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From the books ... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)
Click the page number or the book cover icon
to view that page in the literature.1.
2.
... self-appointed members
present themselves as messiahs representing ...
12&12
Tradition Twelve, p.187
We simply couldn't afford to
take the chance of letting self-appointed members present themselves as messiahs representing
A.A. before the whole public.
3.
These are the growing group's hierarchy of service -- self-appointed, of course, because there is no other way.
4.
5.
The emphasis on inventory is heavy only because a great many of us have never really acquired the habit of accurate self-appraisal.
6.
Hence it was most evident
that a solitary self-appraisal, and the admission of our defects based upon that alone, wouldn't be nearly enough.
7.
Outline the program of action, explaining how you
made a self-appraisal, how you straightened out your past and why you are now endeavoring to be helpful to him.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
The chief activator of our
defects has been self-centered fear -- primarily fear that we would
lose something we already possessed or would
fail to get something we demanded.
14.
No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme,
doesn't care for this prospect -- unless he has to
do these things in order to
stay alive himself.
15.
We wives found that, like everybody else, we were afflicted with
pride, self-pity, vanity and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person; and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn't
fully solve the fear problem, or any other.
22.
These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.
23.
Then we had been told that so far
as alcohol is concerned,
self-confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability.
24.
25.
I felt I had every right to be self-confident, that it would be only a matter of exercising my will power and keeping on guard.
26.
I was self conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable.
27.
You will no longer be self-conscious or feel that you must apologize as though your husband were a weak character.
28.
29.
Service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in
the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that
we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God's scheme of things -- these are
the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.
30.
31.
32.
If all our lives we had more or
less fooled ourselves, how could we now be
so sure that we weren't still self-deceived?
33.
Therefore we remained
self-deceived, and so incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to sanity.
34.
By every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore nonalcoholic.
35.
36.
Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.
37.
Post-war disillusionment, ever more serious alcoholism, impending mental and physical collapse, brought him to the
point of self-destruction.
38.
39.
So the difference between "the boys and the men" is the difference between striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is
of God.
40.
What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been
accomplished by years
of self-discipline.
41.
These are the sort of fundamental inquiries
that can disclose the source of my discomfort and
indicate whether I may be
able to alter my own conduct and so adjust myself serenely to self-discipline.
42.
Then he fell victim to a belief which practically
every alcoholic has --
that his long period of sobriety and self-discipline had qualified
him to drink as other men.
43.
44.
45.
46.
Mrs. Jones -- she's a nut, she snubbed me; she committed her husband for
drinking; he's my friend;
she's a gossip -- personal
relationship; self esteem (fear).
47.
My employer -- unreasonable, unjust, overbearing; threatens
to fire me for drinking and
padding my expense account -- self esteem (fear); security.
48.
In most cases it was found
that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened.
49.
Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions,
our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with?
50.
51.
52.
For these minutes and sometimes hours spent in self-examination are bound to make all the other hours of our day better and happier.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
In later life he finds that real happiness is not to be found
in just trying to be a number one man, or even a first-rater in the heartbreaking struggle
for money, romance, or self-importance.
59.
60.
When we became alcoholics, crushed by a
self-imposed crisis we could not postpone
or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.
61.
62.
... self-insurance has
resulted in the restoration of ...
BB
Appendix V, The Religious View on A.A., p.572
This self-insurance has resulted in the restoration of physical,
mental and spiritual health and self-respect to hundreds of men and women who would be hopelessly down and out without its unique but effective therapy."
63.
64.
Because our surface record hasn't looked too bad, we have frequently been
abashed to find that this is
so simply because we have
buried these selfsame defects deep down in us under thick layers of self-justification.
65.
For pride, leading to self-justification, and always spurred by conscious or unconscious fears, is the
basic breeder of most human difficulties, the chief block to true progress.
66.
First off, they can be told
that the majority of A.A. members have suffered severely from self-justification during
their drinking days.
67.
68.
These family talks will be constructive if
they can be carried on without heated argument, self-pity, self-justification or resentful criticism.
69.
For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for drinking, and for all kinds of
crazy and damaging conduct.
70.
71.
But the actual or potential alcoholic, with
hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge.
72.
73.
74.
If temperamentally we are on the depressive side, we are apt to be swamped with guilt and self-loathing.
75.
Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.
76.
Many of us also like the experience of an occasional retreat from
the outside world where we
can quiet down for an undisturbed day or so of
self-overhaul and meditation.
77.
78.
Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves,
our resentments, or our self-pity?
79.
The bleeding deacon is one who is just as surely convinced that the group cannot get along without him, who constantly connives for
reelection to office,
and who continues to be consumed with self-pity.
80.
81.
82.
Because we were still bothered by fear, self-pity, and hurt feelings, it was probable we couldn't appraise ourselves fairly at all.
