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The Serenity Prayer is the greatest exercise in prioritisation. I end, however, with some words from a doctor who seems to be suggesting that AA works because it makes us more emotionally healthy. I have suggested clearly in previous blogs how I think AA’s 12 recovery programme helps specifically with problems of emotion dysregulation. One can see how this concept of sin disease or in other words spiritual malady could be and was applied to early AA and incorporated into the Big Book of AA. Sins I believe are the poisoned fruit of fear, often helped along in alcoholics by false pride, shame and guilt.
Unless, we let Go and Let God and ask God to remove these negative emotions/sins/defects of character we end up in a futile increasingly distressed spiral of negative emotions. In Grace we can still experience negative emotions but God allows us to see them for what they are and not react. His Grace takes the distress out of thee negative emotions. The newcomer gave me an example of a resentment spiritual malady he was experiencing after this guy at a meeting said “get off your pink cloud” a phrase that refers to the sometimes mildly ecstatic feelings of early recovery. For me we engage futilely and distressingly in resentment because we have an inability to process and control our emotions, they overwhelm us and we often react by people pleasing or react via various defense mechanisms .
Three Aspects of Alcoholism
We have the chance to be free from the sick version of our real self, the self that has been in bondage, in addiction. We often take them to grave sooner rather than later unless we decide to be open and share our secrets with another person. Most of us were determined to take these secrets, these “sins” to the grave.
The magic of the the steps is that they seem to reveal the patterns of behaviour that our actions have prompted over the course of our lives. It helps us see ourselves and our condition of alcoholism and how it effects us and others. The spiritual principles of AA and the 12 steps in particular were drawn from the 4 absolutes of the Oxford group, via initially the 6 steps and the idea of a spiritual malady is also borrowed from the Oxford group. I do not believe I have the same spiritual malady as other normal people such as those people who were in the Oxford Group. The psychology and neuropsychology of alcoholism, addictive behaviour and recovery. What the book says is that the only thing that will solve our drink problem is a spiritual awakening, spiritual experience, attitude adjustment, or psychic change.
Complicated Grief, Soul Loss, and the Dark Night of the Soul
I am full of shame, more so than fear, although these two overlap. I grew up in a family that did not express emotions like the ones I had mentioned. We reacted via anger and put downs hence I have grown up to be dismissive. The years of recovery reveal many different things, some of them not so palatable. Anger responses are modeled and learned in some families.
The majority of twelve-step programs, however, address illnesses other than substance addiction. For example, the third-largest twelve-step program, Al-Anon, assists family members and friends of people who have alcoholism and other addictions. About twenty percent of twelve-step programs are for substance addiction recovery, the other eighty percent address a variety of problems from debt to depression. It would be an error to assume the effectiveness of twelve-step methods at treating problems in one domain translates to all or to another domain. The “spiritual malady” of the Oxford group seems enhanced in me, I believe I sin more than normal people because of my emotional immaturity and reactivity. My “loss of control” over drinking is also linked to emotion processing difficulties as it prompted impulsive, uninhibited drinking.
