Recovery from an addiction involves learning to monitor myself emotionally and to live proactively.
Sometimes I feel like I’m watching myself on surveillance
video to see how I react to situations. If I get tense or irritable, then It’s
time to intervene. Instead of taking medication, I go through the checklist; Am
I hungry? Am I angry? If so, why? Am I lonely or tired? If so, what do I need to do? I added another
one to the AA checklist; Am I craving? I no longer crave alcohol, but I crave
sugar or shopping. Those things tell me I need to unload some stuff.
Sadness or loss can creep up on me when I least expect it. Things
that happened years ago can come to my mind and I have learned to ask myself
what those things might mean. When I felt loss as a child, I never knew how to
process that. I just buried it and kept the sadness inside. If it bubbled up, I
pushed it back in. Now I am told that is not a good thing to do, but that was
an unhealthy habit I built at a young age.
If I find myself feeling loss now, I have had to train my
brain to process the pain or sadness. If I have a difficult memory, I have learned
to talk it through with people and God. Many things that I have believed were
true I have found to be only partially true, or even completely false. I
believe my memory gets twisted and doesn’t always report things accurately. I
am constantly on the lookout for inaccurate perspectives that I held onto which
require sifting. As they say in
AA concerning our brain, Don’t ever go in there alone.
I have found that our enemy, the devil, often feeds us
thoughts that we need to challenge and prove in the eyes of God.
Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. 1 Pet 5:8
