STORED LOSS
May 23, from “Strengthening My Recovery” daily reader
“This sharing of our story with our sponsor or informed counselor reveals destructive patterns in our adult lives while illuminating abuses from our childhood. We also begin to see our grief or stored loss lying beneath our decisions to wrong ourselves and others.” BRB p.1 10
Some of our shares with our fellow travelers are about the deeper, self-destructive patterns we have been acting out. We may have assumed that we were helpless to change these patterns. Hope seemed to have vanished from our lives.
ACA restores the hope that we can change. The program teaches us that our destructive patterns are learned in childhood and continue to affect us as adults. The knowledge that we, ourselves, aren’t self-destructive gives us hope to change what we thought was an unchangeable aspect of ourselves.
It slowly becomes clear to us that unexpressed grief is at the root of all the decisions and actions that resulted in hurting ourselves and others. Finally, relief from these habits can be seen as we raise our sights and see Step Two as giving us the hope we thought was forever lost.
On this day I will share with my fellow travelers any deeper self-destructive patterns in order to help release them. I will express the grief and loss that underpin these habits as I look to Step Two with a renewed sense of hope.
My Experience:
Good Grief!! Once I struggled to realize and acknowledge that I had grief, I decided to tackle the grief. This was very difficult because I was not used to walking with my emotions, my fears, or my grief. But this is what needed to be done. I needed to see that I was grieving a lost childhood, abandonment from my parents, encountered racism, lost loves, survival, encountered loneliness, etc. I was also grieving those traits that were developed to help me survive. Why did I have to become a gladiator and fight all the time? There is a saying that I use in my book, “The Gladiators Journey,” “I have been fighting since I was a child, I am not a survivor, I’m a fucking warrior.” Therefore, I am grieving those that I have slayed along the way, the hurts that I caused, and the pain I have inflicted. So much grief that is always under the surface keeps us where we are. If you are like me, it keeps you angry, others are kept sad, some are kept off-balance, while others are stuck in the fetal position. It does not matter the effect, grief must be examined!
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