Part 5 (1/2)

When you're ready, take up your pen and paper, and write a short letter to yourself as a young child, from the perspective you imagined above, where today would be the day you turned everything around. What will that young person need to go through to get where you are today? Don't try to rewrite history. You've suffered, and that young person will suffer too. You know that he or she will suffer, and there's nothing you can do to prevent that. But if today were the day that your life turned around, what message would you have to offer your young self? What gift could you give? What about that young person's experience have you come to treasure now, even if it was impossibly hard at the time? Breathe. Take your time. If hard things come up, let them. Don't push them away. Just go quiet. And when you're ready, continue.

When you're finished, put down your pen and paper. Let your eyes go closed and take a few long, deep breaths before you set down this piece of work. Maybe go get some air before coming back to your letter. Try reading it aloud. Make a few notes about what kinds of things this exercise brought into-or caused to spill out of-your inclined heart.

Yet Another Perspective: Acceptance We hope you've made a little mental note to keep trying to understand-feel, really-how these ideas we're discussing with you fit into the bigger idea of psychological flexibility. We're looking to find an answer to the question ”How can I find a way to do what I choose to do in my life, even when I'm hurting, even when I doubt that I can make the choices I want to make?” Being still when it matters is one way. Seeing things from perspectives other than your most instinctive or most practiced is another. Now we'll move on to another aspect of flexibility. It's about finding a way to be all right with the fact that your life, all of our lives, are filled with experiences that are sweet or sad, and sometimes both at once. In a word, we call this way acceptance.

AA and the Gift of Perspective

Although the 12-step literature does not contain a lot of direct talk about perspective taking, the steps contain many opportunities. Individuals who have been treated from a 12-step perspective are often asked to do a substance use history, perhaps not unlike the substance use history we asked for in the last chapter. Making an inventory of using and its costs, and putting it all down in black and white, can sometimes cause it to come into view in a different way. Rumbling around in our heads, these things can drain the life from us. Sometimes the simple putting of pen to paper can allow you to see your own flaws with enough distance to encounter yourself with kindness and humility.

Humility is mentioned often in 12-step programs. It is an interesting concept. It does not mean humiliation. One cool way to think of humility is offered by historian John d.i.c.kson. Humility, says d.i.c.kson, is the dignified choice to willingly forgo status and offer resources for the good of others (this is in d.i.c.kson's book Humilitas, published in 2011). d.i.c.kson identifies three key elements in this definition. First, the definition a.s.sumes dignity. That is, it a.s.sumes that the person is in possession of some resource. If you have the strength to straighten chairs and serve coffee at a meeting, you have resources to offer. Second, humility is freely chosen. Humiliation is different. Humiliation is visited upon us. You do not have to serve, but the humble serve. And the final quality identified by d.i.c.kson is that humility is social-it is service to our fellows. Even believers in G.o.d, who see all service as ultimately to G.o.d, will find in their spiritual tradition a sense of the importance of offering yourself in service to your fellows. Such a perspective on humility will take you a long way in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Another major place where perspective taking is used again and again is in the fourth step: ”We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” The details of the fourth step are worth reviewing here. I have used this inventory with plenty of people, including many who had no drug or alcohol problem at all. Why? Because the inventory deals primarily with the problem of resentment, and although the AA Big Book suggests this is something peculiarly important for alcoholics, in my experience it is a big problem for a lot of people.

The fourth-step inventory begins with a list of resentments. Members are asked to look back over their lives and make a list of persons, inst.i.tutions, and principles with whom they are angry. Sometimes just getting this list on paper can cause people to be a bit shocked at the breadth of their resentments. Next, beside each, they are asked to write what impact the resented party had. Did they threaten or damage a sense of self-worth, some ambition, financial security, or interpersonal relations? Next, members are asked to view these individuals as perhaps spiritually sick. ”Though we did not like their symptoms and the ways they disturbed us, they, like ourselves were sick too” (AA, p. 67). Individuals are asked to go back to the list and attempt to view each person from this perspective and to pray for each in turn.

