12 Steps and (the right) Therapy Go Hand In Hand

Thank God for AA and Empathic Therapy

“We are convinced that a spiritual mode of living is a most powerful health restorative. …But this does not mean that we disregard human health measures. … though God has wrought miracles among us, we should never belittle a good doctor or psychiatrist. Their services are indispensable in treating a newcomer and in following his case afterward.” [Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, p. 133]

HAVING WRITTEN THAT…..

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Me and a group of recovering addicts/alcoholics had the opportunity to participate in group therapy from a brilliant ground-breaking therapist and writer in the field of “Trauma and Recovery”. Randall Mayrovitz is employed at Meridian Healthcare, Bridgehouse Rehabilitation Center. The therapy took place in 2006, our little group of women are still to this day sober and very much emotionally healed. And thanks to the 12 step program spiritually fed. Our commonality besides addiction is we women had suffered from abuse and neglect, of different types and different extents.

Please, we all love AA and still go on the most part. We believe deeply in the working of the steps. However, each of us women believe in our heart of hearts that without learning what Randy taught us in group, we would not have made it. The pain was much too deep to be healed by looking only at “our part” in matters.

Learning our own patterns of dysfunction was a large part of recovery. But do we shut down the tears of a five year old who is black and blue from the fist of a parent? Do we send him off with an assignment to write down his part in the abuse? An abused child now an adult does not grown out of needing comfort, care, and an understanding and loving hand to say, “I feel your pain, its safe to cry.” An abused child suffers and until that child is taught a way to heal they will be sick and continue to suffer. Outside issue you say? Well in some ways yes. But also for us it is the issue. Causes and conditions, the reason we (not all) drank and drugged was to bury feelings we could not bear. Addiction is a shame based malady with fear at the helm and anger spewing from the rudder. If addiction were or is solely a spiritual malady then we must all have a demon dwelling in us. For us spirituality is the remedy but the sickness is very much emotional coupled with a lack of spirituality. In my opinion.

Randall

EMPATHIC RECOVERY STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

We come together as survivors of painful life experience seeking a place to heal our wounds. We’ve reached a point in our recovery where interventions aimed at symptomatic relief no longer satisfy us. We recognize the revolving door of symptom substitution and feel the weight of something deeper.

While our symptoms and circumstances may vary, the end product of our trauma is the same: frozen feelings bottled inside because it was too unsafe to feel. It was our natural inborn impulse to express these feelings in order to heal and grow. Their suppression has created a powerful negative energy, driving us to emotional, physical, and spiritual illness and destructive behaviors.

Through each other’s empathic support and understanding, we hope to be able to restore our life flow, the inner force that guides us toward vitality and well being, compelling us to feel our darkest pain in order to recapture our deepest pleasure. In so doing, we will slowly render unhealthy coping mechanisms useless, giving expression to old and new feelings and healing our wounds one piece at a time.

I will be publishing more from the Empathic Healing Workbooks that we were given at Bridgehouse

The Healing Journey

Embracing The Storm

Empathic Relashionships

March 17, 2015

LOST DREAMS

LOST DREAMS

Dreams just like goals are very important to have and to keep. To work toward a goal is fulfilling. To have hope and dreams is spiritual because “hope” itself is one of the spiritual gifts from the creator of spirituality itself (hope, faith, Love 3 greatest gifts). Having goals and fulfilling them is vital to our self-worth. Our very life depends on having goals to attain and accomplishing tasks and feats. When mankind retires from his work often times him /her just dies partly because of feeling worthless. If a man feels they have no purpose or worth they may lay down and die.

So what happens when a dream fails, crashes, is lost and unattainable for reasons beyond our control? Well, partly, we should have a mourning period. Yes! By-god, our dreams and our feeling are of great value and valid! Don’t allow others to tell you to “get over it” before your heart has grieved the loss of an important, & purposeful dream. We lean heavily on our goals and hopes for the future. So, when that hope is impossible and just won’t work we should grieve for a time. The amount of time to grieve any loss varies however, we don’t move into “acceptance” of a loss until it has been mourned, grieved, and properly processed through various methods of emotional processing.

So to process the loss we cry, we beat the pillow, we talk about what happened and how it made us feel, we write about our feelings connected to the loss and we pray to our Higher Power to help us accept the loss and move on. If someone invalidates our feelings we simply ignore their ignorance. (We can journal about it later.) Repressed emotions are the number one cause of depression, anxiety, and feelings of worthlessness. We need one person in our lives we tell anything to whom will not invalidate us or try to fix us, someone who will listen, mirror our feelings (understand & relate) and show care. If we have intense feelings attached to any situation then we should process that situation to get it out of us and move on. Otherwise it will turn to resentment, wrath, anger, and then depression. Depression is anger without enthusiasm.

And then after we have processed and mourned, we put on our shoes, we get up and we walk, we stretch, we breathe, and we develop a new dream to take the place of the old one.

