Facing My Feelings in Recovery
During my recovery, I have been faced with many emotions. The great thing about recovery is that you have tools to work through these feelings and address them head on. You do not have your crutches that you have used in the past to gloss over them and put them in the back of your mind. You can’t drown them in alcohol and worry about them when you come to. When you are clean and sober you have to own them and confront them. It can be overwhelming at times. At other times it can be very cathartic and healing.
During my first six months of sobriety, I battled with two emotions that I struggled with daily: sadness and anger. I was sad because I realized that I had to give up living a chemically induced lifestyle for the rest of my life. I was also sad because I had turned into one of those relatives that had been in and out of recovery and I was finding myself being no better than them, when I had said to myself over and over again that I would never be like them. I was sad because I had lied and deceived friends and family members for years. I was angry with myself for being weak. I was angry for wasting close to twenty five years of my life in a drunken and drug induced state— being miserable and not enjoying life. I was angry that my actions put me in a humongous hole at 49 years of age and then I had to dig myself out of it.
These emotions stayed with me for a while during that first year. That purple cloud haze of a first year was when I was starting to see that being sober was not so bad and that I had multitude of reasons to be alive and thankful. It was an emotional roller coaster during that first year, but I survived by doing what everyone told me to do: Go to meetings and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The second year of sobriety, I thought, ‘I have got this thing figured out.’ Little did I know that I was just beginning. During the second year, I worked at getting my professional life back and becoming financially stable again.
During my recovery, I turned to social media to talk about my recovery. I used Facebook and let all of my friends and social acquaintances into my personal world. I never hid the fact that I was an addict. This meant that some of my professional contacts also had privilege to this information. I ran into a former co-worker during this year and it was an awkward encounter. Knowing that this person had seen my social media postings and sensing their disapproval, I quickly ended the conversation in a polite way and walked away feeling hurt. After much soul searching and a little maturity, I realized through my growth that one person’s opinion does not define me. The irony is that they silently approved of me when I was in active addiction but vocally disapproved of me in recovery. I have found that irony often walks hand-in-hand with recovery.
I am now at year three of recovery. I still have feelings and emotions that are overwhelming at times. Sometimes, I have to remember to breathe and acknowledge my emotions and pray. Other times I talk to others, go to meetings, face my feelings and do not dwell on them and let them encompass my every moment. There is one great thing about emotions in recovery. When you are sober, you can absolutely feel them. They are not drowning in alcohol and masked by drugs— they are raw and real. When you can realize the beauty of feeling again, you can truly say you’re on your path to recovery.
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Much Love,
Bo