Thread: Step One
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Old 01-28-2012, 08:56 AM
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DesertEyes
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Starting over all over again
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Originally Posted by Suffocating View Post
How do I do the work? Please share. I will do the work and post it.
What I do is take the questions from the book ( in this case, the questions are posted over in the al-anon step forum), write down the first question, modify it for ACoA, then answer the question as it applies to _my_ life.

Then the second question, and the third, until they are all done.

Once I have answered all the questions in writing I go back and read my answers and see if I can find how all the questions fit together into the patterns in _my_ life. The objective is to find what parts of my life have been affected by my past, and what parts have not.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over the effects of our childhood, and that our lives had become unmanageable.

"Unmanageable". How is my life unmanageable? It starts with emotions. I would feel incredibly strong emotions, but at the most inopportune times. I could be riding a bus and out of nowhere I would have this overwhelming feeling of sadness. For no reason that I could tell. With the emotion came a sense of panic, that I had to do _something_ to make the emotion go away. I would have to get off the bus, walk around the block, run.

I was unable to feel an emotion without reacting to it. I was unable to feel emotions other than in extremes. That caused me to take actions that were a response to the emotion, instead of a choice that I made. Other parts in my life were affected by that, it was hard to interact with people, never mind hold a job.

"Had become". This is where I find hope. I was not born with these feelings. I was born healthy. My life had _changed_ into the emotional chaos I was experiencing. So if my life "had become" then I had the possibility of _changing_ it again into something else.

"the effects of our childhood". This was huge. My problems are not caused by something wrong with _me_, they are caused by something wrong _outside_ of me. Something that happened when I was a child, not something I was born with.

"powerless". There are a lot of things in my life that I can control. My behavior, my thoughts, my actions. But my childhood? It's silly for me to believe that I can control my childhood. My emotions? I have never been able to control my emotions. "Powerless" tells me that it's a waste of time and energy to try and control the un-controlable.

"Admitted". There are three parts to my recovery. Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. I was aware that my emotions were a mess, and that my life had become a mess with them. Becuase I incorrectly assumed that there was something wrong with _me_ I then tried to cover up the problem, avoid it, blame it on something else. I was Aware, but I did not Accept it. Therefore I never took action to solve the problems, I just continued in denial. When I _admitted_ to other people in the meetings of ACoA that I had a problem I finally was able to accept that the problem existed and that it had a solution. That is when I started to take action.

Mike
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