Soulshine

Every feeling we experience is valid. And important. There are NO wrong feelings. God gave us feelings to help us process life. When we face and process our feelings we return to a balanced place inside ourselves, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Most everyone suffering from addictive behaviors is perpetuating their suffering by suppressing their feelings. We were sometimes taught as children that it was not OK or even valid to have feelings, and many of us learned to turn-off our feelings to survive in our chaotic childhood households. A major part of Recovery is learning to acknowledge and reclaim our feelings, so that we can go about processing life properly. Be aware of the fact, however, that not everyone you know may be comfortable with your learning to respect and express your feelings. For some people in our lives, this will be a new and awkward experience. If people resist our expressions of our feelings, we must also remember that ...

The past few days I’ve been on a real emotional rollercoaster. Since 1998, I had been taking 200 milligrams of Zoloft everyday for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Last year I talked with my doctor and decided to start weaning myself off of the Zoloft, which I had started taking as a means of increasing my natural serotonin production. It helped with my OCD, but later I learned that it also was emotionally numbing-me-out. Deciding that I wanted to start feeling the full rainbow of my feelings again, I began working my way down to 100 milligrams of Zoloft a day; then down to 50 milligrams a day. Last week, I took the last Zoloft I had. Since that time, emotions have started gushing out like crazy. Last Sunday evening I was watching an old Ginger Rogers movie called Romance in Manhattan . Rogers plays a New York showgirl who chance-meets a newly-arrived Yugoslavian immigrant (played by Francis Lederer). They go up to the top of her apartment building one evening; and as Led...