I remember this realization to be the most painful "growing up" experience I ever had in AA, I called it "The Good Actor Blues" when I learned that I was using my so called "good qualities" to manipulate my perception and those around me, I was deluding myself on the most basic level possible

Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wish ed, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. In trying to make these arrangements our actor may be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self-s acrificing.

What usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think life doesn't treat him right. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes, on the next occasion, still more gracious. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well? Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatchin g all they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony?

I learned that the day comes in AA when I started taking credit for myself, this is when our codependency comes to the fore in hitherto unsuspected ways, I thought I was "doing good" for others only to learn I was "doing good" for myself, I had started giving "love with strings"

Bill explains it as follows years after he got sober he had the same realization

"I think that many AA oldsters who have put our AA 'booze cure' to severe and successful tests still find that they lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA - the development of a 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 17 - prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age 47 or 57.

Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotional and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we 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 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 the the 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 circumstance 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 out-going 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 absolutecut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life. 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

Plainly, I could not avail myself of 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 dependency meant demand - a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute dependency" 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, quilities 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.

Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance), then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product - the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.

The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.

In the fist six month of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came our of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy 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 Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.

Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea - only a gimmick that has started to 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."

This article is written by Bill W. and was first published in the AA Grapevine January, 1953 under the title "The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety."

I think much of this problem is tied in with "Groupthink", where when surrounded by a number of like minded individuals we lose our own sense of proportion and perception



In AA we learn that our perceptions are wrong when we work the steps, but I have found in many cases we just have a new script, we used to have one script but now we have another but we still doing the same things just with AA instead of the bottle, we replace one addiction with another, we are using red balls instead of blue, the next step is learning to incorporate the steps into our everyday life rather then just spout them, and we had to learn what part of ourselves were still self delusional, I had to learn "Individuation"

This turned out to be the most important and painful realization I ever had in AA that -my program- had to drop from my head to my heart, and like Chuck C said, I had to learn we do this for free and for fun with no expectations