fookisan
Guest
Written for a 12 step group
On a simple living forum the question was asked if the members still do Christmas? My response was: "Yes, I still do Christmas, but the difference in my life is that Christmas doesn't 'do' me any longer."
Many addicts lose sight of their recovery programs around the holidays. The very time they need their program most is the time that they do not make use of it. Crazy, isn't it...but, that is the addicts way. We seem to forget to put enough time in our program consciousness and instead put excessive time into thoughts of expectations, demands and complexities with our ever faithful friend of 'perfection' right by our side. Entitlement sickness is another pitfall for us. Are we entitled to get everything and do everything we want at Christmas as well as in life? No, we are not entitled to a thing in life except a peaceful and serene existence...if we work a good recovery program and are sober, abstinent, solvent and living within our comfortable means. Remember that expectations are pre-planned resentments. Looking towards perfection as our 'fix-all' is where many of us get lost instead of practicing gratitude and accepting of our comfortable means and abilities in life. Losing ourselves in perfection helps boost our ego and pride as well as provide a distraction to the unbalanced and painful life we have created for ourselves and our family. Giving ourselves over to acceptance and gratitude requires humility and faith and the way to do this is to start small and see that positive results can come about from changing the direction we have lived in the past. The law of opposites - go in the opposite direction from the one you have been going in for so long. (Provided of course, you are not satisfied with your current life and are looking for a new direction.)
The holidays are a signpost for me to be careful and I have to be on guard no matter which holiday it is, but for me the Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Years season up to January 6 can be the most treacherous. I make it a practice to stick extra close to my recovery programs and also try to relax more in my outside of program life as well. If your feeling stressed at this time of year try something new. What have you got to lose? You can bring pain back with ease if you miss it. Try scaling back, relaxing some and sticking close to your favorite support group. Try living well within your means, whether it be your financial means, mental means, physical means, spiritual means, recovery program means and comfortable space means. Make this year a year in which you consciously strive to do less and thus have more time to enjoy the holidays with less stress eating at you. Learn to say NO to demands, mindless rituals and people robbing you of your life. You are not recovering until you start refusing - as soon as you start refusing your sick past life you start recovering a new healthy one. Just producing more debt, more clutter and more fat only leaves you feeling sicker and depressed, so try another route this year. Going further down the wrong road will never lead to the right destination, you just keep getting further away from where you want to be.
For the last seven years I've had a very enjoyable Christmas season and hope this season will be number eight. Prior to this, I used to dread the holidays and really hated this time of year. You have to wonder what joy I could find in the holidays if I hated and dreaded them coming and couldn't wait for them to be over? Planning the 'perfect holiday season' requires one to live in the future a lot of the time. The future and the past is a common place for addicts to live in ... everyplace other than the present. After all, the present life is the life they have created for themselves and is not a pleasant one, so they get lost in hope for better times ahead or in reminiscing about the past. How much of our life is wasted by living in the future. We need to balance the future and the past with the present to live healthy lives, but need to be aware of how much of our supposed happiness is being put on hold until some future date that never seems to come. This is what fuels the 'Cult of Next' - you know - I'll be happy when I graduate or happy when I lose my weight or happy when I get my new car or happy when I move into my new house or happy when I find a new wife or happy when I take my vacation. We postpone our happiness until tomorrow.
Early in my recovery career, I read a post from an addict that wrote in how bewildered he was that his family had such an unhappy Christmas even though he had gone into debt to finance it and had bought such a giant tree that he could not fit it into the room unless he hacked a portion of it off. (Chevy Chase's movie "Christmas Vacation" comes to life!) He said that after the holidays the family split up and the wife left him. I guess there were more important things that needed addressing in his marriage other than "How big a Christmas tree can I buy?" This tells me two things: The first lesson is: "one thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far with giving a person a good life." The second lesson is: "when a mans mind is concentrated he is blind." If you have read my posts you will hear me repeating certain concepts over and over. This is because these are the simple concepts I use to recover with. I repeat them for two reasons; to plant seeds of recovery in others and to constantly remind me of their recovery importance. If we want to enjoy good recovery, we must be pointed in the direction of recovery at every turn throughout the day. Addictions never take a holiday or coffee break.
