Character "Defects"

In 12-step meetings you usually introduce yourself with some version of “Hi, I’m {name} and I’m an alcoholic/addict/etc.”. It’s a way of asserting your own belonging to the group - nobody can do it for you, and nobody can take it away from you when you do.

Some people, though, have a lot more that they want to say about themselves in their introduction, and it’s almost always bad. They take the opportunity to lay out as many of their flaws as they can before they have to take a breath: “I’m an alcoholic, a lustful nymphomaniac womanizer, a lyin’ cheatin’ stealin’ selfish bastard who would be dead and in hell right now if not for the grace of my higher power whom I choose to call God.”

This practice rare and very much not encouraged, since in the context of a meeting it can come across as self-absorbed and divisive attention seeking. The best place to do that sort of thing is outside of a meeting, with trusted friends and your sponsor. The general practice of identifying what’s wrong with you - your “defects of character” - and confessing them to yourself and others (and God of course) is a staple of traditional 12 step culture. It’s intended to engender clarity and humility, to motivate the person in recovery to continually pray to be “relieved from the bondage of self”, since the self is what got you into all this mess in the first place.

That’s not the whole story nor the only story to be found in traditional AA, but it is a popular one - popular because it keeps a lot of people sober and motivated to keep coming back to AA. I also really, really don’t like it at all.

I don’t like the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with me, something that is beyond a human capacity to resolve. I do like to remember that we humans are finite, that we will constantly be bumping up against our limits in terms of what we can understand and accomplish, and that being perfect and all-powerful are laughably-implausible expectations for us. This image moves me to keep an open mind and to seek support when I need it; more importantly, this image moves me to keep moving, to keep seeking growth and challenge and change wherever I can find it.

I used to find the traditional image of humanity as fallen, broken, contemptible creatures compelling, at least when it came to myself and my own life; it explained everything that I had done and continued to struggle with, my many moral failures and the continued friction and frustration that persisted as the years went by. I was passive and pessimistic, doing what I saw possible but not seeing much that I could do, hoping someday that I would be “sober enough” to be healthy and happy.

I don’t think my pessimism got proven wrong, so much as I finally got the opportunity to drop it and try optimism on instead. I used to think that the righteous way of life was to take no initiative, to hold on to the painful wisdom I had about what would happen if I ever trusted myself again, that the point of my life was to prevent the old pain from ever coming back. Optimism, it turns out, has also done a fine job of not letting the old pain come back; it’s actually done a better job of it, since I’m no longer defining myself and what’s possible for my life in terms of what I said and did in the past.

It’s definitely true that I have had and continue to have patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting which can occur as unhelpful - some of those patterns can hurt myself and others, and quite a bit at that. The biggest thing that helps me change these patterns is not identifying with them, not seeing them as something essential about what and who I am. If I am, say, selfish, then the best thing I can do is try and obey someone or something else that can override my corrupt inner forces. If, instead, that’s not what I am, then there is always hope of doing something different, even if I haven’t figured out how to sustain that yet.

I’d assert that my most difficult friction-causing “traits” are there to serve a deeper, life-affirming purpose. They were survival mechanisms at one point, emergency ways of meeting my needs. I might say that my behavior is right or wrong, but my needs are just my needs - acting selfishly isn’t okay, but feeling insecure is totally understandable, as is feeling called to take action to feel more secure. The key to long-term change has been to figure out what the utterly acceptable and lovable needs are that are underneath the patterns of self that I want to change, and then figure out some new way of meeting those needs.

I’ve posted elsewhere about the difference between abstinence and sobriety - sobriety is the work you do to figure out what needs were met by drinking/drugging/whatever and getting new systems in place to meet those needs in order to stay abstinent long-term. Merely quitting drinking/drugging without doing that work has a lower chance of success - the behaviors might be stopped but the needs are still there, and unless there’s some work done to put new need-meeting behavior in place then the old behaviors are highly likely to come back, since (for better or for worse) they are at least in some way a solution.

I don’t know what the ultimate truth of humanity is, whether or not there’s some final nature that we have that defines what’s possible for us. What I would assert is this: whether we say we can change or whether we say we can’t, either way we’ll end up being right.