THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 8/31/09

]


Feeling Good Isn't The Point. For us recovery is more than just pleasure

While in the midst of our addiction, most of us knew exactly how we were going to feel from one day to the next. All we had to do was read the label on the bottle or know what was in the pill. We planned our feelings, and our goal for each day was to feel good. To prevent any uncomfortable or painful feelings and focus only on feeling good and only feeling good.

Once we got into recovery, it was a different story. We will feel anything from one day to the next, even from one minute to the next. We may feel energetic and happy in the morning, then strangely let down and sad in the afternoon. Because we no longer plan our feelings for the day each morning, we could end up having feelings that are somewhat inconvenient, like feeling tired in the morning and wide-awake at bedtime and have no control over when or where we feel these feelings..

Of course, there's always the possibility we could feel good, but that isn't the point. The point today is not feeling good, but learning to understand and deal with our feelings, no matter what they are. If someone says something to us that hurts our feelings, where we use to pop a pill we now have to deal with those feelings. Something we are not use to doing. But if we are ever going to honestly recover, we have to learn to deal and process all feelings. Not just the good ones, but the bad ones too.

We can do that by taking a moment to allow ourselves to feel those feelings. It is normal to feel hurt or betrayed by something that happened or something someone said. It is normal to feel happy and elated about something good in our lives. Allow yourself to feel those feelings and then process them. Either talk it over with a friend or trusted person or keep them in a journal. Whatever way you can to process them instead of falling back on our old habit of numbing ourselves to the feelings with drugs. It won't be easy but in order to honestly stay sober, we have to make these types of changes in our lives.

The old saying "one day at a time" as cheesy as it sounds is so true in this situation. So just for today keep reminding yourself "I will accept my feelings, whatever they may be, just as they are. I will learn to live my life with my feelings and deal with them in a healthy way."