Hi All,
It has been so long since I have found the time to write. Interestingly, I have spent a lot of time thinking. I had a conversation last night that openend my eyes again to how dangerous it can be for me to think my way into feeling better or doing better. I tend to end up in the same grooves that got me a chair in AA in the first place. It is interesing how easy it is to slide back into thinking the same old way. Even when I think I am really aware and working hard to change--when I am not paying attention--my brain just wants to go back to that thinking.
The indicator with me is an obsession with Self. They dont call it the bondage of self for nothing. It is true bondage to be stuck inside my own head, with my own distorted thinking, and my own old self-made solutions. No, not the drinking solution--but the isolating solution, or the shutting down solution, or the feeling sorry for myself solution, or the thinking i am better then or different solution. Terminal uniqueness. I hate being so predictably dysfunctional. Even my dysfunction wants to be special and different.
Despite the fact that my feelings feel quite unique and special to me, many or almost all of my characther defects link up quite nicely to the disease of alcoholism. A disease that I hope we all understand is only partly to do with the actual drinking and very much to do with the thinking that allows this self indulgence and self destruction to continue. My negative thoughts are really dangerous to me and my sobriety. Much more dangerous then I'd like to admit. My negative thoughts really are as dangerous to me (in the long term) as a bottle of Kettle One is sitting on my shelf (in the short term). At least the Kettle One bottle I am aware of and would probably do something about--either give away or pour out etc. The negative thinking is different bc it sort of settles in when I am not paying attention.
Next thing I know I am back isolating, feeling different, and cloaked in a melancholy that I believe is unique to me but really is not at all. Perhaps I should start to imagine my negative thinking as a big green bottle of poison (not Tanqueray but close). When I hear that familiar voice telling me no one really likes me or how what I just said was stupid or how I am worthless then I could visualize the big green bottle and go into action to break it. I need to get rid of that poison with the same intensity as the Kettle One on the shelf--call someone and get some help with those voices before they convince me that they are actually a part of me. What I have learned is that my disease can sound just like me--so much so that I sometimes mistake my disease talking to me for my true self. The difference is not tone but content. My true self does not tell me I am worthless or bad because deep down I know I am not either of those things.
For today, I am again exposing these voices to you all and to myself as I write--then I watch them shrivel up and disintegrate into the air like paper I burned up. I can give those voices credit for a nice try but I am lucky to have too many people on my side now. Those voices dont stand a chance when I have so many other smarter voices to listen to now. xxk
The image of the green bottle of poison is powerful. Possibly a more useful image would be a positive one: an image of yourself as a green flower unfolding, drinking in the oxygen and light and water and growing toward the sky. Loving what is, in yourself. Instead of banishing or loathing your complex negative thoughts, accept that they come from your brain's natural habit of repeating things until a new pattern is chosen. Repeat the good things, they become the new pattern. You are worthy, you are gift to everyone who is lucky enough to know you, you are always working toward greater consciousness. Congratulate yourself Karen.
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