Life is hitting a routine. It is a fairly enjoyable routine of good sleep, exercise, fresh salmon/steak for dinner, and excellent group therapy several hours a day. I even have a massage scheduled next week at the gym.

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Thank goodness for caffeine, ibuprofen and Imitrex. You have snatched another good day out of the jaws of my migraines!

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I haven't had a lot of new information come to me since my last post, at least nothing too profound. I did have an excellent meeting with a former Catholic priest this morning. He is the local spiritaul adviser. We connected on so many different planes that I felt sure it was of God. His story that lead him to recovery is very similar to mine in most every way. Everyone else drinks unbelievable quantities and has dramatic stories of blackouts and life or death situations. His was like mine, too much, too often and good ridence.

He also seemed to appreciate the vastness of God. He liked to refer to Carl Sagan and he also appreciated the intimate and caring qualities of God seen in individual hearts touched by God.

He referred to the beginning of the Bible and how Moses was told by God that "I am who I am" and how this was the beginning of monotheism to the world. This is a point I learned in a valuable class in College. I never hear anyone discuss it, but it had a huge impact on my life. I was thankful it came up again.

He also appreciated the need to know things and understand them. But he also seemed amazingly fond of the phrase "know when you don't know". This has been a mantra of mine for years.

He seemed to help me exound my understanding of God as a vast and unimaginable being balanced with the understanding that he cares about each one of us. I often stay in my head and fathom the vastness while failing to look in my heart and feel the closeness.

He had a Celebrate Recover Bible on his shelf and a copy of the Ragamuffin Gospel.

He believed that living in God's will, rather than living in self-will, brought about wonderful things in our lives and was actually evidence that God exists. I had to stop and tell him of how my life has changed by moving towards forgiveness, after my conversation with Theresa, and towards God's will in my life and away from resentment and self-will and how much peace that has brought me in the last 2 weeks.

My meeting with him seemed to have been preplanned and I took it as a sign from God that He is real.

The lecture this morning was on "feelings". He said he would keep it simple for us. He described the four basic feelings: hurt, anger, fear, and joy. He focused on the first three. I think he believes that those of us here have experienced plenty of that through our habits while trying to escape and not deal with the other three.

Feelings are automatic and are OK. They are neither moral nor immoral.

Being emotionally accountable to yourself is a key to being healthy.

He asked everyone to say whether they were better at expressing hurt or anger (take a second and ask yourself the same question). Think about which you have been better at expressing over the last 5 years and if you aren't sure, think about what your spouse might say. Usually one of these was more allowed in childhood and we are better at it as adults.

If you express one of these well, then it is the other one your need to work on.

It did wonders for me just thinking about it. What do you think?

As an additional test, try NOT to do this for others you know, but only for yourself . . . remember, being emotionally accountable to YOURSELF is the key to being healthy!!!!

I really didn't expect this to be such a spiritual experience, but it truly is. In order to get healthy each night we have a "10 at 10". We take 10 minutes as a group in the apartment and describe our current feelings (luckily they give me a cheat sheet to find the words to describe my emotions!) then give our spiritual high/life giving moment and our spiritual low/life sucking moment of the day. Then we pick out from a list characteristics/defects of self-will and characteristics of God's will that we displayed that day and ask God to "humbly remove all these character defects and any I have failed to mention." I think we actually all look forward to closing the day this way. (I have to add that I never thought I would have such a spiritual experience in a meeting that used the f word and the s word so frequently!)

At the beginning I noticed I displayed mainly characteristics of self-will and so I made it a point to let God direct me to a place where I could experience characteristics of His will. I think it is working and I am feeling much happier and much more positive about the future.

For your benefit, here is the list of self-will characteristics:

Selfish and self-seeking, dishonesty, frightened, inconsiderate, pride, greedy, lustful, anger, envy sloth, gluttony, impatien, intolerant, resentment, hate, harmful acts, self-pity, self-injustice, self-importance, self-condemnation, suspicion, doubt.

And of God's will:

Interest in others, honesty, courage, consideration, humility-seeking God's will, giving or sharing, what can we do for others, calm, grateful, take action, moderation, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, love-concern for others, good deeds, self-forgiveness, modesty, self-forgiveness, trust, faith.

We had a good lecture on co-dependence. I thought I would propose a question for all of you who have read, or should read, Co-dependent No More.

A:

Dependent, seflish, blame others/bitter, victim, go fast, trust issues, isolated, need someone to take care of them.

B.

Self-critical, appear independent, controlling (passively or aggressively), try to be responsible for someone's happiness, need someone to take care of, difficulty expressing feelings, hard time saying no without feeling guilty, often depressed.

C.

Enmeshment, resentment, family sickness, major depression, expectation, trust.

Which person, A, B, or C is most likely to be alcoholic and which one is likely co-dependent? Which one describes characteristics common to both?

See comments for the answer.

Was anyone surprised by the characteristics ascribed to each category? I was, and I found myself described by the wrong category. They said that wasn't unusual. So, I'm totally confused what it all means.

A lot of the lectures are like this. They seem to provide some pearls of wisdom, but then there is general confusion at times. I guess I'll keep looking for the pearls and keep calling Teresa.

Yesterday was Day 2. The day was unremarkable until late evening. I went to exercise and came back feeling quite angry. A lot of the anger was focused on one doctor who assumed he knew all about me (he said I looked like a duck and quacked like a duck . . . so maybe I'm a  . . . .) and a therapist who was skeptical of almost every word I said. Nothing in gorup helped much so, about 1130 I called Teresa!!! It was a great idea. She kindly reminded me that anger and resentment often occur because we haven't forgiven. After I got off the phone I began forgiving right and left in my mind and fell immediately asleep in peace. I even woke angry at 3am and started forgiving again and I fell back to sleep quickly.

It is great to have free phone calls to therapeutic sisters when your getting $30,000 treatment.