We don’t beat ourselves up for the loss. We don’t call it or us a failure. We don’t ever call ourselves ugly names or say we were stupid for having our lost dream to begin with. Alternatively, we take inventory of all that we learned along the way of our lost dream. If we do the inventory we find that we gained valuable lessons because of our previous dream. We realize that our next dream and goal will be all the better because of our prior goal. What we learned along the way is priceless. We remember that it’s how we react to life’s disappointments that defines our character. Nevertheless pretending to be ok with a loss instantly will only bring more displaced anger. In recovery we have learned that all our feelings are valid no matter how ridiculous it seems to our psychological reasoning. We must not let our minds tell our hearts how to feel. THERE IS NO WRONG FEELING ONLY WRONG ACTIONS. We no longer repress our intense feelings

Our new dream and goal gives us greater purpose. We have focus again! We have gratitude in our hearts now because of the opportunities that our Higher Power has provided us.

In the real world our dreams come crashing down in the real world we learn to mourn and then we get up and we build new dreams. My Love this is the essence of “Hope” one of the three greatest spiritual gifts…now you see why.

July 7, 2014

STEP FIVE Alcoholics Anonymous (1)

SELF-LOATHING

SOBRIETY SABOTAGE

STEP 5 AA

STEP FIVE-There is a huge difference between the healthy emotional processes of steps 4 & 5 versus struggling for unattainable perfection, failing to live up to it then relentlessly beating ourselves to a pulp in our heart and mind for our guilt.

It is flawed thinking to surmise that somehow if we flog ourselves enough for our perceived imperfection THEN we will be good and acceptable to our Lord and our fellows. The pure and anointed process God has set down to relieve our guilt by confession (or fifth step as we label it in AA) works famously to relieve self-hate. The trouble is most self-haters don’t realize that it is themselves that they hate. Because of our ability to survive emotionally we put blame quickly into action. Then it becomes the world’s fault that we are miserable. Oh well….no not “oh well”, this emotional survival process that so many of us humans engage in of blinding our self-awareness is at the core of every sick murderous and violent act against mankind that we can imagine. Plainly said, blame is at the core of our worlds straying from Love.WE, THE CHILDREN OF A CREATOR ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE THE INALIENABLE RIGHT TO CONDEMN OR PUNISH OURSELVES or anyone else. The decision to punish or not to punish lies in the realm of our Higher Power and the law. Furthermore it is a common and subconscious illusion that self-abuse will render us pure and perfect…probably rooted in childhood punishments. Interestingly my spiritual teacher whom was a missionary, a reverend, a grandmother, and a friend once informed me that “there is a counterfeit for every spiritual principal in existence on our Earth”. Surely our former destructive methods of cleansing ourselves by self-abuse (even when it is done subconsciously) is surely the counterfeit of the pure and enlightening act of confession or “Step Five”. And if your a religious human who prays often. Do not be fooled by merely confessing all your wrongs to God and leaving out the “human” angle. There will be little humility gained by confessing faults only to God. This keeps false pride and sick secrets snugly in place in our hearts. Confessing to a human and God are both vital to recovery.

January 24, 2014

We Must Take off the Mask! AA

DEPRESSION IS ANGER WITHOUT ENTHUSIASM

TAKE OFF THE MASK

Humans generally learn by default to put on a hard emotionally protective shell so others will not see their vulnerabilities and they won’t get hurt. However oftentimes that hard shell tends to offend others before they can actually see what is going on with us. In other words; when we are hurt we may seem just angry or mad at someone who really has nothing to do with the reason we are feeling unrest. Hurt and fear by default turn to anger in most alcoholics because it is a safer emotion to portray to our fellows than an emotion that appears weak, like “hurt”. Some say depression is anger without enthusiasm with hurt at the core. We alcoholics tend to have trust issues and we are often not willing to show our real emotions to anybody. We fear for our survival in this world that we see as cruel and unsafe! This my friend is the core reason so many fear and run from doing a fourth and fifth step.So what do we do? Do we continue repressing every hurt and pain till the emotional agony takes us down? No never! Not if we are to heal and actually be able to say “Hi, I am Lori, I am an alcoholic addict in recovery.” Not if we want a psychic change…we must find someone we are willing to trust with our feelings, our shame, and our fears. We need, yes need someone in the program who will relate to us and have compassion, someone whom we can cry to.We must for survival sake do a thorough Fourth and Fifth Step to get out the skeletons of our past that are eating at the very fiber of our being and hindering our relationships!

We must make our step work personal by writing and sharing our Fifth Step in the “I” context. We should state our feelings and events with honest emotion.

IT IS THE THING WE ARE MOST ASHAMED OF THAT SHOULD BE AT THE TOP OF OUR LIST. A shallow and non-revealing Fifth Step with our most shameful events omitted will not help us near enough. No, not if we are to recover our joy and obtain the miraculous psychic change needed to not only stay sober but to stay sane enough that we do not choose suicide over sobriety like countless addicts and alcoholics have.

We are dying out there and we must take serious action for our true survival…”It is better to save our ass than save our face.” “Pride comes before a fall oh how deep that fall can be.” Hope is the answer, hold on to the hope that we really can get better with God at the helm of our step work.

What should I do today to start the process of working the steps?