“Keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it”
In every 12 step group, after the Our Father is prayed, this phrase closes the meeting. I love it for how cute it is—I will sound cynical, but overt assertions of people’s worth always strike me as merely schmaltzy. And I will sound like I’m discrediting healthy 12 step groups, but “it works if you work it” has not always been true for me. In the beginning, I distrusted what I’ll call the “dogmatism” of 12 step groups. This “drink the Kool-aid and you’ll be ok” attitude didn’t add up. In the beginning, I had trouble with God. I would ask him to take my faults away, and he wouldn’t. I’d been working the steps, I thought, and my life was still unmanageable. I’d heard the call to give up self, but I continuously sucked at it.
Ultimately, I’d like to take a look at how healthy, (or unhealthy) my working of the steps is. But first I need to be clear about why I believe the “addict’s problem” applies to me. (A link to the 12 steps of ACA can be found here. From this point on, I’ll be referring to the three classic divisions of the steps: Trust God, Clean House, Help Others. In steps 1-3, we trust God. In steps 4-11, we clean house. In step 12, we help others.)
I self-apply the term “addict” because my interaction with the objects of my addiction follows an addict’s pattern: spree, remorse, resolve repetition. Interiorly, it’s the same: I don’t always feel things like happiness or sadness—in that regard, I’m pretty numb. What I do feel is resentment, rage, and self-pity. That’s all good and well, you might say, but what is it precisely that you’re addicted to?
It took me years to figure that out.
I don’t know why, but my ego--at least on an intuitive level--has always terrified me. This has been the case since before I had a name for it. We can talk all day long about how “the ego is a false self.” That’s true, but when I first experienced it—as loud and ghostly and generated by my head—it owned my ass. It was all I could see: my own falseness scared me.
Since April 27th's post "Only as Sick as my Secrets", I’ve told you my identification as an Adult Child results from household dysfunction in early childhood—for which I need to overtly absolve both my parents, who did their best with the crappy programming they’d been handed. It also results from an oppositional relationship with my own body due to cerebral palsy. I learned to joke about it, of course, but only to mask the immense difficulty of it all, so I don’t cathart to strangers on public transportation.
I hear a phrase repeated frequently among adult children: “I feel like I’m addicted to everything.” I empathize with that. Many of us were addicts before we had substances—or the years of repetitive behavior—to justify the claim.
As the program calls it, “Self Will” is my primary addiction. But it bends my relationships toward codependence, and makes me use the things of the world like they’re the only water for miles and I’m dying of thirst. As a result, I behave addictedly with a good number of things.
In my teaching, when I have my druthers, I always teach about the eight evil thoughts: it’s why, when I started Under the Influence, I did a whole set of posts about them. The “everything” to which I’ve always felt addicted can be boiled down to eight subjects: pride, as I said, but then vanity, wrath, lust, sorrow, sloth, greed and gluttony.
With those eight things, I exhibit all the classic addict traits. I engage in denial, all or nothing thinking, and unhealthy dependency. I globalize others’ faults—but not before silently stewing over them for days on end. I can say for certain that I've spent days fasting, and spent days emotionally eating. I've given away all my possessions at least once, and I've spent whole days searching the internet for the perfect leather jacket. I lived in celibacy for 7 years, only to follow it up with a series of relationships that, though all parties were well intentioned, ultimately yielded regret. The compulsive nature of it all has been exhausting.
To date, the Steps haven’t worked for me. I attribute that to three things: a dualistic mind frame, idolatry, and a wounded ego.
It’s a function of dualistic thinking to see God as one sees a grocery store Clerk. It’s a function of dualistic thinking to see our relationship as transactional. Believing God worked this way led me to see God as separate from and outside myself. I would “call out to God” (mostly with requests for help) and, when he wouldn’t hear me, I’d get anxious. Anxiety is one of the natural consequences of trying to hash out an experience of the one God with a cacophony of pious intellectualizations. An anxiety free relationship with God would be more about me connecting with the ground of my being than about a being who may or may not hear me. It would be less about talking and more about listening. Hell, I have a hard enough time hearing what's going on between my ears. It'd be a bit much, asking God to do for me what I refuse to try doing for myself.
Secondly, instead of turning myself over to God as I understood him, I made a god of my understanding and turned myself inward. When God works, it’s imperceptible, even in quiet and peace. Only in hindsight can I look back and see such quiet as formative. Adult Child Symptoms replicate Israel’s Golden Calf incident. That is to say, unable to see God in the present emptiness, I fill my head with noise and call it God. That turns what would have been “powerlessness” into unhealthy dependency on a false god. Fractured interpersonal relationships come to echo the broken divine one.
Third and most recently, new light has been shed on my cynical misportrayal of 12 steppers as saying “drink the Kool-Aid and you’ll be ok.” I’m seeing now that, in the program, though “Egolessness” is an ideal for all, it’s a lived reality for very few. 12 steppers drank the Kool-Aid—they went to meetings, worked the steps, and talked to sponsors—because they weren’t ok. To use a phrase that’s long meant “in recovery,” somehow I forgot that, “in the rooms” healing consists of a constant acknowledgement of our desire—nay, our need—to get well. We all have wounded Egos. What initially struck me as schmaltzy self-affirmation now seems like a room full of people like me: whose personalities conceal the wounded and the well. At my best, in recent years, the more mature voices of my conscience have tried to calm my inner child’s tantrum-like insecurities. Maybe repeating slogans is just the audible equivalent of that move.
Moving forward—dealing with addictiveness—might not primarily mean “working on the steps” for me. It might not primarily entail going to meetings or finding a sponsor. For me, that all smacks too soundly of ego. I’m more convinced than ever, though, that I’ll never give up a wounded ego to whose healing I've paid no attention. And I know for certain that the steps, in the end, continue to work on me.
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