find how different we were from one another; they sought to find whatever personality traits, if any, this group of alcoholics had in common. They finally came up with a conclusion that shocked the AA members of that time. These distinguished men had the nerve to say that most of the alcoholics under investigation were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose.
How we alcoholics did resent that verdict! We would not believe that our adult dreams were often truly childish. And considering the rough deal life had given us, we felt it perfectly natural that we were sensitive. As to our grandiose behaviour, we insisted that we had been possessed of nothing but a high and legitimate ambition to win the battle of life.
In the years since, however, most of us have come to agree with those doctors. We have had a much keener look at ourselves and those about us. We have seen that we were prodded by unreasonable fears or anxieties into making a life business of winning fame, money, and what we thought was leadership. So false pride became the reverse side of that ruinous coin marked “Fear.” We simply had to be number one people to cover up our deep-lying inferiorities. In fitful successes we boasted of greater feats to be done; in defeat we were bitter. If we didn’t have much of any worldly success we became depressed and cowed. Then people said we were of the “inferior” type. But now we see ourselves as chips off the same old block. At heart we had all been abnormally fearful. It mattered little whether we had sat on the shore of life drinking ourselves into forgetfulness or had plunged in recklessly and wilfully beyond our depth and ability. The result was the same—all of us had nearly perished in a sea of alcohol.”
Often, in my life, I have felt not good enough. Demonstrably, though, I was, because being good enough to have a job, have friends, basically rub along in life, requires only a waddling mediocrity. The problem was never really that I did not have sufficient qualities to rub along but that I either hadn’t managed to shine, to outdo literally everyone else, or hadn’t managed to bend a situation or other people to my will and felt thwarted. The counter would then flip, and the reverse of hubris, shame, would kick in, red-faced that I’d been caught so brazenly raiding the cookie-jar of divine usurpation.
The problem is not that I am not good enough; it’s that, in my eyes, I’m not God enough, I know that others have seen through me, that they will see me for what I am: a failure in my endeavour to usurp God’s creative power to create myself, that I am as at the mercy of the material world, circumstances, and people as they and others are. The Wizard of Oz is just a man behind the curtain. Simply embarrassing. I would feel insulted if people said, "You're only human." My response to this line from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, "We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it," was "Why bother, then?"
When the glamour [related to Old Norse glámr, meaning ‘moon’, ‘ghost’, and glámsýni, meaning illusion] fades, and the trickery is revealed, I have to pay the price (which was always waiting in the wings) of setting myself up in competition with God as the author of my own creation, wishing to create a set of roles for myself in the world (in contrast to humbly and invisibly doing God’s will). That fundamental rebellion is the real source of the shame, which finds its way out and hooks itself onto any external failure of will.
The only solution is recognising my ego as the enemy, the source of all this nonsense, stepping back, and going to God for instructions.