“It may be unwise at this stage to rehash certain harrowing episodes.” (Page 84, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
The context of this is Step Nine.
But the idea is interesting: lots of things happened to me in my childhood that were unpleasant. I thought for years I had to process these. But the solution turned out to be the opposite. I had to un-process these. The events were disagreeable in their happening, but the long-term effect arose not from them themselves (as pain passes and does so rapidly if permitted) but from a story I told myself about the events. That was the harrowing—the event was not harrowing in itself; it was merely painful. I harrowed myself. I was a self-harrower. My story needed to be untold. The story was replaced with, “Nothing much happened here. The story about it is unreal. The event was brief and passed. It’s gone. And that’s that.”
In the past, certain people (within and outside AA) queued up round the block to encourage me to focus on the pain, on the wounds, on the past. They offered processing. They treated the story about the event as being as real as the event. They ‘validated’ (whatever that means) the feelings, which usually involved encouraging me to view the story I had told myself as real, authentic, accurate, and meaningful. They made a passing unpleasantness into a permanent horror, then attempted to teach me to live with the horror, as a permanently wounded emotional cripple who now had ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’.
Then I read, at a couple of years sober, a Taoist reading, about the barking of a dog being simply a sound echoing down an empty corridor. It encouraged by the use of this image the un-telling of the story. This changed everything.
Sometimes, in AA, the idea is that our stories are terribly valuable, that they are our identity.
The stories are valuable, but not in themselves: the real value lies in showing other people how we untold the stories we made up and neutralised the past by seeing it for what it was, and, what, indeed, all time, past, present, and future is: an endless sequence of largely neutral events punctuated by moments of pain and moments of pleasure, each of which will past swiftly if allowed.
No harrowing is real.
No rehashing is necessary.
Unhashing: that’s the name of the game.