Blog entry for:

i am learning to feel my feelings rather than trying to control them.
the action of the first step surrender -> tolerance -> acceptance, quite the progression. i have also discovered that acceptance does not necessarily mean that i have to like something. i can accept a whole bunch of things as they are, such the nature of life itself being fragile and temporary, without ever coming to the place that i LIKE that fact. such it is with being an addict. although it explains a lot, like how i missed all those lessons about getting along with others and the fact that one is never enough, there are time when i do not like that fact. i can say this: my life in recovery is a whole lot better and more fulfilling than my life in active addiction. i also understand that the only way that occurred was that i HAD to work the steps, integrate the steps into my daily life and actually practice them until i learned how to live them. that process is still ongoing and will take my entire journey in recovery to complete. as awful a that feels some days, today i am OKAY acknowledging that fact and moving on. it was not that i got clean, became a member and i instantly GOT that fact, BUT it did finally dawn on me after it was hammered in, time and time again. there was to put it mildly, just a tad bit of resistance to that fact for just a little bit of time!
so dealing with surrender and acceptance of how powerless i am over addiction, i can move on to the second part of me seed. i used to believe i used because i wanted to control the way i felt. that is true to a minor extent. as i stay clean and as i get a just a bit more understanding into who i am, that i see was a desired side-effect to getting high. getting high was always the primary purpose of getting high. feeling comfortable in my own skin, being able to ignore my problems and numbing out my feelings were part of the deal, and truly i can say that: I LIKED IT! so getting clean, left more than a few dangling effects that i had to learn to live with, without the use of substances. i learned that i could feel my feelings, or i could change them through other behaviors, but as my recovery journey continued that became an unacceptable way to live. as a result, i finally got to the point that IF i am powerless over addiction, AND IF i want to stay clean AND IF i wanted a life that did not suck, THAN i had to come to grips with the fact, that as a human being i will have feelings and feeling those feelings in the here and now, was how the other 85% or so of humanity did it most of the time. the first step when applied to feelings reads something like this I AM POWERLESS OVER MY FEELINGS…
i am however NOT powerless over how i react to these feelings. by learning not to attach a value judgement to each and every feeling that comes down the pike, i learned that not only can i survive my feelings i can actually thrive as a result of having feelings, and that spin made all the difference.
so after sleeping in and taking most of yesterday off, it is time to shower off, suit up and get some stuff done. i can be more than i was yesterday, BECAUSE today i am responsible for my recovery and i understand all that statement implies!

∞ DT ∞