Blog entry for:

by risking trust and find the rewards of sharing. quite a thought for an early sunday morning or for that fact any morning. among those i trust today are my girlfriend, my sponsor, my sponsees, my closed-mouth friends and a few of my family members. BUT i do trust them at varying levels, which is a topic for another day. today is about how i learned to trust in the first place, because as the reading suggests, my first foray into this whole trust gig was with my sponsor. when i came to recovery, i did not trust the fellowship that has given me this new life and started out in a different, MUCH different, twelve step fellowship, because i believed some silly beliefs foisted upon me by a person in authority, but of course none of this is relevant to this discourse. i did not trust myself, i did not trust women, i did not trust authority, and most of all i did not trust other men. in fact, my first inclination was to get a woman sponsor, because i had learned over time that i could manipulate women easier than men. so in this internal atmosphere of distrust and not being trustworthy myself, asking a man to sponsor me was the last thing i was ever going to do. in fact when the words dropped out of my mouth and i actually asked another man to sponsor me, i was probably more surprised than he was.
that small crack in my closed mind has led to relationships with others over time, and i have yet to have that trust betrayed. i now am capable of learning to trust others and have moved beyond a life of fear, confusion, suspicion and indirection, into a life where i accept personal growth and am capable of having others trust me. life is much better than before and i get to be more than i ever was, because truthfully when i think back on it, i was not that successful as a using addict. although my measure of success has changed since those early days in recovery, the one thing that has not changed is that any day i choose not to use is a successful day, and those days have begun to pile-up!

∞ DT ∞