Honor ALL of the Feelings

I am aware each and every day of the blessing of my sobriety.  I am aware that I am living a life of great privilege and that it's a life I did not expect and one that I would not have pursued.  The gift of sobriety and the gifts I accrue following a spiritual life have come as a surprise.  I never thought, never figured out, that material possessions and deep, meaningful relationships come as a result of right living.  I was under the impression that if I already had a good job and lots of stuff and friends and a good partner then I would be happy.  I didn't grasp the truth that I needed to become the best version of my own self to be able to appreciate having these things and - even more incredibly - that if I didn't accumulate them to the level I wanted I'd be okay with that, too.

I speak regularly with my brother Willie.  We have an easy rapport.  I know that if I'm hurting he's got my back and vice versa.  This understanding means that each of us can take liberties with the relationship.  To wit: on our last call he shared some frustration he was having with his boss . . .  who he does not like.  This is real, this kind of anger and frustration and fear, and we have to honor this in our fellows.  It's natural to feel these kinds of feelings sometimes and our job as spiritual people is to empathize and support our friends (and even our not-so-friends) when they're going through them.  It's unkind to imply they shouldn't be having these feelings or that if they were more grateful for all their blessings then they'd be able to overcome the fear or resentment.  For example, I have been upset at the machinations I've had to go through and the hoops through which I've had to jump and the money that's coming out of my pocket to fix the damage done to my brand new car by someone who wasn't considerate enough to leave a note, someone I would like to poison with plutonium or incapacitate by slipping ground up glass into their oatmeal.  A quick death is not going to be good enough for me.  I intuitively understand that these little troubles won't amount to a hill of beans in the long run but it would be unkind for someone to tell me to shake it off, to get over it, to count my blessings instead of tallying up my defeats, to remember that at least I have a new car.  I will come to that eventually but right now I'm imagining hot pokers being inserted into . . . well . . . I'll leave everything to your imagination.

Here's the fun: while I listened to Willie and I empathized and I didn't discount or brush off his frustration I have the kind of relationship where, after a minute, I could say to him - I could interrupt him while he was talking, in fact - and remark: "Let me get this straight - you make a lot of money working two days a week and you're bitching about your boss?"

His response was perfect: "Fuck you.  Fuck you!  Why do I pick up the phone when you call?"  We were both roaring with laughter.  On the surface my comment was brutal but my timing was so exquisite I knew I'd get away with it.  Be supportive and be honest and know when to do which.

An update: my A.A. daughter offered to accompany the new girl to the hospital yesterday to get some help detoxing.  It was arranged.  It did not happen.  Radio silence from the new girl.  We are frustrating, heart-breaking people.

Self-Knowledge and Willpower Will Avail You Nothing

More tidbits from the Plain Language Big Book.  It's funny how often I can recognize the content of the original passage in this updated version but there are some sentences that don't ring a bell.

"Self knowledge would fix his problem.  He was absolutely convinced he had to stop drinking.  He had no excuse for drinking.  He showed real judgment and determination in other areas of his life, yet he was totally powerless to stay sober."

Self-knowledge and willpower; willpower and self-knowledge.  The utter futility of these two powerful forces to arrest an active alcoholic is driven home over and over again.

"I saw that willpower and self-knowledge would not help me.  So we'll say it once more: At certain times, alcoholics have no mental defense against the first drink."

In case you didn't believe me when I said what I said before.

"Instead we found that - no matter how hard we tried - relying only on ourselves and our willpower always completely failed.  We are powerless to control our drinking.  Which means that in order to change our drinking habits, we cannot just rely on ourselves."

In case you didn't believe me when I repeated what I said that I said before.

"To be doomed to die an alcoholic death or to find a way to live a spiritual life is not an easy choice to make."

I almost laughed the first time I read this line and then I thought: "Wait . . . they're serious here.  They're not joking."  It reminds me of the joke about a long-timer telling a newcomer he would have to choose between a spiritual solution or suffering a long and miserable life before succumbing, bereft and alone, only to hear the newcomer reply: "Can I get back to you on that?"  It's almost literally what happens a lot of the time.

  "We know that choosing between living your  entire life as an alcoholic or becoming a spiritual person can be difficult."

