When I first came into recovery, my mind was all over the place.  I was unable to organize my thoughts and the feelings that were surfacing were overwhelming.  Fear, anger, shame, remorse and bitterness.  Fourteen months later, my thoughts have slowed down.  I can identify feelings and manage them.  This has been made possible through the program of the 12 Steps.

If I’m consistently doing the right thing such as keeping my commitments, showing up on time, keeping my priorities in check, helping others and maintaining conscious contact with my Higher Power, remaining grateful  and not keeping secrets or being dishonest, then I’m sure to be happy.  Right?  Well, so far, this has been the case for me.

I don’t need to have the best of everything.  What I do need is to make the best of everything.

Don’t get me wrong, things don’t always go my way and I have a lot of complicated situations in my life, but I keep my attitude positive.  I do this by practicing acceptance and by listening to the experience, strength and hope of those in the program who have gone before me.  I know that if I do what they do, my life will have a limitless amount of possibilities.

-JS

I have come to realize recently that my old habits, particularly the habit of negative thinking, are slowly disappearing.

A situation arose this week where I live and I did not react to it the way I would have nine months ago.  The “old” me would have gone into a tailspin.  I would have been angry, frustrated and ultimately depressed.  It is likely that if I didn’t have the tools I have gained since coming into recovery, I would have headed straight out for a drink.  Because I am conscious of changing my habits, my thinking is changing as well and as a result, the thought of relapse did not even occur to me.

I have changed my habit of considering everything in black and white, right or wrong, and the result is that I can now look at situations such as happened this week in a neutral way.

I did some soul searching and knew that, first, the situation is completely out of my control.  Getting upset or angry (or negative) about the issue would only hurt myself.  I didn’t cause the issue, and I could not take it personally.  It was not the end of the world.

I then sat down and thought about all the things I have to be grateful for.  I knew that gratitude outweighs any negative issues I might come up against.

I realized that when I change my old thought patterns, which were habitual, I can overcome obstacles in my life.  What is important is how I react to certain issues.   Changing habits means that my behaviours are healthier, and I can find humour where I used to find frustration.  What is most important is that I refuse to let something come between me and my serenity.  It is possible to look at things in a positive light.  And for that I am grateful.

SC

We often use anger as a way of getting what we want – it is sometimes much easier to be angry than to stay calm and make our needs known.

I have read many times that “venting” is supposed to be healthy, but in reality, it is only a temporary fix.  I have found that reacting in anger only made my feelings of frustration worse.  I knew that coming into recovery meant I had to learn to cope with anger – it was vital to my continuing sobriety.

First, I needed to find the causes of my anger – what people, places and things made me angry and why.  Was my anger justified?  Was the level of anger I felt reasonable, given the situation as I saw it?

I learned that when I start to feel angry (the telltale signs for me are buzzing in my head and burning in my ears), I have to find ways to avoid an angry outburst that only ends up making the situation worse.

Very often, our anger is misplaced – it can simply be a result of miscommunication with others, our own negative perception of a situation or our unrealistic expectations of other people in our lives.

When we feel frustrated, our emotions can and will take over – that’s part of being human.  But if we give in to it, or use it to manipulate or hurt others, we will likely hurt ourselves more, either physically, emotionally or socially.  The anger I carried a lot of the time resulted in alienating friends, family and co-workers.  It became an excuse for relapse.

I have learned how to cope with anger in more healthy ways, before it gets the better of me.  I may take a long walk, talk to someone who can be objective, or simply count to ten in my head before I say or do anything.  These coping skills have helped me deal with anger and its negative results – and maintain my serenity.

SC

Some of us are very good at putting things off – I became a pro at this.  I convinced myself that I worked better under pressure and would wait until the very last minute to start something that needed to be done.

It was so much easier to focus on the things I wanted to do rather than tackling something that should be done.  And if I missed a deadline or avoided doing something completely, I could easily blame others or minimize its importance.

A lot of us have learned the hard way that recovery is a process and it is dangerous to stand still, rather than taking action.  But I now know that if I’m not moving forward in my recovery, I will revert back to my old ways of thinking and behaving, making relapse almost inevitable.

To be successful at anything, including recovery, we need to face what has to be done and take the action needed to accomplish it.

I myself had work to do to clean up the past and I had a lot of fear around it.  But I knew that moving forward in recovery meant change and part of that change was facing my fears.  It would have been easy to wait until I was backed into a corner, but that would be the very behavior I wanted to change.

By accomplishing some of the work slowly and not overwhelming myself, my self-esteem began to improve – I started to feel like a person again.  I also discovered that many of my fears around the issues were unfounded.

Experience has taught me that procrastinating is not a healthy behavior.  If I avoid or delay doing the necessary work, it will only create new problems and that is something I don’t need or want in my life.  My motto is “do it now” because it will improve my life in the long run.

SC

A lot of people in recovery have a predisposition to isolate.  We do this for many reasons.  We may feel shame or guilt for our behaviours when we were drinking or using, we may fear being around people, places and things that could trigger our addiction, or we may isolate simply because it is familiar to us.

Unfortunately, isolation means we spend a lot of time in our own heads, and this is not always healthy in sobriety.  We have to learn to avoid getting lost in our own negative thinking.

Isolation also results in avoidance of our support systems.  We don’t move ahead in our recovery, we retreat into old habits and behaviours, causing us to isolate even more.

Isolation causes anger and resentments to build until we start to crave something that makes us feel better – usually a drink or drug.  Our self-esteem we have been trying to nurture in recovery goes down and we often develop physical and emotion health problems.  We can find it difficult to tell others how we really feel so we hibernate.

When I find myself isolating, I take stock of myself because it is a sign that something is not right.

Being alone can be good at times, but chronic isolation is detrimental to our recovery, so if we see that we are spending too much time alone, we must look at why and correct it quickly.

SC