Recovering Through Open-Mindedness

So, this post is being written with some pretty heated emotions... Well, I wouldn't say heated emotions, but just a lot of emotions all at once. I don't know really what to feel. Hurt? Used? Preyed upon? Anger? Frustration? Sadness? Joy and relief? It's all hitting me at once. During my active addiction I would often try and run away from my emotions, and just cover them up with drugs and try not to feel. I would also try and drown out my sorrows by having sex with anything and everything that moved. I thought that sex might cheer me up, and make me loose the sense of reality even for just a little while, but I only realized that doing that didn't help either. So, what happened today that has me so messed up? I'll use the words "they" and "their" to make sure that anonymity is still present, and to not assign a specific gender to this addict. An addict who I was very close to recently went back out and relapsed. Unfortunately this addict is g...

"... we understand that the world's condition wasn't really the problem. It was our ideas and attitudes about the world that made it impossible for us to find a comfortable place in it." ~ Basic Text p. 55 You know, I was thinking about this today before I even read the Just for Today. It was pretty interesting that this was the topic for the Just for Today . I said a few weeks ago that I don't believe in coincidences anymore, and I'm coming to realize that if I open my eyes to the view around me that things usually are connected to each other in one way or another. So today was a pretty rough one. Unfortunately I can't say much because I don't want to violate our traditions and anonymity principals of the Narcotics Anonymous program. So, I'll just talk about the Just for Today . "Our attitudes and our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see our lives. If our "glasses" are smudged or dirty, our lives look dim. If our atti...

So I'm writing this post on Saturday October 7th, but I'm scheduling it for the future. I'm going to be doing this more often as to not overload my readers with too many posts and too much information on one single day. I'm going to limit my posts I believe to two per day depending on what the post is about and the length of it. Now onwards to the actual post! "When a thought occurs to me, do I immediately act on it without considering the consequences? In what other ways do I behave compulsively?" ~ NA Step Working Guide p. 2  So, this question makes me really think. It's a difficult one to answer for myself, but yet its so easy. The short answer: Yes I do. As an addict I'm always thinking of the short-term and how to satisfy my need for short-term satisfaction. In my active addiction I was always going super fast, and never slowed down to think about how my actions would effect myself, the people around me, or the things around me. I always want...