Blog entry for:

if i am not willing to pay the price for acting on such feelings, i do not have to act on them.
acting out to feed some desire for self-destruction? well not right at this moment, however the day is quite young and i have yet to venture out anywhere to interact with other people. i understand my compulsive need to self-destruct, well perhaps understand is not the correct term, i accept that this need exists and that sometimes i act-out against my will. so am i saying that acting-out on destructive feelings is not part of self-will and somehow i can blame something like say my disease for this behavior? well i could and have in the past, however as i ruminate over this question i find that there is really no place to shift the blame off of me. one of the things i really have come to loathe in recovery is when i hear a member with time whine about how their addiction makes them do things that are contrary to their values. to me, that sounds like a cop-out and that they are using the powerlessness that is expressed in our first step to avoid the responsibility for their actions. i would love to be able to dismiss these actions so simply, but over the course of time, i have come to realize that i do make choices, and i do have the tools available to choose to behave self-destructively or not. the desire to act-out may come from the part of me i call my disease, the rationale for behaving in such a manner is also provided by that part of me, but in the long run i know better and have the means to decide to behave differently. i may have once been enslaved by my addiction and i may have once been a victim at the hands of that part of me i call my disease, however those days are long gone, and have been replaced by a program of active recovery. do not misread this though, i still act-out, i still rationalize such behavior and i still want to cast blame on anyone or anything besides me. all of this is still part of my human condition, all that has changed is that i can now take responsibility for such actions, clean-up the damage such behavior causes and move on with my life. most importantly, for me, there is a way out of acting-out -- a simple phone call to my sponsor or a friend can provide me with just enough time and space for my recovery to kick in, and i am not stuck once again regretting my behavior. that is what i get for living a program -- FREEDOM TO CHOOSE and today i am grateful for the ability to choose to act-out or even better to NOT ACT-OUT, after all in the long run only I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MY RECOVERY!

∞ DT ∞