Offering a Helping Hand to One's Fellow Sufferers

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Offering a Helping Hand to One's Fellow

Sufferers

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Marty Mann

 

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Marty Mann (here in 1960) was the

first woman to join Alcoholics Anonymous. She also created the National

Committee on Alcoholism. Born into a wealthy

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font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"> family, Mann worked as a

magazine editor, art critic and photographer. Corbis

© 2005

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"> “

color:red;font-style:italic">At times I feared life so much more than death

that twice I sought death. Suicide seemed a welcome release from a terror and

agony past bearing.”

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font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">I am an alcoholic -- one of the

fortunate ones who found the road to recovery. That was 13 years ago, but I

haven't forgotten. I remember what it was like to be hopelessly in the grip of

the vicious disease of alcoholism, not knowing what was wrong with me. I

remember my desperate search for help. Failing to find it, I remember my inner

despair, my outer defiance.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">I remember the arrogance and

pride with which I faced the non-understanding world, in spite of my terrible

hidden fears: my fear of life and my fear of death. At times I feared life so

much more than death that twice I sought death. Suicide seemed a welcome

release from a terror and agony past bearing.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">How grateful I am now that I

didn't succeed. But I believed in nothing, then. Not in myself, nor in anything

outside myself. I was walled in with my suffering, alone and, I thought,

forsaken.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">But I wasn't forsaken, of course.

No one is, really. I seemed to suffer alone, but I believe now that I was never

alone -- that none of us are. I believe, too, that I was never given more to

bear than I could endure, but rather that my suffering was necessary, for me. I

believe it may well have taken that much suffering, in my case, to break down

my wall of self, to crush my arrogance and pride, to let me seek and accept the

help that was there.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">For in the depths of my suffering

I came to believe. To believe that there was a Power greater than myself that

could help me. To believe that because of that

Power -- God -- there was hope and help for me.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">I found my help through people:

doctors whose vocation it is to deal with suffering, and other human beings who

had suffered like myself. In the depths of my personal

abyss I received understanding and kindness and help from many individuals.

People, I learned, can be very kind. I came to believe deeply in this -- in

people and the good that is in them.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">I came to realize that suffering

is universal. It lies behind much apparent harshness and irritability, many of

the careless, even cruel, words and acts which make our daily lives difficult

so much of the time. I learned that if I could understand this, I might not

react so often with anger or hurt. And if I learned to react to difficult

behavior with understanding and sympathy, I might help to bring about a change

in that behavior. My suffering helped me to know things.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">I do not believe that everyone

should suffer. But I do believe that suffering can be good, and even necessary,

if, and only if, one learns to accept that suffering as part of one's essential

learning process, and then to use it to help oneself and one's fellow

sufferers.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Don't we all endure suffering,

one way or another? This fact gives me a deep sense of kinship with other

people and a consequent desire to help others in any and every way I can.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">It is this belief that underlies my

work, for alcoholism is the area in which I feel best fitted, through my own

experience, to help others. And I believe that trying to help my fellow men is one of the

straightest roads to spiritual growth. It is a road everyone can take. One

doesn't have to be beautiful or gifted, or rich or powerful, in order to offer

a helping hand to one’s fellow sufferers. And I believe that one can walk

with God by doing just that.

font-weight:bold;mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Jai Sairam

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NPR.org,

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mso-bidi-font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;mso-bidi-font-style:normal">May

19, 2005

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