This is the substance of a revealing letter which Bill Wilson wrote several years ago to a close friend who also had troubles with depression. The letter appeared in the "Grapevine" January, 1953.
EMOTIONAL SOBRIETY "I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "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 AA, the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance, urges quite appropriate to age seventeen, prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven and fifty-seven.
Since AA began, I've 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 along 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's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all of our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions and 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've 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 really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.
I kept asking myself "Why can't the twelve steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer ... "it's better to comfort than to be comforted". Here was the formula, all right, but why didn't it work?
Suddenly, I realized what the matter was. 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 wasn't 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 I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by 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 AA, indeed upon any act of circumstance whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as 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 God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.
For my dependence meant demand, a 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 God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken 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 God's 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 haven't offered you a really new idea --- only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own hexes' at depth. Nowadays, my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine"
Bill Wilson
Attitude is Everything
and heres some more on the subject...
people and circumstances don’t make us angry; we make ourselves angry. People can’t make us angry—unless we let them. We alone are responsible for our feelings.
A measure of the effectiveness of communication is the result it produces. If you don’t like the results you are getting when communicating with another person, there’s a great deal you can do about it. I’m not willing to let any thing or any person put my physical sobriety at risk; why should I put less value on my emotional sobriety?
For physical sobriety, we had to give up drinking, and for emotional sobriety, we have to give up blaming others. No longer can we say, “You made me angry!” Instead, we must accept personal responsibility for our emotional state. This much responsibility may seem extreme, yet in fact it is a great freedom. Henceforth, no person or situation can upset us if we don’t give them or it permission to do so. What could be a greater freedom than that?
Emotional maturity is like serenity. The first time I felt serene, I wondered what was happening, but I liked the feeling and wanted more. The more I got, the more I wanted. Serenity is addictive."
I can’t prove it’s true, but I choose to believe people treat me the way I’ve taught them to treat me. This creates a big responsibility for me. It means that if I don’t like the way someone is treating me, I can alter their behavior by first changing my own. I can have a positive influence on the situation. Since I have, by my behavior, taught them to treat me the way they are treating me, I can often, by changing my behavior, teach them to treat me differently. If I want them to change, I must change first. It is a basic psychological teaching that if we want to change the way we feel, we must first change the way we act. I could no longer say, “You made me angry.” I could only say, “I chose to get angry when you did what you did.”
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All of this is what makes “victimhood” so popular. As victims, we aren’t responsible for our lives. We blame someone else. However, this statement is true for me, and it’s true for every one else: My life is my responsibility. The circumstances of my life don’t determine the quality of my life; the quality of my life is determined by my reaction to circumstances.
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As we grow in the program, we realize that assigning blame is not only a waste of time, it is a serious impediment to emotional independence and peace of mind. It really doesn’t matter who is to blame. That’s not the important question. The important question is who will be the first to take a leadership role in recovery? Who will be the first to surrender, to call a truce, to bring joy and love back into the relationship? Instead of competing to see who will win the argument, let the spirit of competition determine who will be the first to give in, the first to accept the fact of the situation and change it. In a very important sense, the first to surrender wins.
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Our emotional distress often arises from our expectations of others—either expecting too much and not getting it, or expecting too little and getting it.
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And one more time I realize that if I want to change my feelings, I must first change my actions and my thinking—mine, not theirs. I cannot let their behavior be more important to me than my emotional sobriety, my serenity. No matter how much I love them, no matter how much I care about them, no matter how important their welfare is to me, I must watch my priorities. I must value my serenity ahead of their behavior.
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In an attempt to improve my communication with my Higher Power, I’ve recently been modifying the Serenity Prayer. I say, God, grant me the serenity to calmly accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change my attitude, and the wisdom to enjoy life’s journey. __________________ nothin' changes if nothin' changes OnLy hAm iS CuReD!!! Living a good life is the greatest revenge!!
