View Single Post
Old 05-30-2012, 10:32 AM
  # 6 (permalink)  
sugarbear1
~sb
 
sugarbear1's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: MD
Posts: 15,967
Just maybe your HP (Higher Power) wanted your parents to be the catalysts in jump starting your personal journey to recovery. Now it's up to you to work on the relationship you have with your HP and to stay stopped.

In the program (steps) of AA, we work on a conscious contact with out HP. We are then granted this New Manager in our lives so we can be useful to others. We are the hands, legs, and mouths of our HP. Our HP aligns our will with theirs. We then begin to live a most loving and useful life filled with spiritual principles. "No human power could have relieved our alcoholism." Your parents were just what your HP ordered, but no, they are not your Higher Power, they were just useful to you (and your HP) at this time.

I also found I was using my family as a "reason" to begin drinking, yet now I see that I had many characteristics of an alcoholic way before I began to drink. Today, I know that to drink means to die, for me. I have better things to do with my time than to commit slow suicide today.

Work the steps fearlessly and then thoroughly, the guilt will leave. Once you have worked the steps of recovery through the first time, try reading Ernest Kurtz's book Shame & Guilt.

For now, stick close to AA and your sponsor and network of friends in recovery.

In time, it will all make more sense to you.

Glad you are on your sober journey!

Peace, hugs & love,
sugarbear1 is offline