Recovery Today / April 2009
In most primal cultures, it’s the job of the old men of the tribe to pass on the group’s wisdom to the younger ones who are just coming along. Learning about suffering, and the necessary role that it plays in our psychic development, is one of the duties they’re charged with teaching; and so, ancient rites of passage were developed in nearly all of our cultures to achieve this task of ego-reduction that alone seems to open the door to maturity. Sadly, we’ve lost our ways of initiation and most of our old men have given up their responsibility. That’s probably because no one was there to teach them when it was their time to learn.
Our recovery field may be the one branch of our modern culture that holds out any hope of righting this wrong. I know, when I was initiated into recovery, I had a counselor who thought “suffering” was just about the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread. And, for some strange reason, he seemed particularly fond of my pain and my suffering! Whenever I was hurting, this guy just really seemed to come alive! Sometimes he’d ask me, “Bill, what’s going on with you today - pain wise?” And when I’d tell him what part of my life was hurting, his response was never to say: “Oh, you poor, little baby! You come over here right now and let me give you a great big hug.” Instead, he’d usually just laugh. But somehow I knew that he wasn’t laughing at me, but he was laughing at life. He saw that life was inflicting its pains on me just as it had on him. And he saw too that, just like him, I was going fighting, kicking, and screaming all the way! After he’d had himself a good laugh, he’d assure me, that my life seemed to be proceeding right on schedule because I was hurting in all the right places.
Before I got sober, I had always thought that suffering was a very bad thing and so I tried to avoid it all costs. Alcohol and drugs came in real handy for doing just that. Whenever life handed me some pain, I handed myself a drink or took a drug to make it all go away. I avoided pain for as long as I could. I avoided it until one day my painkillers simply didn’t work any more – and then, when my pain got really, really bad, and when there was no place else for me to go, that’s when I joined the Recovery Tribe.
A patient of Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist who had a hand in starting AA, once told this story. He came for his regular, weekly therapy session with the great master, but on this particular day, he was tremendously excited because he’d just received a huge promotion at his place of work. He’d been made Vice President of Something-or-Other and when he arrived at his doctor’s office he was flying really high. But he could tell from the look on the old doctor’s face that he wasn’t nearly as thrilled with his good news as he was. When he asked Jung why that was, the old man replied, “Because I’m afraid, son, that you’re not going to benefit very much from today’s session.”
You see, Jung knew that there comes a time in life when we humans learn our lessons mostly from the pains and the disappointments of our lives. Jung wasn’t a pessimist, but he was wise. He knew the human ego much prefers to be in a state of inflation. To be filled with the thrill of victory rather than deflated with the sting of defeat. But he also knew that we’re not very open to learning life’s lessons when “we’re doing just fine.” When our egos are all puffed up – and when we’re the ones who, as we say in the program are, “large and in charge.”
Jung knew his patient needed to have his inflated egos brought down to a more humble, and to a more teachable size. He knew he needed this especially since his patient was an alcoholic whose very life depended on his having room in his soul for God’s grace to enter. The pains of life help bring that about. That doesn’t mean we can’t get promoted or that we can’t have fun. It just means, after a certain age, those things have very little to teach us in the ways of wisdom.
My own wise counselor gave me a pretty good insight into all of this when he once asked me, “Bill, what’s the term we use for a psychiatrist?” I finally thought I knew the answer to one of his tricky questions, so I answered, “You call ‘em: shrinks?” But then he fired another question at me before I could bask in the GLORY of getting one right! He asked me, “And just what do you think it is they’re supposed to shrink?” When I looked a little blank – he gave me the answer, “It’s our inflated egos! That’s what needs shrinking!” And then, he laughed!
There’s a guy who’d been in therapy for well over ten years. And for ten long years, in one form or another, he was forever asking his therapist the same question: “Why me? Why me, Doc? Why’d all this bad stuff have to happen to me?” But after ten years of costly analysis, he finally arrived at the answer to his question. He realized: “Why not me!”
We alcoholics and addicts are really no different from all the other people in this world. We don’t suffer any more than many do. We just take it all a whole lot more personal - and we complain about it a whole lot more loudly! We didn’t get picked on by God to go through the hell we’ve all been through. Life did that to us – and life is hard. We need to learn that before we die!
We’re each only one of some six billion human beings here to live, and to learn, and to join in this mystery we call life. We’re here to live life on life’s terms; not on our own. We’re here to learn from our suffering the spiritual lessons and the wisdom – that pain and sometimes pain alone comes to teach us.
Sometimes, I think it’s really a shame that we recovering people leave off the last half of that Serenity Prayer. It has some real wisdom to teach us, maybe as much or more than the first. The remainder of that prayer goes like this:
“Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it.
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will;
So that I will be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
When I look back on the pain in my life I now know how very much it has helped me to do whatever growing I’ve done. It couldn’t have happened any other way and still have been my life. There’s still more to go and more to grow through. I don’t know that I’ll be well enough to laugh at them all as they come; but each day I’m getting just a little closer to understanding the laughter of that man who helped initiate me into this tribe.
Send comments, questions and treatment scholarship donations to:
Fr. Bill Wigmore, President/CEO / Austin Recovery / 8402 Cross Park Dr. / Austin, Texas 78754
or email: BillW@AustinRecovery.org