DETACHMENT

One day, my son brought a gerbil home to live with us.  We put it in a cage.  Sometime later, the gerbil escaped.  For the next six months, the animal ran frightened and wild through the house.  So did we -- chasing it.
   "There it is.  Get it!" we'd scream, each time someone spotted the gerbil.  I, or my son, would throw down whatever we were working on, race across the house, and lunge at the animal hoping to catch it.
    I worried about it, even when we didn't see it.  "This isn't right," I'd think.  "I can't have a gerbil running loose in the house.  We've got to catch it.  We've got to do something."
    One day, while sitting in the living room, I watched the animal scurry across the hallway.  In a frenzy, I started to lunge at it, as I usually did, then I stopped myself.
    No, I said.  I'm all done.  If that animal wants to live int he nooks and crannies of this house, I'm going to let it.  I'm done worrying about it.  I'm done chasing it.  It's an irregular circumstance, but that's just the way it's going to have to be.
    I let the gerbil run past without reacting.  I felt slightly uncomfortable with my new reaction -- not reacting -- but I stuck to it anyway.
    I got more comfortable with my new reaction -- not reacting.  Before long, I became downright peaceful with the situation.  I had stopped fighting the gerbil.  One afternoon, only weeks after I started I started practicing my new attitude, the gerbil ran by me, as it had so many times, and I barely glanced at it.  The animal stopped in its tracks, turned around, and looked at me. I started to lunge at it.  It started to run away.  I relaxed.
    "Fine," I said.  "Do what you want."  And I meant it.
    One hour later, the gerbil came and stood by me, and waited.  I gently picked it up and placed it in its cage where it has lived happily ever since.  The moral of the story?  Don't lunge at the gerbil  He's already frightened, and chasing him just scares him  more and makes us crazy.
    Detachment works.

Today, I will be comfortable with my new reaction -- not reacting.  I will feel at peace.

Sharing The Real Me

Intimacy is the sharing of our innermost thoughts and feelings with another human being.  Many of us long for the warmth and companionship intimacy brings, but those things don't come without effort.  In our addiction , we learned to guard ourselves from others lest they threaten our using.  In recovery, we learn how to trust others.  Intimacy requires us to lower our defenses.  To feel the closeness intimacy brings, we must allow others to get close to us -- the real us.
    If we are to share our innermost selves with others, we must first have an idea of what those innermost selves are truly like.  We regularly examine our lives to find out who we really are, what we really want, and how we really feel.  Then, based on our regular inventories of ourselves, we must be as completely and consistently honest with our friends as we can be.
    Intimacy is a part of life, and therefore a part of living clean -- and intimacy, like everything in recovery, has its price.  The painstaking self-scrutiny intimacy calls for can be hard work.  And the total honesty of intimacy often brings its own complications.  But the freedom from isolation and loneliness that intimacy brings is well worth the effort.

Just for today:  I seek the freedom from isolation and loneliness that intimacy brings.  Today, I will get to know "the real me" by taking a personal inventory, and I will practice being completely honest with another person.

Step 12

The 12th Step says that having had a spiritual awakening, we try to carry this message to others.  Our message is one of hope, love, comfort, health -- a better way of life, one that works.
    How do we carry it?  Not by rescuing.  Not by controlling.  Not by obsessing.  Not by becoming evangelists for the recovery cause.
    We carry the message in many small, subtle, but powerful ways.  We do our own recovery work and become a living demonstration of hope, self-love, comfort, and health.  These quiet behaviors can be a powerful message.
    Inviting (not ordering or demanding) someone to go to a meeting is a powerful way to carry the message.
    Going to our meetings and sharing how recovery works for us is a powerful way to carry the message.
    Being who we are and allowing our Higher Power to guide our actions are powerful ways to carry the message.  Often, we find ourselves carrying the message more effectively than we do when we set out to reform, convince, or coerce someone into recovery.
    Caretaking and controlling are not ways to carry the message.  All those behaviors carry is codependency.  
    Still, the most powerful form of helping others comes down to helping ourselves.  When we do our own work and are honest and open about it, we impact others more than by our most well-intentioned "helping" gesture.  We cannot changes others, but when we change ourselves, we may end up changing the world.

Today, I will strive to carry the message in ways that work.  I will let go of my need to "help" people.  Instead, I will concentrate on helping and changing myself.  If an opportunity comes up to share my recovery with someone, I will do so quietly.  Help me show others comfort, empowerment, and hope.  I can be a channel to help others when I am ready.  I do not have to force this; it will happen naturally.

