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If you’ve been to any 12-step meetings, you’ve probably heard the spiritual axiom mentioned roughly 4,000 times. I’ll throw it out there just in case it hasn’t popped up on your radar recently. It’s from Step 10 of the 12 and 12 book. Here goes:
“It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also.”
Oof.
I’ve written about this before, but I have had some ups and downs with the spiritual axiom. When I first got sober, it made sense to me 100 percent of the time. I found that even when people did wrong me, I would become disturbed because I was hanging onto it. Sometimes I wanted to be mad. It was exciting. To this day, I get an adrenaline rush when my fists are balled up.
Then, after I had been sober for awhile, I met some people who had deep pain from terrible things that happened to them, often when they were very little kids. I really found it impossible to look at them and say, “Well, you know what the spiritual axiom says…”
Now I’m somewhere in the middle. I have found that the vast majority of disturbed moments—let’s say maybe 98-99 percent—confirm the spiritual axiom to be true.
And for that small percentage where it’s just an awful thing where anybody on earth would be disturbed and is entitled to be disturbed, I’ve found that almost every one of them is not a problem that the 12-step programs are necessarily meant to solve on their own. Our literature consistently reminds us that if you’re looking for marriage therapy, go to a marriage therapist AND talk to your sober network, or for legal counsel, call a lawyer AND your sponsor, or if you have trauma from other life events, find a great psychiatrist or therapist of some sort to help you through it.
I’m bringing this up right now because I had a recent difficult situation with a loved one where they did something pretty crappy, in my humble opinion. If I told you the details of it, I bet you would agree with me. I say that because I called, oh, maybe 4.1 million people to try to build my case. Because when it first happened, I had a grand plan to to take this thing to the Supreme Court for resentments.
In all seriousness, these are the toughest situations for me to navigate because I feel like I am right. Deep down, I feel like it is justifiable to be upset.
But here’s the fine print you’ll see in Step 10 if you give it another read. It addresses these exact situations. Justifiable resentments are even more poisonous than regular ol’ run of the mill beefs, because it’s hard to not think I was wronged and therefore I am right.
As I unpack those situations, I often find that I might not have started off in the wrong… but I have now veered into the wrong lane and am driving 90 mph. In this most recent situation, I realized quickly that my role was that I was running with the resentment, not working through it.
Here are a few questions I asked myself:
—Am I sharing this with others because I want to process it and move on… or am I looking for other people to tell me I should be pissed? (One thing that helps me navigate this answer is that I listen to how my voice sounds. I want my tone to be calm and measured, not a guy ranting on the phone trying to swing a voter to my side. I need to be looking for a solution, not building up a problem. My voice is actually a good indicator.)
—What percentage of me is thinking about how to punish the person, versus what percentage is thinking about how to forgive the person? (I’m not saying this has to be 100 percent forgiveness… but forgiveness has to be in the conversation with all the terrible punishment scenarios running through my brain.)
—Have I prayed about it? And if I did, did I mean it? (I’ve done fake prayers before because I wanted to be able to say that I did. “Dear God, help this asshole to stop being an asshole.” That’s not really helping anything.)
I did not have great answers to those questions on Saturday when my difficult situation began. But I got there eventually. I made a few phone calls to trusted sober friends, and that helped take the steam out of my anger long enough to begin productive conversation and thoughts about pushing through it.
I’ll be honest, I’m only about 70 percent through the woods. I’d love to say when I apply the Fourth Step and spiritual axiom to significant disagreements that there is a Resentment Genie that appears and poof, it’s gone. It’s not always that simple. But what I find is, when 70 percent of the anger is pulled away, it’s actually enough to tackle the other 30 percent in a calm and serene way.
So I’ll be working on the 30 percent this week. And good news, it looks like I will NOT be needing the nine Supreme Court justices to help me through it.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
"I was a garden-variety drunk. Almost every morning I woke up in someone's garden."
(CREDIT: AA Grapevine, December 2004, by Mike D.)
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