As we recover we discover values that we didn't know we had, but at one time we all had had them, but they were lost because of our problem. It's not because we are less than other people, like so many of us had convinced ourselves as a way to explain the moral decline we were experiencing. None of us were able to keep up with the lowering of our standards fast enough to meet this decline. This is how we developed that self loathing that accompanies so many of us all to recovery. Then we hear it said, for the first time when we come into recovery, that we're not bad people trying to be good, but sick trying to get well. What a sense of relief we get from knowing this and then we get a new happiness, and begin to see that recovery can do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves