“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” – Victor Frankl
I experienced one of the most disorienting experiences in my life when I got sober in 1995. I use the word disorienting because time slowed to a rhythm that made me feel I was walking through quicksand, slow and sinking. I anticipated that sobriety would transport me from dizzying levels of uncertainty to a stabilizing sense of groundedness, but that wasn’t my experience.
In hindsight, I’m pretty sure that I was moving from the illusion of manufactured certainty, from an image of myself that I had carefully constructed, to recognizing very little about myself without my armor. For a few weeks I had difficulty answering questions about how I felt or even what I wanted for dinner. Mercifully, I quit drinking from a pretty high bottom, so I didn’t have to experience physical symptoms as part of my process. Giving up smoking cigarettes, which I did at the same time, was tougher.
I quit drinking because I wanted something different from my life and my history. While the physical part wasn’t challenging, the mental and emotional experience felt like looking in a wavy mirror. I made these changes as part of a search for solid ground and a more reliable view of myself, and what I got was the distortion of a fun-house reflection.
…I started to find my stride in the new rhythm, eventually appreciating and syncing to this new pace in a powerful way. I learned that I drank to counteract a level of introversion that was misunderstood and therefore not tolerated in my family, a lack of belonging that came from being handed the Good Texas Girl Playbook that I couldn’t abide, and a sensitivity and hypervigilance that developed alongside frighteningly accurate pattern-making and prediction skills.
I translated the quotation from the beginning of this chapter into a formula that looks like this:
S( )R.
I have it written everywhere as a reminder to myself.
When I was growing up, there was no space between stimulus and response. I don’t think I even knew that space was an option. In our family, the ethos was either SR or, sometimes, RS (guess how shit is gonna go down and then beat ’em to the punch).
For me, the gift and the superpower of sobriety have been the ability to pry open that space. Over the years, the parentheses between stimulus and response slowly came into focus. At first, the formula looked like this: S()R. Sobriety gave me just enough focus to stick my foot in between the parentheses, like racing to stop an elevator door from closing.
After about a year of sobriety, I experienced the big space maker. It’s a line from the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book about sobriety in action:
“That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we have been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor afraid. That is our experience. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.” – Big Book p.85-86
I can enjoy the gift of neutrality if I can stay in fit spiritual condition.
While this past May marks twenty-eight years of sobriety, I am still constantly experimenting to better understand what “fit spiritual condition” means for me. I’m sure this will be the case until I die. At the baseline, I try to keep that space between stimulus and response wedged open with sobriety, sleep, prayer, working out, practicing curiosity, a great coach, my Above/Below the Line Practice, and intentional breathing—to name a few strategies.
It’s funny because I have a visceral response to the words neutrality and surrender. I’m not a do-nothing-and-give-up kind of person. In my family these words, along with vulnerability, would have been seen as the opposite of our family ethos: Be tough. Swing first. Of course, now I’m better equipped to understand that ethos as Self-protect, self-protect, self-protect.
But with age and experience, I’ve also learned that the gift of neutrality—not running toward or after—is one of the most valuable and unexpected superpowers of my life. And as far as surrender goes—well, Sarah Lewis helped me with that one. During a podcast episode about her work on failure, creativity, and mastery, she taught me that surrender is not giving up, it’s giving over. And for me, giving over is an act of faith and courage, which happen to be my two core values. The grace is that I’m able to keep the parts of me that I’m deeply grateful I got from my family, and I’ve experienced the growth and freedom to make choices about the other parts. Maybe my new personal ethos is something like Be tough. And vulnerable enough to be brave. Stay curious about wanting to swing and about other emotions. Have the courage to give over when that’s the right thing to do. And stay in fit spiritual condition—and physical condition to kick ass on the court.
What I hope for all of you is the ability to wedge your foot between stimulus and response and to pry those parentheses open wide enough to answer the questions about what fit spiritual condition means in your life. Again, I don’t mean religiosity or God, if that’s not how you think about your spirit. I mean humility and curiosity about the mysteries that make us human and the connections that sustain us. What makes us cry when we see dog videos or do the wave at ballgames or laugh until our stomach hurts or listen to songs that we know will make us sad. The poetry of being human. When we understand that, and respect it in ourselves and in one another, we don’t have to look for strong ground outside ourselves—together we become the strong ground.