Kindness Is An Act of Love

“Love yourself

And the rest will follow.”

Don Miguel Ruiz

   Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to better recover from our self-loathing.

   Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-talk with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.

   In recovery, there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is perfect. Second, the more we practice self-acceptance and love through words and acts of self-kindness, the more we will be able to empathize with the brokenness of others.

   Recovery is about self-love, but it’s also about community. No one recovers from self-hatred or addictive behaviors on their own. It takes outside help. We need others. No one else can rescue us or make us OK. We have to do that ourselves. But we are better able to do it when we  are able to share insight and support with others.

   Self-love removes our inner-neediness. This means that we are free to love and help others for the right reasons. Before recovery, many of us manipulated and used other people for our own benefit. We fooled ourselves and others into believing that we loved them for their own good. And we bent over backwards to help others in an attempt to take from them the love we weren’t willing to give to ourselves. Hence, the term “care-taking.”

   We became caretakers and people-pleasers for our benefit alone; although our behaviors benefitted no one. We wore ourselves out trying to meet the needs of others while believing that if we did, they would reciprocate. When we were able to control others and squeeze a little happiness out of them, it was never enough. And when we failed to control them, we were then controlled by our side addictions: food, shopping, drinking, etc.

   As children in alcoholic households, we learned to use people, but in recovery we learn to partner with them. Addiction is a relationship disorder. It starts by being out of right-relationship with ourselves, then spreads to being out of right relations with God and others.

   Love and kindness help to place us back in right-relationship with self, God and others, and we learn this in recovery circles.