Newsgroups: alt.recovery
From: apurmal@us.oracle.com
Subject: Re: i do it for myself
Organization: Oracle Corporation, USA
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 15:31:02 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
              at Oracle Corporation.  The opinions expressed are those
              of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.

Gabriel,

     Thank you for your post, I enjoy seeing posts from fellow ACOA's
here.  I like the posts which have been followed your original post.

     Christina, thank you for so eloquently expressing the ideas of
powerlessness and the role of a higher power.  You put into words
things I feel.  I like how you described your higher power.  It
reminds me of a program friend who addresses her higher self as her
higher power.

     So , that leaves me only one thing to answer from the original
post.

>                                                            How can I
> hand over the driver's seat to an entity that I don't even know
> exists?

     For me it's not so much having to hand over the driver's seat as
it is not having to always pick the right road.  I used to agonize over
decisions wanting to make the "right one" so that I would maximize
the positive results.  Now I have faith that I can pick the one which
feels right.  I don't have to know what road I'm going to be taking
next week, next month or next year.  It opens me up to experience
things I never would have thought or imagined I'd experience.  I no
longer have to control every aspect of my life, I can go with the flow.

     Sometimes its really frightening for me to pick the decision which
feels right.  Sometimes it isn't fun at all, but it turns out to be
the right decision most of the time.  I no longer spend the present
plotting the future or regretting the past and missing the present.
I know that if the decision feels right at the time, I trust it was
the right one for me to make.  For some people this is intuitive, but
growing up in the house of control I did, this is very counter-intuitive.

     Some of the replies to Gabriel's not bring me back to thoughts I
had during the discussion of "Beyond the 12 Steps".  I got a new view
of the 12 steps and how they fit into recovery in general.  I realized
that the 12 steps are just one representation of higher concepts and
that those concepts can be expressed in many different ways.  The
expression of those concepts which work best for a person depends on
their paradigm, their situation.  For many alcoholics AA's 12 steps,
traditions and slogans are the best for them.

     I thought of a parallel which works for me.  If I think of the
recovery concepts like calculus, I see AA like applied buisness
calculus.  In learning buisness calculus, you don't really need to
know how the calculus works, or why it works.  When you trust it and
apply it to your buisness problems it works.  The same can be said
for calculus applied to physics problems or electronics problems.
It works for each of these different areas, but one needn't have any
knowlege of how it works for another for it to be useful.

     Anyway, I know I get a lot out of this newsgroup.  If there did
exist an alt.aa, I would probably read it as well.  I have ACoA and
a CoDependancy issues and am not a member of AA, but I do get a lot
out of the posts from AA people.  If they dismiss or dispute something
outside their paradigm that I accept or believe, I can leave it.  I
find that take what I like/need and leave the rest works for me very
well here.

     Thanks to all who post here.  Although I may not write here very
often I do get a lot from reading the posts here.

peace,

Tony
Newsgroups: alt.recovery