Christ, Christians, and the Body Language of Transformation

For the Catholic Church, and in rather broad strokes, the first ecumenical council--the Council of Jerusalem--began a spate of councils, all of which were focused on right belief, or orthodoxy.  They told us you didn’t have to become Jewish first to become Christian, that we ought to avoid eating animals that’d been strangled, or with blood still in them, and that we ought to remember the poor.  They then spent the next several hundred years, through the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon at least, defining what philosophical orthodoxy looks like vis a vis God’s being and Christ’s.  It’s a stunning omission that they never defined God and Christ as they appear in our being, under the guise of a stranger.

If you count Liturgy as part of right practice, the council of Trent continued the “remember the poor” piece, in the way it defined right practice.  That said, orthopraxy was not significantly expanded until 1891, with the first social encyclicals of Leo XIII.  Again, they defined orthopraxy in terms of how we worship and whom we serve, but never how we ourselves act.

Five minutes of Interaction with Zen would make the Catholic Church realize it’s left something out.  I don’t know if this is an accepted term, but Zen uses Koans to suggest there is such thing as “orthomorphosis” or right transformation.  And while I’m not a Zen teacher, and will not seek, in this post, to apply exclusively Zen thinking to Catholicism, there is something in me that screams “IT’S THESE YOU SHOULD HAVE PRACTICED, WITHOUT NEGLECTING THE OTHERS!”  Only in the 1980’s, when Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington sat in Spencer, Massachusetts to hammer out the pieces of a “Contemplative Outreach” did we begin to acquaint people with the resources Catholicism might use to define “Orthomorphosis” for itself.

From the council of Jerusalem to the second Vatican council, the Catholic Church has not answered the question “what does a person look like who has, truly and certainly, been transformed by Jesus?”

So, in short, I hope, today, to identify what transformation looks like from a uniquely Christian perspective.  The puzzle pieces exist.  I don’t know if I’ll be assembling them anew or reassembling them, but I believe we owe it to ourselves to see the whole.

Any discussion of transformation has three pieces: body language, identitiy, and basic human needs.  An “untransformed person” acts a certain way, believes certain things about himself and has a certain orientation toward basic human passions.  Because thoughts manifest as actions, an untransformed person will fidget more than others, as they are, on some level, being ruled by thoughts with which they’ve not yet become fully reconciled.  (This is, of course, relative to each person.  A person with ADHD or OCD will fidget at home and abroad, whether he’s busy or at rest.  Them’s just the breaks.  Acceptance and letting go are more important than sustained placidity.

An untransformed nature clings to a notion of “selfhood,” even though it should torment them or even suggest suicide.  There’s something right about this.  The Ego’s basic desire is to die, even before physical death.  The problem is, people don’t know they’re not their ego.  Suicidal people might be greatly helped by a process of meditation, but the knowledge of movements like “contemplative outreach,” to say nothing of widespread meditation practice—alas, this is sorely lacking in the church. 

Throughout all of the stages, suffering comes from holding beliefs that are out of whack with reality.  Our “unredeemed reality” is marked by dualistic thinking.  This means that the Buddha was basically right: life is suffering.  At our most unredeemed, our major obstacle is denial, though, so it’s a crapshoot whether we’ll see it at all.

The “Stages of Transformation” are three, and correspond, basically, to the three parts of the human brain.

The first stage of transformation acquaints us with the “Reptillian brain.”  The reptilian brain rules the needs basic to survival: automatic functioning of organs, the need to procreate, the need to be safe, the need to control.  Denial is the major obstacle that this stage is designed to overcome. All the resources of religion—its reason, its realizations, help us to manage our basic needs at this point. This is the stage in which codependents discover that their body is a repository of unprocessed pain, and their psychology contains each of the dysfunctional voices of their family of origin.  To our surprise, we learn we have eight basic desires, but that our relationship to them is warped, to the point that we’ve built a façade out of their moving parts.  We had to be ruled by ego, because neither our wounded inner child nor our diseased inner adult could get the bills paid on time and the living room clean. The mental drug of Ego has stopped working for us, though.  In this stage, by struggling with the eight evil thoughts, we negotiate our relationship to food, possessions, life’s pressures, and sadness.  In this stage, we figure out how to relate to our need for love, we negotiate anger and our need to be the grinning and shiny center of attention.  We see much-prized messages of self-reliance for the isolating sickness they create.  And our acquaintance with them is one of extremes.

