It's NOT My Fault

 It is human to shift blame for our failures and our parents come in for an over-sized share as do our spouses and bosses and siblings but it's a fact that we really wail on our parents.  It's easier to blame them - flawed human beings, after all, who were doing the best they could with the tools they had at the time and let's not forget we weren't the easiest kids to manage.  So we get frustrated with the slowness with which productive change actually takes place for slowness is a concept that does not play well in our impatient society.  We're looking for solutions that are quick and easy to difficult, intractable problems - creams and pills and plastic surgery and fat reduction and the list is endless and most of it doesn't require much actual work.  One would think we're in an orgy of self-improvement and yet the new people I talk to - the ones who are brave enough to admit that they drink too much and that they need help to stop - are pretty much doing the same things that they did yesterday and last week and last year, with pretty much the same results.  We have become used to the idea that much of what we don't like about ourselves and our lives can be quickly overcome with little effort on our part.

If you keep doing what you've been doing you're going to keep getting what you've always got.

We can usually discern whether a new person has a real interest in getting sober or whether they merely wish they could stop drinking.  Alteration of long-standing attitudes and behaviors is a slow process - change is incremental.  We live in a society that has elevated complaint to a primary form of public discourse.  The media and the courts are full of victims of this and that - a bad upbringing, mistakes of others, lack of good opportunities, random misfortune.  Voluntary behaviors have been reclassified as illness so that sufferers can be pitied.  I've always liked the difference between empathy - an understanding of the pain of another - and sympathy - feeling sorry for the circumstances and troubles of another.  I get a lot of empathy in Alcoholics Anonymous and not much sympathy.  For my problems are of my own making.

Many of us mistake thoughts, wishes, and intentions for actual change.  This confusion between words and actions clouds the recovery process.  Confession - our Fourth Step - is good for the soul, but unless it's accompanied by altered behavior, it remains only words in the air.  I learned quickly and early on that my expressions of intent were listened to and then ignored - the only currency that meant anything in The Rooms was behavior.  The disconnect between what an alcoholic says and what the alcoholic is willing to do is not simply a measure of hypocrisy because we usually believe our statements to be of good intent.  We simply pay too much attention to words - our own and those of others - and not enough to the actions that really define us.  

We want to want to get sober.  In my earliest days I went to one meeting a week.  Yeah, I didn't stay sober.  My jaw dropped when someone asked me what meeting I was going to the next day.  The next day?  The next day?  Two days in a row?