I love the Mark Twain quote “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.”.
This article can be very helpful in developing humility which is described as the “foundation principles of each of AA’s Twelve Steps”(12&12p.70) – Bruce M.
Here’s a concept for you:
All of us are whole people and not life-support systems for a bunch of brains.
Brains are really marvelous instruments, but like a gifted child who has been praised too much, they get this obsession with being center stage. They don’t know their own weaknesses, or perhaps know them too well, and they swell up in order to compensate, like giant puffer fishes.
You laugh! But just think for a minute about the kinds of thoughts that spill out of your brain at any given moment: I’m a terrible person. I’m a much better person than him. If only I had gone to medical school, my life would be perfect. Why did I waste all those years in medical school, when I could have been a circus clown? Her sandwich is bigger than mine! Why does the sandwich guy hate me?! It goes on and on and on.
Our brains are specifically designed to impose order on the world, arranging all of our thoughts and perceptions into more or less arbitrary categories and, when the information to connect the categories isn’t already known, making up what’s missing. The good news is that these big brains of ours put us absolutely and undeniably at the very top of the food chain. If you get eaten by a bear or a shark before you finish reading this, it will be because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because the bear or the shark had anything on you in the way of cunning, adaptability, technology, or problem-solving skills. The bad news is that these big brains also incline us to suffer, to suffer over the fact that we suffer, and to suffer over our suffering at the fact that we suffer—not just any time, but often. Whew!
One of the more common general assumptions of psychology over the last sixty years or so is that irrational or distorted thinking is the cause of many bad feelings. This might be true. And it seems like a pretty good idea that, if your inaccurate thinking is a problem for you, the correct solution to the problem is to start thinking more accurately. The problem is, though, that the attempts to get people to control, change, suppress, or manage the contents of their thoughts have generally been unsuccessful (as we discussed at some length in the last chapter).
Getting into the business of managing your thoughts or feelings, including attempts to boost your self-esteem, in order to live most effectively is a little like managing clouds so you can live most effectively. As we mentioned in the discussion about self-esteem, there may be some level of cloud cover that’s optimal for you: not too gray, not too much blazing sun.”
What’s up next is the idea that you can learn to hold the stories that make up your experience of the world lightly, that you don’t necessarily need to believe everything you think.
Instead of trying to control and change the content of your thoughts, you can learn how to hold very gently the stories about the world that your mind tells you—no matter what they are, no matter whether they are true. The more technical name we have for this aspect of psychological flexibility is defusion, which is a made-up word that refers to the way you can keep yourself from “fusing” with your thoughts much like your tongue would fuse to a frozen flagpole if you licked it on the coldest day in winter. If your thoughts are like clouds, defusion is something you can work on that will allow you to live your life in both heavy cloud cover and full sun
AA And The Gift Of Diffusion
Although defusion, or holding stories lightly, is not discussed in particular in the AA literature, the sensibilities are common. The basic idea behind fusion is that we become trapped in and by our stories. When we look through the lens of our stories, it causes a lot of seeing and not seeing. Remember our prison words: always, never, impossible, everyone, no one. People often come into AA with a dead certainty about the past and the future. One of the things that happens in AA is that people get a chance to listen to many, many stories that sound impossible to resolve—stories of ruin and degradation, stories involving tremendous losses. We also find people who have inexplicably risen from the ashes of an impossible situation and found lives that are rich in meaning and purpose.
The fourth-step inventory is a good way to loosen your grip on stories. In the inventory, 12-step members take multiple different approaches to stories of resentment that have haunted them for years. The very process of changing your relationship with these old stories of right and wrong can have a dramatic effect on your ability to live in the presence of those stories. You do not have to determine if the stories are correct or incorrect, you do not have to agree with them or like them, you do not have to resolve them. In that fourth step, you learn to change your relationship to them. In the end, you have your stories instead of your stories having you.
Consider the following often-quoted passage from the AA Big Book, fondly referred to as “the promises.” This segment follows discussion of the ninth step of AA, in which members are asked to set about a systematic course of mending situations in their lives in which they have broken with their own values and brought harm to others. Step nine is the amends step.
