Soulshine

Heaven knows that the thought process for many addicts is seriously flawed. Many of us learned to engage in negative thought patterns like “all or nothing thinking,” “overgeneralization,” “discounting the positive” and “jumping to conclusions.” Let’s examine some of these to see just how they negatively impact our lives. Most of us probably understand “all or nothing thinking” as “black and white thinking.” When we engage in this mental process, we back ourselves into very small corners. I used to trap myself into being an instant failure with this very limited way of thinking. For example, I was an English/Creative Writing major in college. My career has always involved writing. And it used to be that if I found a typo in something I had written, I was devastated. It made no difference to me how brilliant or well-written my work was, because a single typo could rend the entire work worthless due to my all or nothing thinking. Obviously, this took a serious toll on my self-worth ...

In his book The Power of Kindness , Piero Ferrucci speaks of “the soul wound.” Coined by Thomas Yeomans, the soul wound is “what we feel when as children we are not seen for who we are—a soul full of marvelous potential for love, intelligence and creativity—but instead perceived as a difficult, headstrong child, or a lovely showpiece, or as a great nuisance—or not seen at all.” Those of us who grew-up in addictive households known the pain of the soul wound and it is something that we have carried with us into adulthood and into the rooms of recovery. This is the primary wound that our inner-critics zero in on. It’s the wound that bleeds with the belief that we are a nuisance, or worthlessly stupid, or hopelessly unlovable. And it fuels the merciless voices of our inner-critics. I’m often amazed at how active my inner-critic is every day. When it isn’t hammering me, it is hammering someone else in the same manner in which it hammers me—shamelessly. More and more I am aware of...