As we go down this road of reinventing ourselves, reclaiming the things that we lost is a priority. Two of the areas we lost related to personal power and personal time. Since our life became so out of control any semblance of power was imagined and when it was real it was fleeting. Our personal time was equally affected.
One of the most challenging things that any of us do is finding what works. When we start down the journey of recovery we must decide what is going to work for us. When I was an obese person I tried various diets and types of activity that could help promote healthy food choices for me. I ultimately decided on gastric bypass surgery. That procedure ultimately gave me a new start. It would also transform me physically that could allow me better control and helped me change my mental approach to food. It’s the same thing with any type of recovery. Regardless of where we are at in our personal life and whatever we are looking to overcome, we must find out what is going to work for us.
This approach is, what I call, The Exchange Theory of Recovery. In this Great Exchange, what we are doing is understanding the need to remove negative past thoughts, experiences, or people by exchanging them with something/someone more in line with the positive path we are choosing.
So much of Step 9 is more than just an apology. It is about moving forward differently. Many of the amends I needed to make were living amends. Yes, there were direct amends I needed to make, to myself, my children, my mother, and a few close friends.
In simple terms, obsessive compulsive disorder is a disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations/ obsessions that make them feel driven to do something repetitively and compulsively. OCD is common, chronic and a long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts/ obsessions and or behaviors/ compulsions that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over. This defined me perfectly. It was my trap that I thought I was going to die in.
The importance of becoming grateful is far greater than most of us can appreciate especially when we are new to or resisting recovery. In the beginning, we are often too angry, frustrated, or confused to recognize how vital gratitude is in our lives.
Without faith, we would never become who we are designed to become. Faith is fuel to the power that we will need to breakthrough our negative lifestyle into a life of victory and personal accomplishment. One of the things that I have found in my personal journey, is my personal faith serves to encourage others.
hose of us who find ourselves in the program of Al-Anon have often lived with either a distorted, self-righteous view of ourselves—that all the pain suffered was the result of someone else’s choices or behaviors, or the opposite—that some of us have an unwarranted sense of responsibility for our role in the difficulties and pain in our family. Neither is an entirely accurate view of reality. If we were honest with ourselves, even if we had the purest of intentions, sometimes our reactions to alcoholism hurt those in our lives.
It is hard to have a positive assertion or a personal affirmation when we are inundated with so much negativity.
As a Person of Recovery and a former obese person I understood how neglecting my body can cause such great present and even future damage. The emotional dimension is often based on who I see in the mirror.
Once I then add the spiritual as an essential influence to my view of me things begin to become even more distorted. Since the spiritual is intangible and therefore can’t see it, the likelihood of that perspective overriding the other three is near impossible.
As vital as meditation is it is, unfortunately, involuntary. there is no involuntary characteristic to it. there is no spiritual or otherwise fire alarm that automatically kicks in when we need it. meditation only occurs when I decide to meditate.