Weather, Weather Everywhere!

Snow, rain, tornados, avalanches, and all the rest. When the external calamities extend across the nation, never mind the political ones, it’s easy to ignore or medicate our own personal internal storms and conflicts. The difference is, the external ones will eventually abate. Not so the internal ones.

And change creates internal strife – even change for the better – and most of us resist getting the short term help that eases transitions and reassures us. So we plod along waiting for circumstances, others, and/or the world to change.

Of course we can’t change anyone or anything else any more than we can the weather, Washington, our relatives or anyone else.

Knowing that should, to an extent, be liberating.

But we can always change ourselves. And that too can be freeing. Not only can I change my present way of living, and the future that will result, I can even change my past.

Change my past? How?

There are events and things that happened that we can’t change – but there are also events we have forgotten about, ignored, or interpreted incorrectly. There are thing we learn about long after they occurred that change our understanding of ourselves and others.

Just as a brief example, think of all the people who, as a result of DNA testing and matching, are discovering relatives, including parents and siblings, they never knew about and how that effects their personal world view.

Not everything need be that dramatic of course – but we can all review our personal history and look at in a different light.

How?

Our minds have a “negative bias.” That means we remember the bad things better than the good. Or when we are feeling depressed, sad, lonely or afraid we automatically winnow out the events in our past that support feeling even worse.

Not so when we are happy since we don’t need those feelings reinforced. We just are happy in the moment.

So?

The “so” is that you might want to spend a bit of time searching through your memory for happy times and events. Practice remembering them. Enjoy them. Write them down. Get good at recalling them when you start sliding down the black hole of negativity that always seems to have a bottle at the bottom.

That’s how you change your past – by deciding which parts to focus on. That’s how you recover – not stay stuck in that other black hole, “in recovery.”

Labels – and Avoiding Them

Alcoholic, Addict, Alcoholism, Addiction. The four “A”s you’ll want to avoid. Words to remove from your vocabulary.

Why?

Because they all come loaded with baggage that none of us can ever completely erase from our thinking.

Refer to yourself as an “alcoholic” and you are sticking yourself with all of the brainwashing AA and the Steppers have inflicted on our consciousness, and to our detriment. Sign up for being an alcoholic and you sign up for being a powerless victim with an unrelenting “disease” from which you can never recover.

Never mind that most people with a period of over medicating with alcohol fully recover. Unless, of course, they go to AA.

Of course labels make life easy, absolve you of responsibility for acquiring the “disease” or recovering – since by definition you can’t. Ever.

If that suits you, feel free to go down that road. It is your life and your choice.

But suppose you don’t want to turn your “free will,” to the extent we can exercise it, over to a fictitious malady? Suppose you prefer to manage your own life instead of adhering to Steps and the wisdom in a door knob? Advised by a predator called a sponsor?

That’s called being an adult – a person who assumes responsibility for their choices, including the choice to address conditions rather than self-medicate them or drink a cult’s Kool-Aid.

As a fondly remembered client said years ago, “I got it. You offer a 2 Step program: get a grip; get a life.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.