Blog entry for:

this reading speaks of tolerance, and as such stands on its own, no further comment is needed. as i grow in my recovery i learn that which i see in others that makes me intolerant towards them, is the stuff i cannot tolerate within myself. La La La!
what i heard this morning, was sort of a flip side to this reading, that sometimes as i get better i finally see how sick and unhealthy some relationships i am in, really are. as i begin to take stock in who i like, love and want to spend time with, and who i do not, i have discovered, some of my peers, who i thought were the greatest minds since Einstein, and the most spiritual beings since Gandhi, are not quite what i believed them to be, and actually have feet of clay, to say the least. i have uncovered many such relationships, across the course of my recovery, some i walked away from, quietly, with little or no fanfare, and others, well it could be said there was certainly a behavior or word that i need to own responsibility for and admit that i was wrong to say it. the ironic part is, the sicker the relationship, the tighter i clung to it, and in the end, the love i made was destroyed by the explosion of my pent-up frustration and simmering resentment.
sick = desire to change.
yes, sometimes the traits i find the most attractive are the ones i want for myself, but in my immaturity, i mistake bullying for assertiveness and conceit for self-acceptance; and i play into that, hoping to find what they have. unfortunately i have discovered more than once people are only human, even those with clean time, numbering in the decades. sometimes, when i take the clean-time blinders off, i see that those i most thought i wanted to be like, actually are not the people i once saw them to be, and actually have very little, other than their clean-time, to offer me. so where does that leave me?
well, in the relationship with my sponse, we certainly have had our battles about all sorts of things, and yet when it comes down to guiding me through my recovery, i trust him implicitly. i have learned that those who do not know him as well as i do, believe him to be intolerant on some of the things that make up day to day life. everything i have told him, and i hold nothing back, he has understood and been moire than worthy of my trust, regardless of what someone else told me. in fact that should have been my first clue that relationship was far from healthy, but alas it was not, because i was unwilling to accept that fact, at that time. i still NEEDED them as part of my life, because i BELIEVED i could get better by emulating them. i sought their APPROVAL and desired their PRAISE, not all that different than how i felt about my parents in my childhood, and as i grow in recovery i can see, that as a phase i need to grow through.
today, when i examine the people in my life, those i like and those i find less than likeable, i can remove the rose-coloured glasses of judgment and start to see them as they are, just addicts, doing whatever they can to live a program of recovery, just for today. me, i have to decide whether it is my perceptions that need to change or do i just need to walk away for a little bit, to allow myself the time to grow a bit of tolerance and respect.

∞ DT ∞