-I could not possibly count high enough to count the fears that the passage of time has proven to be totally baseless.

-When I first started my recovery, I often listed the things I was afraid of in the morning. That evening, I reexamined my list and noted how many of my morning fears had proven groundless. Then I would pray, “God, I give myself permission to be afraid again in the morning and not feel guilty.  Please help me to turn things over to you enough to rest well tonight. I repeated that process for months or weeks at a time. This process was very helpful to me.

-A good many of my evening fears came from a prayer I said every night when I was a boy that included the line, “…If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul you to take.” It was not appropriate for me as a young boy to go to sleep each night wondering if I was going to die.

-Worse, what would happen to me if the Lord chose “…My soul not to take”. I needed to feel totally received by my parents to help me deal with the reality that I felt absolutely dependent on them for my survival. Because I was so young, I was not conscious of these fears . Nevertheless, this prayer only served to deepen my distress.

-That prayer also gave me a fear of life after death that I could not even begin to get into words because of my youth. Without the parental bonding I so desperately needed, that vague but stalking fear of eternal abandonment could only grow stronger as I grew older.

-The only comfort I have found for that stalking abandonment fear is the daily, intimate fellowship with God that the 12 Step people call conscious contact.

-The word “conscious” in the phrase conscious contact has two meanings for me. The first meeting has to do with the fact that I consciously set time apart each day  to learn to enjoy God. The second is that moment by moment sense that  I never have to pray God in from Chicago. She is always there.

-Fear can be successfully suppressed if the purpose is to help me deal with a situation that needs total focus.

-However, if that suppressed fear is not brought out in the open after the immediate threat is passed, the fear can stay inside me to do damage.

-If I use my Higher Power and my friends to help me process my tension, then I can accept and enjoy the reality that I successfully handled a tough situation.

-Using my recovery tools in that way, trains into me a growing confidence in and respect for myself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Recovery Talks, String of Pearls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.