Keep practicing your recovery behaviors, even when they feel awkward, even when they haven't quite taken yet, even if you don't get it yet.
Sometimes it takes years for a recovery concept to move from our mind into our heart and soul. We need to work at recovery behaviors with the diligence, effort, and repeated practice we applied to codependent behaviors. We need to force ourselves to do things even when they don't feel natural. We need to tell ourselves we care about ourselves and can take care of ourselves even when we don't believe what we're saying.
We need to do it, and do it, and do it - day after day, year after year.
It is unreasonable to expect this new way of life to sink in overnight. We may have to "act as if" for months, years, before recovery behaviors become ingrained and natural.
Even after years, we may find ourselves, in times of stress or duress, reverting to old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
We may have layers of feelings we aren't ready to acknowledge until years into our recovery. That's okay! When it's time, we will.
Do not give up! It takes time to get self-love into the core of us. It takes repeated practice. Time and experience. Lessons, lessons, and more lessons.
Then, just when we think we've arrived, we find we have more to learn.
That's the joy of recovery. We get to keep learning and growing all of our life!
Keep on taking care of yourself, no matter what. Keep on plugging away at recovery behaviors, one day at a time. Keep on loving yourself, even when it doesn't feel natural. Act as if for as long as necessary, even if that time period feels longer than necessary.
One day, it will happen. You will wake up, and find that what you've been struggling with and working so hard at and forcing yourself to do, finally feels comfortable. It has hit our soul.
Then, you go on to learn something new and better.
Today, I will plug away at my recovery behaviors, even if they don't feel natural. I will force myself to go through the motions even if that feels awkward. I will work at loving myself until I really do.
Kinda goes with "fake it til you make it" I never really understood that but its starting to make sense. If we believe and do certain things over and over they will manifest into reality.
When I first started in recovery, there were two things that were said at a meeting that have stayed with me all these years. One was, "We aren't bad people trying to get good. We're good people trying to get well." The other was, "Give yourself at least twice as long to get well as it took to get sick in the first place."
When I first started hearing about "acting as if," I thought, "I can't do that. It's dishonest. It makes me a hypocrite because I'm acting like something I'm not." But the damage that was done to us was done in the very core of who we are. As this reading makes clear, that damage doesn't heal overnight. Sometimes it does take years. In the meantime, acting "as if" doesn't make us liars or hypocrites, people trying to be something we're not. We're acting like what we really are - whole and complete human beings. It's the damage that's the hypocrite, the culprit that causes us to act like something we're not. I believe that who we really, truly are deep down in our core is confident, self-loving, self-assured, and capable of being loving, patient, kind, gentle and generous, but also firm and steadfast when we need to be - not only toward others, but toward ourselves. It's the wounds that have been dealt out to us that are the imposters, not our new behaviors.
Red Hawk
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. A passion to make, and make again, where such un-making reigns.
For me it's the difference between when you learn something intelectually, and when you learn it cerebally, when it "drops from your head to your heart"
In Drivers training they tell you "turn into the slide" if you lose control of your car, we "know it" but we don't have any experience with it, so the first few times we panic, we spin out because we turn -away- from the slide, causing us to spin out and lose control
until the day we turn into the slide and have a nice controlled drift all the way around the corner, and after a few times it becomes "integrated" we know what to do and it's comfortable
aint no faking involved, it's going through the motions until we get traction, it's having trust the people before us know what they are talking about, then learning it for ourselves
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
