When I stopped drinking, my feelings seemed to be driving me nuts at times, but didn't know where most of them came from or what to do about them as I'd been used to knocking them out by drinking. Anger was coming out as rough edges started to appear, and I was shocked by my own overreactions. I started trying to strangle one of my students on a fine Sunday morning, in front of his older sister and another AA member because he had greeted me with, "Hi Jimmy!" when I jumped into the train car he was in. I had never done anything like that and felt that something seemed to be out of control. I came to see that feelings are like the indicators and warning lights on a car, meant to give me useful information. But when I got here, several seemed to be lit or flashing, seeming to tell me that something was terribly amiss but they had no labels and I didn't know what they meant or what to do about them. When drinking, I was like a driver who saw a flashing oil light, but, instead of checking the oil level, took a hammer and smashed hell out of the oil light, trying to kill the messenger. I now find that my feelings are helpful. It if feel guilty I can ask myself why I feel that way and usually find that there is something I can do about it, making, apologies, amends or changes in my attitudes or actions so that I no longer feel guilty, deal with the problem instead of turning my back on it. There is a scene in the movie, "When a Man Loves a Woman" in which Meg Ryans character becomes quite bitchy a few weeks after getting out of a rehab. Her husband asks if their is anything he can do and her reply is something like, "Can't you understand that I don't need a reason to feel like this!?" I would often go to four meetings on a Sunday because I had a feeling of impending doom about going back to work as a high school teacher the next day, and I still suspect that the kids were out to get me. I like the saying that I have heard that the good news is that, after a while the feelings come back, and the bad news is that after a while your feelings come back. Until that happened, when the flashing lights started to have labels on them again. Since the feelings didn't seem to offer me any useful information, I tried to concentrate on doing things, like getting to work and lots of meetings, which would slow my racing mind a bit, sometimes get my mind off myself for a while and shrink mountains back into the mole hills they really were. I recall a speaker saying that alcoholics have the same feelings and emotions as everyone else, but we make a federal case out of them. We tend to react strongly, poorly and inappropriately. Treating the feelings as problems instead of just useful messengers telling us that there might be a problem we can do something about. I was told that, "Feelings aren't facts." although it took me quite a while to work out what that meant. I needed to learn that a feeling of impending doom did not mean that doom was impending, just that my feelings were still pretty defective and unreliable. I had to try to remember that I was in the hands of Whatever was running things and about all I could do was trust that He or It would find a way to guide and protect me if I kept showing up at work and meetings and tried to do whatever I thought I moral adult would do. I recall hearing someone say that AA could stand for Altered Attitudes in some of my early meetings, but, although I had a couple uni degrees at the time, I didn't know what attitudes where or how I could alter them. I eventually came to understand that attitudes are the way I look at things, and, while I can't do much about my feelings, I can largely choose myattitudes, and the feelings tend to follow. For a while, I carried a Just for Today card, something still found in Australian meetings, around with me and read it each day. But I would get to a part in which is says that Abraham Lincoln said that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, and get a resentment against Abraham Lincoln. I was feeling miserable and he was saying that was my fault, and I didn't find that very helpful. I eventually came to see that Abe was pretty right, but it isn't quite that simple. If I'm miserable, it usually means that I have let the glasses I see the world through brown up due to unhealthy negative thinking.There is really little wrong with reality, but one aspect of this disease is a tendency to bend it out of shape into a frightening thing I should try to run away from. While I sometime don't feel very different from what I was like 34 years ago when I wasn't quite ready to stop drinking, it seems that the rest of the world has gotten a lot nicer. I love just about everything about my life here and now, and feel that I will as long as I keep doing more than I need to to maintain my sanity(the ability to adjust to reality) as well as sobriety. Perhaps the most useful thing I have heard in recent years is that it is really life that happens, and it if only when my attitudes are off that it looks or smells like it is that other stuff that is happening. When I was new, I tended to get feelings mixed up with attitudes. I thinking that gratitude, acceptance and love were things I would feel after a while if I kept going to meetings and working steps, instead of ways I could choose to think. I recall a guy named Ukelele Jimmy who came out of skid row in Melbourne. One day he asked an older member what love was. The guy told him to picture the AA member he liked least and to imagine him walking toward a popular pub called Young and Jacksons. The he was told to imagine that the guy was planning to have a drink. "Would you want him to do it?"After thinking about if for a minute, he said he wouldn't, and the old timer said, "You're in love, Jimmy!" I think of it as a bit like deciding which side to stand on to look at and equestrian statue of a man on a horse. I can look up at the faces of the noble steed and rider or go around the other side and look up the horse's ass. I find that choosing my attitudes is much like making that decision on a continuing basis, and I am finding more and more that I am looking at thebright side of life, like those guys hanging on crosses at the end of Life of Brian, without even having to talk myself into it. |