For this blog post’s purposes, Aristotle was the wrongest, most thoughtful motherfucker in history.  His “Bent Stick Theory” said that, if you eat emotionally, the thing to do is to fast.  If you’re greedy, then voluntary poverty is the solution.  By bending the stick in a vice’s extreme opposite direction, you end up somewhere in the middle in the end.  We say things like “Ego, Greed, Lust, etc. is ‘not who we are.” Any extreme of vice or virtue, though, is just as willful a reaction to our passions, just as clingy a response to our basic human needs. 

Interiorly, our dualistic mind falls too quickly into judging and rejecting the basic passions of our reptilian brain. But they’re more inevitable than anybody, especially a spiritual person, wants to admit, so that’s not the best move.  With regard to our passions, ‘accepting and including’ is the ‘basic maneuver’ of transformation.  The solution to the need to have things is neither voluntary poverty nor rampant acquisitiveness.  It’s to sit with that need until we accept that “who we are” includes but isn’t limited to it.  If passion of lust were a room, using people for their bodies would be one wall, and white-knuckled celibacy would be the other wall.  The solution isn’t to focus on the walls: we’ll spend our lives banging our heads against both of them, causing ourselves and others a lot of suffering.  The solution is to go lie in the center of the room until the anxiety subsides.  With regard to the eight basic passions, when we stop bouncing off the walls of abstention and overindulgence, we’ve become fully human, and can accept that we need the basic goods the passions are trying to show us.

If the truths this struggle yielded could be summed up, it would be accurate to say that the problem isn’t passions, but the fact that we act on them egotistically.  The problem isn’t desire, but attachment.

Luckily, the Limbic brain, and the next stage of transformation, resolves attachment. The Limbic Brain rules emotions.  Anxiety is the major obstacle of this stage, mostly because there is a difference between the healthy existence we’d like to have and the unhealthy existence that currently seems to be our miserable lot.  Religion’s logic becomes a hindrance here, and learning by “realization” takes its place.  There are three micro-stages within this one, namely “limbic resonance,” “limbic regulation” and “limbic revision.”  Like the “sympathetic resonance” between a plucked guitar string and an unplucked, nearby equivalent, Limbic resonance is the stuff of early childhood emotional-becoming.  Merely by proximity to healthy parents, a child develops a healthy emotional life.  Body language and breathing, the pace at which a child hears his father’s heart beating, all of these teach emotional skills to the newborn.  If either proximity, or, say, the emotional health of the mother is compromised, then our infant’s emotional growth will be stunted.  Limbic regulation is the next micro-stage.  We learn where the deficiencies are in our emotional formation, and we tend to them. A child whose parents were absent in early life, for instance, may place a great premium on the emotional side of intimacy in their adult life.  In the limbic regulation stage, anxiety decreases as we learn the tricks of balanced emotions.  The last Stage is limbic revision. When Adult Children of Alcoholics speak of the need to “reparent themselves” they’re speaking of this stage.  Having become conscious of their internalized dysfunctional family, they develop an internalized healthy adult, whose job is to make the body a safe space for the functional and the dysfunctional to live together: the healthy adult validates the wounds, and builds a new foundation on healing.  This is the stage that says, though limbic resonance sorely lacked, the wounds it produced needn’t be the end of the story.

The Neo-cortex is the seat of transformation’s last stage.  Increasingly, this part of the brain is active in an inner child who’s done significant chunks of the reparenting task.  All of the resources of the preceding stages—the logic and realizations of religion, the healthy ego we’ve spend years constructing—these all yield to the greater task of Ego-dissolution.  If it doesn’t yield, it hardens into a mix of spiritualized entitlement, and egotistical psychobabble.   At best, though, what is partial yields to the whole.  This is the seat of all syntheses, where basic human emotions and needs get nuanced to accommodate the inevitable “self-emptying” that comes from being a part of decaying-creation’s governance by the “Logos.”  Everyone’s going to die.  Even if there were enough toys to suffice our desires—newsflash, there aren’t—we would have to confront desire’s basic insatiability.  When the neo-cortex kicks in, we learn to placidly live with less.  Unless the ego reasserts itself, this is the stage when disciples become teachers.

