On our quest for a spiritual awakening, a psychic change that keeps us safe from alcohol, we uncovered some hard facts about ourselves in the Fourth Step. One of them is this, we tend to run on emotion. Not just feel things, but run on them. And not only that, we built monuments to our feelings. We took anger, resentment, hurt, fear, and turned them into something solid, something we lived inside of and kept feeding. It got so overwhelming that we acted on it, and when that didn’t work, we covered it up with booze. That was the cycle.
Moving forward, we’re still going to get angry, still going to get hurt. Stuff is going to happen. That’s life on life’s terms, it’s unavoidable. But for us, something changes. We lost our card to stay upset. We don’t get to hang onto it like we used to. Sure, we’re going to feel it, but we can’t afford to live there anymore. We can be upset for like an hour. An hour to feel it, an hour to process it, and then we move. We don’t stretch it into a day, a week, a resentment that sits there and grows. We lost that card.
Same thing with getting bummed out. It shows up, we feel it, but we don’t camp out there. Cap it. An hour. Then we get up and move forward, whether we feel like it or not.
For us, it’s just like that. We’re not in the monument-building business anymore, we’re in the acceptance business. And acceptance keeps our character in check and, ultimately, keeps us sober. Might not like it, but we have to accept it.
Are you still building a monument to your feelings, or practicing acceptance?
