Originally posted on 07-19-07:
About 6 years into my AA experience, I got very angry at my parents. I had read a couple of books by John Bradshaw, popular in certain segments of AA at the time, and I got so angry I called my parents and told them how sick they were, and how their sickness had infected me and made me sick and miserable. They had no idea what I was talking about, but they were apologetic, sorry I was so unhappy, etc.
My anger got less intense over time, but what eventually eliminated it was a scientific understanding of human behavior.
Many people have an aversive reaction to the word “science,” but we are all scientists, whether we recognize it or not. Everyone who follows a recipe, makes a phone call, drives a car or flies in an airplane is doing an experiment. They follow directions, and if they get the expected outcome, it means that the directions reliably lead to predictable results—that’s all science is, developing recipes for reliable results. The theories of science, ideas about why things happen reliably, are only useful if they suggest ideas that can be tested to find new, reliable, and hitherto unknown recipes. If a theory doesn’t suggest any testable ideas, it is useless, and if a theory is developed which explains all the previous results and leads to still more new testable ideas, it is more useful than the old theory and replaces it. That is why science is always changing its explanations—it finds more useful ones.
Thanks to my history, I have always been interested in science—sometimes more than others—and my ability to apply it to my own life and problems has improved over the years.
As science has improved its understanding of the workings of the brain, it has become totally obvious to neuroscientists, and to anyone who follows the literature—even the popular media versions—that no one makes themselves who they are. Brains are very complex systems, and given their individual, biological attributes, and the environments they are placed in, they evaluate information and come to conclusions without there being any agent, or self, in control.
My parents didn’t make themselves into the people they were. They were born and raised in southern Alabama, in a primitive Christian culture, with very little formal education—third grade for Dad and tenth for Mom—and it makes as much sense to be angry at them for being shaped by that environment as it would to be angry at them for being white. There was nothing in them that could have altered the reactions of their particular brains to the particular environments they grew up in.
Certainly who they were had consequences for me and their other children—some pleasant and some unpleasant—but there was no way they could make themselves different than who they were.
If anger at people for being who they are is irrational, forgiving them for who they are is equally irrational. What sense does it make to forgive someone for having one leg shorter than the other?
Of course, my irrational anger and resentment toward them were conditioned over a long period of time, and those reactions don’t disappear immediately. It’s as difficult as breaking any other bad habit when you realize that it’s causing you harm.
Fortunately, or so it seems to me, my interest in this area of science continued, and the more convinced I became of the science, the more my reactions were defused. I came to see the scientific explanation as applying to everyone, not just my parents, and came to see that everyone’s reactions to me, and mine to them, were the result of circumstances over which no one had control. If someone dislikes me, it is no more their fault—or mine—than it is the stream’s fault for following the crevice in the rock, or the rock’s fault for having a crevice in that particular place.
Everything that is—human or otherwise—results from the playing out of natural forces in varying permutations and combinations. The possibilities are endless in their complex variety—no two sunsets are the same, even though they are all made of light, dust, clouds and wind.
We are all blameless: deserving no anger, needing no forgiveness.
These Thorns Are All Your Fault
