AFFIRMATION
I am getting healthier the more I realize that I don’t have to feel the way I feel and that I have the options to feel content and even smile today if I desire. I will act like I want to smile even though I don’t feel like smiling.
“If you have made yourself a martyr to your unappreciative family, remember the principle of partial reinforcement and apply it to your family. If you are always at their beck and call trying to meet their every demand, they will not appreciate you, but once they find that they cannot rely on you to meet their needs, they will appreciate what you do for them.” (7)
REFLECTION
I know that so often those who are codependent and live all the time in everyone else’s feelings need to remember that the real maturity and happiness lies in being there for myself—not for everyone else. I think that this reflection points out the fact that I need to reinforce my own worth by going to meetings, actively getting involved with my own recovery and putting the recovery over anything or anyone else. If I am going to begin to be a pleasant person, I will want to learn how to be pleasant to myself.
Now is the time and this is the program where I start to detach from other people’s opinion’s of myself and start to reflect on my own opinion When I am depressed, I know that I have not been able to forgive anyone, much less forgive myself. I feel totally cheerless. I meet my own demands and continue to work the Steps so as to get in touch with what I need to do to reinforce those positive concepts that I am forming about myself. I need to get prepared for a new me today. We are now on a different basis: the basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust, infinite God rather than our finite selves. Just to the extent that we do as we think God would have us do, and so humbly rely on God, does he enable us to match calamity with serenity.” Bill W.
MEDITATION
When we gradually work our way to the real self we get closer to God who made us.
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SOURCE: Copyright (c) Higher Thoughts for down days: 365 daily thoughts and meditations for 12 step fellowship groups. Depressed Anonymous Publications, Louisville, KY 40217.