It can be difficult to hear that something you said or did felt bad to a friend or loved one. Mature people don’t want to consciously hurt others, but even when we don’t intend it, our inflection or the way we phrase our words can be misconstrued and trigger a negative reaction in someone else. It’s important to know and care how we affect others so our relationships can grow more harmonious. Responding defensively makes it seem like we don’t care. It’s a difficult habit to change but the pay off is…
A happier everyone.
Jarl and Steve
I am grateful above all that my understanding of your work has served me as a great leap forward in my alcohol recovery.
I am in the beginning stages of using some of your work to simplify and redirect that program, only because it is time. The ideas and the language are eight decades old and a great deal of water has passed under the bridge, so the ideas themselves are becoming obscured. I am really just mulling the prospect so far.
Many people in recovery take umbrage at the thought of extending or improving that program. It is a little like people clinging to the Old Testament because it is sacrosanct, never mind that we don’t really behave like that anymore. I will never win hearts and minds by offending the establishment which has done so much for so many, so anything I do has to be totally reframed without allusion to AA. Even though it seems to me a rather simple job, it is fiercely sensitive.
It is a good thing for me to think about because your work on discussing consciousness is the perfect next chapter.
I will forever remember that the UN assigned the Lasker Award sometime in the fifties to AA as an idea that could be extended to bring peace into the world by bringing peace into ourselves. What I have learned from your work is in the same league and seems to me a near perfect fit in a culture that has become addicted to a host of things. I see addiction as having the effect almost entirely of a generalized, egotistical defensiveness about any kind of conscious openness, similar to the most outrageous sorts of propaganda.