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well this morning the reading hit me right between the eyes. i have always considered myself fairly level-headed and a bit on the cool side. this was a reality when i was using because i used substances to take the fire out of my emotions. i learned as a child to swallow 'bad' feelings and only allow myself to feel my feelings in small doses. you know the whole 'big boys don't cry' bullshit.
in recovery up until recently, i have been doing something similar, although i have not been repressing my feelings, i would fill my life with enough activity and other people to take the edge off. well that has changed over the past few months and now i feel almost victimized by my feelings, not only are they inconvenient, i have never learned to do anything but react to them, shoot from the hip so to speak.
in fact i was just whining to my sponsor last night that i needed to learn how to handle my feelings. he asked me what that would look like and i said delaying my actions long enough to grab a few spiritual principles before acting so i could minimize the effect of my passion on others. he reminded me that depth of feeling and passion was a gift of recovery and that when i react, i will react without consideration of anything but selfishness and self-interest. we then went over what i thought was the fallout from one of my recent acts. he laughed and reminded me that although how i carried the message was probably not the best, i did plant a seed.
so then this reading about accepting my feelings exactly as they are really topped the cake. i hear the message, learning to live with my feelings means tolerating and accepting them, work the steps to integrate this new facet of me into my program and never forget that no matter how many days i have clean, i wake up every morning in active addiction, it is only with prayer, meditation and reading the damn JFT book that i have any chance for recovery at all today.
∞ DT ∞