Everybody's Crazy

 Here's another article about our ability to overcome things.  While this is meant as an explanation of how resilient people are generally  and how this directly affects their mental health I find a lot of relevance to how we recover or flounder or die from alcoholism.  My A.A. protege and I have been trying to get in touch with the suddenly unresponsive new woman and having no success for a couple of days, never a good sign.  Then, today, the new woman calls me - explaining that she has been working and hates texting, excuses, excuses, how we love excuses - and left me floundering as to how to explain the insanity of her behavior.  Too busy with work and kids and an increasingly frustrated fiance to get some medical health for the shakes she gets when she tries to quit drinking cold turkey while realizing she's on the razor's edge of losing her job and kids and fiance but unable to bridge that gap of insane thinking to pick one or the other.  It's heartbreaking.  I literally didn't know what to say.  I can only stress that as a non-professional I think she needs some medical help.

In 1966, a developmental psychologist named Diana Baumrind published a study that would change how we think about parenting. Working out of the University of California, Berkeley, she identified three distinct styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Her research was groundbreaking. But here’s the thing that always strikes me about that timing.

My dad grew up in the 1960s, working-class, outside Manchester. His father worked in a factory and was involved in the union. His mother worked in retail. Nobody in that household was sitting around discussing feelings over dinner. What they discussed was politics, work, and whether things were fair or not.

Dad didn’t talk much about his childhood in sentimental terms. But the stories he did tell had a common thread. He walked to school alone. He sorted out his own problems. If he got into a scrap with another kid, no parent was phoning anyone. He dealt with it, or he didn’t, and either way he showed up the next day.  That wasn’t unusual. It was just what childhood looked like.

What psychologists now recognise is that this kind of unsupervised, unstructured experience was quietly building something. Research psychologist Peter Gray, who has spent his career studying free play at Boston College, has argued that the contraction of children’s independent activity since the 1960s has made them markedly less resilient. Over several decades, as children’s freedom to play and explore without adult intervention declined, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people steadily climbed.

The uncomfortable conclusion? The very thing that felt like neglect was functioning as emotional training.  There’s a concept in psychology called distress tolerance. It’s exactly what it sounds like: the ability to feel awful and not need it to stop immediately. To sit with discomfort without being destroyed by it.  Children raised in the 1960s got daily practice in this without anyone calling it that. They waited for things. If they wanted to watch a programme, they had to be there when it aired. If they wanted something from a shop, they saved for it. If they were bored, tough. Nobody was handing them a screen.

As Gray explained, play is how children learn to direct their own activities, negotiate with peers, and deal with minor bullying. When adults constantly supervise and intervene, children never get the chance to develop those skills for themselves. The result, he argues, is that the first real emotional storms don’t arrive until eighteen instead of eight. And by then, the window for building certain coping mechanisms has narrowed considerably.

I think about my dad’s generation and the way they handled setbacks. Redundancies. Health scares. The slow erosion of the industries their towns were built on. They weren’t immune to pain. But they had this ballast, this underlying steadiness, that came from decades of small, unrescued difficulties stacking up into something solid.

Here’s where the data gets really striking.  Gray’s research highlights work by psychologist Jean Twenge, who analysed decades of data on something called the “locus of control.” This measures whether someone believes they have control over their own life (internal) or whether they feel controlled by outside forces (external).

Twenge found that between 1960 and 2002, average scores among young people shifted dramatically toward the external end of the scale. By 2002, the average young person was more externally oriented than eighty percent of young people in the 1960s. And that shift tracked almost perfectly with the rise in anxiety.  In other words, the generation raised in the 1960s didn’t just feel tougher. They had a fundamentally different relationship with their own agency. They believed they could influence what happened to them. And that belief, according to the research, is one of the strongest buffers against mental illness.

My grandparents lived through the war, and their stories made history feel like something that happened to real people, not just textbook stuff. That perspective filtered down. You didn’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself because you’d grown up hearing about people who’d survived actual catastrophes through sheer will and stubbornness. It recalibrated what counted as a crisis.

None of this means we should go back to telling children to toughen up. The 1960s produced resilience, but it also produced a generation that often couldn’t talk about what was hurting them. Emotional suppression was the norm. Mental health was stigmatised. There were blind spots that did real harm.

I’ve mentioned this before but I think one of the most important things I’ve learned from reading psychology and history is that you can hold two truths at once. The 1960s got some things right by accident. It also got some things badly wrong on purpose.

But the overcorrection is worth thinking about.  Play is how children develop the character traits needed to become independent adults. When we protect them from every bump, we’re not building confidence. We’re quietly communicating that they can’t handle things on their own.