From an ACT view, it would be very helpful to painstakingly take the time for each person on the list, attempting to imagine the very real possibility that this person who had caused harm was operating out of past wrongs done them, out of vulnerability, or perhaps fear. Perhaps your bullying boss has a history of being bullied. Perhaps she feels terribly insecure and bullies and acts competent in order to hide that. You won't know whether any of this is true, but taking time to imagine how this might be so can change your viewpoint and, in doing so, exercise that perspective muscle you've been working on. This is not done in order to justify someone's bad behavior. Just because behavior is understandable does not make it good or acceptable. For example, in a war zone you might understand why the people on each side are shooting at one another. However, you would still not want to walk around on the battlefield. Bullets fired for good reasons or bad reasons are equally deadly. Nor is practice at perspective taking done in order to correct your wrong ideas or evaluations or to make you into a saint. It is simply the case that being able to see things from the other guy's perspective is an a.s.set. The potential benefit to you lies in your increasing skill at taking different perspectives. If your car died and you had an idea about what was wrong, you might open the hood and take a look. Looking might change your mind and it might not. But the person who knows how to check under the hood is in better shape than someone who cannot. Taking other perspectives is a way you can check under the hood in your relations with others. And, as in the first and fourth steps, it's a way to check under the hood of your relations.h.i.+p with past and future versions of yourself.

Another place to practice perspective taking is in 12-step meetings. The way meetings typically proceed is that one person speaks at a time. We encourage you to let go of comparison and evaluation while listening. Try to see from the eyes and hear from the ears of others. This does not mean that you have to agree or follow any advice they might give. You will hear people in meetings who are incredibly trapped in their stories about themselves. And you will also hear stories of self-discovery, of people finding things within themselves that they never knew existed. You will surely hear stories of people who have lived long enough to transcend their own stories about themselves. See if it is possible to take a kindly and compa.s.sionate view of the ones who seem trapped. That someone might be you on a particularly difficult day. As you listen to those who have let go of old stories and who are actively curious about the ongoing story they are writing with their lives, pay special attention, and allow yourself to become curious about what your story might look like if you were to rise above it and chose a new and vital direction. You might ask one of these people if he or she would like to go to coffee afterward or which meetings he or she likes. Someone like that might be a good candidate as a 12-step sponsor. You might find that this person's perspective on other good meetings puts you into some very interesting meetings.

4.

The Sweet and the Sad The t.i.tle of this book, as you'll recognize if you have any experience with AA (and probably regardless), is a part of the Serenity Prayer. Probably first written down in the 1930s and often credited to the the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the prayer has been expressed in a few different ways, one of which is now strongly a.s.sociated with AA and other 12-step programs: G.o.d grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

Since we cribbed the t.i.tle of this book from the prayer, you won't be very surprised to learn that we think a good deal of what we have to say in this book is expressed with uncommon simplicity and elegance in these three lines. Of the six pieces, or processes, we'll talk about in the book, the prayer directly addresses two: acceptance, which is the subject of this chapter, and commitment, which we'll get to in chapter 7.

Opening Up You can start your adventures in acceptance right now, by letting go of any tension you feel about reading a ”prayer” or seeing the mention of the word ”G.o.d.” We don't know you, reader, so we don't know how you feel about these words. For some people, these are extremely important words. For others, they are sources of discomfort. For now, though, set aside the idea that these three lines are a prayer and that they're directed at G.o.d. And set aside the fact that AA has adopted them and shared them with so many. Whatever your religious views or your opinion of AA, there is a lot that's useful to us in these three lines without taking those things into consideration.

The first line of the prayer asks for the serenity to accept things we cannot change. And while it seems almost too obvious to mention, there are actually a whole lot of things that we simply can't change about the world and ourselves. If your eyes are brown, they're brown. If you miss your train at the station, you miss your train. If you've been drinking for twenty years, you've been drinking for twenty years.

Sometimes the things we cannot change are more daunting than the color of our eyes or a missed train, though. Sometimes they are even more daunting than a long history of drinking problems. Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning (1984), describes an experience he had while imprisoned in a n.a.z.i concentration camp during World War II. He speaks at length about suffering in the camps, which is no surprise. However, the point upon which the entire book turns is Frankl's description of the time he and a companion find a way to escape the camp. They gather some food and a few other supplies. The day before their planned escape, Frankl decides to make one last round with the patients in his makes.h.i.+ft hospital. He knows that his attempts to care for his fellows are not going to save many of them. The prisoners under his care are sick and starving, and he has few resources with which to help them. In fact, he has little to offer them except comfort.

Frankl describes one fellow he had been particularly keen on saving, but who was clearly dying. On Frankl's last round, the man looks into his eyes and says, ”You, too, are getting out?”

Frankl writes, ”I decided to take fate into my own hands for once.” (79) He tells his friend that he will stay in the camp and care for his patients. Upon returning to sit with his patients, Frankl describes a sense of peace unlike any he had ever experienced.

