THOUGHT FOR TODAY 9/23/09

We may do less-than-logical things to cope with tragic or unhappy events in our lives. That is how we ended up in this situation to begin with. Yeah, we may have started out taking pain meds for legit physical pain, but I hear SO MANY TIMES (and it's my own story as well) that it wasn't long when I soon realized that those pain killers helped with emotional pain as well. We don't do these things because we're silly or stupid, we do them because it's the only way we know to survive. It was easier to have the pills take away the emotional pain than to have to FEEL that pain or work through that pain. The problem arises when we have used so long and blocked feelings for so long that they just pile up on top of each other until we are one big, hurting mess of feelings.

One of those feelings is SELF ESTEEM. We all have a problem with that, I don't care who you are or what walk of life you come from, as a recovering addict, we all have problems with self esteem.

One of the silliest things we do to cope with life is devaluing ourselves when bad things happen to us. We might have experienced a lot of pain while we were growing up, or as a child we looked around and said, "Yup. This must be my fault. There's something wrong with me." Or, "I know if I would have kept my room cleaner, my daddy wouldn't have gone away."

Low self-esteem-- and all the ways it manifests-- becomes a way of coping with painful events. We look around and see all the people who don't appear to have our level of problems, so we may conclude, "There's something wrong with me." Although adapting a posture of low self-esteem might have been a way of surviving pain, that time has passed. It's time to replace low self-esteem with new perspectives.

Stop coping with events by devaluing yourself. Instead, respond to life by loving and taking care of yourself. You are not a bad person because something bad has happened to you, you are not a bad person because you are a recovering addict. I hear a quote somewhere once and it said we are not a bad person trying to BE good, we are a sick person trying to get well. I believe this is so true.

Love yourself just as you are, faults and all. Stop beating yourself up because of the mistakes you have made. No one is perfect out there. An "x" is and "X", doesn't matter if it's a big X or a little x, it is still a "X" and the same goes for people and mistakes. A mistake is a mistake, some are big, some are small but a mistake is a mistake and EVERYONE makes them.