The Language of Letting Go: July 25th

Keep at It

Keep practicing your recovery behaviors, even when they feel awkward, even when they haven't quite taken yet, even if you don't get it yet.

Sometimes it takes years for a recovery concept to move from our mind into our heart and soul. We need to work at recovery behaviors with the diligence, effort, and repeated practice we applied to codependent behaviors. We need to force ourselves to do things even when they don't feel natural. We need to tell ourselves we care about ourselves and can take care of ourselves even when we don't believe what we're saying.

We need to do it, and do it, and do it - day after day, year after year.

It is unreasonable to expect this new way of life to sink in overnight. We may have to "act as if" for months, years, before recovery behaviors become ingrained and natural.

Even after years, we may find ourselves, in times of stress or duress, reverting to old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

We may have layers of feelings we aren't ready to acknowledge until years into our recovery. That's okay! When it's time, we will.

Do not give up! It takes time to get self-love into the core of us. It takes repeated practice. Time and experience. Lessons, lessons, and more lessons.

Then, just when we think we've arrived, we find we have more to learn.

That's the joy of recovery. We get to keep learning and growing all of our life!

Keep on taking care of yourself, no matter what. Keep on plugging away at recovery behaviors, one day at a time. Keep on loving yourself, even when it doesn't feel natural. Act as if for as long as necessary, even if that time period feels longer than necessary.

One day, it will happen. You will wake up, and find that what you've been struggling with and working so hard at and forcing yourself to do, finally feels comfortable. It has hit our soul.

Then, you go on to learn something new and better.

Today, I will plug away at my recovery behaviors, even if they don't feel natural. I will force myself to go through the motions even if that feels awkward. I will work at loving myself until I really do. 

From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©1990, Hazelden Foundation

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 Mistakes are
the portals of
discovery.
—
James Joyce

How do you react when you learn
that you have made a mistake?
Stay calm? Freak out? Many of us
freak out, at least a little bit, because we
have been trained to have an aversion to
mistakes, to being wrong. The reaction is
just that, an automatic response due to
conditioning. We don’t think about it and
decide to react—we just react. It’s like
touching a hot stove; we pull back and try
to make sure we never do that again.
There is a problem with this. The
problem is, that which we call a mistake
is really an opportunity to develop a new
awareness. The awareness might be that
a false fact was accepted as true, or that
there was a misunderstanding about
something, or that a technique needs to
be adjusted or relearned. The automatic
negative reaction greatly decreases the
likelihood that any productive change will
occur. We feel shame and embarrassment,
and we shut down for a time.

In reality, there are
no mistakes. Every decision leads to a
set of consequences that flow from that
decision. If the consequences are that
which we desire, we keep going; if the
consequences are not desired, we make a
different decision. If that involves making
amends to someone, we do that as part of
the process. That’s all. Simple.