83.
84.
But in A.A. we slowly learned that something had
to be done about our vengeful resentments,
self-pity, and unwarranted pride.
85.
Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it
be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.
86.
87.
88.
89.
What happens when we wallow
in depression, self-pity oozing from every pore, and inflict that upon those about us?
90.
All of us saw, for example,
that we lacked honesty and
tolerance, that we were beset at times by attacks of self-pity or delusions of personal grandeur.
91.
92.
93.
These family talks will be constructive if
they can be carried on without heated argument, self-pity, self-justification or resentful criticism.
94.
We wives found that, like everybody else, we were afflicted with
pride, self-pity, vanity and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person; and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty.
95.
Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.
96.
97.
98.
Under these compulsions
of self-preservation, duty, and love, it is not strange that our Society has
concluded that it has but one high mission -- to carry the A.A. message to those who don't know there's a way out.
99.
100.
101.
From a trembling, despairing, nervous wreck, had emerged a man brimming over with self-reliance and contentment.
102.
103.
As long as we placed self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was out of the question.
104.
105.
106.
This self-insurance has resulted in the restoration of physical,
mental and spiritual health and self-respect to hundreds of men and women who would be hopelessly down and out without its unique but effective therapy."
107.
108.
109.
110.
For we can neither think nor act to good purpose until the habit of self-restraint has become automatic.
111.
In all these situations we need self-restraint, honest analysis of what is involved, a willingness
to admit when the fault is ours, and an equal willingness to forgive
when the fault is elsewhere.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
Self-righteousness.
117.
118.
If, however, our natural disposition is inclined
to self-righteousness
or grandiosity, our reaction will be just the opposite.
119.
We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung
to so many 'believers' even in their Sunday best.
120.
Self-righteousness, the
very thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our
own besetting evil.
121.
Others fell apart because of sheer self-righteousness while trying to enforce upon the rest of mankind some millennium of
their own specification.
122.
123.
For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he
could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead.
124.
125.
126.
True, most of us thought good character was desirable, but obviously
good character was something one needed to get on with the business of being self-satisfied.
127.
128.
For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching becomes a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.
129.
As we have seen, self-searching is the means by
which we bring new vision, action, and grace to bear upon the dark and negative side of our natures.
130.
Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of
our pride, the confession
of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation.
131.
132.
If a group of doctors possessed a cancer cure, they might be conscience-stricken if
they failed their mission
through self-seeking.
133.
134.
135.
Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.
136.
Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it
be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.
137.
138.
The A.A., or indeed any man, who tries to run his life rigidly by this kind of prayer, by this self-serving demand of God for replies, is a particularly disconcerting individual.
139.
140.
141.
Should his own image in the mirror be too awful to contemplate (and it usually is), he might first take a look at the results normal people are getting from self-sufficiency.
142.
Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all
self-sufficiency and all
will to resist its demands.
143.
144.
The roadblocks of indifference, fancied
self-sufficiency, prejudice, and defiance often prove more solid and formidable for these people
than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic or
even the militant atheist.
145.
It was only at the end of a long
road, marked by successive defeats and humiliations, and the final crushing of our self-sufficiency, that we began to feel humility as something more than a condition of groveling despair.
146.
There will be those who have drifted into indifference, those filled with self-sufficiency who have cut themselves off, those who
have become prejudiced
against religion, and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands.
147.
148.
149.
150.
151.
Tradition Seven -- "Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions."
152.
153.
There are no dues or fees for A.A. membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions.
154.
The real tests of the situation are your own willingness to confide
and your full confidence
in the one with whom you share
your first accurate self-survey.
155.
More experienced people, of course, in all times and places have practiced unsparing self-survey and criticism.
156.
157.
This is because people who
are driven by pride of self unconsciously blind themselves to their liabilities.
158.
Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some
time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.
159.
We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only.
160.
Each of us has had his own near-fatal encounter with the juggernaut of self-will, and has suffered enough under its weight to be willing to look for something better.
161.
We attempt to sweep away the debris which has accumulated out of our effort to live on self-will and run the show ourselves.
162.
The first requirement is
that we be convinced that any life run
on self-will can hardly be a success.
163.
So our question will be
this: How, by ignorance, compulsion, and self-will, do we misuse this gift for our own destruction?
164.
But when self-will had driven everybody away and our isolation had become complete, it caused us to play the big shot in cheap barrooms and then fare forth alone on the street to depend upon the charity of passersby.
165.
166.
Though self-will may slam it shut again, as it frequently does, it will always respond the moment we again pick up the key
of willingness.
167.
They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so.
168.
Like all the remaining Steps, Step Three calls for affirmative action, for it
is only by action that we can cut away the self-will which has always blocked the entry of God -- or, if you like, a Higher Power -- into our lives.
169.
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