We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Oomph. This is a big one.
We want to find exactly how, when, and where our natural desires have warped us. We wish to look squarely at the unhappiness this has caused others and ourselves. By discovering what our emotional deformities are, we can move towards their correction.
My warped natural desires are:
To be completely independent and self-sufficient in my emotional and financial needs. This arises from distrust of the other.
To have sex without attachment. One would think this manifests in lots of casual sex (I wish!), but it actually causes the opposite. I am celibate for years at a time because sex creates attachment and thus I avoid it.
We wish to look squarely at the unhappiness this has caused others and ourselves.
In my quest for "financial independence" I have come to rely on help from friends to keep myself afloat. I've stayed with friends for months on end, I've asked them for money.
I just notice how my warped natural desires cause exactly the opposite effect. Wanting causal sex leads to no sex. Wanting financial independence makes me dependent on my friends, not out of need but out of vanity (I only work for clients if I'm desperate).
We have drunk to drown feelings of fear, frustration, and depression.
Nod.
We have drunk to escape the guilt of passions, and then have trunk again to make more passions possible.
Not working because I'm high, then getting high because I feel guilty about not working. Also: admiring female beauty.
We have drunk for vainglory—that we might the more enjoy foolish dreams of pomp and power.
THIS. I resolve all of my problems, and even the worlds' problems while I'm high. Somehow, when I come down, the solution to these problems proves inadequate or I find myself unmotivated to carry them out.
If temperamentally we are on the depressive side, we are apt to be swamped with guilt and self-loathing.
Ouch.
For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for drinking, and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct.
Argh, difficult to look at, but I must admit: sometimes I get high in order to not care about not doing something. Then I justify getting high because trauma.
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.
Yes, you become insensitive (yet not immune) to disturbance.
And with the genuine alarm at the prospect of work, we stay lazy. We loaf and procrastinate, or at best work grudgingly and under half steam. These fears are the termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of whatever sort of life we try to build.
Ouch.
By now the newcomer has probably arrived at the following conclusions: that his character defects, representing instincts gone astray, have been the primary cause of his drinking and his failure at life; that unless he is now willing to work hard at the elimination of the worst of these defects, both sobriety and peace of mind will still elude him; that all the faulty foundation of his life will have to be torn out and build anew on bedrock.
So resolving my unhealthy desire for independence and non-attachment will also resolve my habit.
The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them too much.
It seems to me that I've succeeded in recognizing it, I hope this doesn't come from pride.
[writing questions and answers] will be an aid to clear thinking and honest appraisal. It will be the first tangible evidence of our complete willingness to move forward.
Ahoy! At least I'm doing something right. I'm surely not being as comprehensive as I could be, but I feel everything boils down to a single conclusion: In feeling betrayed by the other, I sought to go at it completely on my own. But we all have very real needs of intimacy and connection, so I will play strange games. I invariably make good friends and sometimes lovers as I'm about to leave a city. I use weed to cope with my loneliness.