In the gospels, at least three examples of this are worth mentioning.  The first stage is shown by Jesus himself, who went into the wilderness after his baptism and was tempted by the devil.  This is Jesus coming out of denial, struggling to stop bouncing off the walls of his basic human needs.  He doesn’t say the devil is wrong, or that he doesn’t need food.  He doesn’t say he doesn’t need power or recognition.  He simply says he won’t be egotistical in obtaining it.

In terms of identity, the second stage is shown in the story of the Gerasene demoniac, whose identity was so riddled with desire that he’d derived his name –“Legion”—from their multiplicity.  His anguish became an imposed hell of self-harm.  Jesus was able to help him through it, and the man whose demons had gashed him with rocks and struggled against his chains was eventually calm and in his right mind.  Emotionally, this second stage looks like the example of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  Jesus proves himself totally subject to humanity’s common suffering, and the tears flow because of it. 

The third stage is evident as Jesus progressively accepts the authority of his call as a suffering servant.  Its turning point is the garden of Gethsemani, where Jesus weeps and asks that God’s will take precedence over his own.  Jesus laid aside not only the unhealthy ego that had been tempted by the devil, but also the healthy ego who’d been told it was “God’s beloved Son.” With purposeful exceptions, Jesus, after the Garden of Gethsemani, proceeded through his trial and execution in the starkest silence of his life.

And all of this is paradigmatic.  In the end, it's continuing to live that kills the ego: every healing is a little death. Transformation isn’t judged by the health one ends up with, but by the sickness one has let go of.  Its barometers are absence, not presence. If we are transformed, our body language will go from agitated to restful.  If we are transformed, our “identity” will be increasingly uncertain, but we’ll be at peace with the doubt.  If we are transformed, we won’t manipulate with our sadness or anger or sense of identity. To riff off of the Tao Te Ching: emotions and identity will arise and we’ll let them go.  We may be emotionally ourselves, but we will, indeed be ourselves, glorious and mediocre.  When the ego loses both its grip on the passions and its life, what we’ll have is life. We'll have a non-dual consciousness--it's both "no big deal" and the mind of Christ.

God’s name, YHWH, can be taken to mean “I will cause to be what I will cause to be.”  And, quite suddenly, the end is the beginning.  St. John said “What has come to be in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”  Seeing this light, opening my eyes—when my inside is wedded to my outside, these and everything else are the same, and it’s enough.

KKC 10: John 11, Jesus as Teacher of Self

Catherine of Siena said “All the Way to Heaven is Heaven.”  I’ll dodge the temptation to write “Amen I say to you” then differ with it.  Instead I’ll riff on Catherine’s words and get to the point: for the true self, schooled in letting go, All the way to enlightenment is enlightenment.  This is the value of an incarnational messiah: people are messy, and Jesus acquired his non-dualistic mind by encountering it.  

Just as cancer patients are taught, in meditation, to enter into their pain and transform it, our emotions can be entered into. They, in their turn, gain some of their force from subconscious psychic wounds.  But the seat of enlightenment, and consciousness, is prior even to that.

A close reading of John 11 is instructive here: whatever is behind our subconscious wounds—I believe this is the persona with which Jesus spent his life getting acquainted.  It’s a label for the non-dualistic perspective that assisted Jesus in encountering both himself, and ultimately the Father who begat him.  

