Anderson, South Carolina
A first-line treatment for retinal detachment consists of burning them with lasers. If it were not for the possibility of frying my retinas with argon gas lasers, I would have gone blind decades ago. A genetic curse in my family tree endowed many of us with retinas as stable as wilted lettuce. Lattice degeneration of our retinas causes the appearance of small holes which are eventually penetrated by vitreous humor in the eyeball. The result is spontaneous retinal detachment followed by darkness. Repair constitutes a surgical emergency of the highest order to avoid blindness.
I was in Russia two years ago when I ‘popped’ my retinas for the third time. I experienced much angst in figuring out what to do about my urgent dilemma. Visa challenges and other contingencies forced me to the higher-risk decision of waiting until I got home three weeks later to have surgery. I made it a point to take lots of photographs; it might be the last time I could do so. I had surgery the day I arrived home.
When a carefully-guided laser burns into a retina the result is formation of adhesions. The scar tissue resulting from the heat acts as an effective spot weld, holding the retina firmly in place. There are at least a thousand of these little spot welds all over both my retinas. I’ve had the good fortune to visit ten countries in the intervening two years since my last welding job, taking twenty thousand photographs of everything from the pyramids of antiquity to the most sublime of natural phenomenon.
For nearly four decades I’ve had this genetic eight ball in my life. For the same amount of time argon gas lasers have kept me seeing many of the things that matter most in life; the face of a dear friend, the ignition of a fiery sunset, the shimmering of a platinum moon, where to place my foot on a five-thousand foot granite wall.
In recent years another form of spot welding has proven far more important in my life. Life circumstances far more challenging than my wilted-lettuce eyeballs brought me to embrace the tenets of twelve step recovery, a journey on which I’ve gained life-saving knowledge of how to spot weld my soul.
Evidence is ever mounting for the primary role of unmitigated anger and repressed emotions in the genesis of diverse catastrophic disease and premature death. Seventy-five years ago a group of alcoholics got together and wrote a book on the spiritual aspects of alcoholism, drug addiction, and many maladies of life. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous with its declaration that stuffed anger, resentments, is the number one killer of alcoholics has sold untold millions of copies. Extensive work in the seventy-five years since this declaration was made suggests it’s a small leap to declare resentments to be the number one killer of all people.
Stuffed emotion, especially anger in the form of smoldering resentment is more corrosive and threatening to our state of being than any kind of physical disease. Those enlightened post-Depression alcoholics of the 1930s went on to state emphatically “From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mental and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically ... this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit ... If we were to live we had to be free of anger.”
These alcoholics quickly found that repressed emotions gave power to the people around them. “We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had the power to actually kill.” Seventy-five years later psychoneuroimmunologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have well proven the lethal power of resentment, clearly demonstrating the neurophysiology of it.
“How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered but how?” Medical experts have for decades been declaring the immutable consequences of genetics, the inexorable outcomes of bad childhoods, the curse of toxic parenting, and the hazards of bad environments. Could a bunch of drunks have found the answer, one eluding experts? Time suggests they did.
“This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done’.”
It really is this simple. It’s essentially impossible to hate other individuals while praying for their well being. Recovery is entirely about learning new ways of thinking. From new ways of thinking we learn new ways of behaving. Our emotions line up with our new thoughts and actions. No longer tyrannized by repressed untended emotions, we enter into new ways of living. Rather than harboring corrosive resentments we ask for the blessing of those who would offend us. It’s that simple.
In recovery we often speak of having a simple program for complicated people. As emerging medical research finds out just how extraordinarily complicated we are, how unresolved emotions can generate catastrophic disease, we learn the simple way to spot weld the holes corroded into our souls by anger and resentment. Twenty centuries ago the same message in as many words was written down in Greek.
“Do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you, and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do no turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy’, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
It just might be the most clarifying thing you ever do.
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