Altered Attitudes is one of the many sayings that are used in meetings and in rehabs that is adapted from the letters of Alcoholics Anonymous into another word or phrase.
AA meetings and the recovery process generally are full of sayings and phrases that for some people are quite catchy, and for other people can be a bit irritating.
What is often important, is to look behind the saying or the phrase, and see what it is really saying to you.
The idea of changing an attitude can seem relatively simplistic, until that is the individual tries to do it. Also the relevance of why one should have to change an attitude can often take time to sink in, in the context of alcoholism and recovery generally.
Anyone getting sober is likely to become aware after a while that they have some level of huge emotional turmoil going on inside them. This may well manifest itself in levels of anger and fear that feel at times overwhelming.
It is unlikely that anyone experiencing these levels of fear and anger will start asking themselves intellectual questions about how they change their attitudes.
It is quite likely after a while, that the individual will begin to realise that in order to stay sober they need at some level to begin to correct the underlying emotional drives and distortions that seem to fuel their drinking and their alcoholism.
The need to change attitudes, like a lot of stuff in recovery or make more sense over time, and will make more sense once it has actually happened.
Knowing what your attitudes are in the first place can seem like a life’s work for many people, let alone the process of changing them.
This can often seem an insurmountable task. How do you begin to change what is going on inside your head, and how do you deal with the fear that accompanies the notion of any type of change of this magnitude.
The whole process of changing one’s emotional outlook upon life, is in effect about changing one’s inner world, and that is a massive subject.
The book Alcoholics Anonymous details the process of the 12 step program, and application of this program and its principles over time will begin to effect the necessary changes in many people.
The first and most important thing in many ways is to become consciously aware of what one’s attitudes are, most importantly to yourself and to those people around you and life generally.
Mostly in life, the attitudes we have towards everything are not formed as a conscious process. Our attitudes and outlook on life tend to be formed as a basis of our experiences, normally our experiences in childhood that form our sense of self and our identity.
These are normally done at a subconscious or automatic level. The real freedom that comes from being able to change your attitudes actually comes in many ways from having a conscious sense of control about what your attitudes are and what you can do to change them.