Love my therapist
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Been reading a few posts about wanting to be sober for a year STOP IT, take care of today and yourself and time will take care of itself for you.
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Expectations ā unmet expectations ā resentments ā relapse
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Found out a client of mine died of an overdose a few days back. Not sure exactly when he died but they found him last night. He was dead for at least a few days. Real smart kid, masters degree, came from a good family background. Him and I had quite a few talks about addiction but he was one of those guys that thought he had it all figured out. Everyone suggestion I had he had a āreasonā or excuse why he didnāt need it, or wouldnāt do it. He wasnāt bad enough for rehab, didnāt like the feel of meetings, therapy wasnāt his thing, itās only cocaine, I donāt use needles, etc He just thought getting a job and his own place would do the trick.
Well he died alone in his own apartment of an overdose from drugs he bought with money he earned at work.
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Words I repeat to myself everyday. Thank you 
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(thank you - a tragic reminder our recovery is about us doing work to stay recovered)
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Sorry to hear this, Derek. I really canāt imagine trying to get sober at a young age. There are different challenges, I guess, at any age. Just heartbreaking. My son is a senior in high school and just lost a classmate to an OD. It shook him up even though he didnāt know her that well. Parents had a ceremony at the high school and some of her rehab sisters spoke. I admire the parents.
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Brings it home that this illness will kill you ,like my cousin found dead last jan she was a school teacher offered her to go to meetings with her but she choose to continue drinking . today there are plenty of programs and ways to get sober and recover , in my early days there was only one place i could go to AA no internet or world wide net or mobiles , as i said today there are plenty of choices , some of my guys i sponsor i used to say ill kick your ass if i dont see you at a meeting , meet those guys again 20/25 years sober so being tough helped them then thats fine not everyone i said this to as i knew they would react different . so knowing when to not say the truth or use tough love became part of my recovery
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I often think about where Iād be if I had continued to do recovery my way. When I thought I could outsmart my disease. Or when I thought if I just said all the right things to all the right people they would believe I was sober . Or if I could just get a job and call myself functional so I could keep drinking or using. Or trying to find that absolute bare minimum I needed to do to be sober so that I didnāt need to change myself.
I wanted sobriety, I think, but I never really wanted to put in the work to get. All the half measures I tried always availed me of nothing. All the effort I put into avoiding putting effort into my sobriety led back to the bottle. Stopping AA because (insert reason here) never hurt anyone in AA, but it certainly fucked up my life. Dropping out of multiple IOPs didnāt prove a single point to anyone like I thought it would. It only showed me that my way never worked. Took a couple years to realize it never will.
But when I think back to how my life would have turned out I can just look to a couple of posts previous to this.
I would have wound up dead in my apartment for days because I had no one to come check on me.
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FYI, Iām stealing this. Most excellent, Bootz!
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Excellentā¦. Iāll even add that shame and self-loathing is likely to result in relapse as the person likely doesnāt think they deserve any better. 
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(slow clap)
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So Iām feeling uncomfortable. I have two choices:
- Seek something more comforting
- Embrace the discomfort
Something I didnāt get until embracing recovery is the first one can be a trap. Seeking comfort or avoiding discomfort meant my world was small, and it kept getting smaller until I was nearly crushed.
Embracing discomfort though? That can make my world bigger. It makes the space Iām comfortable in bigger. It means learning where my fears are illusions.
It means next time, I may not be uncomfortable at all. I might even eventually enjoy myself!
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This is where the ābreakingā needs to happen. You know how they say everything you do is either to run toward pleasure or escape from pain? I escape BOTH just to avoid being uncomfortable. Thatās fucked up. Thanks @Eke and you, too @Mephistopheles
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Wow, me too.
I shared on another thread how I am choosing to just have faith and accept that this is where I am at. Finding comfort in discomfort is such an unusual concept for me after avoiding being uncomfortable my whole life.
A good friend on the forum shared this with meā¦ " i read something beautiful about those times of unrest and feeling unsettled being like when our souls are composting a bunch of gunk. fertile soil comes next. beauty will grow there again."
This analogy made sense to me, I am growing and I need to trust the process.
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Awesome. Love this. 
This is where itās at. If we can manage this, we truly transform. 
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A good friend of mine in AA remarks āUncomfortable? Hell, I didnāt even want to be inconvenienced!ā. And that makes me reflect on the another truth about thinking, that I see what I look at and I think about what I see. If I look at the pain and inconvenience and discomfort that is what I see and think about. If I seek out others in the same boat, maybe I start seeing similarities in the human condition and possible solutions. I can look for the aspects of it that I am grateful about. I can look for other things to be grateful for. If I look at the torn up earth, I can bemoan it as not what it used to be, or celebrate it for the bed of new growth and new beauty it is, like your gunk analogy.
Emotional pain and deprivation can be a crucible that we use to refine our minds to look beyond the most urgent insistence of the moment, to see the potential for healing and recovery that is contained in that same moment. Sometimes physical hurt or limitations can prove the same teaching to us. The spiritual response transcends any of these.
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Corollary: Ask enough people and you will get an answer you like.
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I really want a motorcycle though. 
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