Faced with some of the cruelest circ.u.mstances ever devised, Frankl found freedom that day in the camp by accepting his circ.u.mstances and choosing a course that mattered to him. He chose to be ”Viktor Frankl, the man who did what he could to care for his patients” rather than ”Viktor Frankl, the man who escaped.” We'll have more to say about the choice Frankl made when we discuss values a little later. For now, the thing to note is that, in order to make his choice, Frankl needed to accept some things that, for most of us, are only the stuff of nightmares, and he found incredible freedom in that act of acceptance.

What Acceptance Looks Like We define acceptance as remaining intentionally open and receptive to whatever it is that you experience at any given time. Acceptance means being willing to feel what you feel, think what you think, and see and hear what you see and hear-even when what you feel, think, or perceive is unpleasant or painful.

Acceptance Isn't Approving, Wanting, or Liking Do you remember the distinction we drew in the last chapter between meditation and rumination? When you meditate on something, you consider it, notice it, and observe it. When you ruminate on something, you judge it, evaluate it, or try to solve it. Taken this way, acceptance is like meditation in that it's necessarily free from judgments, evaluations, and desire. When you accept something, it doesn't mean that you're going to approve of it, like it, or want it. If you feel yourself come down with the flu, you can accept the thoughts that arise about getting sick, being uncomfortable, and so forth without wanting or liking the illness. Acceptance means that when a particular experience arises, you find a way to acknowledge it, be present to it, and take it in without attempts to alter it in any way.

This doesn't mean that judgments go away or need to go away, though. As you lie in bed with the flu, you're likely to be thinking about how lousy it is to be confined to bed with fever and chills. You might wish you didn't have the flu.

Two Paths to Letting Go

Acceptance and letting go of struggle have been enormously important in my own recovery. I think they can be in yours too. There are two paths I know of to letting go. One path to letting go involves holding onto something, anything, really tightly. If you are holding something tightly and are approached by a person carrying a baseball bat, and the person hits you with the bat repeatedly, you will eventually let go. This was my path to acceptance and letting go. I took a tremendous beating-physically, emotionally, psychologically, and financially, unto death really-before I let go. I do not recommend this path.

There is an easier way. Just let go. I doubt there is anyone reading this book who has not taken a beating. Maybe more than me, maybe less (I hope less). The good news is that you get to decide how much of a beating is necessary.

Acceptance Isn't Resignation Another subtle distinction is between acceptance and resignation. Resignation involves some aspects that are similar to acceptance. For example, if you are resigned to something, you may no longer fight it. However, resignation often involves a sort of giving up on life and on possibilities. Acceptance in ACT is more like opening up than it is like giving up.

The Opposite of Acceptance The opposite of acceptance, as we understand it, is called avoidance. It's probably easy for you to imagine what avoidance might look like. It's an unwillingness to be open to the things that make up acceptance.

Avoidance is something that you might want to spend some extra time thinking about because, from an ACT perspective, we can often describe drinking and drug use as kinds of avoidance behaviors. What kinds of things make you want to drink or use? Feeling tense in social situations? Being in physical pain? Feeling lonely? Angry? Hopeless? Or even uneasy and uncertain about whether you'll stay clean and sober? None of these experiences are going to feel very good. Actually, they're all going to hurt quite a lot. If you're not willing to have those experiences-if you're unable, in other words, to practice acceptance with respect to these experiences-you can attempt to avoid them by drinking or using.

It's a plain fact: it's raining someplace all the time. No one gets through life without getting hurt. Everyone and everything that matters to you will one day slip from your grasp and be lost to you forever. No one alive today is going to stay that way-at least not in his current form. Living hurts like h.e.l.l, at least some of the time. Each time we turn away, slip around, or close up to painful experience, we run the very real risk of our world shrinking just a little bit. With a lifetime of avoidance like this, your world can become very small indeed.

How Much Pain Can you Stand?

People often think that there is a line across the universe of pain. On one side of the line is the amount of pain a person can stand. On the other side of that line lies ”too much.” The truth, I think, is that we do not know how much pain a human can stand. History is filled with people who have suffered extraordinary pain in the service of something they valued. For example, in probably every war in history, there have been people in the middle of a war zone who handed their children to a stranger on the back of a cart or a truck, knowing that they would never see them again. They did so because they knew that to keep them meant condemning them to death. Like Frankl's decision to remain in the camp to care for his probably hopeless patients, these are acts of heroism.

A Call to Your Own Personal Heroism