I think of facts as things that can be proven to be correct, although there certainly have been cases where accepted facts have been proven to be wrong. And beliefs are things that people think are true, and may even base their lives on, but which cannot be proven scientifically. I read that Mark Twain once said that, "Religion is what most folks believe and wish they could be sure of." or something like that.
I'm not sure I am clear on the difference between attutudes and perceptions. Maybe attitudes are harder to hide, as we often say someone has a bad attutude but probably wouldn't claim to know what their perceptions are. I tend to think of attitudes as how I think about things, something I now see I have some choice about. I now see love, gratitude and happiness more as attitudes, like acceptance, than as feelings. I can concentrate on appreciating what is good in my life instead of looking for what is amiss, on the 90% of myself and my life that is pretty good now, instead of dwelling on the the 10% that isn't but can easily go off if I'm dwelling on the other 10%. I once confused attitudes and perception with feelings. I needed to learn that feelings aren't facts. Having a feeling of impending doom doesn't usually mean that doom is impending, just that my feelings are highly suspect when they try to tell me something like that. My feelings are like warning lights on a car's dashboard. Early in sobriety, most were flashing and there seemed to be no labels on them to tell me what they were telling me, giving me the feeling that something was terribly wrong, even though I didn't know what it was. Later, I began to understand what they meant and found them useful. Feeling guilt, I could work out what I felt guilty about and do something about it, do something, stop doing something, make amends or pray. It is a bit like and oil light on a car, telling me to check the oil and put some in if necessary. Before getting to AA, my reaction to such a feeling was like seeing the oil light, grabbing a hammer from the glove compartment, and bashing hell out of the oil light, the old kill-the-messenger approach. Facts and my beliefs don't tend to change, but my perceptions and attitudes do. Early in recovery, my mood swings gave me a few brief ups and a lot of times when I felt I was going through the floor. Sometimes I loved my job and often hated it. I recall sitting in a meeting thinking about who I might ask to sponsor me. I sat in a meeting thinking that the others were all so wonderful I couldn't ask any to bother with me. Then the next week sit in the same meeting thinking that none of them would be up to the job. Over time those swings evened out to the point where they just don't seem to happen any more. The world now seems pretty nice all the time and I feel that I have had a couple years of almost continual contentment. I used to like the theory that AA works because we don't all go crazy at the same time and there would be somebody to haul me back into the lifeboat the next time I went nuts. But I still have to remember that alcoholism is still a mental illness and I still have it. As the saying goes, "We're all still here because we're not all there." I see perception as how I see things around me as well as how I interpret it, and I am becoming more inclined to just accept them as they are without interpreting things as good news or bad, threatening or friendly, challenging or easy, etc.Someone said that the normal state of a dry alcoholic is anxiety and depression, and it seems to me that this stems from the way we perceive reality if we are not maintaining sobriety by living a life in accord with the steps and in fellowship with each other at meetings. I now see the things around me and flow with or accept them instead of seeing everything as something to react to, physically or emotionally, with my reactions getting me in trouble on many occasions. I solved my alcohol problem when I stopped drinking the stuff, but didn't begin to solve my problem with alcoholism until I could start seeing that I could hope to live in reality without escaping into a bottle. For some time after I put the plug in the jug, I was like the guy I heard joked about in the army who was born with a condition in which the nerve to his eye was switched with the one to his anal sphincter, and he ended up with a shitty view of life. Over time, this world and the people in it seemed to get a lot nicer, and there was no longer any need to escape. Things that happen to me which I used to interpret as bad now seem good because I have a chance to deal with them a bit better than I did last time something like that happened, pushing me out of the comfortable rut I could otherwise get a bit too comfy in. I can do little directly about my feelings, and perhaps not much directly about my perceptions, but I can change my attitudes, the way I see things, and my perceptions as well as feelings tend to follow. It there are things about the world that are bothering me, I usually can't do much about those things, but I can think about why they are bothering me and ask myself if the problem is really with my own attitudes, and it usually is. I can often get the answer by just thinking about the Serenity Prayer. I now usually have enough wisdom to work out whether I need acceptance or courage, with the answer usually being acceptance.A couple years ago, I read a novel called The Naked Face by Sidney Sheldon. In it, a psychiatrist says that "sanity is the ability to adjust to reality." That was something of a revelation for me, realising that that was a large part of what our Steps, Traditions, slogans and Serenity Prayer are about. I have found in recovery that reality is actually pretty nice, certainly not something to try to escpape from. My problem was never with reality, just my warped perception of it as seen through shit colored glasses. |