Learning to Walk on Water

Learning to Walk on Water

I stumbled upon a group of people in the rooms of my twelve-step program that are just that little bit different.  Different enough for me to listen just that little bit more attentively.  They have a very specific and intensive way of looking at the twelve steps.  The idea is to go through the steps in a very disciplined and self-revelatory fashion.  I refer to it as the masters degree of step work.  I won't go into detail about their process but suffice it to say that my sponsor required that I dedicate at least an hour a day to my recovery work while I was working on step four, which I diligently did for four months straight.
The fourth step involves making a "fearless and thorough moral inventory of ourselves."  It is often thought of as the resentment step.  There are a lot of things that made up the work I did, but when it came time to write the resentments I had no problem listing the things I felt people had done TO me.  But once I was finished with that, I was told to look at each resentment and turn it around, to look at it from another angle.  Basically I needed to see either what my part in the situation was, or what I saw in that resentment toward another that I didn't like about me.
In most cases I really didn't have much trouble figuring out what my part was.  For example I got yelled at as a child by my grandmother's neighbor.  I was picking blackberries off of her tree with some other children in the neighborhood.  I held a resentment about that all my life.  When I looked at it from her point of view, it was pretty simple to see that my part of it was that I stole her blackberries.  Pretty basic example.  In others it wasn't as easy.  It wasn't always a simple equation of tit for tat but I worked at it and was able to figure it out for all the resentments... Except one.
I got stuck on my brother.  I got stuck looking at that dark, sad set of memories and was blinded by the horror of it all.  How was I going to take my resentment toward him for molesting me and turn it around?  It seemed impossible.  I was a child, I had done nothing wrong, nothing to invite the abuse, nothing to deserve such soul-destroying treatment.  I remember pacing back and forth looking at the sheet of paper and shaking my head in frustration and anger.  I nearly gave up, I nearly walked away and didn't go back to that twelve step meeting.  It would have been easy to throw my hands up and say this was all bullshit, but I didn't.  Running away from discomfort has been my MO all my life and I just didn't have that option anymore.  It has never really served me well.
Fortunately I didn't give up and after talking to "Joe" for a while, it came into focus for me.  I thought about how much I crave forgiveness from those I love for the mistakes I made during my active addiction.  It occurred to me that I had been ill.  I had done some awful things as a result of that illness.  Then I thought to myself, for someone to have done what my brother did, well... they would have to be ill themselves.  I consider him to be sick and he did something abhorrent as a direct result of that sickness.  I wrote this down on the other side of the paper to the resentment and there was the answer in black and white.  I was sick, he was sick.  I deserve forgiveness, he deserves forgiveness.  If I want to be forgiven, I must first learn to forgive.
There have been many gifts I have received of late but this is the biggest one by far and the sheer beauty of it is that I gave to to myself.  I can look now at the two, five-subject notebooks that I filled with resentments, hurt, fear and anger and marvel at how heavy that all was to carry around with me for so many years.  Is it all gone?  No, but a lot of it is.  I feel lighter and seeing the situation with my brother from this angle has been like learning to walk on water.  No, I am not trying to compare myself to Jesus in any way, but I am beginning to rise above my own troubled seas and find a new way to navigate.