March 25, 2004

• CLEARING

  
  

  My friend Ren recently wrote an insightful and potentially very helpful blog detailing a simple technique for releasing resentments and making yourself happier, liberating yourself from the emotional ups and downs that come from allowing other people’s actions to “make” you feel bad.

  
  

  She received a bunch of comments claiming that the technique didn’t seem “simple” at all, and in essence arguing that the commentors would rather suffer hurt feelings and remain able to blame other people for them than to accept the responsibility for their own emotions and be hapy and free.  Go figure!

  
  

  Just for the record, Ren was right.  It is one of the most simple things one can do, as easy as setting down a burden.  By an interesting synchronicity, we were talking about this in a recent NA meeting I attended.  One of the other dope fiends there said that when he was in active addiction he carried around resentments.  He likened it to swimming while carrying a load of rocks.  I could relate.  I’m swimming a lot more freely now that I’ve let go the rocks I used to carry.

  
  

  To do that, I had to take responsibility, own my own feelings.  I had to admit that nobody makes me feel any way, not good or bad.  I feel as I choose to feel.  I can choose to be cast down, uplifted, or unaffected by what other people do and say.  What’s so complex or hard about that?  A simple trial can convince anyone that it is true, and yet so many go on choosing to believe that they have to feel bad because someone says something they don’t want to hear.  Sheesh!

  
  

  I think it may be unnecessarily excessive to go to the length suggested and apologize to someone because you allowed their words or actions to get you down, unless you had retaliated against them for your self-inflicted injury.  It is important to understand that we ourselves are responsible for any and all emotional injury that occurs to us in adulthood.  Even childhood betrayals by parents, etc., once one has matured and done enough reflection and soul searching to discover that they were the source of one’s pain and psychopathology, become the responsibility of the “sufferer.”  There’s no point in hanging onto that stuff after you identify it.  I learned that from those Family House junkies who gave me the keys to turning my life around thirty years ago.  They yelled at me and shouted down my bullshit until I got the point that I am responsible for how I feel.  I felt pretty bad, being yelled at like that, until I got the point. 

  
  

  While wearing our KaiOaty hat a while back, Greyfox and I had to refuse to do some shamanic work for someone who demanded it but didn’t need it.  She wanted a soul retrieval, when what she really needed was to start taking responsibility for her feelings.  She was miserable and was blaming everyone except the one responsible, herself.  (By the way, blaming oneself is not a good idea either–”no shame, no blame” are good words to live by.)  When I wrote to her that we would not provide the “treatment” she had prescribed for herself, but would help her transcend her self-created problems, she took offense.  I suspect there was a degree of NPD involved, because her response was typical of a snit of narcissistic rage.  She came back and said we were “unspiritual” and that she wanted nothing more to do with a couple of frauds such as us.  Guess what–it didn’t hurt my feelings at all.

  
  

  NOTE:

  
  

  Lupa has replied that going in and dragging our skeletons out of the closet (as suggested in mooncry’s clearing technique) would be difficult and painful.  Here is my answer to that:

  
  

  
  

  You can choose to believe this or not, but the hardest part of it you’ve already done, Lupa.  Thinking about going into that closet is the hard part.  Doing it can feel like a refreshing shower or like the relief of going to the bathroom when you’ve been holding it for too long.  Fear is what hurts.  Painful events, things to which we responded with anger or hurt, and then let them cause estrangement or isolation, grow larger when buried.  Facing fear and getting on with life in spite of it doesn’t hurt.  It feels good, which unfortunately is something those who choose to give in to their fears and let them rule their lives will never find out.  Trying to forget hurts guarantees that they will remain with you.  What you resist, persists.  Purge them and then you can heal. 

  
  

  I am completely serious when I say that we can choose how we feel about any given thing.  Choose acceptance when the things are not the sort of things that one can readily feel happy about, and emotional pain is no longer a part of your life.  Challenges and injuries, when we survive, strengthen us.  Choose to feel gratitude for those strengthening learning experiences and you will love and bless the ones whose actions would otherwise hurt you if you chose to let them.  As my mentor Dick Sutphen says in his Bushido training course:  Learn to cycle from positive to neutral. 

  
  

  
  You’re Watership Down!
  by Richard Adams
  Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.
  Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

  
  

  
  You’re South Africa!
  After almost endless suffering, you’ve finally freed yourself from the oppression that somehow held you back.  Now your diamond in the rough is shining through, and the world can accept you for who you really are.  You were trying to show who you were to the world, but they weren’t interested in helping you become that until it was almost too late.  Suddenly you’re a very hopeful person, even if you still have some troubles.
  Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

  
  

  

  
  

  You don’t know what you are. You aren’t an angel.
  Even I don’t know what you are. You are a child
  of a higher force. You are different. You are
  deep, and extremely dazed. You are you, and you
  is gone. So you are confused. You are one of a
  kind. Good luck with finding yourself, my immortal. Good
  luck with your quest.
  
