“The Twelve Steps were designed for desperate people like us—as a shortcut to God. … The Steps are like a medicine which many of us won’t bother to take, although we know they can heal us of the sickness of despair, frustration, resentment and self-pity. … Consciously we think we want help, but some dark and hidden sense of guilt makes us crave punishment more than we want relief from our ills.” (ODAT, 5 April 2025)
I thought the answer to my problems was talking about the external situation and the people in it, talking about my feelings, talking about the past, tracing my unhappiness back to my childhood, finding who was responsible. I dramatised the whole affair with gross, blanket statements about my childhood (which was, in reality, as is the case with any childhood, a very mixed bag), like, “My parents never took an interest in me. My father was not there [he was, though, some of the time]. My mother was angry. They weren’t emotionally available. Everything I did was wrong. Nothing I did was good enough. I was alone. They didn’t understand. I wasn’t allowed to feel.” This was an artistic fabrication borne of my self-pity and self-centeredness. A magpie’s nest of selected treasures.
My memory for suffering was particularly well-honed; I fostered amnesia for the good or the neutral. You can make anything out of anything if you try hard enough.
I erected an ice palace to live in and got colder and colder. Only when I was half frozen to death with my own head-talk was I ready to really look at the Steps, to really change.
The Steps melted this pseudo-recovery and then proceeded to remodel the problem: me.