“My wife and I abandoned ourselves with enthusiasm to the idea of helping other alcoholics to a solution of their problems.” (Big Book, page 15)
People want to work on their darkness.
They don’t want to abandon it.
You don’t work on darkness.
You don’t sweep darkness with a broom.
You turn on the light.
Then the darkness goes.
On several occasions in recovery, I went for outside help, which meant paying people to be interested in my darkness, in the belief that they would help rearrange it somehow, or provide some insight into it, which would make it go away. The belief was this: I think an awful lot about myself; if I think more about myself, I will stop thinking about myself. In other words, “the answer to the problem of thinking about myself is to think about myself.”
I did this for years, going from outside helper to outside helper, reading outside book after outside book, and I was more full of self than I was at the beginning, but I still believed that the problem was not that I was thinking about myself too much but that I had not yet thought about myself enough, so more thinking about myself and recruiting others into the endeavour was the answer.
Eventually, after yet another panic attack in connection with meeting a family member, in a period where I could barely countenance spending time with any family members at all, I gave up the game I had been playing since the age of 15 (I was then 37), and I heard something that suggested that my darkness was folly, ridiculousness, absurdity, delusion, and nothingness and, crucially, offered a way out.
The way out was to abandon self, and one single, last look at the darkness was required in order not to understand it but to provide the motivation for the abandonment.
That worked.