Recovery

Feelings

/ Tim / 1 Comment

“The great part about recovery is that you can feel again. The lousy part of recovery is that you can feel again.” 

My goal, when I was still in my disease, was to numb the feelings that flowed through my head. I wanted to escape how I felt about myself, about others and about situations. I couldn’t deal with how I was feeling so I tried to eliminate them completely. Loneliness, depression, fear, anger and resentment were some of the stronger feelings I felt more or less at any time and often in a combination of two or three. I had only one way to deal with them, and near the end, even that didn’t work. I didn’t know how to live with them. I guess I missed that course in life: Dealing with Feelings.

For the first three or four months in recovery I was on the proverbial ‘pink cloud’ where everything was wonderful. Then it hit me. I had started to work on Step Four and I was realizing all of my defects of character. As the saying goes, a sober horse thief is still a horse thief. I might have been in recovery, but I was now a ball of emotions and feelings that I had to learn to manage. I had begun to feel again. I remember going on a bit too long at one meeting. Afterward, another member asked me it I had a sponsor. “Of course I do!” I replied somewhat proudly. “Maybe you should use him,” suggested the member.

It was in the heart to heart discussions with my sponsor that I first started to learn that to deal with feelings I first had to accept them. Using examples of his own life, he showed me how he worked through those strong feelings in early recovery, just as I was doing: by working with his sponsor, by talking about them and by discovering their source, the ‘exact nature’ of those feelings. Why was I angry? Who or what was I angry at? Was there threat to me? What can I do to diminish my feelings of anger? I learned how to do the same with other feelings as well.

Analysing my feelings helped to diminish their strength and power. I learned that I needed to acknowledge what I was feeling and where it was taking me. I didn’t have to allow the feeling to take me into depression or loneliness, anger or fear. I had a choice. My feelings didn’t have to dictate my reaction. If I was lonely, I could go meet a friend or pick up the phone and call someone.  I  didn’t have to wallow in loneliness, allowing it to spiral me downward into deeper and deeper sadness. Often I would just get on my motorcycle and drive and drive and say the Serenity Prayer over and over until I felt peace replacing the strong feelings that threatened my recovery.

My life is manageable today and I lived more in tranquility than chaos. The frequency of those strong feelings is diminished. Strong feelings still do come up but not as often and I know that I can’t avoid them. I have to deal with them. It’s my choice when I do so, but sooner rather than later works for me and frees me to enjoy my life and not be burdened by it. I am grateful.

 

Dream

/ Tim / Leave a comment

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown. -Denis Waitley

Dream! Plan! See a future that you want for yourself! What are your hopes and aspirations? What are your goals? Where would you like to see yourself in five years? Ten years?

What? You don’t see it as possible? Then you haven’t looked around you. Miracles happen, wishes come true and dreams are realized because people make them. I sit in a room full of people who had no dreams and little hope and here they are clean and sober and living lives beyond their wildest imagination. I can read online everyday success stories of people who came out of abject poverty and yet created a completely new world for themselves. The skyscraper you see glittering in the sun or the castle overlooking the valley were once dreams in the minds of their creators that have now been realized.

Not possible for you? Then you don’t know the process for fulfilling a dream. As addicts and alcoholics we spent hours solving the problems of the world and sharing with everyone who had the patience to hear what we might have done and what we were going to do. Unfortunately we never picked ourselves out of the gutter or got off of the barstools to make those ideas come true. We came back to the same place day after day and said the same things over and over again. If we do thing same things we get the same results. No one has ever married the person of their dreams, bought a house on a tropical island, written a book or fulfilled any dream by sitting on the barstool. You have to step away from what is and walk towards what can be.

Fulfilling a dream takes work. It takes patience. It takes humility. People often tell me that they wish they could live in the rainforest near the ocean as I do. I tell them that they can do so if they want to. “It’s not impossible.” They reply that they can’t, they have a job and family and a mortgage. What they are really saying is that they don’t want to risk a change of what they have to get what they want. They might like the idea of stepping out of their comfort zone, but they really don’t want to make the necessary changes. They don’t want to do the work needed or the time to do it so it’s all really just pie in the sky. What they are really dreaming about is finding a genie in a bottle or a visit from their fairy godmother.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Chinese proverb.

I’ve learned in my program of recovery to enjoy the moment, live in the present and trust the process. And I can still dream. I am learning not to live in the future, rather work toward it. If I want a sober and clean life it begins one day at a time and gradually the days begin to add up. At first it’s difficult. It’s change from the norm and out of my comfort zone.  With the Twelve Steps, it gets easier. I have to do the work. My dreams are the same. I have to work at them. I have to take that first step toward them today and another step tomorrow. And it all starts by stepping off the stool.

Became Entirely Ready

/ Tim / Leave a comment

I didn’t give much time to Step Six when I first went through the steps. I didn’t think it needed a whole lot of thought or discussion. I had discovered my defects of character in Step Four and shared them in Step Five. So yes, I was ready to have them removed and move on with the program. I was still, perhaps, in the mode of getting through the steps as fast as possible: quantity over quality.

A couple of years ago I went through Step Six and Seven again with my sponsor. As part of the process I read the book, “Drop the Rock”, a Hazelton Publication. Here I came to learn that I missed two fundamental parts of Step Six when I first went through it. I got being prepared to let my Higher Power remove my defects of character. But I totally missed that in order to have those removed, I had to let them go. And I wasn’t quite ready for the new person that would be created as a result of this transformation.

Going through the first five steps had changed me. I was starting to like who I was again. I had learned to look into the mirror and love who was looking back. I thought I was doing pretty good with the whole recovery thing. And after seven months in recovery, I was. I just didn’t have the depth necessary in order to understand what ‘entirely ready’ really meant. Yes, I wanted to be rid of those character defects of arrogance, perfectionism and entitlement, to name a few. I wanted them gone. But wanting them gone and letting them go? I didn’t realize that those were two different things. I had to open my hands and let those things go. As the book says, I had to drop those rocks that were weighing me down and holding me back.

The other thing I didn’t realize at the time is something that is sort of understood, but not stated in the step.  In the same way that ‘could restore us to sanity’ in Step Two tells us that we were insane, here too there’s an understanding that I am going to be a different person when I have my defects of character removed. This I really didn’t consider the first time through the step. My character was made up partly by those defects of character that I wanted gone, so it made sense that I would be a different person at the end of this. But: I had to be willing to let go of the ‘me’ I knew for a ‘me’ that was new. In this step, I can’t hold onto the old me, I have to release it in the same way that I release the rest of the ‘rocks’ that hold me back and, at the same time, trust my Higher Power and the process of going through the steps would create a new and improved Tim.

Letting go of who and how I am still proves to be difficult. Every once in a while I find another part of me that needs to be worked on. It comes with living the Steps. I must be willing to leave behind as well as move forward. I am grateful that I have many examples of others who also live the steps and I can see the results in them. I know that my Higher Power will do the same for me.