DarkHorse Ministries

A Soul Vision

A day after doing a 5th step (i.e. the sharing of my 4th step moral inventory) with my sponsor, I was called to substitute teach at a high school in a large urban ghetto. While waiting for my first class to arrive, I stood looking out the second floor window at the entrance sidewalk below. I watched as several African American teenage girls came through the gate. Suddenly, in a flash, my entire world turned grayish-white, as I witnessed the souls of these children. I could clearly see in their gestures and mannerisms the deep shame created by generations of prejudice and poverty; the pain etched so deeply into their tragically distorted hearts and souls. Water shot straight out of my eyes, as I broke down in the empty classroom. The only word that came up was 'empathy.'

This empathy was a completely new emotion for me and probably a direct spiritual result of having done an honest 5th step. All my crazy life, I was so preoccupied with the dire mental and emotional after-effects of growing up in a pathologically dysfunctional environment, that I had never known or developed empathy. I was psychologically blocked from it. I had many times sympathized, or felt sorry for others, but this always seemed to involve some sort of mostly unconscious belief in my superiority over 'those poor less fortunate people.' My sympathy — of which I was consciously convinced was genuine caring — actually served me more than anyone else. It enabled my insecure ego to get the attention I desperately craved, by posing as a caring person to society. But, both before and after this experience, I had almost no ability or interest in truly seeing anything from anyone else's point of view. To the contrary, I had always been concerned about myself and what I could get out of any particular situation, although I carefully concealed my intentions and motivations from even myself. I can now see that others were mostly cardboard cutouts, that served to make me look important. I even recall interacting with my friends' parents much like Eddie Haskell did in the 1950's TV sitcom Leave it to Beaver. I was compulsively selfish and self-centered without even remotely suspecting it. These were the skills I learned in order to survive my childhood. Many times in recovery, I read right over the statement in the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book: "...the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so." (Alcoholics Anonymous p.62)