Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Devastating Weakness…
Take note of what is being talked about in “accepting our devastating weakness and all its consequences.”* Take note of what that means in so many areas of our lives… What is that we are accepting? We are accepting that we can go into trauma memory, into trauma pain, and we can feed that pain and that trauma into any area of our lives.
Like driving… we see someone we think doesn’t drive well, cuts us off, and they’re driving a nice car so they’re a jerk, an arrogant butthead… Then maybe we realize that we don’t have a car that nice, and why not? Why does that inconsiderate person have a nice car and not us? Why is it that all the people who have nice cars are such arrogant, mean people? And then come the thoughts, “Well, I didn’t grow up in a nice family that had money.” Which spins further into, “I’m not around successful people. Why are other people born into good fortune and I’m not? It sure would be nice to have that network of a family to go to get help when I need it.”
The devastating part of this thinking is that now our soul is gone. Now we’ve lost all hope and we’re victims again. The weakness is that we can now be off the highway, but then our girlfriend or spouse doesn’t respond the right way and we question why we don’t have a better relationship. “Why doesn’t this person appreciate who I am?” Which then leads to beating ourselves up about being bad providers or being bad people… Then we’re questioning ourselves about all our failings at being a good partner in a relationship… Going back in time to find all of our failings one by one… And our soul is gone again… In another area… And this all takes place in five minutes… And we’re attracted to this feeling of being in regret and that we’re not a good person… We’re attracted to the trauma of victim-hood and it will touch every area of our lives.
Our devastating weakness and all its consequences is the minute we start looking at what people should or should not be doing, it triggers everything that should or should not have happened in our lives. And though we lose our soul in this process, we keep feeding fuel on the fire with thoughts about the pain we’ve been in… Which then projects into the future… We’ve lost our soul… We’re devastated and we don’t even recognize it. We’re uncomfortable, in anxiety, bitterness and remorse because we’ve gone through our past and resurrected every trauma there… And now we go forward with that same trauma and attach it to our future. This is the weakness that starts to synergistically project ahead: “Man, it’s never going to happen. Everything will just keep falling apart. How am I going to put it together?” It starts coming back at us again.
We’ve put fuel on the fire and we’re projecting backwards and forwards with trauma. It is all triggered by our not accepting that we can’t think from that area of trauma ever again… Not accepting that when times are hard that this is not the time for us review our lives and everyone in our lives. This is not the time because it will send us into a hole where we freeze and can’t move.
If we’re in the trauma, we can’t look at the trauma because it will devastate us, steal our soul and then our weakness is that we will carry it into every area of our lives. We have to wind down, get quiet. Then if that trauma is truly important to be reviewed, then it should still be there to be dealt with on an objective level now; to be cleaned out and to allow us to come to peace with that memory. We can’t live in chaos and injury and expect to create order. Or expect that others owe it to us to put that order into place. It doesn’t work that way.
That is where the devastating weakness takes us… Into trauma pain and memory, into regret, remorse, bitterness, envy, anger and self-condemnation. It takes us into victim-hood and creates a world we live in where everyone owes us a break or a hand up for our pain… We project that into our future where nothing will come to pass because no one helped us when we needed it… These are the consequences of our devastating weakness: A world with a hopeless future because of a past that we don’t want to accept.
This is accepting our devastating weakness and all its consequences… That we cannot nor do we want to ever reference our memories and their effects again without guidance and humility. Accepting that we by ourselves and of ourselves cannot clearly see the assets and opportunities from the trauma that we had in our lives… Accepting that everything that has happened to this point is for purpose and to bring us to a place of peace and fulfillment. To live in a world that has order and purpose and fulfillment provided that we accept that we can no longer trust what comes to us alone, from our memory, as a reference point for who we are today and what we are capable of today as the new person reborn everyday.
Much love,
K.C.
*from the “12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous”
