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i find that i do not know how to identify my feelings. these are the times when i need to seek the assistance of our sponsor or other members of the fellowship. okay a bit of honesty here is required, this sad state of affairs in longer rampant in my life or recovery. i still have the desire to suppress my feelings from time to time, i think that is more part of the human condition and not necessarily a trait of the part of me i call my addict. what is evidence that my addiction is still part of my life is the manner in which i choose to act, when i feel like suppressing a feeling or five. in active addiction, i did not really want to feel anything, and that is exactly what i got, quite conveniently from the various substances i chose to use. recovery eliminated that option, so like any good addict i found all kinds of different ways to work on suppressing my feelings. the list is long and i have shared about that before, needless to say that i replaced on behavior with another, and those new behaviors worked well enough for a while. the ironic part of this, is that as i stay in recovery, and as i live the program to the best of my ability, i find that suppressing feelings is not really what i want to do anymore. do not get me wrong, i still feel that feelings in general suck, and if suppressing them was actually working for me, i would continue to do so. but, alas, that is no longer the case, suppression of my feelings only delays the feeling and no longer removes it, and now i know that those feelings were never actually removed, they just stayed there, waiting under the surface, until the pressure was great enough for them to erupt into my conscious life. of course, eruptions of this type had serious consequences that i did not like and i eventually came to the conclusion that like them or not, i had to feel what i had to feel, and move on. so today, i still have the desire to suppress, but i choose to allow myself to feel whatever i need to feel and move on. it has become the easier, softer way for me, as i have yet to die from any feeling, and they pass as quickly as the come on. so in this slice of time, just for today i think i will stick to my guns and let myself feel whatever i need to feel, after all i do want all the gifts recovery has to offer, including a full range of human emotions. so off to the showers and on to watching paint dry, so to speak!

∞ DT ∞