Cumulative Growth

“Practice makes permanent.”
—Bobby Robson

Growth and learning both take time and effort. As adults we get easily frustrated when we don’t think we are progressing fast enough whether it’s a recovery issue or some other learning opportunity.

Often when we are growing or learning new things we are unable to see the growth. It’s gradual and we are not able to see the movement because we are in the midst of the growth. Others often see and recognize it before we do. 

It’s easy to get discouraged when we practice something over and over and don’t feel we are getting anywhere, but if we continue the recovery efforts, or other learning process one day we will be aware of just how far we have come.

It may be good from time to time to look back at where we were. If we were a drunk at our bottom or an addict barely hanging onto life, and now we are clean and sober for a month, year, or more, we can easily see things in our lives that are better and ways that we have matured in our behavior.

If we are learning a new skill, we may need to remember back to the beginning when we knew nothing and see that we have learned a lot, it’s just hard to see when we grow tiny bits every day.

What’s important is that we continue to practice since this is how we learn. Sometimes growth comes in spurts. We may suddenly see our growth after not noticing it for a long time. We certainly won’t grow and learn if we don’t continue to try.

Growth and learning are cumulative; a little at a time and soon we reap the benefits.

False Limitations

“Argue for your limitations and surely they will be yours!”
—Marshal Sylver

Even for those who may have been blessed by parents who provided them with an almost perfect life growing up, there are no perfect families and we all have our limitations. Being raised in a nurturing and loving environment is ideal, but even those who experienced that may have difficulties in life when they are met head on by less than ideal conditions outside their family of origin.

Any one of us, from those raised in abusive homes, to those in near perfect conditions, can argue forever that we can’t do this or that because of something that we see as limiting. We use excuses like: I just don’t have enough talent; I don’t have a degree, or the right education; I’ve never been good at that; I always mess up; last time I tried that I failed; I am no good at relationships; and so on.

When we glorify our limitations we manifest them. What we believe about ourselves will basically be what we do with our lives.

If we can turn around our self-defeating thoughts, we will find ourselves having self-fulfilled prophesies of success, rather than utter failure. “I think I can,” may be our new motto. “I think I can do this, maybe not perfectly, but I’m going to give it a shot.” Maybe it didn’t work last time we tried, or we never tried because we’d already doomed ourselves to failure by saying we could not do it.

We really do not have anything to lose by taking the positive angle on life. We may try and fail, but that’s always better than never trying. Life is meant to be lived, not merely tolerated until we die.

Limitations are just excuses to never give all we have to life.

Winners

“If you want to be a winner, hang around with winners.”
—Christopher D. Furman 

No matter if you’re 12 years old or 72 years old who you spend your time with has a huge influence on your level of happiness and healthiness.

None of us would encourage or even allow our children to spend time with people who we know are bad for them, so it makes little sense that we would socialize with those who are a bad influence on us. We don’t have to continue to be in situations that are unhealthy. If it’s a work situation that we can find no resolution for, then we must seek new employment.

The world is full of people. If we find ourselves depressed and troubled by the company we keep, it’s our choice and responsibility to not spend time with those people any more. When we spend our time with healthy positive people, we will be more healthy and positive.

Winners are those who have a positive outlook on life, who meet challenges head on, albeit hesitantly at times, who look for good rather than bad, but accept reality. Winners try their best to be free of gossip and judgment, although they know they are human and fall short of perfection, they still try. Winners seek peace over turmoil, and love over fear.

If we want to gossip and find strife there’s plenty of it out there, but living that kind of life only brings on more of the same. Just as hanging with winners makes us winners; hanging with losers makes us losers.

You become your environment so make it healthy.

Why Ask Why

“I don’t always get to know why.”
—Judith R. Smith

Often we can get so caught up in asking why that we cannot move on. We want to know why our parents treated us the way they did; or why someone stopped dating us; why our spouse had an affair; why we didn’t get the job; why we got sick; or any number of why’s.

The problem with why is that most of the time whatever happened was out of our control. We may blame ourselves and say we’ll do it different next time, when we don’t even know what to change because we don’t know the answer to why.

It’s difficult. Many of us are way more comfortable with the known than the unknown. Even if we don’t like the reason we can attempt to manipulate our thinking to remove the blame if we know that we are at fault. We can use denial, blame someone else, or anything that makes us feel better instead of owning our issues. But when we don’t know why we are left to our own vivid imaginations and that can be a troubling place to be.

Sometimes things just happen and the why doesn’t even make sense. Our parents may have treated us differently than we would have liked, but even if we knew why it would not change the fact that it happened. It might help us forgive them more, but if the reason wasn’t a good one in our opinion, then it could make things more difficult to forgive.