(Commercial break: I’ve never used the past tense of “beget” in my writing, and it’s fun, in the same way exclaiming “FORSOOTH” is fun.  Y’all should try it sometime.  Because I’m a big nerd, it’s a stress reliever.  Now back to our regularly scheduled program…)

Let me pencil sketch the instructive bits of Jesus life for a minute:  Lazarus takes ill, and Jesus hears about it.  Despite his disciples’ insistence that they go to see him immediately, he remains where he is for two days, during which time Lazarus kicks the proverbial bucket.  We know Jesus uses this as a teaching moment, because he says “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” I don’t know for certain, but I imagine “Jesus the teacher” struggling somewhat with “Jesus the Human being” here, the way I do when I have to ask my students to do something crappy so that they’ll learn.  Not fun, but necessary, and I bet Jesus felt that tension acutely. 

Thomas then says “Let us also go, so that we may die with him.”  I probably suffer from chronic low-grade depression (dysthymia), but I remember, back in the monastery, walking with my brother Sepehr.  He said he felt dead—in response, I assume, to a short night of sleep.  I said “I do too.  The problem is, I don’t often stay that way.”  Sepehr praised me for giving a “perfect buddhist response,” the way he sometimes did.  The point is not that I got a pat on the head, but that I, like Thomas, recognized that there is a lowercase “self” whose greatest desire is to die, and to yield completely to who we really are.  Of course, this insight did not result in consciousness of the Uppercase Self, the mahatman, any more than it did in Identification with that Self.  I still hope, though, that the impulse to stay dead was doing important, foundational work.

When Jesus and pals finally go to the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, they find Lazarus dead and the whole place in mourning.  Martha says “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  Jesus is said to have been “greatly disturbed in spirit” at seeing the grief of his friends.  This is a clue, that the real work being done here is not on the level of ego.  It’s not intellectual work, but a matter of Limbic resonance—the kind of intuitive empathy of which real “identification” between people consists. 

Martha intuits something more, so she says “even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”   Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the Life.  Do you believe this?” He thus obscures the lines between his physical being and Martha’s own True Self.  Martha’s response is “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”  This is tantamount to Martha claiming her own mahatman.  The line “if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” gets tossed at Jesus by Mary too, and the enormity of grief from one with whom Jesus had always felt such a bond moves him to weep himself.

Disturbed, Jesus goes to the tomb.  He asks that the stone be moved, and commences to holler: “Lazarus, come out!”  In short, our man Lazarus complies, and Jesus says “unbind him and let him go.”

This is significant for the way it shows Jesus having non-dual perspectives about his own emotions.  (Commercial break: A modern cult movie has a character who says “strong men also cry.”  Our Lord and savior agrees.  Tune in next time...)  In short, Jesus wants to usher others into a transformed consciousness, a non-dual perspective.  And he wants us to transmit that to each other.  This is the key to his line “Unbind him and let him go.”

In a future post, I’ll talk more about Transformational Authority, and its transmission.  For now, though, suffice to say that our problem is a “lowercase problem.”  It rests not in our "Selves", but in our "selves".   The problem is not perceptions or conceptualizations, but our attachment to them.  It’s a question of claiming our impermanence versus getting stuck.  When we’re acting out of the programming written onto our unconscious, we fear the death of the ego.  This is why Jesus’ action garners assassination plots for both himself and Lazarus—those who plotted felt threatened.  For Jesus, though, sharing others’ grief helped cement his identification with his mahatman, on the basis of which he became unafraid to surrender his life.

I have, for years, meditated as if thoughts and emotions are antithetical to what I’m seeking.  Unwittingly, I was letting the 5 Skandhas ping my internal radar and influence my direction.  The 5 skandhas are, as I understand them, the components of the buddhist “unconscious.” They are the equivalent to the desert fathers' teaching on the eight evil thoughts: mental phenomena that we mistake for an identity.  The five skandhas are: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.  As I understand it, these are the 5 parts of our lowercase self that get reincarnated till we learn to let go of their drama.  But the problem is not the skandhas, but our attachment to them.  Respectively, we get attached to material form, sensory experience, mental examination, building a consequent mental narrative, and the sense of ourselves as separate or distinct from other objects.

