Soulshine

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery. Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness. Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort. First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we ...

Everyone has multiple opportunities to become the hero of their own life story. In Disney’s Maleficent , we focus primarily on the character who is portrayed as the evil fairy in the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty. We learn her complete story: The fact that she began life as a good fairy who was the champion of her people against an evil king, who was then betrayed by her close friend and the future heir to the evil king’s throne, Stefan. We thus learn why Maleficent became so bitter and why she cast an evil spell upon her betrayer’s first born child, Aurora. Maleficent, like all of us, was not born evil. Redemption was always within her grasp. And, although we are addicts, redemption is always within our grasp as well. It’s completely up to our being willing to choose to redeem ourselves from addiction. That’s the first step: admitting we have a problem and that we are now willing to do something to help ourselves. And how is Maleficent redeemed? She is redeemed throug...

“In the end all that matters is how well did you love, how well did you live, how well did you learn to let go.” Anonymous The addictive personality thrives on control. It is hypervigilant and aggressive about making sure that all is as it “should be.” The need to control never sleeps. When we’re in this control-life-at-all-costs mode, we run on adrenaline and fear 24 hours a day. We are constantly monitoring everyone and everything around us. We must make sure that all of life cooperates with our desires, expectations and assumptions. Whenever we discover a threat to our imagined serenity, we are quick to move into Terminator mode and stamp it out as quickly as possible. So we pull out our inner-arsenal of manipulative behaviors, like flattery, caretaking, people-pleasing and self-righteousness to beat down anyone who might be standing in the way of our perceived happiness. As a result, we “love” and “live” poorly. Notice I said “imagined” serenity and “perceived” ...

“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 pr...

“I now find myself eating for all the same reasons I drank:  I’m lonely, I’m afraid.” Craig Nakken , The Addictive Personality Many people mistakenly belief that addiction itself is the primary problem. It is not. Addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is self-hatred. Most every addict suffers from a severe amount of self-loathing. In fact, self-love is a tern that is completely foreign to people who are caught in the throes of addictive behaviors. No one over-indulges in alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping or any other addictive behavior for no reason. The reason is clear to me. It is lack of self-love. That lack of self-love leads to lack of self-esteem and lack of self-worth. We are then left fearful and lonely. We fear that others will find out how miserably imperfect and unacceptable we are and so we isolate as much as possible to avoid rejection. As we separate ourselves from people and healthy relationships, we begin bui...

“This is the day your life will surely change. This is the day when things fall into place. You could've done anything -- if you'd wanted. And all your friends and family think that you're lucky. But the side of you they'll never see Is when you're left alone with the memories That hold your life together like Glue.” This Is the Day by The The Sometimes the memories that hold our lives together like glue are the same memories that hold us bound to our addictions like glue. And sometimes we’re able to hide those addictive memories and secrets very well; so well, that family and friends think we’ve really got it together or are actually “lucky.” Prior to entering recovery, I thrived at being an overachiever. It always seemed like an oxymoron to me: I thought I was a living piece of shit and yet I thrived at work in public and press relations. I edited award-winning publications; winning awards on local, state and national levels. I drove a beau...