AFFIRMATION
I am getting healthier the more I realize that I don’t have to feel the way I feel and I have the option to feel content and even smile today if I so desire. I will act like I want. I will 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 ther demands, they will appreciate what you do for them.” (7)
RELECTION/CLARIFICATION OF THOUGHT
I know that so often those who are codependent and live all the time in everyone else’s feelings need remember that the real maturity and happiness lies in being there for me 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 this 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 want to detach from other people’s opinions of myself and start to reflect on my own opinions about myself. When I am depressed, I know that I haven’t been able to get angry, nor able to forgive anyone, much less to 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 positive concepts that I am forming about myself. I need to get prepared for a new day today.
“We are now on a different basis: the basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust God rather than on our finite selves, just to the extent that we do as we think God would have us do., and humbly rely on him, does he enable us to match calamity with serenity.” (As Bill sees it, p.265).
MEDIATION
When we gradually work our way to our real self we get closer to the God who made us.
SOURCE: Copyright(c) Higher thoughts for down days: 365 daily thoughts and meditations for members of the 12 step fellowship groups. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Pages 14, 15.
Good stuff. One of my major flaws is comparison and this speaks tangentially to that chink. If I won’t accept and appreciate myself as uniquely qualified to be me I will never be inwardly peaceful and therefore never free to give myself to others.
Thank you, Dan, for your response to this blog. And why be someone else when that someone else is never going to be who we are. And for those strengths that are already ours, why give them to some fictional someone who doesn’t exist.
I believe that trying to please others diminishes our authentic self until even we don’t know who we are.
Thank you and please keep coming back.
With gratitude
Hugh