The Wisdom To Know The Difference Part 5

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

What if you could be a hero? Since I cleaned up in 1985, I have seen heroism and sought stories of it. These stories have been like food for me over the years. I have listened for them and tried to hear the heart of them. I have read stories of Martin Luther King's civil rights heroism and Gandhi's country-freeing heroism and Mandela's apartheid-ending heroism. I have also listened to small stories of heroism. President Barack Obama tells of his mother getting up before dawn each morning to tutor him before he went off to school and she went off to work. This sounds like heroism to me.

I have been looking for the common thread that connects these stories, and I think I have found it. The common thread is that these acts all involve people doing the next right thing in their own lives. What they did day-by-day was hard and it was for a purpose. Gandhi's great fasts involved going the next hour without food, and the next. Mandela's heroism involved bearing each day of hard labor in the lime quarry-this rock and the next, one after another. And King: this step, in this march, and the next. And President Obama's mother, rising at 4 a.m. to tutor a son, this morning, and the next. All these stories, large and small, involve pain and purpose.

As I read these stories I ask myself what this might look like this day in my own life. What is before me? Here is a story: As a father of three children, my first reaction is to say that I cannot imagine the pain of letting a child go. My second reaction is to recall that cold fall morning in Seattle in 1978 when I let my oldest daughter slip away because I lived inside the story that I could not tolerate the pain of life without drugs and alcohol. Recent years suggest that that story, which seemed so completely and absolutely true at the time, was false. I have in fact lived smack in the middle of life without drugs and alcohol for more than twenty-five years. And I have walked through a fair bit of pain over those years-treatment for hepat.i.tis C, cancer, the deaths of two of my brothers. (And I have also been deep into nonacceptance a lot of times. A lot.) There aren't that many Gandhis and Mandelas and Kings. But there are many, many heroes: men and women who make the decision that one day will be their day to pick something different for their lives. You have that capacity for heroics inside of you, whether or not you believe it now.

Acceptance Isn't Good; Avoidance Isn't Bad It's worth a mention here, all good notwithstanding, that acceptance isn't an end unto itself-n.o.body gets a medal or merit badge for being accepting-and, so far as we know, there are no avoidance police. If you need to get a root ca.n.a.l, we strongly recommend you accept when the dentist offers you the novocaine. Miring yourself in pain for its own sake isn't the idea here.

As with learning to be still and learning to see things from different perspectives, any efforts you make to be more accepting are in the service of developing greater psychological flexibility-the ability to do what you choose, when you choose, even if things are going on in your head or in your life that make it hard. When painful experience gets between you and what you want, acceptance is the skill you need to keep your feet moving through the hard stuff and keep heading in the direction you want to go. Avoidance, on the other hand, is what you might do-and might have done in the past-to get away from the painful experiences.

Still, it might be worth noting that there is an ever-growing body of research evidence that suggests attempts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions can have detrimental effects (Purdon 1999; Roemer and Borkovec 1994; Wegner et al. 1987). There's also evidence that suggests that openness and acceptance foster good long-term outcomes (Gifford et al. 2006; Hayes et al. 2006).

The Cost of Avoidance

Let's take a little pause here to reflect on times in your life when you've been unwilling to have certain experiences. Before you start recording your answers, take a few moments to sit quietly with your eyes gently closed. Reflect on experiences you may have had in which there were thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, or a sense of uncertainty that you simply were unwilling to have. Don't rush into writing about this. Just call them to mind and wonder about them for a while. And breathe.

When you're ready, make notes about some of these experiences. What were they? What did you do to avoid them? How did this work out for you in the short term-say, the same day or within a few days? And how did your attempts to avoid the painful experience work out for you in the long term? You can use the table below or record your thoughts in a notebook.

What do you take away from the notes you've made above? Do you see any kind of a pattern? And if you do, how does it compare with what we've suggested about acceptance and avoidance? Do you generally find that attempting to avoid negative experience has resulted in positive consequences? Or have you suffered as a result of avoidance?

Control Freak There's more to not being accepting than running and hiding or blotting out painful experiences with alcohol or drugs. Some of us try to mitigate painful emotions by clamping down, suppressing, or trying to micromanage our experiences.

Controlling and Supressing Emotions You won't be terribly surprised to learn that attempts to control or suppress strong negative feelings and emotions don't work much better than avoiding them. Psychologist James Pennebaker pioneered a series of writing studies in which partic.i.p.ants wrote about difficult situations. Most of the studies involved partic.i.p.ants writing about a difficult topic for approximately twenty minutes on three separate days. In their writing instructions, they were encouraged to write about their deepest feelings regarding the difficult topic.

Pennebaker's results suggest that expressing these powerful feelings had some positive results (and recall that, in order to express them, you more or less need to accept them). A group of workers laid off from their jobs who wrote about the pain of being laid off were reemployed more rapidly than workers who didn't do this writing (Spera, Buhrfeind, and Pennebaker 1994). College freshmen who wrote about their difficulties in school showed fewer health care visits and better grades (Pennebaker and Beall 1986).

Now, just because there are some studies to suggest that expression of strong emotions is perhaps beneficial at times, don't imagine that we're saying it's healthy to just go around expressing yourself everywhere you go. That's not the message. Some people just don't want to hear it. If they're in a position to do you harm, they might. Remember that the people in the Pennebaker studies usually do their expressing in complete privacy. Also, the habit of keeping emotions to ourselves in an effort to control them often gets extended from places where it is necessary to places where it is not necessary. For example, there are a lot of things that might be a problem if they were expressed at work that can be freely shared in an AA meeting.