It’s not a bad thing in situations to know why if that information is available, we just want to avoid getting stuck in a place where we need to know why when we probably will never know, or getting to the bottom of it would just cause more strife.

All we can do when reasons are unknown is go on what we do know. If we are aware of behaviors that we are not happy with in ourselves, then we work on growth and avoid that behavior in the future. What we don’t want to do is change who we are in order to get an outcome we want, especially if that is based upon a particular loss that we are having difficulty getting over. If we are not true to our self no matter what we do we will end up unhappy.

We don’t always have to know why.

Humanness

“I laugh, I love, I hope, I try, I hurt, I need, I fear, I cry. And I know you do the same things too, so we’re really not that different, me and you.”
—Colin Raye (song lyrics)

We feel alone sometimes. Different. Lonesome. Independent. Isolated. Free. Afraid. Terrified. Peaceful.

Whatever we feel is nothing more or less than what others feel. We may not be in the same place on the same day and moment as our partner or best friend, but it’s pretty much a guarantee that if we are in grief, they have felt it as well. If we’re feeling sad and lonely, they’ve been there.

As much as we are unique creatures, we are also very much alike in many ways. Some may not choose to admit to anyone else that they feel fear, loneliness, or maybe even joy. There are those who would never say they have failed at anything, just as there are those who are quite successful who would never admit to their stature.

If we are human beings we bleed just like the next person. We cry, we hurt, we have joy, we feel lost, we love, we hate sometimes, we just are who we were made to be. Trying to be something else by no allowing ourselves to be human is a loss for whoever is trying to do that.

Sometimes we can just be free and loose and let life roll, and at other times we may try to have firm grip of control on its every motion. Both are essential to life and growth, having their own times and places, but in time we see that we cannot control much in this world. We certainly cannot control outcomes, other people, the universe.

The more we learn how similar we are the quicker we will find peace because we won’t have to fight so hard to be something we aren’t or to pretend we don’t feel like the next person. Keeping it real will keep us grounded. It will help us to feel our feelings so that we may move on.  Denial of a feeling never made it go away it just keeps it buried below the surface and holds back our growth.

Once we understand the humanness of others, we will accept ourselves more fully.

Focus on Good Too

“I always have two lists: things I’m happy about and things I’m not. It’s my choice which list I focus on.”
—Anne Arthur

It’s almost a guarantee that on any given day we will have some things to be very happy about and some things that cause us pain or anger or some other emotion we would rather not feel. Often the unpleasant things are where we will focus.

It’s important to take care of all aspects of our lives so we don’t want to ignore the negative things that happen, or the difficulties we experience, but we have a choice whether we wallow in the troubling things or think about what’s good too.

Sometimes we experience times in our lives when we are happy about things and upbeat, and there may be those in our lives who are suffering with severe illness or loss, which may cause us to try to keep our happiness under wraps. We can be respectful of others and still be happy.

When we choose to focus only on the bad it’s easy to fall into a depression that may begin gradually and end up taking over our lives. We don’t want to ignore the unhappy things if we can do anything about them, but if we can’t then we can turn our focus onto what does make us happy.
If we can’t find anything to be happy about and all we are doing is complaining and languishing in our unhappiness, it’s time to sit down and think about things. Maybe we need to actually make a list with things in our lives that we are happy about in one column and the other stuff in another.

Celebrate and focus on the “this makes me happy” list. On the other list, where we are not happy, we can look at these things and start taking action on getting them out of our lives or changing them if we can.

Having happiness doesn’t mean everything in our lives has to be perfect.

Doing the Difficult

“The right thing and the hardest thing are always the same.”
—Christina Havrilla (song lyrics)

The right thing may not always be difficult but in a lot of circumstances doing the right thing is the hardest thing.

Treating another person with kindness and love when they have treated us with the opposite is very hard to do. We gain nothing, however, by treating a mean person in kind. Mean spirited energy aimed at another probably does us more harm than it does our target. And the fact of the matter is our thinking mean thoughts about someone else never reach their ears.

Instead of negative energy we can be positive when we feel angry or hurt to our very core. Staying mad at someone only keeps us in the victim role anyway and is oppressive and depressive.

There may come a time in our lives where we are attracted to someone in a romantic way, yet that person is in a relationship or married, or maybe we are. The right thing and the hardest thing may be to stay away from that person even if we feel drawn to them with our whole being.

Leaving an abusive relationship; getting help for an eating order or addiction; looking for a job even when we keep getting rejected; slowing down and taking care of ourselves when we need to rest or we are sick; and standing up for ourselves on a job when we are being abused or harassed; all of these things and lots of other situations call for doing what’s difficult when not doing anything might be easier.