I am slowly realizing my error.  For an emotion, see, enlightenment is the moment it realizes it is in motion.  For the ego, enlightenment is the realization that it’s already dead, (and perhaps death itself.) The Tao says “Things arise, and he lets them go.”  It was talking about a true disciple here, but might as well been talking about the mahatman.  I have only just intuited this, and I’m not certain of it.  I think, though, that being able to allow emotions and egotism their existence for as long as it takes to accept them, this is just as important as eventually letting them go.  That is the mind of Jesus.  What's left--all of the life that endures beyond egoic death--might well be a legitimate foretaste of eternal life.  With the right mix of providence, grace, and playing our cards right, it may, one day, be ours.

Rocking a Sad-White-Guy Vibe: a PSA on depression.

I came into teaching with an essentially narcissistic desire to “inspire the youth of America” or whatever.  Laudable as that is, the successive autumns began wearing the edges off my inner “rookie teacher.”   In the end, this isn’t just a post about learning to wear professional “big kid undies.”  It’s yet another role reversal: my students became unwitting sounding boards, while l myself assimilated more deeply the material they were tasked with learning.  In short, the faith journey has shown me that curing depression is possible, but it involves skills many of us don’t use.

In a crowd of high school students, developing those skills is important work indeed.  In my classes, the month of February tanks everyone’s moods.  During one such dark stretch, my students attitudes were grey as the weather, and to turn a South Carolinian phrase, were seriously overcooking my grits.  My normal tendency back then would have been to be harsh, to insist my kids leave their problems at the door, and dole out write ups to the non-conformists.

In the midst of this, Will Parks had a shitty week.  He’d been irritable or disengaged in class.  That wasn’t normal for him.  

We never talked about this, but his emotional life tended toward brooding.  In other lives—my own in particular—this was a sign of depression.  I am none too pastoral with myself when I’m depressed; my first instinct with Will was to be just as harsh.  Maybe it’s because I genuinely liked Will, I don’t know, but it occurred to me that I didn’t need to strong-arm him.  After two days of Will being out of sorts, I greeted him at the door of school.

I looked at him squarely: “Will,” I said, “you’re never a hard student to deal with, and you have been for the last two days.  Is everything alright with you?  Is there anything I can do for you?”

Tears formed in the corners of Will’s eyes.  He fought them back.  “I’m sorry Mr. Warner.”  As he said the words, he began to lose his composure. “Yesterday was the one year anniversary of my friend getting shot.”

Will's words silently knocked the wind out of me.  I had, at least briefly, been angry with him.  At his words, that anger cut through my inner back-alley of guilt and opened to heartfelt concern.  I embraced Will, and he shed as many tears as he’d allow himself.

Before that day, I would have ignored all of the memes about everyone coming to class with struggles I know nothing about.  After that day, I didn’t need reminding.  As simple an emotional skill as empathy is, one would think it would come more naturally.  I needed a student, in pain and willing to be vulnerable, to teach me.

Hilary Jones was this dynamic’s next best example.  Natively quiet, one day Hillary came into her study hall period visibly agitated.  I asked her if she needed to talk, she said she didn’t.  Later she reneged, and as it was a study hall, I placed chairs for the two of us right outside the door, where I could keep watch on the class from the window.  Among the many things she and I talked about that day, panic attacks and anxiety were her chief concern.  

She said “Mr. Warner, sometimes when I have a panic attack at night, it feels like the bed is spinning.”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “I sometimes get anxious too.  It’s been a long time since it was so bad that a room spun, but you’re not in the room spinning club alone.”

“How did you deal with that?” She asked.

“At first I didn’t deal with it.” I said, “I just hung on for dear life until things improved.  One of the things I’ve learned more recently, though, is that anxiety is the mind’s natural response to my attachment to the evil thoughts.”

“Oh, wow:” Hilary responded, “just like we learned in class…”

“Yep, just like in class.  Also, lately, life’s been trying to show me that my body’s purpose is to get me out of my mind, and at rest in reality again.”  Hilary wore a quizzical look, so I continued: “When I’m anxious, if I am present to what my eyes see, what my body feels and my ears hear, it reduces anxiety.  I have to be gentle for it to actually help the anxiety, instead of just forcing it underground, but it works.”

