Are You the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened to You? Stop Victimizing Yourself!

We can read dozens of  Recovery books, we can attend meetings everyday, we can work the 12 Steps with the best of workbooks— But all of this is useless if we don’t first develop a good sense of self-acceptance.

No on has been less accepting of me than ME! No one has been meaner to me than ME! For years, I’ve beaten myself up with negative self-talk. True. I learned this negative talk from my parents, teachers, bullies at school and others that I gradually gave my personal power away to, but I’m the one who accepted their negative words and chose to use them against myself. I allowed them to victimize me and then I became my own worst enemy.

Endless negative self-talk destroyed my self-acceptance and prevented me from developing a positive self-Love and self-esteem. And as Melody Beattie says in her book “52 Weeks of Conscious Contact,” “The biggest challenge to accepting ourselves isn’t what other people tell us. It’s the things we tell ourselves.”

Self-rejection is self-abandonment. And nothing is more painful. If we want to successfully work a Recovery program, we have to begin by changing our negative self-talk into positive self-affirmation. We have to stop victimizing ourselves.

Self-acceptance is the doorway into healthy self-Love and successful recovery from our addictive behaviors. Practicing self-acceptance means we learn to change our criticisms of ourselves into affirmations. It means we have to accept everything about ourselves that we have loathed. And it means we have to surrender our need to victimize ourselves to our Higher Power. In partnership with our Higher Power we can come to accept and love ourselves just as God created us.