Sobriety and Choosing Your Religion: "The neat metaphysical trick buried in “Bill’s Story,” is turning the alcoholic’s cult-y worship of alcohol into a belief in a world where the point is finding a way to be of maximum service, not finding the quiet seat at the end of the bar."
The more I read your writing in TFLMS, the more I see how we are all just humans.
I like how you referred to the ‘self-dishonesty’, the lies we feed ourselves, as ‘elemental foundations of the Jenga tower called ‘Me’. You referred to the particular system of an alcoholic... but we all have an identity system.
We all have a character that’s driven by how it thinks the world is.
‘I’m on my own, and I have to do everything myself’
‘Nobody loves me anyway, so it doesn’t matter how I behave’
‘My dad is an egomaniac asshole, and so is my boss and so is my wife...’
‘There must be something wrong with me, I don’t belong anywhere so I’ll just do my own thing and wait to die.’
Etc.
And when these core beliefs are exposed as half-truths (or lies), the jenga tower starts to tumble. We’re sometimes left at-sea and we’re scared and lash out defensively.
Substance addiction perhaps amplifies that, but it’s already there to be amplified. And we’re all addicted/attached to who we think we are.
What having a connection with our higher power gives us is knowing that that was never who we were anyway. We’re part of something bigger.
Wow----I love the way you put that and wish very much that I had written that!!! I think that's it exactly; recovery from addiction is not the only time that believing we're part of something bigger and re-discovering the people we're meant to be comes in handy. Letting go of the old version of myself was a truly frightening, unmooring event and there was quite a long "trust fall" after that, but then I looked around and saw that I was right where I was supposed to be.
Thank you for sharing those beautiful insights. This is why everyone should read Three Things Weekly.
I grew up in a Zion Lutheran so this hit home pretty hard. Where was yours? Mines in upstate NY.
The more I read your writing in TFLMS, the more I see how we are all just humans.
I like how you referred to the ‘self-dishonesty’, the lies we feed ourselves, as ‘elemental foundations of the Jenga tower called ‘Me’. You referred to the particular system of an alcoholic... but we all have an identity system.
We all have a character that’s driven by how it thinks the world is.
‘I’m on my own, and I have to do everything myself’
‘Nobody loves me anyway, so it doesn’t matter how I behave’
‘My dad is an egomaniac asshole, and so is my boss and so is my wife...’
‘There must be something wrong with me, I don’t belong anywhere so I’ll just do my own thing and wait to die.’
Etc.
And when these core beliefs are exposed as half-truths (or lies), the jenga tower starts to tumble. We’re sometimes left at-sea and we’re scared and lash out defensively.
Substance addiction perhaps amplifies that, but it’s already there to be amplified. And we’re all addicted/attached to who we think we are.
What having a connection with our higher power gives us is knowing that that was never who we were anyway. We’re part of something bigger.
Wow----I love the way you put that and wish very much that I had written that!!! I think that's it exactly; recovery from addiction is not the only time that believing we're part of something bigger and re-discovering the people we're meant to be comes in handy. Letting go of the old version of myself was a truly frightening, unmooring event and there was quite a long "trust fall" after that, but then I looked around and saw that I was right where I was supposed to be.
Thank you for sharing those beautiful insights. This is why everyone should read Three Things Weekly.