144 pages of Daily Meditations-read free/copy/post
Love is an action as well as a feeling.
Any act of giving without strings attached is a Loving act. We don’t have to feel fuzzy and
yummy in our hearts to create an act of Love. The fuzzy and yummy does sometime come after
the giving act however.
When individuals come into recovery often times we are riddled with guilt concerning our
children. Usually for us woman our deepest regret and guilt is in the arena of our children.
Either we abandoned them or we lost them or we neglected them.
My first counselor and sponsor told me during the reading of my Fifth Step that I would not
have done the things I did had it not been for the addiction that had such power over me. When
I was strung out on pain killers they became my world. I had to be well first and foremost and if
I did not have my opiates I was not well. I put the needs of my daughter on the back burner. I
had to do allot of journaling and confessing to get that guilt off my chest.
I also did a thorough Ninth Step with my daughter. It was an emotional time she was only nine
years old yet she understood that she had been neglected the many times I left her behind with
her grandparents or brought her along on drug runs. Telling her how ashamed I was of myself
for those times was an opportunity that some addict parents never get.
The 12 Steps are designed by providence for those of us who want to change our lives and have a
conscience to not live an addiction based life.
I make daily amends to my daughter by being present and raising her with Love by making her
meals, buying her clothes and putting her needs ahead of my own. By the Grace of God and the
Program of Alcoholics Anonymous the poison shame that would have killed me has been
released. Without my Higher Power there is no such thing as a “program” that works.
I don’t have all the answers concerning God and the state of humanity as to why atrocities are
allowed by a great power and creator. However if I baulk at Step Three and Step Eleven where
my connection to God is I baulk at Love and that would be an atrocity in itself.
