Emotional Recovery
This letter from Bill to a friend appeared in the January, 1958 A.A. Grapevine. Bill refers to faulty emotional dependencies, which today we call co-dependency.
By: Bill W.
I think that many oldsters who have put our A.A. "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in A.A., the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relationships with ourselves, with our fellows and God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security and perfect romance, urges quite appropriate to age 17, proved to be an impossible way of life when we are at age 47 and 57.
Since A.A. began, I have taken immense wallops in all these areas, because of my failure to grow up emotionally and spiritually. My God how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible and how very painful to discover, finally, that all a long we have had the cart before the horse. Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.
How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy and good living? Well that is not only the neuroticīs problem, it is the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to the right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That is the place so many of A.A. oldsters have come to. And it is a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions, phony aspirations still stream, be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want. How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.
I have recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones, folks like you and me, commencing to get results. Last autumn, depression, having no real rational cause at all, took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I have had with depression, it was not a bright prospect. I kept asking myself "Why canīt the 12 Steps work to release depression?" By the hour I stared at the St. Francis Prayer . . . "It is better to comfort than to be comforted." Here was the formula all right, but why didnīt it work?
Suddenly, I realized what was the matter. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence, on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.
There was not a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.
Because over the years I had undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before so starkly revealed. Reinforced what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon A.A. , indeed, upon any act of circumstances whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as St. Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life. Plainly, I could not avail myself to Godīs love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would love me. I could not possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.
For me dependence meant demand, for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute dependence" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.
This seems to be the primary healing circuit, an outgoing love of Godīs creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current cannot flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.
If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent demand. Let us with Godīs help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love. We may then be able to gain emotional sobriety.
Of course, I havenīt offered you a really new idea . . . only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. "I have been given a quiet place in the bright sunshine."
