Please try to apply this to yourself or it won’t do you any good. Open your mind to free your identity.
Prayer and step three are a prerequisite to all recovery steps and exercises for guidance and direction, for revelation, and epiphany, for self awareness and cutting through the ego .
AA status quos are the AA Juggernauts that can kill you. We must allow ourselves to become vulnerable emotionally if we are going to heal. We must not allow our intellect to stifle what our heart needs to say. The AA Juggernaut is to follow socially acceptable rules during our recovery process. By this we would cover up our heart and hide it from real recovery.
My recovery from addiction in short has been about
me going through a process of courageous yet simple action to gain the confidence to be who I really am. By showing the world my truth of self I am being true to my own heart. By being true to my own heart and accepting that I am a human being my chronic shame of self has dwindled to near nothing. My shame is what put me in bondage and my shame is a result of what I was taught about myself as a child. The wrongs I have done to other’s are in comparison minute details by the wayside of the real reasons for my guilt and shame. Neither my wrongs or wrongs suffered should be ignored in my recovery process that leads to healing.
Could recovery really be about wrongs suffered? ABSOLUTELY! It’s just that, these wrongs happened so long ago we seldom realize or remember them.
I had to learn an emotional processes in and by me that enabled me to get-out the negative feelings from past, present, and fear of future so I don’t get myself sick all over again. And so the poison that lived in my bowels and had taken on a life of their own have been expelled. I screamed in my car many times to release endorphins and get out the pain and anger of my past.
Does this strange way of recovery mean I am not talking about the 12 step recovery and AA? Not at all. Steps eleven and twelve must be taken seriously and be on-going. If we don’t build a habit around sharing our story and telling “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now” FROM OUR HEART we won’t build the confidence we need, nor will we process the fear and poison and shame living inside us. Sharing our truth with a like minded and seemingly caring listener is vital to recovery.
Step Eleven meditation is what will reveal many of our core issues to us and bring up the body and mind memories from our original pain. We should meditate for at least 30 Minutes every other day for years on end. We also should have a way to allow our anger to escape. Once we discover who has really hurt us the worst in childhood by teaching us that we are “lesser than” we must process that anger and hurt by writing. We also process inner pain by harmless physical aggression therapy focused on that pain while “hitting the bag” per say. If we don’t know our core issues and don’t focus on them during punching exercises we won’t be getting the poison out. Focus is a big part of the physical exercise to expel our demons.
A step four is very important so we become aware of the patterns of our character flaws. Our character flaw patterns are our core level animal survival skills that are usually based in denial of self awareness. Stuff like blame, fault finding, criticalness, verbal abuse, name calling, dysfunctional sexual endeavours, drama, condemnation of self, and deflection of responsibility, ego pumping, and putting others down to make us feel “good, better than” are our desperate attempt to fix what’s broken in us. But since these C.D.’s are not authentic truths they don’t heal us. They just deflect and distract our heart from the original pain.
Be aware there is a fine line between identifying a childhood abuser and dysfunctional blame/critisism. Once we identify an abuser who taught us that we were second rate citizens. One whom we trusted and loved, one whom told us we were bad, and wrong from the core we should write how they made us feel. Write at least one “fuck you ” letter (do not send) to process our hurt and wrath. Every time we get raging mad we should sit down and write some letter of wrath so we can see how we feel and think. We don’t share these writings they should be brutal and full of rage. The letters are most needed in our first and second years of recovery. Sometimes it helps to burn them. And at some point we should confront our original abuser and share how and what they made us feel and believe as children. But we should avoid long bitch sessions and critical on-going condemnations except during physical focus exercises like beating the bag or beat the bed with plastic bat.
We share from our heart not from our place of war. We say something like this to our abuser: “I was so convinced that I was inferior because of what you taught me about myself that I feared all people around me because they were better than me, so I thought.” This is a healthy typical way to process in the I context. Do not expect the abuser to fix you or even admit his wrongs EVER. And don’t do the confrontation until all your other steps 1-12 have been done at least twice. Find at least one person you can tell anything to and share your most intense fears after putting them on paper. If the confidant invalidates your heart you must find another confidant who will say “I know just what your mean, I have felt that way too.”
Do you know that you think you are “bad”? Do you realized that it’s not really your fault? We were fed the realities about ourselves way before we ever hurt our first victim and committed our first crime. Our reason for deep pain is usually a broken heart which was incurred way before our first girlfriend or boyfriend dumped us. Why do we defend ourselves relentlessly? Because we believe in our heart of hearts that we are bad, wrong and inferior. This perception can only be changed by action and a new way of life. It is a hard truth to swallow because it goes against our false pride.
Many addicts will never see who they really are because their false pride won’t allow it. They won’t do these exercises because they balk “socially unacceptable”. The AA status quo does not support many of my recovery from addiction findings.
We still need to do thorough fourth steps and see our part in situations that we have hurt others. We still must take responsibility for our own wrongs done. But we must NOT neglect processing wrongs suffered because they are at the core of our original pain. They are the “why” behind our addiction. Why do I need to know the “why”? Because if I don’t find the core issue behind my pain I will always walk with a poison splinter in my heart, infected, and seeping. If I don’t address the core infection then I will always be one step away from the next big pain that begs the next drink. This is the difference between needing meetings always and real healing recovery. People who have recovered don’t generally need meetings but and they have no reason to want to drink and drug. Their core pain has been healed and scarred over. They don’t get depression or paralyzing anxiety anymore.
Often we want our parents to love us so badly that we blind ourselves to the horrible lies they taught us about ourselves. It took me seven years sober for my worst core issue to finally surface about how deeply my own father broke my heart and fed me to the wolves.
How does a child excel when he is armed with the horrible lie that he is inferior to all people around him? You did the best you knew how to survive as an adolescent with a broken heart. Get out a photo of yourself as a small child. Look at it, the innocence, the beauty. From now on when you see yourself remember THAT child still lives in you and needs to heal, she/he needs to be heard by you and others. Identify the survival characters you have developed to survive emotionally. Identify the one personality in your mind who is telling you “you’re bad, you’re wrong, your shit, you can’t do it, give up, don’t try, don’t tell anyone what you think or feel” and let that ego know during step eleven meditation that she/he is loved, and it will be okay. She does not have to be afraid any more.
You have a choice. You do not have to pick up today. You can heal, you just need more information and clarity about who you are and why you drank. There is a valid reason for every character defect you developed. No one taught you how to emotionally nurture yourself. Your parents had no idea how to nurture your emotions and self esteem. They beat you down unknowingly (most likely). Someone beat you down as a child, my friend, someone did.
God does not make junk. Society has certain status quos that will kill you if you adhere your personality to them. That includes AA status quos like, we are never afraid, if we fear it means we are not working a good program (total bullshit) see fear list fourth step for on-going fear solutions. Or the status quos: we are not allowed to realize we were victims, or we are not allowed to explore wrongs done to us. Or we are not allowed to cry or be sad. Or we are not allowed to grieve unless someone dies around us. People are so (subconsciously) desperate in AA to process their pain they will grieve about a fellow who dies even though they didn’t even know the guy and could really care less. Why? Because socially it’s the only time in AA we are allowed to grieve and share our pain openly without being bombarded with comments like, SELF PITY, or labeled some other character defect. Emotions are not character flaws until someone gets hurt by them.
You have a right to do some grieving for your own reasons. Your heart is free listen to it. Do not be paralyzed by it but rather allow it to spring you into action. THE TRUTH ABOUT YOURSELF WILL SET YOU FREE.