Recent investigations into the mind illustrate the power of Gratitude in the healing of chronic diseases.  “Double Blind” drug trials have long baffled drug researchers when the placebo group often have similar recoveries to those taking real medicine.  Speculation is that the minds of the placebo takers assume that it’s the real McCoy, which acts to reduce stress-producing hormones such as Cortisol, in turn, reducing inflammation and other symptoms.

The Big Book and our witness of the lives of fellow members tell us that we have no permanent cure from alcoholism, only a daily reprieve based upon the maintenance of our spiritual condition.

12 Steps and 12 traditions.   “Learning daily to spot, admit, and correct these flaws is the essence of character-building, and good living Hazleton Betty Ford Center supports a webpage that extols the Gratitude practices of one of its long-term associates. He was told as a newcomer to get a notebook, write down ten things he was grateful for, and then add three new items on the list every day-He stopped numbering when passing  5,000 items for which he was thankful.”  Is this an extreme practice or something we program people should all be emulating?

Our famous serenity prayer (formerly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi) but more recently credited to Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, of Union Theological Seminary), is the most consistently said prayer along with the Lord’s Prayer at most AA meetings across the country.  The serenity “to accept the things I cannot change” has become the mantra of most program members granted any meaningful amount of sobriety when dealing with challenges small and large

The Big Book,  and the 12 and 12, (twin Bibles of AA) both refer to gratitude although sparingly “….My health is better, I enjoy a fellowship which gives me a happier life than I have ever known, and my family joins me in daily expression of gratitude.” And more prescriptively, “Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God’s will into all of our activities.  An honest regret for harms done, genuine gratitude for blessings received, and a willingness to try for better things tomorrow will be the permanent assets we shall seek.”

A sign hanging in The First Step House of Orange County, a men’s detox and recovery outreach, is much more unrestrained about the virtues of Gratitude-“Grateful people are happy people-those that aren’t, aren’t.”

To me, encouraging an “attitude of gratitude” in ourselves is a critical component of attaining the most important thing we as alcoholics have got to possess and that is a “…a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition”.   This is a crucial component of what the Twelve Steps of Alcoholic’s Anonymous wished to accomplish in our infamous Spiritual Awakening. 

In my experience, the cultivation of an outlook of gratitude on life has involved in a more intentional approach and has become a cornerstone of my daily reflections, prayer, and meditation.  An observer might describe my daily “gratitude” routine as a spiritual practice. My own experience of keeping a journal every day for five years, which among other disciplines, lists everything I can be grateful for from the previous day has produced enormous benefits in my happiness. I might even go so far as describe it as the “Peace which surpasses all understanding” referred to by Paul in Philippians 4:7.

 

There is no reason to over intellectualize the subject of resentment. Understanding is not necessary for the effective removal of resentments but taking action is. Like any other defect of character we need only identify it; disclose it to God and another person; become willing for God to remove it and then ask him to do so. But some resentments are more persistent than others, or more delicious to our state of being and therefore exceptionally hard to give up. So what to the unafflicted so called “normie” may be obvious connections may remain hidden to the alcoholic whose brain has developed the ability to keep many important observations compartmentalized and unconnected.

An important offender of these is the problem of jealous comparison. This subject is explored in depth by two students of Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist who himself was a major thought contributor to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Beyond Success and Failure we grow learning to make comparisons one after another until we come out second best thereby creating the “jealous” comparison. We are wronged because somebody else’s status or situation is better than ours and we thereby feel “less than”.

The problem of envious or jealous comparison creates problems of forgiveness; courage to confront issues before they become resentments; and most importantly the willingness to give up defects of character fostered by maintaining resentments. These defects can take the form of self-pity, pride and a stance of victimization.

Resentment has been called the number one offender.  It probably leads more alcoholics back to drink than any other condition of the mind.  The word resentment comes from the Latin root “Sentire” which means “to feel.”  So to have resentment means to “re-feel” an emotion usually of anger or hatred towards someone.

There are several issues in dealing effectively with resentment:  the problem of envious or jealous comparison, forgiveness, courage to confront issues before they become resentments; and most importantly the willingness to give up defects of character fostered by maintaining resentments.   These defects can take the form of self-pity, pride and a stance of victimization.  These issues will be dealt with more completely in a future blog(s).

There was a cartoon in a Grapevine monthly publication a few years back that gets to the heart of the resentment problem for alcoholics:  The cartoon depicts several AA members in a cemetery gathered around the tombstone of a recently departed brother.  There are no words between the members, just them looking at the tombstone caption:  “Here lies a man with a [JUSTIFIED] resentment,”  emphasis mine.  It seems from an accumulation of hugely negative experiences of our society that we are not a class of persons who can handle any kind of resentment, justified or not.  Conversely, as the Big Book says, “…resentment is the dubious luxury of normal persons…”

So why is resentment toxic and even fatal for alcoholics?  For me, it’s because it can be so totally possessive of my consciousness.  My pattern is to replay the actions of others that hurt or betrayed me in my mind’s imagination until I can feel palpable indignation.  How could they have done that to me?  Or often as not, how could have I let them do that to me, which promotes anger towards myself?  This of course leave aside what was our part in causing them to act so harmfully to us.  That is the process of the fourth and fifth steps in the AA program to discern our patterns of behavior or “defects” if you will that cause retribution on the part of others.  However, here, for the purposes of dealing with resentment, we can assume that there are actions of others that wrong us and cause us actual or emotional harm.

An urge to show them or to “drink at them” is often the basis for taking the first drink and possibly losing a substantial amount of sober time and having to start over the climb back into a clean life.  All the time the thoughts precipitating that first drink are ones of retribution justified by our self-pity and sense of being wronged. Has there ever been a resentment that was not based on someone or something treating us unfairly, based on our definition of fairness of course?

We can see it is not the initial actions of others that most often threatened our sobriety. It is our harboring feelings of resentment successively replayed in our mind until the only relief appears to be a totally justified first drink and resulting drunk.  So to rid ourselves of resentment and continually keep our consciousness clean of them is one of our chief tasks as alcoholics who want desperately to maintain our sober way of living.  The next blog on resentments will get into some of the mechanisms for doing exactly that.