If life was always easy we wouldn’t grow and we would certainly never reach out to our Higher Power. In order to have a spiritual life we must turn our attention to God and most of us would never do that if we didn’t have problems or need help.

If the right thing is hard to do that’s no reason to ignore it.

Success

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”
—George Patton

Just ask anyone who has hit a bottom so low they almost died, and they’ll most likely tell you they feel a sense of success for having simply survived the ordeal. Most anyone who ends up in a Twelve Step recovery group and is able to turn their lives around will feel an overwhelming sense of success.

People hit bottom in many ways, some to drugs and alcohol; some to sexual prowess; others may be thieves and liars. There are many things that can send our lives spiraling out of control. And each person’s supposed bottom is at their own perspective level; they know it when they are there and it may be higher or lower than that of others.

Successful recovery from issues is a lifelong process. It’s something that one can never truly give up on because it will always be there to remind us of a place we wish never to return. Maybe we have dreams about the hell we were in, or we are reminded of it by watching a movie, or some other event triggers the thoughts. Perhaps we get tired of the struggle of recovery and think about returning to whatever made us hit bottom, but usually remembering the pain is enough to keep us away.

We won’t become perfect once we begin to recover, and nobody said we should. But we will become better people if we truly seek to be. Our success is unlimited and may not have the same value that we once thought it would. Success can be measured in a lot of ways: one person may become highly educated, another may be an awesome sponsor in a Twelve Step program, someone else might write an award winning novel, and yet another may be a success because they are able to continually stay away from whatever brought them to their bottom. Success is a personal thing.

It’s often said about drugs that however high a person gets they will go to an equal low. And so it is that once the drug isn’t there a person will hit a state of depression, sometimes within hours of using the drug. Life can be the same in that however low our bottom is we can go to the same level on the other end; the end of success.

Success may be measured by just how low the bottom was that we climbed out of.

It’s An Inside Issue

“Wherever you go, there you are.”
—Earnie Larsen

Wouldn’t it be great if we could walk away from our troubles? We could leave a job because we don’t like our boss, but the next one may be worse. We might get a divorce or leave a relationship because “they” don’t do things the way we want. But is our happiness or distress really caused by others or is it something inside of us? Is it our behaviors that get us into the messy relationships and situations?

Most likely it’s a combination of things. And we ought to look at what is the common denominator in our life. It is us. We can’t always fix a problem if the other person won’t do their share, but we can always work on our own issues. Geographical changes rarely fix our problems.

There’s an amazing thing that happens when we pray for others. When in a situation with someone that causes us stress and problems the first thing we should do is pray for the other person. Pray for them to have peace, joy, love, whatever good we can think of. If they get those things, don’t worry, we aren’t going to miss out on the same good stuff.
Next we can pray for ourselves. Prayer can calm many storms, both internal and external, and it can help us keep ourselves out of further arguments and misunderstandings.

Thinking that the world is against us and all of our problems are because of “them” is not a solution. Looking within at the one thing that we are responsible for will help us. Trying to constantly escape our self is not a solution because we are still there.

Look within and solve your own problems because you can’t escape yourself.

Manufactured Problems

“If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.”
—Don Herold

If we were to go back in our lives and count up the number of times we worried about what might happen, we would probably be overwhelmed by the needless minutes and hours we wasted.

It’s seldom that our imaginary worries end up becoming real problems. What we think may happen at a job, in a relationship, or with our children, for example, may not happen at all. We may even dread some change or event only to find that it actually has a positive impact on us once we’ve experienced it.

Sometimes we can even make trouble where there’s not any. We perceive or imagine something to be an issue and it’s not one. We create a problem by making too much of an issue of something or pushing others too much.

The more easily we move through life the more calm we remain, the less problems we will actually have. When we let fear override peace there’s little way to avoid trouble or disharmony. Fear and peace just don’t exist together.

Remaining calm in a storm, especially one that’s simply a creation of our imagination is the best remedy. And we do this with great effort. We give as much energy to being serene as we do to the worry and fear. We find what works for us to not make imaginary problems for ourselves. Maybe we find prayer works. Others may need to talk to a friend. Someone else may find distracting themselves from worry with exercise or reading a book is helpful. Obsessing about what might happen is clearly not the answer.

There are enough problems in our lives without creating new ones in our minds. Sometimes our imaginary troubles are worse than any problem we will face in reality. And often what we think is going to be a bad thing is a blessing in disguise.

Don’t let imaginary problems take time away from handling real issues in life.