We Can Trust Ourselves

For many of us, the issue is not whether we can trust another person again; it's whether we can trust our own judgment again.
"The last mistake I made almost cost me my sanity," said one recovering woman who married a sex addict.  "I can't afford to make another mistake like that."
Many of us have trusted people who went on to deceive, abuse, manipulate, or otherwise exploit us because we trusted them.  We may have found these people charming, kind, decent.  There may have been a small voice that said, "No -- something's wrong."  We we may have been comfortable with trusting that person and shocked when we found our instincts were wrong.
The issue may then reverberate through our life for years.  Our trust in others may have been shaken, but our trust in ourselves may have been shattered worse.
How could something feel so right, flow so good, and be such a total mistake?  We may wonder.  How can I ever trust my selection process again, when it showed itself to be so faulty?
We may never have the answers.  I believe I needed to make certain "mistakes" to learn critical lessons I'm not certain I would have otherwise learned.  We cannot let our past interfere with our ability to trust ourselves.  We cannot afford to function with fear.
If we are always making the wrong decision in business or in love, we may need to learn why we insist on defeating ourselves.
But most of us do improve.  We learn.  We grow from our mistakes.  Slowly, in increments, our relationships improve.  Our decisions about how to handle situations with friends or children improve.  We benefit from our mistakes.  We benefit from our past.  And if we have made mistakes, we needed to make them in order to learn along the way.

Today, I will let get of my fears about trusting myself because I have made mistakes in the past.  I understand that these fears only serve to impair my judgment today.  I will give my past, even my mistakes, validity by accepting and being grateful for it all.  I will strive to see what I've gained from my mmistakes.  I will try to look at all my good decisions too.  I will keep a watchful eye for improvement, for overall progress, in my life

Faith Without Works is Dead

I'm starting to realize that "I'm sorry" means absolutely not a goddamn thing unless you put action behind it.  I can say I'm sorry until I'm out of breath and blue in the face.  But what really says "I'm sorry" and how to make amends for my defects showing up in my behavior is by acting differently.  The more actions and time I put between now/myself and the mistakes I've made equals to the growth in character I want to achieve and display. 
What makes it especially hard are the behaviors and defects that I'm not even aware of until someone (let's call him shmandrew) points them out.
Self-righteousness, indignation, and rationalization of my self-centeredness being some of my biggest problems, normally I'd get defensive, write him off, and end it with a "fuck you, it's not me, it's you" statement.  But what drives the point home and really makes me listen and pay attention is the fact that I can see the effect my actions and behaviors have on him.  With that feedback, it makes me realize and see that some of the things about myself I've been completely oblivious to are, in fact, not acceptable and are some crucial defects of character that need to be tended to ASAP.

I understand that "we don't recover overnight" and that it's "progress, not perfection."  I just hope that he does or has some semblance of understanding of those same concepts and he's patient with me.  I'm trying.  I really am.

I'm just fearful that it's not happening fast enough? 

The Cut and Run

Lately, I've started to realize just how deep rooted and chronic some of my character defects really are.  Self-centeredness, self-righteousness, jealousy, greed, pride, ego, and rage/anger (just to name a few).

But the one, lately, that really has been catching my attention/concern has been my propensity to do the good ol' fashioned "cut and run."  What's the "cut and run you ask?"  Instead of seeing something through to conflict resolution or sticking something out until peace or a compromise can be reached, I'm noticing that my deep rooted habit is just to say "Fuck it!" not even try, give up, and run away, crying futility and victimization the whole way home.

Someone in particular has been calling my attention to it lately every time I do it (or start to) as well as the multitude of times I've done it in the past.

One of my favorite things he said was just said recently:

"Everything isn't always going to be perfect.  People, friends, couples...they all fight.  Some more than others.  But they don't give up and just walk away.  They eventually work it out, move forward, and get over it, and they're okay."

That was definitely an example of my Higher Power speaking through someone in front of me because the moment I heard those words I knew I was hearing absolute truth. 

I need to pay attention to my habit of doing the cut and run whenever a situation gets uncomfortable or actually requires effort.  Instead of acting out in FEAR (Fuck Everything And Run) why not actually apply myself and fight for something important to me?  Imagine that.

The Victim Trap

The belief that life has to be hard and difficult is the belief that makes a martyr.
We can change our negative beliefs about life, and whether we have the power to stop our pain and take care of ourselves.
We aren't helpless.  We can solve our problems.  We do have power -- not to change or control others, but to solve the problems that are ours to solve.
Using each problem that comes our way to "prove" that life is hard and we are helpless -- this is codependency.  It's the victim trap.
Life does not have to be difficult.  In fact, it can be smooth.  Life is good.  We don't have to "awfulize" it, or ourselves.  We don't have to live on the underside.
We do have power, more power than we know, even in the difficult times.  And the difficult times don't prove lire is bad; they are part of the ups and downs of life; often, they work out for the best.