The Cost of Emotional Control

Let's do a little inventory, similar to the one that you did before for situations and experiences you might have avoided. This time, though, let's think about situations when you've tried to suppress or control emotions or feelings you may have had. Once again, you can work on the page below or in a notebook, but before you put pen to paper, take at least a few long, deep breaths and really allow your memories of these experiences to rise up inside you. Sit with them for a while and, when you're ready, make your notes.

Just as you did before, take a little time to look over your notes. Wonder a little about the patterns you're observing. In general, do you think your attempts at controlling or suppressing painful emotions have been helpful, harmful, or neutral in your life?

Controlling Physical Sensations The story is pretty much the same in the world of physical sensations as it is for emotions. Acceptance of them makes them easier to live with and results in better outcomes than avoiding them or trying to control them. This similarity makes a good deal of sense, since your brain and your body are all part of the same you. What you feel in your body is very likely to stir up your thoughts, and vice versa.

Consider people diagnosed with panic disorder. They experience panic attacks-periods of anxiety so extreme that they feel as if they are going to go crazy or die. People who have panic attacks sometimes begin to avoid any situation where they fear they might have a panic attack. So, for example, they might not go to the store during a busy time because they fear they might have a panic attack while in line and not be able to readily get out of the store. But another thing that people with panic often do is to avoid bodily sensations that are connected to anxiety. So, for example, they might stop exercising because it makes their heart rate go up-just like it does when they have a panic attack. But it turns out that the more people avoid places (like the store) or sensations (like a racing heart), the more disabled they become.

Another area that is relevant to physical sensations is chronic pain. It works in very much the same way as with panic. People experiencing chronic pain begin to bend their lives in ways that help them avoid pain-at least in the short run. The problem is that the ways they avoid pain in the short run-by staying in bed, using narcotic pain medications, reducing activity, for example-can backfire in the long run. The more you avoid the pain sensations, the more disabled you become. The longer you lie down, the less likely it is that you will ever get up. Lying down, getting small, reducing activity, all work over the short terms but are disabling over the long term. The strategies are a trap.

There can be a lot of physical sensations that are connected to letting go of substances. Sometimes it is the physical discomfort of detox. Don't underestimate this. Some people who are extremely physically dependent on drugs such as alcohol can have life-threatening physical withdrawal symptoms. But even relatively small regular amounts of drug and alcohol intake can result in nonlife-threatening, yet uncomfortable, physical symptoms when those intakes are removed. For example, it is common to experience vague physical discomfort while in situations that are connected strongly to drinking or using. Sometimes we just feel out of place, like our skin does not quite fit. And, running in the back of the mind is the certainty of how immediately a drink or hit would dissolve that discomfort. But like pain and panic and a hundred other physical sensations, the short-term benefit of retreat ends up being buried by the cost of the retreat.

The best medicine for this is to grow your acceptance muscle. As we described above, acceptance does not mean brutally forcing yourself into different situations or gritting your teeth. It means taking yourself to hard experiences with kindness and compa.s.sion. It means noticing the ways we tense up and say "no" with our body, mind, and behavior.

Checking In with Your Body

This is a simple meditation of the body-scan variety common to a range of mindfulness-oriented practices. The idea is to become aware of sensations in your body, deliberately and gradually-to just notice them and let them be, without evaluating or controlling them. Honestly, you'll benefit the most from this kind of practice if you're not in severe pain or experiencing detox symptoms at the moment. It will be a lot easier to relax, notice, and accept physical sensations in your body if they're not causing you extraordinary discomfort. Practicing this kind of awareness exercise is c.u.mulative: the more you do it, the more natural it will seem, even if you are in pain. But we need to meet life where we are, not where we'd ideally prefer to be. So, if you are in pain or withdrawal, you can still try this exercise. Be especially kind and compa.s.sionate to yourself, though, if you find your attention falling apart or your patience wearing thin.

Start by loosening your collar and belt. Kick off your shoes, and find a comfortable place where you can lie down with your arms at your side. If it's more comfortable for you, you can place a pillow under your head and another behind your knees.

Take four long, slow deep breaths, allowing the air to fill up your belly first and then your chest. Exhale slowly. Once you've finished, just allow your breath to flow naturally for the rest of the exercise, without trying to slow it down or make it deeper intentionally.

Start first by letting your attention flow into the soles of your feet. See if there is any sensation there, any tension or pain. Can you feel the weight of your socks? The floor beneath your heels?

Gradually allow your awareness to travel from your feet into your legs, through your belly and chest, down your arms, and back up, until you come to the top of your head. Take your time with this. Pay attention to everything you notice: warmth or coolness; the feel of fabric on your hair; the motion of air across your skin if you're in a draft.

When you've completely scanned your entire body, call to mind any place where you're feeling pain or tension. If your head hurts, for example, allow your awareness to flow into the pain. What does it feel like? Sharp? Stabbing? Dull? Does it change when your heart beats? What about when you breathe in or out?

While you keep your attention focused on the painful sensation, take one of your hands from your side and place it over the place where it hurts. Does the warmth of your hand change the sensation? See if you can find a way to relate to the pain that doesn't seek to get rid of it or evaluate it. See if you can find a way to appreciate the way it changes from moment to moment. Try to imagine, even for a moment, what it would be like to make a place for this pain in your life, to welcome it as part of who you are. Yes, this will be a frightening thing to think about, especially if you're in a lot of discomfort. But try to see how this change in relations.h.i.+p affects your experience of the pain itself.