How can we do an accurate inventory if our vision is distorted? And what if we began our inventory with a greater awareness and curiosity about how our disturbances like our resentments, fears, guilt and shame might be distorting our judgments of people, places, and things including ourselves?
What if we were not all or nothing? What if there was a part of us that saw things one way and another part of us that saw things another way? Wouldn’t it be easier to accept the conflicts and contradictions within ourselves if we practice the spiritual principle of seeking to understand them rather than judge, condemn or deny them?
In AA rooms we hear the phrase ‘if you spot it; you got it’. Is it possible what I think I know about you is projecting unconsciously my own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors onto you as a way to avoid confronting these same undesired traits or emotions within myself?
I think these questions are useful ways to prepare ourselves for this article. To accept the possibility as Mark Twain reminds us “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
We can think of this self examination and inventory as our hero’s journey where more will be revealed as we practice honesty, open-mindedness and willingness with courage to enter this new, undiscovered frontier of seeing reality more clearly – Bruce M.
“We swing from blaming others and getting angry, to blaming ourselves and getting depressed. In either case, we weren’t seeing straight”
For us alcoholics, changing the way we see is changing the way we are in every significant aspect of our being: morally, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Our goal is to be better, not just to feel better. And the means to this goal is nothing less than a spiritual transformation that radically alters not only our perceptions but the concerns on which those perceptions are based.
Fostering a change in perception is one of the primary purposes of the AA program in general and of self-examination in particular. Hence, As Bill Sees It describes a moral inventory as a calm examination of the damages that we experienced during our life and a sincere effort to view them in what it terms “a true perspective” (p. 140). Similarly, the 12& 12 explains that “Self-searching” is a way for us to bring “new vision” to illuminate the “dark and negative” aspects of our nature (S11, p. 98). And the Big Book tells us that, once we have written down our resentments, we have to go back to our list and be prepared “to look at it from an entirely different angle” (p. 66).
This angle, vision, and perspective all form part of an entirely new outlook. In our self-examination it involves looking at things through the spiritual principles of the program in order to gain a distinctively spiritual view of our situation. This entails fundamental changes in the way we look at our problem, at ourselves, and at other people. These changes are crucial for us alcoholics. For in no small measure the way we saw things when we drank is at the root of “the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure” (Big Book, p. 64).
Our list of “grudges” and “grievances” is exhibit one. If we consider our resentments carefully, we read in Step 4, the first thing that becomes apparent is that people and the world were often quite wrong. That is, as we have said, our default mode of perception, the way we tend to see things. But concluding that others were wrong was as far as we got, continues the Big Book. What usually happened was that they continued to do us wrong and we continued to stay “sore.” The more we fought back and the harder we tried to have things our way, the worse they became.
That is why we had to take another look at our list and be ready to see it from a different perspective. When we did, “We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us” (p. 66). By focusing on the actions of others and how they hurt us, we were not only failing to see our own hurtful conduct, but in effect giving people power over us. We were allowing them to dictate our feelings and our actions—often to the point of driving us to the bottle and to further wrongdoing.
This rendered us as powerless over our resentments as we were over our drinking. Other people ruled us just as much as the bottle did. They were always “making” us feel this, or “making” us do that. We were little more than passive victims of people and circumstance, trapped in a vicious cycle of negative emotion and action. We were looking at our life through the bottom of the whiskey glass in our hand, says a popular book of daily meditations. This was distorting our vision, and with our vision our emotions. We would swing from blaming others and getting angry, to blaming ourselves and getting depressed. In either case, we weren’t seeing straight.
Our moral inventory reverses this way of seeing. When we look at our problems, it redirects our attention away from others and toward ourselves, putting the focus squarely on what is wrong with us, regardless of what others may have done. It reorients us away from an attitude of blame, anger, guilt, shame, and condemnation. It awakens an honest desire to find out the truth about ourselves, about what we are really like and how we can change. And it reconfigures our perception of ourselves vis-à-vis others, laying an entirely new foundation upon which we can build harmonious relations with all.
Our Spiritual Sickness
Our first change in outlook, therefore—the first shift in construal—is to see that our problem is internal, not external, inside of us, not outside in people, places, or things. The second change is just as radical. It is to see that the problem is essentially spiritual in nature. Earlier chapters and Steps have alluded to the disease concept of alcoholism. They have discussed the concept of a spiritual solution to it. But it isn’t until Step 4 that these two ideas are joined and alcoholism is explicitly identified as a spiritual malady: “for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick” (Big Book, p. 64). That is why freeing ourselves from our resentments is so essential, for, “From them stem all forms of spiritual disease.” Indeed, the spiritual is the very root of the disease, according to the Big Book. As we heal spiritually, we heal in all other areas: physically, mentally, morally, and emotionally.
These two changes in outlook form the basis of a third change which involves our perception of others. This is to see those who have done us harm as suffering from a spiritual malady too, the same malady, in effect, from which we suffer. We move beyond looking at others as being wrong to seeing them more fundamentally in terms of a spiritual illness of which wrong action and wrong emotion are but the visible symptoms.
Here the Big Book extends the concept of a spiritual disease beyond alcoholics to encompass everyone: “We have begun to learn tolerance, patience, and good will toward all men, even our enemies, for we look at them as sick people” (p. 70, our emphasis). Seeing our emotional illness as a product of our spiritual one, the 12& 12 tells us that finally we start to see that “all people” are to one extent or another emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong. It is then that true tolerance becomes possible and that we start to see what it really means to love our neighbor (S10, p. 92).
Thus seen, the harms we do and the harms others do to us are but two sides of a common spiritual malady, a disease we all share as human beings. This outlook is an integral part of AA spirituality. The “spiritual angle” in AA gives us a lens to look not only at ourselves and our alcoholism, but at all others as well, whatever their own addictions, afflictions, defects, disorders, dysfunctions, neuroses, or sins. It allows us to see that, ultimately, alcoholic or not, we all suffer from the same spiritual condition. Selfishness and self-centeredness are our common lot and the source of most of our suffering.
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