“This is like a child who walks into a dark room and refuses to turn on the light. When he stumbles and hurts himself, is the darkness to blame? … When we are faced with the perplexities of the alcoholic situation, and try to do it on our own, we are stubbornly refusing the help that could be ours in Al-Anon.” (ODAT, 29 March)
To do something on my own is really to do something under the instruction of my ego. Self (or others’ selves) and God are the only two sources of guidance. Self doesn’t work. God does. When I’m unhappy, I’ve invariably asked myself what I think of a situation and then told myself something distressing.
The problem is never darkness; it is only ever my failure to turn on the light, which means to empty myself of any notion of what is going on and instead to ask God to help me.
For years, I was like, “Life keeps happening to me, life is fired at point-blank range, and I find it really difficult, and the reason is that my family of origin taught me all these bad patterns, which are my defence mechanisms to keep me safe, and I’m always going to be prone to suffering, but at least I have somewhere to come where people understand, and then I feel less guilty about how unhappy I am, because now I know it’s my past and my childhood that broke me, and I’m in the same boat as everyone else here, and although it’s not really others’ fault either, because hurt people hurt people, the fault is at least not mine, which is the main thing, and although the Steps help a little, they won’t fundamentally change reality or me, they just give me tools and boundaries to manage my depression and anxiety down to sustainable levels, and recovery is a long slow process and there are no shortcuts, so I just have to not abandon myself and instead sit with my feelings and really learn to show up for myself, peeling back layer after layer of the onion to find deeper truths, but I’m out of time, so thanks for all being here, I’m going to pass.”
In other words, I was stumbling round in the darkness.
I turned on the light. And God said, “Oh, there you are. It’s all fine. Follow me. Keep your eyes on me, and I’ll keep you busy.” When I did the Steps, not to manage self, but to nullify self, to reduce it to nothing, they worked, because I was pointing the set of tools at the right object. The jet of water coming from the firefighter’s hosepipe is supposed to be pointed at the fire (= self). I wasn’t supposed to be bloating myself by directing all the water down my own gullet. For years, the Steps, thus misdirected, merely gave me information I did not know what to do with. I missed the whole notion of abandoning myself to God. I wanted God to help me manage me. All that happened was that I got bigger and bigger, blocking out the light.
Enough of self! Dull, dull, dull! That’s the darkness.
Light’s much more fun.