The parenting culture of the 1960s didn’t intend to build emotional resilience. Parents were just busy. They were stretched thin. They were following a culture that expected children to handle a fair amount on their own. But in the gap between needing something and getting it, between facing a problem and finding help, something important was being forged.

I lost my dad a few years ago. And in the weeks and months that followed, I found myself thinking a lot about the kind of person he was. Steady. Unflappable in ways that sometimes frustrated me when I was younger but that I came to admire deeply as I got older. a therapist. He didn’t journal. He didn’t meditate. He just had this core of something that held him together through redundancies, through my parents’ difficult years, through watching his own hometown change beyond recognition as the jobs disappeared.

Was some of that problematic? Probably. He could have talked more. He could have let people in more. But the underlying steadiness was real, and it came from somewhere. It came from a childhood where nobody rescued you from discomfort because nobody thought discomfort was something you needed rescuing from.

Psychologists aren’t suggesting we recreate the 1960s. What they’re suggesting is something more nuanced: that we’ve removed so much friction from modern life, especially from childhood, that we’ve accidentally eliminated the raw material resilience is built from.

The generation raised in that era didn’t choose to be tough. They were shaped by a world that didn’t consider their emotional comfort a priority. And paradoxically, that lack of comfort gave them something that no amount of well-meaning intervention can easily replicate.

Resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill, and like all skills, it needs to be practised. The 1960s provided that practice automatically, woven into the fabric of daily life. Today, we have to be more intentional about it.

That doesn’t mean being harsh with ourselves or our children. It means resisting the urge to smooth every rough edge. It means letting small problems run their course. It means understanding that the ability to sit with discomfort, to tolerate uncertainty, to believe you can handle what comes next, these things aren’t born. They’re built.

And they’re built, more often than not, in the moments when no one is coming to help.

Any Advice? From Me?

I have an update on the young woman who cuts my hair and has struggled with alcohol in her past . . . and in her present as it turns out.  Repeating myself I am still surprised at how many people can relate - either personally or concerning a loved one - when I share about my alcoholism and my recovery.  This naked admission of a checkered past isn't for everyone - isn't appropriate for everyone - but it fits into my lifestyle nicely, partly, I think, because I enjoy the shock value of what I'm revealing, this kindly gray-haired grandpa figure.  Anyway, I was delighted to get a phone call and a text from her asking if I could recommend a sponsor.  I encouraged her to attend my meeting in person - I think face to face works best when you're new - but also passed her phone number on to a couple of young women in the meeting that I thought would be a good fit and that I knew were willing to reach out.  One of them is about her age, also has two small children, and works in the same field.  These two hit it off and the new woman actually showed up at the meeting.  I faded into the background.

Later in the day I checked in with my friend and got a lot more information about the new woman than she had revealed to me.  Granted, I was talking to her in her salon so she was more guarded in our conversation but she told my friend that she was still drinking because she would shake noticeably when she tried to quit and suffered a seizure a while back when she stopped suddenly.  She didn't take a newcomer chip because she needed a shot of alcohol to even make it to the meeting.  She has been to detox several times but isn't open to returning because she needs to work.  My friend - who has a couple of years of sobriety - was brilliantly spot-on in her responses.  I could not have done any better.

Still, she asked me: "Any advice?"

"Stay tuned," I replied, clearly treading in deeper water than I had expected.  "I need to make a coupla calls."

I spoke to a friend who worked in the recovery industry about the shot-taker.  Basically, I know seizures can be deadly so I wanted some reassurance that the new woman wasn't in imminent danger.  Even though I have absolutely no power to make anyone do anything.  His take was that detox is absolutely where she should be, that some people are more prone to alcohol-induced seizures than others, and that most people - most people - come through them okay.  Armed with this information I circled back to my friend - I was once again VERY complimentary - and we have been going back and forth about the insanity of the alcoholic and how powerful that insanity is and how totally powerless we are to make anyone do anything.  I can't rationalize with someone that fogged with alcohol.

The whole episode has rattled me a little bit.  And not a bad rattled, either, more of a crystal clear reminder that I can, if I want, return to this kind of misery, this kind of hopelessness.  Sometimes I get to the point where I think I've got everything figured out, that I'm a member of the Executive Committee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and then the new woman enters my life and reminds me what's waiting for me if I don't maintain my spiritual condition.

It's Not Them?! It's NOT Them!!

