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I was at a meeting the other day where the topic was this sentence:
Working the program—especially the daily inventory of Step Ten—helps us make our way through the funhouse of personal responsibility.
I immediately gravitated toward the last five words: the funhouse of personal responsibility.
First of all, funhouses kind of suck, don’t they? Every carnival I have ever gone to, I immediately regret burning tickets on going into one.
But think about a funhouse for a second, specifically the section that always has the wild mirrors. Now imagine you put something or somebody in there who you are upset with—for the sake of this example, let’s use the biggest a*****e from your job, Biff.
So you’re looking at 25 versions of Biff. One is real. The others are bigger or smaller or fatter or uglier or sillier than the real one. You’re surrounded by 25 Biffs, only one of which is the real one. You can probably see where this is going.
It reminded me how hard the truth is to know, and to digest, and to have good perspective on. The truth is in that funhouse of our brain, where we inflate it and then deflate it and then reinflate it and then, hopefully, eventually find what the actual truth is.
When I get into a significant disagreement with someone, I walk right into a funhouse inside my brain. I usually immediately decide the other person sucks… then I cool down and take a look at my role in the disagreement and decide maybe I was the one who sucks… then I settle on both of us sucking… then I ultimately land on trying to figure out the most productive way to resolve the disagreement. That often involves me saying, “Hey, sorry about earlier, I definitely overreacted. What if we did this idea as a solution?” Then I pitch a compromise of some sort.
To give a specific example, I had a disagreement with my wife about a financial situation a few months ago. Romance and finance stuff can be extremely toxic—every difference of opinion can sometimes feel like it is covered in barbed wire. I make mountains of molehills about the other person, and I make my mountains into molehills.
I ended up leaving the house to go to the gym, and I was hot with anger. I called one program person and found myself spewing out the whole argument, but I had polished up the story a little and I told it from my perspective. A few minutes in, I realized I wasn’t harmlessly venting—I was justifying and rationalizing the very best version that my funhouse mirror was spitting out.
I worked out, which helped burn off some of the frustration, and then I talked to a second recovery friend. That was also beneficial because I found myself not launching into my whole court case of why I was innocent and my spouse was guilty. That’s what the funhouse mirrors often do—they set up right and wrong, and I always end up becoming the hero of my own story, which means there has to be a villain.
By the time I got home, I’d say 90 percent of my frustration was gone. I’d burned off some of it on the treadmill, for sure, but I also benefited greatly from talking to two sober friends and getting a little closer to the right reflection from within those funhouse mirrors. I ended up spending a little time thinking about what that right reflection looks like, and came to a few conclusions.
One is that I was too hot under the collar; I can’t talk in a healthy way or process your words in a healthy way if I am boiling hot.
Secondly, the funhouse mirror often takes a real problem that is six inches tall, and it shows me the same problem at Shaquille O’Neal’s size… much, much bigger and daunting than it actually is.
Thirdly, I was able to think about how we might move forward, and that’s what we did.
I would love to end this by saying, “Well, I learned I am never going into a figurative funhouse mirror room in my head ever again!” But that’s probably unrealistic. I think the starting point would just be to have that visual in my head on a regular basis, that my brain in a funhouse and that I always walk into the funhouse… but I’ve hated funhouses my whole life, so let’s get the hell out as soon as possible and start looking for the exit.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
OLDIE BUT GOODIE
Two drunks are sharing a bottle, sitting on the beach looking up into the darkened sky. "Hav'ya ever seen a more beautiful sunset?" says the first.
"Yer drunk," says the second. "That's the sunrise!"
So the first answers, "Yer drunk. Tha's the sunset!" and they argue:
"SunRISE!"
"SunSET!"
"SunRISE!"
"SunSET!"
. . . until a third drunk staggers up, sits beside them, and begins to share their bottle.
"'Scuse me," says the first drunk to the new drinker. "Izzat the sunrise or the sunset?"
"Why ya askin' me?" says the new drunk. "I'm not from around here."
(Credit: Grapevine,August 2009, by Jay M. of Shelby, NC)
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