EXACT NATURE

Jan 23 from “Strengthening My Recovery” daily reader

“When we look at the exact nature of our wrongs, we see that we have harmed ourselves based on our sense of being unacceptable, inferior, or lost.” BRB p. 198

For years we blamed ourselves for everything – what we did and what others did. To keep the peace, we made amends, both verbal and non-verbal, to unsafe, often violent people in our lives. We were the doormats we were raised to be. We hid our feelings and confided to no one. Some of us, even after we started recovery in ACA, continued to keep things bottled up and wondered why we weren’t changing. Somehow, we had interpreted “taking it to God” to mean just praying the uncomfortable things in our life away. We thought that expressing our feelings, especially anger, to others wasn’t acceptable.

We now view anger as a normal, healthy emotion that can help us know when we need to set a boundary, get out of a specific situation, or let go of an unhealthy relationship. We no longer ignore how we feel.

We may create a list of triggers to help us get in touch with our feelings. We might keep lists of emotions to more accurately identify our own. We realize that even the seemingly negative ones are a part of the gift of being completely human.

On this day I will sit with my feelings instead of pushing them away. Then I will make a phone call to share them with a fellow traveler.”

My experience:

As I am reading this, I am triggered by the phrase, “…blamed ourselves for everything – …and what others did.”  This triggers anxiety inside of me as I know this is what I have done over a lifetime.  I blamed myself for not controlling the outcome of what someone else did.  I should have made them do X, but instead I allowed them to do “Y.”  That is a very unhealthy way to approach life, like I am a god that can make another adult do something.  Now I can identify this as anxiety and not as anger and appropriately deal with the true emotion.  I now allow others to do what they need to do and I get to decide what to do with that information.  When I am truly angry about something, I allow myself to sit with it, process it, and then respond in a healthy way, maybe set a boundary around it, or have a discussion about it, instead of yelling and screaming about it.  I now know that all of my feelings are valid and deserve being looked at.  What a relief that is.  