By: Catherine Townsend-Lyon “It’s hard to walk away from a winning streak, even harder to leave the table when you’re on a losing one.” ― Cara Bertoia I Was Gambling with My Life and Mental Health My recovery journey started again in 2006. I woke up in a hospital as the result […]
For many addicts and alcoholics coming to terms with the puzzle of addiction – knowing they need to change and doing the complete opposite is frustrating and scary. However, the good news is that the barriers and objections are within you and that means you have the ability to change them. It’s just a matter of isolating them, examining them and then changing what doesn’t work or fit anymore.
The reality is that change is going to feel painful, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and uncertain. Too often people focus only on their pain, what they will have to go through to change, without reflecting on the pain that their actions have caused loved ones and friends.
People who have relapsed can learn something from the experience. But, for the rest of us, those lessons are best learned from a distance. We can learn from watching what others go through when they relapse. This is a better alternative than learning first-hand.
If we failed to take notice with the push, then we should expect a ‘where did that come from’ moment that took us up short, and forced us to see. That’s the nature of our life lessons; they will keep coming and with more force each time we refuse to pay attention to the easier way.
It’s amusing to me that ‘author unknown’ means it could be any of us. And in this case, I think it’s all of us in early recovery. We’re scared of staying in our addiction and scared of the unknown called recovery. What happens to many people is that they’re on the fence. Unfortunately, as my mentor told me, “All you get by sitting on the fence is splinters in your ass.”
As a person in long-term recovery, I made many resolutions to stop drinking and using drugs, most of which were while I was high, couldn’t pay a bill, or I had a hangover. That resolution lasted as long as I felt bad, or about 24 hours.
From Marilyn L. Davis, Editor-in-Chief Transferring All those Zeros and Ones To all our loyal followers and readers, “I’m sorry.” In transferring to a WordPress blog, some of our posts did not transfer all neat and tidy. In fact, some look like my nine-year-old grandson wrote them and couldn’t decide the font or […]
Ambivalence or of two minds happens when a person has both positive and negative feelings about someone or something and is struggling with deciding which option has more merit.
You’ll know you are ambivalent if you think conflicting thoughts about something, or hear yourself talking about a subject and then qualify it with a “but….”, “however…..”, or “on the other hand I think or feel……”.
One of the most important aspects of the recovery process is that you do not have to have all of the answers to your problems. A common statistic is that 1 in 10 Americans are in recovery. That equates to 23 million people who have found solutions and in many cases, are willing to share their suggestions and directions with the rest of us. For any other problem, we typically Google our search. For recovery, it’s no different.
