I love Victor Frankl’s book ‘Man In Search Of Meaning’. Consider these three quotes below from this book as you read this article. Also consider how you relate and respond to pain in all its forms … physical, emotional, mental, spiritual … and perhaps how dominant resentment, negativity, avoidance and victimhood were as responses that ignite the impulse for that first drink or character default behavior. I believe these quotes when grounded in a ‘with God’ conscious connection and humility can help us with what BB Appendix 2 (BB p.567) suggests a spiritual experience to be: “a personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism”.
“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 our freedom.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose”
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Consider following the links above and below if you’d like to pursue this crucial topic more thoroughly. – Bruce M.
Drop The Rock
I have learned from experience that staying abstinent, working the Program, and attending meetings through painful times is a guarantee of personality change. We no longer have to escape our pain through using. The Program has given us a tool—humility—which, used regularly, will transform pain into growth. Armed with humility, we who once dreaded change as much as death can learn to face real life with a new courage and hope.
Before I entered the fellowship, I lived in a fantasy world of my own creation. I attempted to control not only effort but outcomes of situations. I tried to keep myself calm with chemicals and food, with no recognition for the ups and downs of daily living. I was seeking an unreal world of complete security, romance, and approval, and the more I tried to control (demand) these things, the more chaos I created. It becomes clear to us in getting sober that we have to change. I like what Bill W. has to say about these rude awakenings in this passage from the Twelve and Twelve:
And as we grow spiritually, we find that our old attitudes toward our instincts need to undergo drastic revisions. Our desires for emotional security and wealth, for personal prestige and power, for romance, and for family satisfactions—all these have to be tempered and redirected. We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole end and aim of our lives. If we place instincts first, we have got the cart before the horse; we shall be pulled backward into disillusionment. But when we are willing to place spiritual growth first—then and only then do we have a real chance. (Twelve & Twelve page 114)
Humility seems to be the basic ingredient for transforming pain into growth. In Step Seven of the Twelve and Twelve, humility is defined as
“The perspective to see that character building and spiritual values have to come first, and that material satisfactions are not the purpose of living.”
We learn that an honest desire to seek and do God’s will is necessary for humility.
“What an order. I can’t go through with it,” used to be my initial reaction to growing through the Steps. I could accept solutions intellectually, but when it came to practical application, I had trouble. I know today that I don’t have to do it perfectly; it takes time to get better. I know that I don’t have to do it alone, that I have a wealth of wisdom and support in this fellowship at my disposal, and that gives me hope for change, growth, and new frontiers.