Blog entry for:

after all, it is hard to move forward if i am looking backwards. remorse, guilt, shame and just plain trash talking about myself. these are the tools the part of me i call my addiction uses on a daily basis to try and sway me back to a life of using. even though i was hardly a criminal mastermind, my past is littered with enough instances of doing harm and taking what i wanted, to make even a saint consider numbing it away. HOWEVER, the 12 Step process has put all of that in perspective. i now understand the difference between guilt, shame and remorse. i now understand which of these are healthy and which are not. in my understanding guilt is my immediate reaction to doing something wrong, i think it in the same class as the pain i get when i place my hand on a hot stove burner -- YIKES THAT HURTS, DO NOT DO THAT AGAIN! remorse is the opposite of euphoric recall, and for me the pathway into shame. remorse takes my healthy feeling of guilt and pokes me into to cleaning up my act, so i do not have to do it again -- the harm not the cleaning up. if i was healthier that is where remorse would stop and i would not need a 12 step program. i am, however, not the healthiest kid on the block, so often remorse is used to take that healthy feeling of guilt and turn it into shame, so that i can punish myself over and over and over and over again. that punishment hurts dang it, and since i am not any sort of masochist, the pain i feel when i am in shame, drives me seek immediate relief, and i mean RIGHT THE FVCK NOW!
so there you have a thumbnail sketch of how i looked when i came yo recovery, and how i could look internally, if i decided that this whole step working gig, was no longer my bag. i am fortunate to have received my daily dose of gratitude this morning, my reward for staying clean yesterday as it were. actually it goes a bit deeper than that. that daily dose and the desire to stay clean AND RECOVER TODAY, is a function of how ell i live the program. that does not mean like a monk or a saint, heck i would find that sort of life so dull that sacramental wine would look like a good alternative, no what i mean is that i do my level best to put into action the principles of recovery i have been given. consciously choosing to recover, keeps me in the her and now and is the foil against that part of me that would want me to be looked in the pain of the past. and locked in that pain, i would naturally use again, as that is my default state.
so i do believe i will put a bit of energy into my recovery today, to keep me from swirling into the chaos of active addiction, after all, my recovery is like any system, without my constant work, entropy will take over and i will return to that unordered state i was in, when i came to the rooms -- and that is not an acceptable alternative to me today. so off to the streets i go, and i leave with this thought -- how i see the future is without a doubt a function of how well i live in the here and now.

∞ DT ∞