Bodhi02

I just heard something interesting in a podcast about recovery that really resonated with me. This journey starts off with stopping drinking but in the end what it comes down to is accepting yourself.

I’m 4 months sober and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface the cravings have really subsided, but I’m just at the beginning of getting to know, healing, and accepting myself.

Does anyone else share these sentiments or have experience with discovering themselves without drinking and ultimately accepting /loving yourself (the good, the bad, and the ugly)?

silentrun

That is what recovery was mainly about for me. The first 6 months were spent breaking the pattern of drinking. After that it was all about breaking patterns of thinking that's were self destructive like believing I wasnt worthy.

nez

Oh yes big time!!! Being comfortable with myself, in my own skin, warts and all, is what the true gift of recovery is all about for me. It is all I ever wanted in the first place... long before I ever started drinking. It is what I was searching for all along, and it found me through recovery. No more facades or chameleon behavior. What you see is me. It is so liberating and a helluva lot easier than the gamesmanship I used to play.

Anna

Oh yes, accepting yourself is the essence of recovery. I think the reason many of us become addicts is because we can't accept ourselves and so we feel we must numb our feelings. I won't say that accepting yourself is easy or happens all at once, but it's essential. For me, it's a journey.

Pondlady

Anna said so beautifully exactly how I feel. Drinking at it's core, was a way to numb myself and calm my anxieties.

DriGuy

The hardest acceptance for me was early on, accepting that alcohol had taken away control over my life. It's not like it was an anxious moment, however. It was just a long period of coming to come to grips with it and having it sink into my thick skull.

Steely

Yes, self discovery and acceptance was/is at the heart of it for me too. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

And less repeating of the bad and the ugly now that I'm sober.

I'm very happy for you. It's a beautiful thing.

Congrats Bodhi.

Scd619x

It's an ongoing journey of self acceptance for me, i had never accepted myself ever! If you stood 100 people in line to come and tell me why i am a good person and give real life examples i would have seen them all as fools and as they seemed to like me i hated them, because i hated myself. So you are in very early days and there is no rush at all. I will never be able to accept myself as a person that had an accepting childhood as that is ingrained in me but i can, daily, make the choice to give myself s break, now and then

Robbie64

Good opening post Bodhi. I'm at the same stage as you, I'm also 4 months sober and I also feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I'm still too hard on myself and still keep finding faults with what I do and who I am. But slowly I am learning to, at least, like myself. One day I hope to fully accept who I am and to love the person that I am. I think both emotional and spiritual growth are the key to achieving that and I still have some way to go to achieve both.

Obladi

Self-acceptance was absolutely the key for me. The hard part was that no one could tell me how that could be done. Or maybe I just didn't know who (or how?) to ask. The phrase "radical self-acceptance" just popped into my head, so I found this definition that completely makes sense to me - now.

Quote:

Radical self-acceptance is the opposite of avoiding responsibility or giving up in self-defeat. It's about pushing against old ways of being, knowing they are what opens the door to healing at the deepest level

In typical fashion (for me), I learned this backwards. It started with a great upset between me and other people that made me really squirm, not being able to get out of that feeling, not being able to escape that situation, and eventually (finally) a warm voice saying, "it's not about you, O."

Wow. I always heard that saying, "Not everything is about you" in a nasty hurtful tone of voice.
What a difference it made to hear it said kindly.
All the difference in the world, really.

If it's not all about me, then maybe there's nothing I can change to fix it. If I can't figure out what "they" want, maybe that's on them, not on me. Maybe I should just ride out those things inside of me that cause me dis-ease without trying to escape them.

The next thing that helped me was the understanding/agreement that I Never Drink Now. And since it's always now and I can ride out those things that are so troublesome just for this moment, I never drink.

And then the work began...

O

brighterday1234

Absolutely. Total acceptance 🙏

fishkiller

Yep