What I have just told you; "One thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far in giving a person a good life" and "When a mans mind is concentrated he is blind" cost me many hundreds of thousands of dollars to realize for myself. This is my holiday gift to you. Balanced living is much more valuable than unbalanced excessiveness, always remember that. As humans we tend to look towards 'the more the better' way of living life and get stuck in looking for inner fulfillment though outer possessions. With this false idea of happiness ingrained in us, we can naturally extend it to the holiday season. Addiction is always about excess and power. We take the good and turn it into the bad through excess. Now, this excess seems to be part and parcel for addicts as well as most humans. The difference is the normal people can stop easy enough when things get out of balance, but addicts cannot stop - addicts lack stopping power.
In my early days of online recovery, I thought that maybe the root of my holiday blues was caused by not spending enough money on them? Reading that addicts story of his holiday woes as well as recounting my own excessive spending experience got me wondering what is required for me to have a happy Christmas season if money was not the most important prerequisite? Over time, I could see that money was not the missing link to my happiness. In fact, the more money I frantically threw at trying to buy the perfect Christmas, the worse the holiday season was for me. Then it became clear that once the necessities of living were taken care of, that money had little to do with my holiday happiness or my happiness for the rest of the year for that matter. I had learned that joy is in us and not in things and that happiness is always an inside job.
We see some people get lost in lights and decorations of all sorts, excessive cooking, spending, alcohol consumption and other rituals of the holiday season. People nowadays seem to clutch onto the idea of 'perfection' and 'best' as a self image builder. After all if they own he best should they not be the best as well? Zig Zigler asked, "How many couples spend more time planning the wedding than they do the marriage? How many people spends more time planning their vacation than their lives?" If the perfect wedding or perfect vacation gets rained on, then they are devastated. They lost their hopes of reaching perfection, they lost their pre-planned happiness. They could try and practice mindfulness and grateful acceptance to find happiness in the moment and still have a good wedding or vacation; but if they have always looked for happiness in the future and have never found it in the present this will be hard to do. We can only really be at one place at a time. If we are not in the present we are not really living fully. As the book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness" says; "If while washing dishes we think only of the tea that awaits us...then we are not 'washing the dishes.' If we can't wash the dishes, chances are we won't be able to drink (enjoy) our tea either."
**Sorry - I had to cut a few sections out of this post off as it too long to be accepted here - even when submitted in 2 parts.**
end of part 1
On a simple living forum the question was asked if the members still do Christmas? My response was: "Yes, I still do Christmas, but the difference in my life is that Christmas doesn't 'do' me any longer."
Many addicts lose sight of their recovery programs around the holidays. The very time they need their program most is the time that they do not make use of it. Crazy, isn't it...but, that is the addicts way. We seem to forget to put enough time in our program consciousness and instead put excessive time into thoughts of expectations, demands and complexities with our ever faithful friend of 'perfection' right by our side. Entitlement sickness is another pitfall for us. Are we entitled to get everything and do everything we want at Christmas as well as in life? No, we are not entitled to a thing in life except a peaceful and serene existence...if we work a good recovery program and are sober, abstinent, solvent and living within our comfortable means. Remember that expectations are pre-planned resentments. Looking towards perfection as our 'fix-all' is where many of us get lost instead of practicing gratitude and accepting of our comfortable means and abilities in life. Losing ourselves in perfection helps boost our ego and pride as well as provide a distraction to the unbalanced and painful life we have created for ourselves and our family. Giving ourselves over to acceptance and gratitude requires humility and faith and the way to do this is to start small and see that positive results can come about from changing the direction we have lived in the past. The law of opposites - go in the opposite direction from the one you have been going in for so long. (Provided of course, you are not satisfied with your current life and are looking for a new direction.)
The holidays are a signpost for me to be careful and I have to be on guard no matter which holiday it is, but for me the Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Years season up to January 6 can be the most treacherous. I make it a practice to stick extra close to my recovery programs and also try to relax more in my outside of program life as well. If your feeling stressed at this time of year try something new. What have you got to lose? You can bring pain back with ease if you miss it. Try scaling back, relaxing some and sticking close to your favorite support group. Try living well within your means, whether it be your financial means, mental means, physical means, spiritual means, recovery program means and comfortable space means. Make this year a year in which you consciously strive to do less and thus have more time to enjoy the holidays with less stress eating at you. Learn to say NO to demands, mindless rituals and people robbing you of your life. You are not recovering until you start refusing - as soon as you start refusing your sick past life you start recovering a new healthy one. Just producing more debt, more clutter and more fat only leaves you feeling sicker and depressed, so try another route this year. Going further down the wrong road will never lead to the right destination, you just keep getting further away from where you want to be.
