Thinking Less of Yourself, Thinking of Yourself Less, Or...

A world of harsh and extreme self-deprecation awaits the newcomer to many traditional 12-step groups. The Big Book of AA (on page 62) identifies the nature of alcoholism as

Selfishness - self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.

So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help.

So the image of the alcoholic/addict is that of someone who is deeply and helplessly self-centered, someone doomed to feel and cause an awful lot of pain until they open themselves up to divine intervention. It’s easy for me to imagine a new-comer walking into their first meeting and walking out feeling even worse and never ever going back.

The prescription for the sorry situation of the alcoholic is “humility”, a term often referenced but not explicitly defined anywhere in official literature. A quote attributed to C.S. Lewis is often passed around in meetings and offers a decent summary of what 12-step groups generally mean by “humility” - “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less”.

AA even has an official prayer asking God for help with this, the third step prayer:

God, I offer myself to Thee – to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of Life.

In this prayer, “the self” is something that binds and prevents the supplicating alcoholic from doing God’s Will. This image was available to me in secular AA too, and it’s one that I ran with for a long time without actually getting anywhere.

I thought that the way out of my misery was to focus on making literally anybody else besides myself happy, since I thought that my self and my desires were fundamentally corrupt and completely irredeemable. Lots of angry and hurting people had lashed out at me for hurting them and tried to offload their pain by putting it back into me, often including a lot of telling me what I really am (selfish) in the process. Focusing on making literally anyone else happy was in some sense a step in a more connected and stable direction, but it was also mostly a reaction to all the negative experiences I’d had rather than an expression of connection and generosity. I lived in constant fear of being punished and told I was a bad person, and desperately trying to self-sacrifice myself away was a prime way to feel like I was avoiding that.

Self-neglect also proved to be a very unsustainable foundation for generosity. If any needs or conflicting desires presented themselves to me I took them to be corrupt and just more of that “bondage of self” that had gotten me into so much trouble over the years. But, of course, if I wasn’t meeting my own needs then it meant that the only way they were met was if someone else met them for me, which is a very difficult thing for even the most devoted and generous person to do, so my own needs wound up being generally unmet and I wound up with very little energy or emotional availability to be doing all this generous-looking stuff in the first place.

I found that (for me) the “self-obsession” that traditional AA derides came about because I had a lot of deep and critical unmet needs, needs that kept demanding my attention and shaping my behavior whether I liked it or not. It was automatic in the way that pulling my singed hand away from a hot stove is automatic. The only way to stop my self-serving thoughts and behaviors was to figure out what unmet needs were running the show and figure out an alternative way to meet those needs.

Right now I think that self-esteem is like food - I need it whether I like it or not, and too much of it or the wrong kind of it can land me in trouble. Nobody else can grant it to me on my behalf, so I might as well take the lead on making sure I have it. Nothing else can really put me in the position of being the person I’m working so hard to be.