She and I continued our conversation, but, in that moment, the truth of my own words turned down its volume a little.  I wanted to stay with the words.  It struck me that my high-school-aged self could have used that advice, back when I first became acquainted with the routine heebie jeebies life doles out.

These would all have remained disparate bits of insight, were it not for another conversation with Will.  He came to me while I was proctoring my study hall.  In the back of my mind, I knew he was supposed to be in English.  But he also looked visibly agitated, so I didn’t refuse when he asked to talk.  

He talked in general terms about depression: how he was struggling with it, how he thought there was something wrong with him.  When he reached a stopping point I said “Will, what would help you best?  Do you want me to share feedback with you, or are you in a mood where you just need me to listen?”

“Naw, Mr. Warner, you can share whatever comes to mind.  That’s why I came to you.”

“You talked about depression,” I said.  “I’ve suffered from that my entire adult life.  It officially blows.  But I’m coming to see that the reasons for my depression aren’t my fault.  First of all, some of it’s pure genetics.  I’m a sad white guy, because being a sad white guy is in the genes.”

Will laughed.  “There you go with the ‘sad white guy’ act again…”

“Oh it’s not an act.  It’s autobiography, pure and simple.  But listen: every one of us is wired to want things that are infinite.  And the fact is, every single thing we’re surrounded by is disappointingly finite.  Our spirits are built to last, but our bodies, all our loved ones, and everything we love about the world is two steps away from returning to dust.  We forget it, but we’re destined to spend our days saying goodbye to one thing after another.  Think of all the people you’ve loved and lost over the years.  If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve done more saying goodbye than saying hello.  Denying that is part of the depression, and being wired for infinite life is the other.  We expect the world to make us happy, and when it doesn’t we’re extra sad.”

Will Parks’ face reads like a book.  I can tell when he’s troubled or happy.  That day I could tell that whatever he heard had brought him some resolution.  “Wow, that right there is a theology class on its own.”

Ralph Cain was the final piece.  Ralph was a joker.  My heart went out to the guy: as the “peace-keeping” middle child, I understood his shenanigans as more-than-likely borne out of insecurity: if Ralph was like me, humor was his way of negotiating social situations for which he felt unprepared.

Empathy notwithstanding, in two seconds flat, Ralph’s chicanery could derail a class.  If I was being honest with myself, my tomfoolery could do likewise.  I was slow in correcting Ralph at first, and my slowness correlated with an unwillingness to see my own humor as a problem.  I was only able to correct this when I began to see my classroom as a task oriented zone, and my own humor for the distraction it was.  Previous to correcting Ralph’s behavior, I had to set limits in myself that make for a well-run classroom.

I can’t vouch for the effect of my teaching on other people.  But sometimes I manage to educate myself.  With all of this swirling around in my head, I sat down and penned this last little bit.

Depression’s caused by thinking out of whack with reality.

Depression is a normal grieving of finiteness by beings with infinite longing.  

My mind lies about others’ motivations.

At least in part, depression’s corrected by remembering:

Suffering is just pain I've not yet accepted.  Curing depression consists in accepting its presence, not eradicating it.

Empathy is important, and frequent checking into the accuracy of my thinking.  

Our bodies have a purpose: they’re tools we use to go out of our minds.  

Serenity comes from feeling, hearing and accepting reality:  nothing is permanent.  Those who think so come to grief

In the end, our divine inheritance is words.  My students, when they came to me saying their lives were chaotic, were doing what it took to find order again.  In responding to them, I was re-finding it myself.  There’s an ache between silence and speech, where the “shekinah” or weight of God finds bodily register. Turned in on itself, this becomes depression.  Liberated, it gives rest: at least to the speaker, if not the hearer too.  And finding ourselves playing both roles at once is a state of grace indeed.

Step 12: Service, My inner adult's inside voice, and the importance of the 13th step

Ultimately, I want to say "because I'm codependent, service is hard."  But this deserves a preface: I made my understanding into a God, instead of letting God be himself.  I called my own will God’s and imagined I was living for a higher purpose.  When I was that delusional, I called my nervous energy zeal and ran myself into the ground attempting to live up to my own unrealistic standard.  I served as I understood service, not as they needed to be served.  I denied all of this and blamed God for what I thought was divine malice.  Over and over again, I burned out.

