Sharing and Caring

[MajestyJo]

For me it is "Recovery of Self!"

I am an adult child, who got a lot of mixed messages that I needed to learn to identify and change to become the person I wanted to be.

I was married to two abusive men and I had to learn my own identity because I had lived my life through them for ten years, along with the many men who were a part of my life.

I am a person who became addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs. I was a workaholic and have an eating disorder.

Every time I used, I lost a piece of me. When I came into recovery I was a fragmented shell, and there wasn't very much of me left. I had lost it, given it away, or just got it all mixed up and didn't know who I was.

Someone asked me what made me happy and I didn't know, and couldn't remember having that feeling too often in my life.

I had to find myself, which I did my the reflection of the people in the rooms of recovery. Some of it was the negative that I had to change, other part were the positive which I recognized as having already, or which was missing and proceeded to apply or add to my own personal inventory.

They say take an inventory, but I didn't have much that I could feel accountable for because all my life I had lived through other people. I did what people told me to do, I acted the way people said I was suppose to, I spoke in the manner which I was told to or I thought was the proper way to speak for each given occasion.

I have come to realize "how can I know what I have never been taught!" When they say keep an open mind, for me it means to be open new ideas and concepts, and be willing to accept or reject them to become the person I want to be in recovery.

I can still go back into the old patterns, I can still act out in my disease, but as I stay clean and grow in this program I am able to identify where I am at and use the tools that I am given to change. I have a Higher Power who often taps me on the shoulder and redirects me and I am sure He sits up there and says, "Tsk, Tsk!!! Don't tell me we are going to go through this again, hasn't she learned her lesson yet?" Yet through it all He is loving, caring, forgiving and just keeps telling me to just try. All I have to do is try to be the best me I can be today, nothing more, nothing less, but I do have to try. The failure is in the not trying. Not on doing, and falling on my fanny or back into old ways of thinking and doing, because this is one day at a program, and each day is a new beginning.

Love and Hugs, keep coming so you don't have to come back. It took me two years to detox because it took me so long to get here. At four years I quit journaling because I looked at what I had written at 2 years and thought "this is a crock of "sh*t" and it took me two years more to realized that it wasn't, it was where I was at in the moment. All I had done was block my ability to get out the feelings I need to and had come to a portion of my life I didn't want to look at, and it was another two years later when I got my computer that I was able to write and open up again.

You need to be your own best friend. Looking outside of ourselves to fulfill our needs is never satisfying and we need to go within and find our true selves.

Something I wrote on another site in 2004.

Looking outside of myself to make myself happy is Step Two. Why should I look to others to make me feel good. If I am not feeling good within, I won't recognized it outside. When I can't find it, and I find it and lose it, or keep thinking more, I am caught up in the insanity of my disease.