We can change our attitude; we can change ourselves; sometimes, we can change our circumstances.
Life is challenging.  Sometimes, there's more pain than we asked for; sometimes there's more joy than we imagined.
It's all part of the package, and the package is good.
We are not victims of life.  We can learn to remove ourselves as victims of life.  By letting go of our belief that life has to be hard and difficult, we make our life much easier.

Taking Care of Ourselves

We do not have to wait for others to come to our aid.  We are not victims.  We are not helpless.
Letting go of faulty thinking means we realize there are no knights on white horses, no magical grandmothers in the sky watching, waiting to rescue us.
Teachers may come our way, but they will not rescue.  They will teach.  People who care will come, but they will not rescue.  They will care.  Help will come, but help is not rescuing.
We are our own rescuers.
Our relationships will improve dramatically when we stop rescuing others and stop expecting them to rescue us.

Discipline

Children need discipline to feel secure; so do adults.
Discipline means understanding there are logical consequences to our behavior.  Disciple means taking responsibility for our behavior and the consequences.
Discipline means learning to wait for what we want. 
Discipline means being will to work for and toward what we want.
Discipline means learning and practicing new behaviors.
Discipline means being where we need to be, when we need to be there, despite our feelings.
Discipline is the day-to-day performing of tasks, whether these be recovery behaviors or washing the dishes.
Discipline involves trusting that our goals will be reached though we cannot see them.
Discipline can be grueling.  We may feel afraid, confused, uncertain.  Later, we will see the purpose.  But this clarity of sight usually does not come during the time of discipline.  We may not even believe we're moving forward.
But we are.
The task at hand during times of discipline is simple:  listen, trust, and obey.

Accepting Love

Many of us have worked too hard to make relationships work; sometimes those relationships didn't have a chance because the other person was unavailable or refused to participate.
To compensate for the other person's unavailability, we work too hard.  We may have done all or most of the work.  This may mask the situation for a while, but we usually get tired.  Then, when we stop doing all the work, we notice there is no relationship, or we're so tired we don't care.
Doing all the work in a relationship is not loving, giving, or caring.  It is self-defeating and relationship-defeating.  It creates the illusion of a relationship when in fact there may be no relationship.  It enables the other person to be irresponsible for his or her share.  Because that does not meet our needs, we ultimately feel victimized.
In our best relationships, we all have temporary periods where one person participates more than the other.  This is normal.  But as a permanent way of participating in relationships, it leaves us feeling tired, worn out, needy, and angry.
We can learn to participate a reasonable amount, then let the relationship find it's own life.  Are we doing all the calling?  Are we doing all the initiating?  Are we doing all the giving?  Are we the one talking about feelings and striving for intimacy?
Are we doing all the waiting, the hoping, the work?
We can let go.  If the relationship is meant to be, it will be, and it will become what it is meant to be.  We do not help that process by trying to control it.  We do not help ourselves, the other person, or the relationship by trying to force it or by doing all the work.
Let it be.  Wait and see.  Stop worrying about making it happen.  See what happens and strive to understand if that is what you want.

Relationships

There is a gift for us in each relationship that comes our way.
Sometimes the gift is a behavior we're learning to acquire:  detachment, self-esteem, becoming confident enough to set a boundary, or owning our power in another way.
Some relationships trigger healing in us -- healing from issues of the past or an issue we're facing today.
Sometimes we find ourselves learning the most important lessons from the people we least expect to help us.  Relationships may teach us about loving ourselves or someone else.  Or maybe we'll learn to let others love us.
Sometimes, we aren't certain what lesson we're learning, especially while we're in the midst of the process.  But we can trust that the lesson and the gift are there.  We don't have to control this process.  We'll understand, when it's time.  We can also trust that the gift is precisely what we need.

Today, I'll be grateful for all my relationships.  I will open myself to the lesson and the gift from each person in my life.  I will trust that I, too, am a gift in other people's lives.

Denial

Denial is a fertile breeding ground for the behaviors we call codependent:  controlling, focusing on others, and neglecting ourselves.  Illness and compulsive or addictive behaviors can also emerge during denial.
Denial can be confusing because it resembles sleeping.  We're really not aware we're doing it until we're done doing it.  Forcing ourselves -- or anyone else -- to face the truth usually doesn't help.  We won't face the facts until we are ready.  Neither, it seems, will anyone else.  We may admit to the truth for a moment, but we won't let ourselves know what we know until we feel safe, secure, and prepared enough to deal and cope with it.
Talking to friends who know, love, support, encourage, and affirm us helps.
Being gentle, loving, and affirming with ourselves helps.  Asking ourselves, and our Higher Power, to guise us into and through change helps.
The first step toward acceptance is denial.  The first step toward moving through denial is accepting that we may be in denial, and then gently allowing ourselves to move through.