I have found over the years that there are threads that exist in most philosophies that center around human behavior and that these threads can be found in Twelve Step programs and in a lot of modern medicine.  I've taken the time to share this article written by the psychologist Dr. Robert Puff and found in the magazine Psychology Today.  I don't know anything about this guy and I've never read the magazine so I'm not shilling or advocating for either but I loved the sentiments.  To wit: We do not control other people.  We do not control the political system or the people at our jobs or the weather or the traffic patterns.  We control none of it.  None of it!   We have control over one thing and one thing only: our behavior, our reaction to these things out of our control and if we work hard on improving ourselves then our alignment with the rest of existence improves.

Every time I write about these amazing, baffling, incomprehensible spiritual principles - thinking of others before I think about myself and leaving the rest of the world to their own devices  - I'm tempted to rebel.  This kind of approach to life can't possibly be workable.  I think about others before myself?!  Insanity!  Apostasy!  The world is out there spinning today.  What can I do about that?  Not very much.  I know this to be true: I have tried to control things that are out of my control for years and years - I still do it today! - and I have rarely succeeded and when I have bent the world to my own design it rarely makes me happy.

So don't use your turn signals today!  Fuck do I care!?

Here's the article:

"When I was in high school, I found out I had an ulcer. I kept waking up in the middle of the night with these intense stomach pains that wouldn’t go away. I finally dragged myself to the doctor to figure out the issue. He asked me lots of questions about myself and my habits until he finally discovered that I drank soda every single day. He said that was the cause of the ulcer and if I wanted my pain to go away, I had to cut soda out of my life. Once I made this change, my pain did in fact go away and never came back.

Now, I’m going to share a silly story—and stick with me because I promise there’s a purpose. Let’s say I went to the doctor and I asked, “Hey Doc, can you give me something to give to my boss so he stops scheduling me to work so much?“ or “Hey Doc, what can I do to fix my teachers who are giving me tons of homework?” She would look at me like I had two heads!

The moral here is, when we go to the doctor, we want them to fix us, not the people who are in our lives. We do this not because other people can’t cause us stress, they certainly do, but we’re not in control of those people. This is why when we go to the doctor, they prescribe us medicine, not the people who are causing us suffering.

(Man, how great would that be?  Doctors fixing other people.)

Just like our doctors can’t control or fix outside forces in our lives, we can’t control the psychological stress people may put on us. What we can do is change who we are. When we struggle, we have a tendency to want to blame others for our problems. I’ve seen this countless times as a practicing psychologist. What I like to remind my patients is that we’re not in control of other people’s actions, but we are in control of our response.

By putting the control back into our hands, we now have a sense of power over our own healing. When we focus our attention on the actions of others, we waste our energy.

Let me use an example to illustrate this. As a clinical psychologist, I’ve helped many couples improve their marriages over the years. Here’s what almost always happens when these couples enter my office: They list the things that are wrong with each other and ask for me to help fix each other. Here’s what I tell them: “Imagine if all of your energy went towards improving yourself, and being the best partner you can possibly be?”

This is because it’s hugely beneficial to our relationships when we focus on ourselves. It allows us to look in the mirror and say that we like the person looking back at us. When we’re happy with ourselves, we can take the time to see if our partners are treating us in the way we deserve to be treated. I recommend when you’re in a situation with your partner where you feel as though they are treating you unfairly, to turn inward and perhaps get quiet with your own thoughts, or remove yourself from the situation entirely if need be.

Again, we only have control over our internal selves, not the external world. The key is to focus on our own behavior, not other people’s. There are many circumstances of life such as our parents, our socioeconomic background, where we’re from, etc. that we don’t have any control over. It may feel tempting to focus on these things that are out of our control, but I’m challenging you to switch your focus to the things you can control.

For example, perhaps you don’t make much money, and this is frustrating to you. I challenge you to zoom outwards and think about the people who make less money than you but are also happy. What this allows us to do is really get to the heart of why this lack of money is upsetting. In many cases, it’s our attachment, and wishing that the external world was different.

But, what if we reframed our thinking to be centered around making the most of what we have? We’ll have more time to spend with people we love, doing things that fill us with joy like getting outside and practicing gratitude and acceptance for what we do have.

When we focus on the things that are in our control, we have the opportunity to change our own thinking. A lot of the time we struggle because we wish things were different or we see things negatively rather than positively.

