Category Archives: Critical thinking

Trust Your Gut

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There is nothing mystical about hunches, intuition, and trusting your gut. We are all the sum total of millions–billions–of experiences, and we remember most of them on some level. We are well-equipped to let our subconscious minds help us out with problems, armed as they are with that wealth of experience.

But we often–if not usually–force ourselves to ignore those gut feelings, the feeling that something is just sort of “icky.” We want to do something, say something, buy something, to fill that empty place inside, and we think up all sorts of ways to justify our wants to ourselves and ignore the message that our subconscious mind is sending loud and clear, if we choose to hear it. Then we go on with the self-deception and make up ways to justify whatever it is to others–our partner, our business associates, our sponsors, our friends but, ultimately, to ourselves.

Good, healthy ideas seldom need justification. Feeling a need to explain, to justify, should tell us that something’s wrong somewhere. It may simply be a neurotic need on our part to assure ourselves and everyone else that we’re really OK, but there’s also an excellent possibility that we’re about to venture where we ought to fear to tread, guided by the child inside who is telling us it’s OK because I Want, I Want, I Want. In either case, there are two possible clues: the urge to hide whatever it is, or the urge to justify it. Both should set off our alarms.

An oldie, but a goody: Concerning a “higher power”

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I heard another newcomer at a meeting complaining about how she’d had God shoved down her throat by her parents, and she wasn’t having any part of this Higher Power stuff, blah, blah, blah.  I find this sort of thing tedious, to put it lightly, having listened to and read about it frequently over the years.  Even when I was claiming to be an atheist I thought it was shallow and ill-considered.  So, since it’s my blog, I thought I’d write about my take on the issue.

It seems to me that if there is a Higher Power, in the sense of someone or something unknowable that affects the physical world, then it must be right here, right now.  I have to admit that I have yet to develop that faith.  Frankly, I find the concept of some metaphysical being busy watching over the entire universe a bit difficult to fathom, while still entertaining the idea that I can appeal to that entity for help with my little problems.  

On the other hand, I find the idea of a god within me, you, and perhaps every other living thing or even the Earth itself not only (remotely) possible in a physical sense  — or at least not impossible — but rather pleasant.  The idea of something that permeates my world and provides a gentle push occasionally to keep things running smoothly for those who wish to have things run smoothly is comforting and engenders hope.  I hope that I may come to believe in that sense, someday.

That said, I most emphatically do believe in a higher power in recovery.  The fellowships, their members and my other supports are my higher power at present, and for now they seem to be enough.  Their collective wisdom provides guidance, and their attempts  and successes in sobriety and recovery give me hope.  They’re there when I call on them — not always individually, but invariably in the collective — to provide the sympathetic ear and moral support that I need to further my own recovery.  And I am here for them, which makes me part of someone else’s higher power, I suppose.

That being the case, I want to register my strong opinion that using the “God Issue” as an excuse for turning away from the 12-step fellowships is simply an excuse for not pursuing recovery.  In my 1/3-century-plus of hanging around AA, NA and some of the other A’s, I have never been told by anyone whose opinion I thought worthwhile that I was required to believe in someone’s God-with-a-capital-G in order to stay sober or work a program of recovery.  That is borne out in the basic texts of every fellowship that I have encountered, if a person cares to read beyond the “G-word.”

We don’t have to believe in God to work a good program of recovery.  Period.  But we DO have to believe in some power beyond ourselves, because the humility to accept new ideas is absolutely essential in order to drag ourselves out of the morass of our own twisted thinking and into a place where we can begin to change. As an old sponsor of mine used to say, “There may or may not be a God, but if there is, you ain’t it!”

So spare me the stories of the Gawd of your childhood and the atrocities committed in His name, then or now.  Spare me the sophomoric, angst-filled testimony of how you can’t “get into” AA or whatever because you have to believe in god.  One more time: You can work a perfectly good program without believing in God, regardless of what the Bible-thumpers in the rooms might say.  As is announced at meetings, the opinions there are those of the individual members, not the fellowship as a whole.

The only higher power you MUST have is the people who will help you drag your sorry butt out of the hole of addiction and into sobriety.  If you get careless and start believing in something else — well, I envy you.

Think About What You’re Posting

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I was just browsing Instagram and found the following:

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”

I see this kind thing all too frequently. It’s indicative of the lack of attention we give to the things we post and the messages we send. I’m sure that the woman who posted it saw the aphorism someplace and thought “Oh, inspiring,” then posted it without further thought.

But what is the underlying message? If you get discouraged, quit; it isn’t going to happen. If we applied that philosophy to life most of us addicts would be dead now (or wish we were) and very little would get accomplished in general.

We – all of us – need to be mindful of the messages that we send to others by our posts, the things we say, and the ways we behave, even when we’re just fooling around. I don’t mean we shouldn’t share things we find inspirational, nor have bumper stickers that reflect our real feelings, nor goof on stuff and have a little fun, but merely that we should look deeply at why these things appeal to us and consider what impressions, perhaps even impact, they might have on others.

I don’t believe the example above is going to destroy anyone’s life, but it doesn’t say a whole lot about the deep thinking of whomever originated the phrase and it’s a perfect example of the stuff we see on the Web. We’re inundated with posts that the perpetrator failed to think about or check out before laying them on people who might not bother to either. Like sheep they repost, and thus pass on the deception or misunderstanding to others. Much of the damage done by this sort of thoughtless posting and reposting is directly reflected in the dissonance of our current national discourse. Facebook isn’t responsible for our unwillingness to think critically; we are.

We human beings believe what makes us comfortable and rarely bother to check out things that seem to agree with what we think we know. Unfortunately, that makes us easy to lead around by our feelings instead of our intellects. We need to be mindful of the difference between opinions and facts.

As John F. Kennedy said so memorably,

“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”