  What Type Of Angel Have You Become?
  brought to you by Quizilla

  
  

  UPDATE:

  
  

  In her comment to my latest blog, Ren brought up another subject:  12-step sponsor/sponsee relaionships.  This is another area where I say she is right.  I never had nor needed a sponsor to help (or force) me through the steps.  When questioned, I say that my Higher Power is my sponsor.  When I hear some party-line parrot declare that the only way to do this program is to get a sponsor, work the steps, etc., I don’t know whether I …

  
  

  
  

  [aside:  I just went to get a batch of muffins out of the oven, got my coffee out of the microwave, and was listening to a thing Doug had wandered into the kitchen to read to me from the paper about a League of Left-Handed Magicians.  On the way back over here, I tripped over a pan on the floor in the dog's feeding area.  Doug, walking beside me, stumbled into the wall and said, "Was that you that tripped over that?  I thought it was me.  There can be drawbacks to being too psychic."]

  
  

  Those conservative, by-the-books types leave me uncertain whether to puke or attack when I hear their bullshit.  The time it takes to make up my mind allows me to calm down and make a rational response.  Under the circumstances, it might seem odd that I have three sponsees.  It seems odder to me than to anyone, I suppose.  I’ll explain.

  
  

  Usually, a person is considered to need a year or more of clean (or sober, if it’s AA) time before they are acceptably ready to sponsor anyone.  Having worked all the steps under the supervision of a sponsor is another common prerequisite.  I have nine months “clean” (but eleven years sober although it wasn’t achieved in a program–for the record, I had also quit both sugar and marijuana before I attended my first meeting).   In my NA group there is only one woman with over a year of clean time and her sponsor doesn’t think she’s ready to be a sponsor since she hasn’t gotten all the way through the twelve steps herself.  She’s sponsoring two or three women, anyway, just because it is assumed by some that every member needs a guide to push them through the steps and the newbies asked for a sponsor, and… what’s a responsible citizen to do?  She, by the way, is the alternate driver for the rehab van.  We take turns driving it to haul the inmate/clients to meetings.

  
  

  I got my first sponsee when a newcomer asked for someone to sponsor her and my alternate driver got this panicky look on her face.  She came over to me after the meeting and thanked me for speaking up and taking the new pigeon.  Somebody has to do the dirty work, and I’m somebody.

  
  

  At the rehab center, every client is required to get a sponsor and work the steps in order to complete their program and graduate.  They have a strict rule that sponsors must have at least a year clean and sober.  They waived that requirement for me when one of the clients with whom I had connected and immediately bonded requested me as her sponsor.  That I had kicked hard IV drugs over thirty years previously and am an AA “legacy” whose father taught her the steps along with the ABCs, must have helped my case, but the primary factor that made them make the exception for me was the scarcity of female sponsors available.

  
  

  I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am an advocate for 12 step programs.  I think they work because in the natural order of the universe Spirit can, when allowed, control one’s mind and one’s mind can control one’s body.  I have written here that hypocrisy is institutional in AA and NA.  Ignorance is another institutional policy with these programs.  Eighty years ago when AA was founded, they thought alcoholism was an allergy.  We (the informed public and the entire competent medical and drug abuse professions) know better now.  Fifty years ago, when NA was founded, bioscience had not identified all the neurotransmitters, much less determined which of those brain chemicals are involved in addiction.  The founders were a bunch of ordinary dope fiends who thought AA had a system that could stretch to work for junkies.

  
  

  I enjoy my time with my inmate/sponsee, and my other two sponsees don’t need much of my time.  One of them is an NPD case and fairly hopeless, I think.  I’m glad the routine policy is for the pigeon to call the sponsor, not the other way ’round, and she doesn’t call.  The other is a Spirit-conscious individual who knows how to talk to God and listen meditatively, so her need for a corporeal sponsor is only for a friend and support person.  I can do that.  The reality is that for those without great wealth or health insurance that covers competent professional rehab, the 12-step programs are all that is available in this geographical area.  Until something better comes along (be patient, we’re working on it) Greyfox and I go to meetings for the support group, the fellowship of like-minded abstaining addicts, and to inject a word of common sense and modern science from time to time.  Since the 1960s, it has been my choice to work from within the system for change.

  
  

  The best web resources I’ve found (Greyfox found them and guided me to them.) on 12-step programs are this survival guide, and the comparative table of  sponsor characteristics for benevolent sponsors (spiritual guides) as opposed to normal sponsors (cult guru wannabes).  I printed out the sponsorship table, posted a copy on bulletin boards in the AA and NA meeting rooms, and we both hand copies to everyone who says they’re looking for a sponsor.

  
  

  

  • 1:07 pm
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