For example, when I drive with other people, they will point out rude drivers to me that I didn’t even notice. Maybe I noticed that they were fast, but I didn’t dedicate the time to even notice that they were acting rude. I am only focused on myself while driving, which is something that I really enjoy. I only have control over my own actions, not the impatience of these other Southern California drivers.

It’s imperative that we stop focusing on what other people do. We can create boundaries around these people to protect ourselves, but again, that is for our own benefit, not theirs. It is very difficult to change other people, but we have the power to make adjustments to ourselves.

What this looks like in practice is this—if you’re in a situation that is causing you anxiety or stress, you may ask yourself, “What can I do in this instance to make things better for myself?” Notice how this is very different than asking, “What can I do to make this person stop doing what they’re doing because it is stressing me out?” The solution to problems lies within ourselves, not others.

This may feel overwhelming at first, but I also think that can be an empowering feeling. It takes the control out of the hands of others and places it back into our own. We are in control of our reactions and our own happiness. And when we focus on improving ourselves vs. the actions of others, we’ll find that happiness is always within an arm’s reach."

More Plain Language For Ya

"We believed that somehow, someday we will be able to control and enjoy our drinking.  (Is this verbatim from the original Big Book?  I think it is, or nearly so.)  

"As alcoholics, we have lost the ability to control our drinking.  We have lost this ability permanently."  (Once you change a cucumber into a pickle you can never change it back.)  

"People with strong willpower in all other areas of life will have zero willpower when it comes to drinking.  Alcoholism doesn't care who you are or what you've done.  We have plenty of knowledge about ourselves as alcoholics but we just ignore it all when we want to drink."  (Never met anyone who wasn't bright enough to grasp The Program but I've sure run into a lot of folks too smart to pick up the essentials and stay sober.)

"The members of A.A. have learned to see and understand the signs of a relapse.  We know how alcoholics think.  We know how they're feeling when they want to stop drinking and cannot do it.   We can see when someone is only doing some of the things needed to stay sober."  (And I'll tell you this - it's usually not difficult to see when someone is dicking around with their recovery program and gotten back on the Road to Perdition.  You're not fooling us.  You can't bullshit a bullshitter.  New people are like teenagers trying to pull the wool over the eyes of their parents.  You think we haven't tried to get away with the same crap you're trying to get away with?)

"Even if we are smart and sensible in all other areas of life, when alcohol is involved we seem almost insane.  It's strong language, but to most of us it feels true.  We feel as though we have lost our sanity.  Actual alcoholics will be absolutely unable to stop drinking just because they want to."

Wasn't Me . . . Or Was It?

I am who I am and it took me a long time to figure out who I am but, man, is it great to know who I am.

A long time.

I think about my parents and how they did the best they could and how they passed along the best parts of themselves to me while also infecting me with their anger and resentments and paranoid depressions.  They did the best they could.  There's no tried and true manual for raising kids.  Every parent is kind of winging it, playing it by ear.   And - c'mon, let's get serious - I was a nightmare as a child and teenager and young adult.  Maybe not a nightmare - more of an unknowable mass of contradictions and bad choices and resistance to any and all help.  I cannot imagine how it must have been watching a talented, popular kid run his life into brick wall after brick wall.

The Statute of Limitations for blaming your parents expires when you hit thirty.  You're thirty!  Quit bitching about your parents for chrissake!

I received a lovely email from a high school classmate about a reunion coming up.  He and I were on the same basketball team and I was privileged to be a member of a group of athletes who shared a special bond and stayed close in the fifty years since we graduated.  In many ways my fondest memories of those years included this group of boys.  My friend shared a long story of gratitude about kindnesses that I gave him during this time.  It was heartfelt and made me feel great about myself . . .  but it never happened.  It was someone else he was writing about, at least partially.  I could recognize aspects of my personality in his memories to a certain degree - he was definitely talking about me - but the actions he mentioned weren't mine.  He was describing our relationship but in an out-of-whack Twilight Zone episode.  It makes me think about the fact that our minds are  composed of malleable plastic, rearranging memories in a fashion that makes us feel comfortable about how we have changed over the years.  I consider this when someone tells me something that may not be factually true, regarding it as a faulty memory rather than a deliberate lie.  And, shit, you know what?  Maybe that stuff really did happen and I'm in the one having a brain fart.  "Euphoric Recall" we call it in AA where we sanitize the disaster of our lives, remembering the good and erasing the bad.