EMOTIONAL PAIN

All addicts have familiarity with pain. Whether it's emotional, physical, social, intellectual, mental, or spiritual pain, there is no form of pain that we don't come to know on intimate terms. We shake when we recall past pain and are in absolute terror over future pain. We hate pain so much, that when we learn that we're creating so much of our pain, it's hard to process. For us, it takes a special form of courage to continue our effort towards improvement after the initial terrors have passed. We got used to awful pressures in our addictive addiction. Recovery requires us to become more sensitive to the signals from the world around us. If we're used to people yelling when they want something, we may have to learn to listen to someone who seems to be whispering. We learn to re-evaluate our impressions of the world around us. We realize a major portion of the freedom that we seek.

In active addiction, we developed a ritualistic, unconscious, and reactionary style of living. Our addiction tells us that we have to look good, cover-up our feelings, deny fault, and never accept responsibility even in trivial matters. These life styles hardly seem ‘liberated.’ Freedom has a price: honesty. One of the problems that many of us face in early recovery happens when we begin to deal with life on life's terms. Emotional honesty takes courage and courage takes hope. After a few months - or years - clean, we begin to run out of problems. We don’t know what to do. People call us ‘crisis Queen’ of habitual worrier. We find ourselves sharing about something that feels like a crisis but is still months in the future. Upon closer examination we find that the problem may not even be possible. Confused, we wonder what have we been doing? We call this ‘borrowing problems from the future.’ Despair on the time plan.

Sometimes, we need to think through what actually happened and compare it to the version that we have in our mind. This is especially helpful when we feel like we're getting resentments. We no longer need to over react to hearsay. In other words, we need to look at the facts rather than letting our emotions cloud our judgement. Otherwise, we may say and do things that we can't take back. Prayer, meditation and close contact with clean addicts help us find our way. As we grow in recovery, we learn to think through what is really happening as it happens. One mark of our growth is the ability to tolerate 'real emotional pain.' We know all too well that the chemical buffers are no longer an option. Our emotions tell us to do things and this is good if what they tell us is true. If someone we love and care about is suffering, we should feel some pain. It is part of caring. If current occurrences stimulate our strong disapproval, we feel angry. If we have enjoyed successes, we have every right to feel good. If we feel overwhelming ecstasy, complete despair, or unfocused hatred, it is a clear indication that our emotions have taken control of us. We must remember that addiction is planning that next usage.

Being clean does not mean that we won't have to face some major tragedies. The sudden death of a loved one, the illness of a family member or a close friend can bring up strong emotions of concern. This is a part of loving someone. Feelings are healthy. They register what is happening in the world around us or the world within us. If they are inaccurate, we may start doing things that have nothing to do with reality. Our disease tells us that we are wrong to feel so strongly and makes us misinterpret and label these feelings as unworthy or defective rather than the mark of a caring, healthy human being. At some point, we must allow ourselves the right to grieve. We aren't made of stone and our reactionary pain at the apparent unfairness of life gets to us sometimes. Maybe God does have a master plan for everything. Still, we are unable to see how some things are right or justified. We may not know where God is going with this. Maybe we wake up somewhere, maybe there is nothing. Staying true to our personal belief is most important here!

We find ourselves reviewing our belief as our need for assurance increases. Making a written list of the things that are going right for us might help to counterbalance the feelings of distress or hostility. Avoiding confrontations may be the correct action in one situation and in another very similar case, confrontation may be the only way to resolve things. We find ourselves hiding our pain under the assumption that others don't really care. Our disease tells us that even if they did care, they couldn't possibly have workable answers for our problems. This is one way that the disease works to reassert itself into our lives and it happens whether we stay clean or not. It seems that as our awareness grows in recovery to include these previously invisible areas. Our demand for personal honesty grows.

As addicts, we may ignore the good things in our life and focus entirely on a painful event. We become obsessed with the negative to the exclusion of all the goodness in our life. We then justify proceeding as if any hope of betterment is foolish. At this point, our disease will work out something dumb to cover up how much we care. Pain is the common denominator amongst addicts. Going about our business and keeping to our meetings can help us get through a tough time when a major upset occurs. We have to keep thinking, "What should I be doing right now?" We persevere and try to manage as much of this as we can. If we've taken time off from work, eventually we have to return to our jobs and resume our life. If we take too long, we may create other problems that don't have to happen.

If we do an honest examination of exactly what we are giving, we are better able to evaluate the results we are getting. Recognizing pain as merely an indicator that something needs correction, we get results. Before we act, we pray. If we want dignity, peace, and creative action, we can have it. We can go, see, and do like never before. We can also choose to remain stuck in our ruts and make believe we're trapped and without choices. We tend to move on more frequently as our addiction progresses. In recovery, we tend to find ourselves in agreeable surroundings and our need to be agreeable increases proportionally. We see where we were creating problems that were invisible to us before. Recovery teaches us that we choose our reality. We never hung around long enough to see this, We changed our surroundings before it got too bad. We may cry out when someone harms us but later we see where we put ourselves in harm's way. We learn not to ask for trouble. We begin to pay attention to the stages that make up having a happy life. We work diligently to root out contradictions from our thinking, speech, and actions. We learn to focus on the good things in life, allowing them become more important than the negativity has been. We spend time doing charitable works and we no longer feel complacent about the pain and suffering in the world.