Since the first of the year, I have been very blessed to be involved in two Fourth Step groups with two groups of wonderful and very present recovering people. As I have gone through this spiritual inventory process with their support and guidance, I have become increasingly aware of how much my/our pasts leak and sometimes flood into our present. The unresolved traumas caused by others’ dysfunction is still active and controlling our current perceptions, reactions, and actions.
So with my many discussions with Kathy about my experiences with these awarenesses, I was preparing to chair this meeting, and I asked her to pick a topic. This is what she decided.
IS IT LIVE -- OR IS IT MEMOREX?
In the seventies and eighties there was a commercial for cassette tapes where a vocalist could hit a certain vocal pitch and break a glass. Then they would play a recording of her voice on a Memorex cassette tape, and it too would break a glass. So the advertising question was, “considering how exact the tape was in recording a voice, how do you know which is which – the live and present person, or the prerecorded version of her past voice?
IS IT LIVE -- OR IS IT MEMOREX? Doing a Searching Spiritual Inventory
I have done three in depth Fourth Step inventories and much Tenth Step work in the past twenty plus years. After the first Fourth Step, it has always been routine to review areas where I have done past spiritual work, as well as inventorying newer past and present material. As I have been doing this in this inventory, I have been re-experiencing patterns of survival from my past where a smaller traumatic or stressful event would occur and activate my mental tape player – suddenly I would be experiencing much more exaggerated trauma and stress.
A tape or tapes from the past would begin to play, I would be unable to realize that what I was hearing and experiencing inside my brain was not “live” – it was prerecorded tapes from past traumatic life events.
I would perceive, react, and act in delusional hallucinations, and never realize how insane, unconscious and destructive my perceptions and experiences were. Now, looking back with this inventory process and with major help from others, I am realizing more and more how insane the prerecorded tapes of my past have made me, and how they can and do affect me today.
Define “Trauma”
In dysfunctional or painfully harmful past situations, and relationships, we experienced emotional separation from others, from ourselves, and from our God – abandonment, rejection, judgment, and abuse. These separations were “traumatic” – injuring of our “souls” with shaming stress. Unless these separation wounds were treated quickly with some form of human and/or spiritual presence, they were recorded in our brains as permanent mental emotional memories. These recorded memories have in turn created other wounds – traumas – by recreating the perception and experiences of harmful painful separation within current events -- beyond what occurred, and even when no separation was occurring.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is where one has had an obvious series of traumatic experiences, and the replay of recordings of fear, pain, and shameful separation occurs dramatically and obviously uncontrollably when activated. One relives past trauma recordings as if they are currently happening – right now.
Is this Live – or is it Memorex? Spiritual Principles of Healing
In my experience, no amount of therapy, education, reading, knowledge or understanding could change my recordings and my pain. Not until I began practicing the Twelve Steps did I begin to find relief, hope, and a healing erasure of the mental tapes.
Step One: We admitted we were powerless -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
Past traumas- -- separations, abandonments and abuses – which resulted from exposure to dysfunctional relationships were recorded in my brain, and are still there. As it was in the past, so it is today that I don’t know consciously when and how these tapes are being activated and played – how my perceptions are being disrupted and distorted – how my reactions and actions are merely perpetuating and increasing the harm from my past. I am Powerless – helpless – unable to control my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When I consciously can experience the pain, I am experiencing my powerlessness.
Step Two: We came to believe that a Power/Presence -- greater than ourselves – could restore us to sanity.
Step Two: We came to believe that a Power/Presence -- greater than ourselves – could restore us to sanity.
There is a Powerful Presence -- greater than myself and greater than my brain -- who can access these mental tapes and begin to erase what is recorded on them – restore me to “sanity”. I am coming to believe this by seeing how They(Higher Power/Presence) are changing others, and by beginning to experience changes in my life recordings that cannot be explained by logic and reasoning – by thought.
Step Three: We made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him/Them.
Based on this relationship with this personal God of my personal experience, I am to actively beginning to let go of my survival grasp on my perceptions (will) as the source of ultimate and final truths, and to let go of my reactions to (life) outcomes as being the deciding factors in my overall happiness and peace. I am surrendering – more and more – my perceptions and outcomes over to Their loving care.
Step Four: We made a searching and fearless moral/spiritual inventory of ourselves.
I am making a thorough and searching inventory of remembered painful traumas from my past -- experiencing the pain, recognizing the fear, and identifying the patterns of behavior, action, and reaction that the recordings have produced in my past and are producing presently.
Step Five: We admitted to God, to our selves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Verbally and emotionally share the most exact conscious awareness of my mental recordings – the nature of my disease – with God, myself, and others .
Step Six: We became entirely ready to have God remove our defects of character (symptoms).
Become spiritually prepared to have God erase our past recordings. Must be spiritually prepared, because without these recorded tapes, there will be a vast emptiness, a frightening sense of loss of self, and a general disorientation regarding who we are and how we fit into this world. These recordings have defined me and my life – even though they were very diseased.
Step Seven: We humbly asked Him/Them to remove our shortcomings (symptoms).
With a conscious awareness/experience of my helplessness to erase my own recordings, I ask God to erase our recordings, based on the depth of Presence They and I have developed to this time. More details of this process are given in Steps 10, 11 & 12.
Steps 8,9: (8)We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. (9) We made direct amends wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
We harmed as a result of our being harmed.
When the prerecorded tapes of my past harms were replayed, I frequently “harmed” others with some form of separation and abandonment. I need to review these recorded harms to self and others and to actively pursue a spiritual Presence with God, my selves, and the others I may have harmed. I need to be empowered by Their love to forgive my selves, or those recordings will continues to rip and destroy me with historical, prerecorded shame and guilt messages.
Steps 10, 11 & 12:
I continue to take personal inventory – continue to ask the question, “Is it live – or is it Memorex?”
1. And when - with our new Higher Powered sanity (Step 2), I recognize that tapes from my past are leaking or flooding into my present experiences – which is revealed by the exaggerated intensity of my emotional reactions –
2. I promptly admit my helpless powerlessness to God, to myself, and to another human being ....
3. Step 11 -- and promptly begin improving my conscious contact with my God through intimate conversation with Them (prayer and meditation).
4. Step 12 – and I consciously do this in all of our life affairs and circumstances – with others.
How do you know when it is “live” or “Memorex”? And what do you do about it?
A new and wonderful life can begin with one simple spiritual question, followed by the practice of spiritual principles of Presence –
Is this my Life – or Is This my Memorex?
