12 Step Symbol – 3 Sides of the Triangle
In our last post, we looked at an article by Raney N. called The Circle And Triangle: A way of life, and a spiritual yardstick, in which he explained, “In my own journey in Alcoholics Anonymous toward physical and emotional sobriety, the circle and triangle were given to me as symbolizing AA’s three-fold solution to my own three-fold disease.” Here is another excerpt from this article:
Physically, an allergy – the phenomenon we call ‘craving’ – renders me incapable of predicting how much I am going to drink once I start. In fact, I usually drank until I was separated from alcohol by unconsciousness, or outside forces such as police or orderlies. Now, this physical part is a problem, but it would be a problem with a very simple solution if this was the whole of it. I could exert power over this allergy in the same way that someone allergic to shellfish exerts power… by avoiding the offending substance entirely.
My alcohol problem is MUCH deeper than just an allergy, because in addition I suffer from this mental obsession which ensures that at certain, generally unpredictable, times – I will succumb to the delusion that a drink is a good idea, no matter how stupid that idea might be. When these two things became operative in me, the overall effect was a complete stripping of any power, choice, or control over if, when, and how much I drank.
Now, if all this wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that even if something keeps me separated from alcohol, this is just going to leave me smack in the middle of the spiritual component of the disease. I am as a rule, restless, irritable, discontent, and plagued by things like despair, frustration, fear, and bewilderment when I do not have alcohol to treat my spiritual condition. Even when outside forces conspire to keep me dry for a period of time, that just means that now I will begin to actively experience the problem that led me to drink in the first place.
Any one of these conditions will automatically reinforce and reactivate the other two, bringing me back into that ever-steeper downward spiral… so any real solution to my alcoholism MUST address all three of these parts. One, or two are simply not enough to make any real difference.
