ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 247: Baby Steps
When I write, I commune with myself. I find it easier to commune with myself than to commune with others because communing demands honesty.
My Twelve-Step friends are helping me with this challenge. I gather with these fifteen or twenty people each week to share whatever is on our minds and in our hearts.
After the big meeting, five or six of us come together in a closer circle for what I call our Round Table of Grace meeting, the talk even more revealing as we answer questions in Al-Anon’s Fourth Step workbook. I am being revealed to myself.
Before these Twelve-Step meetings, I had no accurate self-concept. Through our communing I’ve come to realize I’ve acted in impulsive, invasive, arrogant, and needy ways most of my life. In other words: I was immature. I habitually interrupted people in mid-sentence, thinking that what I had to say was of far more import. This is acting in an impulsive, invasive, arrogant, and needy way all at the same time.
I grew up the second of seven children. No doubt I felt lost and wanted to be recognized. I needed attention, approval, affection. I went about getting it in hurtful ways.
Combined with this was an absolute horror of being criticized. My fragile ego couldn’t bear that, so I drew the curtain on criticism of any kind. I may have heard it, but it was as if I hadn’t. And I tended to drop the person who leveled the criticism.
Why did he or she criticize me? He or she must be jealous! Therefore, the criticism was unjust, and it didn’t change me. Why would I want to change? Wasn’t I perfectly okay the way I was? Change implied there was something wrong with the way I was, and I couldn’t accept that.
My Twelve-Step friends are helping me to see myself objectively. They’re helping me to grow. Just yesterday Hannah pointed out that I had invaded a boundary set by another Twelve-Step friend when I asked him to elaborate on something he said weeks before that began with “I wish my father — ”, then he’d stopped himself, saying: “Anytime I start a sentence with ‘I wish’ or ‘If only’ or ‘I should’, I stop myself. It’s not going to lead me to a productive place.” But for whatever reason, these weeks later I ask him to finish that sentence. “He did finish it,” Hannah said. “He finished it the way he wanted to finish it.”
So, I’m learning aspects of my inner and outer self I’ve avoided or denied or twisted or rationalized. I’m learning to see my behavior with clarity and objectivity. With the help of my Twelve-Step friends, my thinking and behavior are changing — and I welcome the change.
“Baby steps,” we say to each other.
I’m clumsy still, and I take spills, but I am learning to walk.
