Recovery Meditations: January 6th

LONELINESS

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted
is the most terrible poverty.

Mother Theresa


I remember being lonely for most of my growing up years. I never had many friends and never felt I fitted in, so I buried myself in studying and became an overachiever. I also buried myself in reading novels and lived in a fantasy world, always trying to escape that terrible empty feeling inside. I could be in a crowd of people or at home with my family, and yet the feeling of loneliness was always there. I didn't realize then that this was a kind of spiritual sickness, and I began to fill the "hole in my soul" with food; I was hoping food would take away the empty feeling. It took me years and a great deal of pain to realize that no amount of food could relieve that empty lonely feeling. Keeping busy couldn't help either. It was only when the pain of the food and the destructive things I was doing to myself became greater than the pain and the loneliness that I was trying to bury under mounds of food that I was brought to my knees and found the doors of my first program meeting.

Even though I wasn't sure that the program was for me at that first meeting, I knew then that I need never be alone. Other people suffered as I did and the feeling of not having to go it alone any more was very powerful. As I grow in the program and have discovered a Higher Power who is with me day and night, I have come to realize that I need never be alone. I can call on that Power at any time when I feel alone and scared. No longer do I have to feel the spiritual emptiness inside that used to drive me to food.

One Day at a Time . . .
I will remember to call on my Higher Power for guidance and help with my life; in that way, I need never be alone. When I follow the path that God intended me to follow in the first place, the loneliness disappears.

~ Sharon ~

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While I did not bury myself in studying as a child, I DID bury myself in books, living in a fantasy world for decades.  And food; after suffering a trauma at 5 years old, I discovered how excess food would numb me to reality..........take me away from the pain of something I couldn't talk about, and comfort me in some strange kind of way.  I used food to soothe me, until I discovered booze at 13 and cigarettes at 16.  So began what I call the 'unholy trinity' of addiction in the form of oral fixations.  I even bit my fingernails compulsively, speaking of oral fixations. 

I'm 55 years old and just now handling all the addictions together.  I stopped biting my nails at 23, when I was planning my wedding, simply because I didn't want to walk down the aisle with nasty fingernails. In those days, acrylic nails weren't yet invented.  For some reason, when I made up my mind to stop biting my nails, I just DID.  It wasn't hard at all.

The other 2 addictions have been brutally hard to manage, especially the food.  Once I stopped drinking, I stopped thinking about booze (for the most part) and held that addiction off for 9 years before falling off the wagon. Believe it or not, I was going to Italy with my teenage son, on a Perillo tour, and consciously decided to drink wine! I told myself I could handle it, in moderation of course, not really believing I was capable of 'moderation' but lying to myself that I could.  Naturally, I couldn't...........and I fell hard.  It took me another SEVEN YEARS to get sober.

Once I decided to stop eating compulsively and to find abstinence, I struggled at first.  4 1/2 years ago, and I STILL struggle with food.  All I have to do is avoid trigger foods and taking that first compulsive bite, yet I am not always successful with maintaining 100% abstinence.

The cigarettes I got rid of (for about the 100th time) on December 4, 2012.  To date, I haven't taken ONE puff from ONE cigarette, because I KNOW what will happen if I do. I will be back to smoking full time, and I will be smoking MORE as a result of the deprivation I felt from quitting. 

Such is the nature of ALL addictions, and why they progress & worsen each time they come out of remission.  The binges get much larger, the volume of drinking increases dramatically, and the desire to smoke goes thru the roof. 

One is too many & a million is not enough..............that saying applies to ALL of the addictions.

For today, I will not 'soothe' myself with booze, excess food or cigarettes. For today, I realize there is not enough food, booze or cigarettes on earth to fill me up.  Only abstinence & reliance on my Higher Power will accomplish THAT. 

For today, I will fill my soul with health instead of addictive destruction.