Anytime we have a strong emotional reaction to something or someone (resentment, anger, regret, shame, guilt, heartache) when a button is pushed and there is a lot of energy attached, a lot of intensity. That means there is old stuff involved. It is the inner spirit who feels panic or terror or rage or hopelessness, not the adult.
Pay attention to this it's very important. The one who betrayed us and abandoned and abused us the most was ourselves. That is how the emotional defense system of an alcoholic works. The battle cry of why so many relapse is, I'll show you, I'll get me.
Because of our broken hearts, our emotional wounds, and our scrambled minds, our subconscious programming, what the disease of alcoholism causes us to do is abandon ourselves. It causes the abandonment of self, the abandonment of our own inner spirit and that inner spirit is the gateway to our channel to the Higher Self.
Remember this guys, when we are reacting out of old tapes based on attitudes and beliefs that are false or distorted, then our feelings cannot be trusted. That doesn't mean that people who can stay sober don't have (resentment, anger, regret, shame, guilt, heartache). Some of us just have more ego defenses that buries the feelings deeper. That is good news in early sobriety because it helps one to stay sober. It can be bad news later on because it can cause us to resist growth and to not have the humility to be teachable.
The reason that I am alive today is because I was able to go to treatment and work the 12 steps program. When I first got into recovery one of the things that I was told was that all I had to change was everything if I wanted to live clean and sober. I had no idea what that meant back then. Now I know that it means that I needed to change my attitudes, beliefs, and definitions about myself and everything in my life. I needed to start surrendering my way of seeing things, of doing life.
I'll say this until I'm blue in the face. Until we deal with our emotional wounds, past, however you want to describe it, we do not have the ability to be emotionally honest with ourselves. Until we change our relationship with our own emotions it is impossible to be comfortable in our own skins and we will continue setting us self up to further pain.
TB