Читать книгу Emotional Sobriety II - Группа авторов - Страница 11

July 2010

Before I was powerless over alcohol and my life had become unmanageable, I was powerless over unhappiness and my life had become unmanageable. I turned to alcohol in my late 40s as the best self-help option I thought I could find. Often, my unhappiness seemed to melt as I drank. But drinking became an ever more elusive and flawed solution to my unhappiness. It began to create unhappiness of its own. My overall unhappiness was eventually much greater than what I had evaded and yet not solved at the beginning of my alcoholism. Now what?

Maybe the best way to feel was to be happy. How was that possible?

Long before I was a binge drinker, I was a binge thinker. I tended to think incessantly, as if this were an essential part of staying alive. My mind either had no “off” switch, or, if it did, I had no idea where it was. In this constant banter, I could find all sorts of resentments to chew on, grudges to hold, victimization to ponder and catastrophes to protest. Life was unfair, people were the harbingers of much injustice and unkindness, and I was justifiably withholding my seal of approval by not accepting what already was.

I create thoughts. I can do so from default behaviors (what I have come to otherwise recognize as “character defects"), or I can create thoughts within the awareness of having choices. Awareness for me is realizing that I am not my thoughts. Rather, I observe my thoughts and their creation and content. If I need not be run by my conditioned default thinking, then have I discovered the choice of observing and creating constructive thinking?

Once I learned to meditate, as encouraged in Step Eleven, I was able to find the “off” switch to my thinking when that thinking is neither needed nor useful to me. I can use thought, rather than have my thinking use me. “Awareness,” I believe, is the most accessible doorway to what has been referred to as “spirituality” throughout my life and in AA.

Ken T.

Ames, Iowa