OKaysez

 

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Made A Decision

(94)

                            The Dubious Luxury of Normal Folks 

Alcoholics are skilled in the art of resentment. We drunks know how to nurse grudges, stoke envy, harbor bitter thoughts, and also how to thoroughly enjoy being restless, irritable and discontented. 

We do these things in sobriety because they are familiar. It's always easier to fall back into old behavior than it is to embrace change. Lasting sobriety, however, requires us to back away from old bad behaviors. It says so all through our AA literature, including this passage from the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions:

In A.A. we slowly learned that something had to be done about our vengeful resentments, self-pity, and unwarranted pride. We had to see that every time we played the big shot, we turned people against us. 

We had to see that when we harbored grudges and planned revenge for such defeats, we were really beating ourselves with the club of anger we had intended to use on others. We learned that if we were seriously disturbed, our first need was to quiet that disturbance, regardless of who or what we thought caused it.

Our Big Book (page 64) states: 

Resentment is the Number One offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else."

Destroys!!!  No words being minced here. 

When we hold onto our resentments we are in danger of returning to drinking. We are told this over and over by our sponsors and friends in recovery. Dealing with resentment is often the topic of AA meetings where we hear great truths from AA members in sayings like:

Resentment is like acid, eating away at the vessel it is stored in.

 "Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die." (Sent to me by my friend Dave M).

And then there's this one, for men only:  When a mosquito lands on your testicles there will be resentment at its choice for a landing field, but you will immediately learn to resolve resentments without resorting to anger or violence.

 Have you ever seen a drunk in the blink of an eye cop a resentment over another's behavior, switching instantly from happy drunk to angry drunk? It's a drunk's superpower and it's one we don't give up easily in recovery.

Drunk hangovers made us feel physically terrible. Sober drunks have emotional hangovers brought on by resentments and other negative emotions. 

When we give in to rage, or jealousy or fear - or when we wallow in resentments - we are going to feel like crap afterwards. Guaranteed.

So what actually does it mean to have and hold onto a resentment? It means we have intensely negative feelings about someone or something (usually someone) that we can't let go of and we replay our grievance over and over in our minds (often at 3 a.m.). 

We get a resentment when we think we've somehow been wronged. That then triggers feelings of anger, disappointment, sadness and depression. None of these feelings are helpful for staying sober.

Or we may think someone else doesn't deserve the wonderful wealthy life they have while we are living a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. We see them as happy every moment of their perfect lives and ourselves as just struggling to get by. Neither viewpoint is correct. It's called envy and it leads to unreasonable resentments. 

Newly sober alcoholics also have notoriously thin skin. We take offence easily and can often nurse a resentment against someone who is completely unaware of our hurt feelings, usually someone who never intended to hurt our feelings in the first place. 

We let them rent that angry space in our heads, torturing ourselves with bad feelings while they go blissfully on with their lives. 

Who is our resentment hurting here? Them? 

 But what about those people who knowingly have hurt us? Those who betrayed us? Insulted us? Gossiped about us? 

We have all probably experienced these kinds of things, but instead of being resentful we can ease these people out of our lives (yes, even family members) while remembering they wouldn't do these things were they not themselves sick and troubled people. Send them a prayer - and move on.

In our world-wide polarized political climate it is all too easy to join in the game of "them vs us." Biased reporting by television networks fuel political resentments and social media gives us all a platform on which to vent. A very little of this goes a long way and diplomacy on our part is called for. We are not expected to allow others to harm us, but we alcoholics can't afford to let ourselves get played by the process. 

Also, when we resent those who have more than us in life, we need to stop immediately and ask ourselves why? Do we have housing? Food? Are our bills paid? Do we have friends? Family? Sobriety? Surely sobriety has given us most of these? How much is enough? Where's our gratitude?

Quality living is not about fame or having lots of stuff, it's about enjoying what we do have and being grateful for it. Let us never forget those high profile "celebrities" who seemingly have "everything" and yet suddenly shock the world with their suicides. 

We cannot know the pain another person is in and holding a resentment against anyone just adds to their pain, overtly or covertly. It hurts us, too. It hardens us. It walls us off from compassion. Learning to pray for those who bother us in any way is a huge step toward self-improvement and self-care. It helps keep us sober, too. 

(My prayers were once made through gritted teeth and were of the "please let them get what they deserve" variety, but that doesn't matter. We learn to pray for others via that process and eventually come to mean it.)

So the next time we find ourselves giving head space to a resentment the best thing we can do is talk it over with our sponsor, our AA friends, and then share it (without naming names) in our home group. Sharing a problem halves a problem right away. We'll also get a ton of good advice on how to let that resentment go.