Blame and Peanut Butter

Many recovering alcoholics and drug addicts believe that God gave me the gift of explaining things with analogies.  They have told me that I'm able to grasp understanding of spirituality and/or sobriety through the most unlikely experiences of daily life.   This is true.  I accept this as a gift to me from the old HP and, in accepting the gift, I also accept the responsibility for using His gift to benefit my fellow man.  Here is one of the analogies:

When I first came into recovery I liked pointing fingers at who was wrong.  Even if I was (in a very small part) at fault I never wanted to stand alone so I always said something like: "Barbie and Midge did wrong too!!  They need to be invited into the mix here."  I would gather as many other people as possible to share the blame.  For some inexplicable reason my sponsor frowned on this type of thing.  She strongly suggested that I knock it off.  Soon.  As in immediately.  I couldn't figure out what the trouble was.

Shortly thereafter, I was making a peanut butter sandwich.  I really like peanut butter but I also like being able to swallow my food.  It can be fairly tricky to get enough PB to taste but not enough to overwhelm my throat.  I started thinking that spreading PB on many pieces of bread would make it easier to swallow.  Suddenly, I realized that This was how I treated blame!  Blame was like a container of peanut butter and I liked to spread it around to lots of people.  The more people (pieces of bread) there were to take the blame (peanut butter)  the easier my part in it (sandwich) would go down.

What a great concept!  If I can focus on the fault of others, I don't need to focus on my own.  Somehow, in my sick little mind, I was less wrong if others were wrong, too.  Viola!! My part was lessened by the number of others and that made things go down easier for me.  Am I brilliant or what?!

Or what.  As long as my bread had peanut butter on it, I was responsible for choking that truth down and doing whatever is necessary to be accountable for my actions or inaction.  Whatever anybody else has on their sandwich is not relevant to me or my circumstances - I need to stay on my own side of the bread.

Have a good and sober day.