I fell into that most classic of codependent blunders: care taking trumped caregiving.  When I am helping someone, I still have to ask myself whether I am giving them the help they need, or the help I think they need.  In my early days, I was in it for the self-referential payoffs, for the ability to claim my own specialness.  So, these days, I don’t “do ministry.”  

And I don’t “work the steps” as its traditionally understood.  I don’t currently go to meetings.  I don’t have a sponsor.  I do try to curb my desire for secrecy and self-delusion, and have people who will straight talk me, regularly and whether I need it or not.  I do try to work my own recovery and sustain healthy belief in a genuine higher power.  

Though traditionally step 12 comes last, when AA was in its infancy, Bill W discovered the other steps by doing step 12.  I believe I found healthy recovery as I began to prioritize “recovery as I understand it.”   

From the beginning, I made very specific missteps, which “recovery as I understand it” needed to address.  Allowing God to be himself meant, for me, yielded to a truth: to know what I don’t know, I have to go by the way of unknowing.  Overthinking and hyper-vigilance were the earmarks of an inherited dysfunction.  Recovery had to be marked by empathy, had to do the work of mourning the generational pain I inherited.  I gradually acquired the vocabulary to talk about it.

Recovery is not a matter of thought, but of “limbic resonance.”  In short, the human brain is composed of 3 different brains, which have done service at different phases of human development.  The Reptilian Brain regulates heartbeat, breath, and other automatic functions essential to survival.  The Limbic Brain regulates emotion, often on a preverbal level.  The Neo-Cortex regulates the limbic brain, rendering its emotional life describable.

This is the science behind it.  I learned about “limbic resonance.”  I came to suspect that some of my ancient hang-ups were actually inherited emotional patterns from my parents.  I know for certain that my premature birth caused my parents a good bit of pain.  I see a link: between the anger at God that I came into adulthood feeling, and the anger at God my parents felt, despite themselves, when I was first born.  When I’m quiet, my head is a cacophony of judgmental thinking.  I grew up knowing that my parents, at their worse, could be judgmental, and I have come to believe that tendency was passed on to me through limbic resonance.

Recovery, for me, must counteract the three mandates of dysfunctional families: don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.  Breaking the cycle of dysfunction means deliberately doing all three.  To a certain extent, grief is an obligation as well.  I don’t mean sorrow, with its cloying manipulations: I mean grief—of all of the generational pain with which I am faced, that family members before me were either unable to face, or unable to face fast enough.  

As an adult, learning the “limbic regulation” skills I should have picked up in early childhood is catch-as-catch-can.  Luckily, I’m learning to surround myself with people who possess those skills.  But as I get older, I myself am becoming, slowly, a source of the guidance I need.

I recently chaperoned a school retreat, on which three of my teenaged students were participating in a process they will one day lead.  My students did some stellar introspection, sharing their vulnerabilities with a good balance of revelation and tact.  A student on the retreat, who hailed from a different school, talked about her history with complex ptsd.  Though her issues are more severe than mine, I recognized myself in her, and found myself writing her a letter.

Because we knew nothing of each other previous to the retreat, I never gave her that letter.  ACA’s particularly run the risk of spending recovery in a constant attempt to manage others’ dysfunction, rather than expose their own to light.  For ACA’s, and for me, the needed “13th Step” that withdraws my focus from the group’s neuroses to my own, seemed more important than any advice I might give.

But the advice I gave her, I might as well have given myself.  I told her three things: to care for herself, to share with similarly afflicted others, and to feel her feelings, even if she can’t describe them.

The advice doesn’t matter, I suppose.  It was one of the clearest examples of a truly healed, truly adult voice emerging from my psyche.  In the writing, I surprised myself: and therein lay the value of the note.  Perhaps it is truer than I’ve been willing to acknowledge, that dictum that ends each 12 step meeting.  “It works if you work it,” says the members in unison “so work it.  You’re worth it.”

I’ll never get past the saying’s corniness.  But I have come to believe—nay, I’m coming to believe the truth of it.