“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”(BB p.84–85)
This passage often gives members pause. Stuck inside stories, these do seem like extravagant promises. But hearing these words sincerely spoken in meetings, hearing members who had indeed slipped far down the scale and have found themselves in the midst of rich and meaningful lives, opens the door to that possibility for the person listening closely to the passage. It creates just a bit of space between the listener and imprisoning stories. We invite our own readers to bring up the promises as a topic at meetings and to listen carefully for these stories. Allow yourself to become curious about the real possibility that you too might be telling just such a story of liberation, some years down the line.
Another aspect of defusion is the idea of not taking ourselves and our stories so damned seriously—holding the stories lightly. These sensibilities are often evident in the humor one finds around AA meetings. For example, a common AA saying is “If you want to give God a good laugh, tell him your plans.” This may sound dismissive, but it can also be understood as pointing to the very human tendency to be completely certain about things that just turn out to be false. For example, most people in AA meetings were absolutely certain that they would never become alcoholics, are divorcees who were absolutely certain that they would never divorce, are parents who were certain they would not make their parents’ mistakes, and so on.
Life contains a lot of surprises. This does not mean we shouldn’t make plans, but it does mean we should hold the stories we create about our future lightly. Living one day at a time does not mean “don’t plan.” No great house was ever built without a plan. One day at a time means that the plan needs to be lived one day at a time. It means that we need to hold our plans lightly, since the world is a dynamic and changing place and if we are living well we are growing and changing. A plan held too tightly can begin with good intentions but end badly.
In about 1940, some members of AA were considering some rules for conduct for the AA members, and different groups around the country were adopting different rules. One member sent forward a list of sixty-one rules. Bill Wilson reportedly warned that attempts to impose even less grand sets of rules had failed again and again; however, as is the tradition of AA, the making of rules was not forbidden, since AA has no means to forbid anything. There was simply a warning. As it turned out, the member wrote back some time later saying that the advice had been right and that the sixty-one rules had been a disaster. The member also sent along a card labeled “Rule #62” that he had mailed to AA groups all over the country. It read simply, “Rule #62: Don’t take yourself too damned seriously” (Kurtz 1991). Thus was born the AA saying “Don’t take yourself too damned seriously.” From an ACT perspective, this seems like good advice.
There are many other 12-step sayings you might hear in meetings that contain this admonishment to hold what we think lightly. “You have a thinking problem, not a drinking problem” points to a tendency to get caught in worry and rumination and to lose direct contact with your own life. It is, of course, really a warning against overthinking, not thinking per se. The problem of fusion is a problem of letting thinking about life substitute for life. In keeping with the oftentimes self-deprecating humor found around AA, a favorite saying is, “Don’t go into your mind alone; it’s not a safe neighborhood,” and there’s this version from Narcotics Anonymous: “An addict alone is in bad company.” These sayings can be interpreted as negative self-statements, but if they are held lightly, and in kindness, what they point toward is the human tendency to become so engaged in analysis and speculation that we lose contact with the directly experienced world. When you hear a recovering alcoholic, sitting in a church basement at an AA meeting, say with a smile on his or her face, “My best thinking got me here,” you are not looking at self-hatred, you are looking at someone who has learned through trial and error that sometimes their best thinking on a given day is a great source of amusement on another day. Sayings like “Don’t intellectualize, utilize” are calls to action. Thinking about recovery is not the same as active recovery. AA is a program of action, not a program of thinking about action. Ponder, for example, the saying “The three most dangerous words for an alcoholic—‘ I’ve been thinking.’” As with the other 12-step sayings, even the saying ought to be held lightly. No one, and I mean no one, with an ounce of sense thinks that you should give up planning and thinking. But as the Serenity Prayer suggests, recognize the things you cannot change. And if you find yourself grinding through some thoughts over and over and over and over, and, yes, over—maybe, just maybe it is time to let go of thinking for a moment and choose some small act, or series of acts, that serves your values. As they say in AA, “Do the next right thing.” This is not just AA folk wisdom; there is a substantial body of scientific evidence that shows that worry and rumination—a couple of very popular ways to get lost in thought—produce bad outcomes. And there is also a convincing body of evidence that suggests that moving your feet and actually doing things (sometimes called behavioral activation by psychologists) is very good medicine. In closing, on this little note, consider this AA adage: “In AA you live your way into a new way of thinking. You do not think your way into a new way of living.”