The following is loosely excerpted from SURRENDER VERSUS COMPLIANCE IN THERAPY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ALCOHOLISM by Harry M. Tiebout, M.D., an article a friend shared with me. I now understand the difference between compliance and surrender. My childhood trained me to comply. I learned to say yes even when I knew I needed to say no. I agreed with anything and everything to avoid punishment. When my father came into my room at night, I laid still. I never fought. If my mother screamed at me, I felt guilty. I knew she must be right. I must be bad.
Now, I must be authentic. I want to live a sober life. Compliance is not enough my enemy. Alone, compliance is my enemy because it blocks my total surrender. I am an alcoholic. I can no longer afford to be half-hearted.
Submission, resignation, yielding, compliance, acknowledgment and concession only work on the conscious mind. With each of these words there is there a feeling of reservation, a tug in the direction of nonacceptance. Sobriety requires that the unconscious and conscious minds join forces.
“Unless the unconscious has within it the capacity to accept, the conscious mind can only tell itself that it should accept but by so doing it cannot bring about acceptance in the unconscious which continues with its own non-accepting and resenting attitudes. The result is a house divided against itself: the conscious mind sees all the reasons for acceptance while the unconscious mind says, “But I won’t accept!” Wholehearted acceptance under such conditions is impossible. Experience has proved that in the alcoholic a half-hearted reaction does not maintain sobriety for very long. The inner doubts all too soon take over. The alcoholic who stays “dry” must be wholehearted.
We are thus confronted with the question: What does produce wholehearted acceptance? My answer is, as before, surrender. But surrender is a step not easily taken by human beings.“
“In recent years, because of my special interest in the phenomenon of surrender, I have become aware of another conscious and unconscious phenomenon, namely compliance — which is basically partial acceptance or partial surrender, and which often serves as a block to surrender.”
“Compliance needs careful definition. It means agreeing, going along, but in no way implies enthusiastic, wholehearted assent and approval. There is a willingness not to argue or resist but the cooperation is a bit grudging, a little forced; one is not entirely happy about agreeing. Compliance is, therefore, a word which portrays mixed feelings, divided sentiments. There is a willingness to go along but at the same time there are some inner reservations which make that willingness somewhat thin and watery. It does not take much to overthrow this kind of willingness.”
“One thing must be made absolutely clear: There is a world of difference between’ thinking of compliance in conscious terms and in unconscious terms. An alcoholic, at the termination of a long and painful spree, decides that he has had enough. This decision is announced loudly and vehemently to all who will listen. His sincerity cannot be questioned. He means every word of it. Yet he knows, and so do those who hear him, that he will be singing another tune before many weeks have elapsed. For the moment he seems to have accepted his alcoholism but it is only with a skin-deep assurance. He will certainly revert to drinking. What we see here is compliance in action. During the time when his memory of the suffering entailed by a spree is acute and painful he agrees to anything and everything. But deep inside, in his unconscious, the best he can do is to comply — which means that, when the reality of his drinking problem becomes undeniable, he no longer argues with incontrovertible facts The fight, so to speak, has been knocked out of him. As time passes and the memory of his suffering weakens, the need for compliance lessens. As the need diminishes, the half of compliance which never really accepted begins to stir once more and soon resumes its way. The need for accepting the illness of alcoholism is ignored because, after all, deep inside he really did not mean it, he had only complied. Of course consciously the victim of all this is completely in the dark. For a while drink was anathema but now he begins to toy with the thought of one drink, and so on, until finally, as the noncooperative element in compliance takes over, he has his first drink. The other half of compliance has won out; the alcoholic is the unwitting victim of his unconscious inclinations.”
“One of the first things to recognize is the fact that the presence of compliance blocks the capacity for true acceptance. Since compliance is a form of acceptance, every time the individual is faced with the need to accept something he falls back on compliance, which serves for the moment. But since he has no real capacity to accept, he is soon swinging in the other direction, his seeming acceptance a thing of the past. This unconscious split in the compliance mechanism has deep psychosomatic reverberations.”
“As long as compliance is functioning, there is halfway but never total surrender. But the halfway surrender and acceptance, serving as it does to quell the fighting temporarily, deceives both the individual and the onlooker, neither of whom is able to detect the unconscious compliance in the reaction of apparent yielding. It is only when a real surrender occurs that compliance is knocked out of the picture, freeing the individual for a series of wholehearted responses — including, in the alcoholic, his acceptance of his illness and of his need to do something constructive about it.”
“After an act of surrender, the individual reports a sense of unity, of ended struggles, of no longer divided inner counsel. He knows the meaning of inner wholeness and, what is more, he knows from immediate experience the feeling of being wholehearted about anything. He recognizes for the first time how insincere his previous protestations actually were. If he is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he travels around to meetings proclaiming the need for honesty — usually, at the start of his pilgrimage, with a certain amount of surprise and wonder in his voice. Quite frankly, before he was able to embrace the program, he had no idea he was a liar, dishonest in his thoughts; but now that A.A. is making sense — that is, he is accepting A.A. wholeheartedly and without reservations — he sees that previously he had never truly accepted anything. The A.A. speaker does not follow through to state that, formerly, all he had been doing was complying; but if asked, he nods his head in vigorous assent, saying, “That’s exactly what I was doing.” A more articulate individual, after a little thought, added: “You know, when I think back on it, that was all I knew how to do. I supposed that was the way it was with everybody. I could not conceive of really giving up. The best I could do was comply, which meant I never really wanted to quit drinking, I can see it all now but I certainly couldn’t then.”
I surrender. Divine Mother, please take away my deep-rooted denial. Relieve me of the desire to drink not just on a conscious level. touch my inner most soul with the power of your love and grace. For it is by your grace that I will have the courage not to drink today. Protect me, guide me and use me for your highest good.
I will not be able to attend a meeting today, but I will call a friend in AA. No matter what happens, I will not drink today.
Writing into the Light 