For the last seven years I've had a very enjoyable Christmas season and hope this season will be number eight. Prior to this, I used to dread the holidays and really hated this time of year. You have to wonder what joy I could find in the holidays if I hated and dreaded them coming and couldn't wait for them to be over? Planning the 'perfect holiday season' requires one to live in the future a lot of the time. The future and the past is a common place for addicts to live in ... everyplace other than the present. After all, the present life is the life they have created for themselves and is not a pleasant one, so they get lost in hope for better times ahead or in reminiscing about the past. How much of our life is wasted by living in the future. We need to balance the future and the past with the present to live healthy lives, but need to be aware of how much of our supposed happiness is being put on hold until some future date that never seems to come. This is what fuels the 'Cult of Next' - you know - I'll be happy when I graduate or happy when I lose my weight or happy when I get my new car or happy when I move into my new house or happy when I find a new wife or happy when I take my vacation. We postpone our happiness until tomorrow.
Early in my recovery career, I read a post from an addict that wrote in how bewildered he was that his family had such an unhappy Christmas even though he had gone into debt to finance it and had bought such a giant tree that he could not fit it into the room unless he hacked a portion of it off. (Chevy Chase's movie "Christmas Vacation" comes to life!) He said that after the holidays the family split up and the wife left him. I guess there were more important things that needed addressing in his marriage other than "How big a Christmas tree can I buy?" This tells me two things: The first lesson is: "one thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far with giving a person a good life." The second lesson is: "when a mans mind is concentrated he is blind." If you have read my posts you will hear me repeating certain concepts over and over. This is because these are the simple concepts I use to recover with. I repeat them for two reasons; to plant seeds of recovery in others and to constantly remind me of their recovery importance. If we want to enjoy good recovery, we must be pointed in the direction of recovery at every turn throughout the day. Addictions never take a holiday or coffee break.
What I have just told you; "One thing, no matter how fine, only goes so far in giving a person a good life" and "When a mans mind is concentrated he is blind" cost me many hundreds of thousands of dollars to realize for myself. This is my holiday gift to you. Balanced living is much more valuable than unbalanced excessiveness, always remember that. As humans we tend to look towards 'the more the better' way of living life and get stuck in looking for inner fulfillment though outer possessions. With this false idea of happiness ingrained in us, we can naturally extend it to the holiday season. Addiction is always about excess and power. We take the good and turn it into the bad through excess. Now, this excess seems to be part and parcel for addicts as well as most humans. The difference is the normal people can stop easy enough when things get out of balance, but addicts cannot stop - addicts lack stopping power.
In my early days of online recovery, I thought that maybe the root of my holiday blues was caused by not spending enough money on them? Reading that addicts story of his holiday woes as well as recounting my own excessive spending experience got me wondering what is required for me to have a happy Christmas season if money was not the most important prerequisite? Over time, I could see that money was not the missing link to my happiness. In fact, the more money I frantically threw at trying to buy the perfect Christmas, the worse the holiday season was for me. Then it became clear that once the necessities of living were taken care of, that money had little to do with my holiday happiness or my happiness for the rest of the year for that matter. I had learned that joy is in us and not in things and that happiness is always an inside job.
We see some people get lost in lights and decorations of all sorts, excessive cooking, spending, alcohol consumption and other rituals of the holiday season. People nowadays seem to clutch onto the idea of 'perfection' and 'best' as a self image builder. After all if they own he best should they not be the best as well? Zig Zigler asked, "How many couples spend more time planning the wedding than they do the marriage? How many people spends more time planning their vacation than their lives?" If the perfect wedding or perfect vacation gets rained on, then they are devastated. They lost their hopes of reaching perfection, they lost their pre-planned happiness. They could try and practice mindfulness and grateful acceptance to find happiness in the moment and still have a good wedding or vacation; but if they have always looked for happiness in the future and have never found it in the present this will be hard to do. We can only really be at one place at a time. If we are not in the present we are not really living fully. As the book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness" says; "If while washing dishes we think only of the tea that awaits us...then we are not 'washing the dishes.' If we can't wash the dishes, chances are we won't be able to drink (enjoy) our tea either."
**Sorry - I had to cut a few sections out of this post off as it too long to be accepted here - even when submitted in 2 parts.**
end of part 1
