Our best thinking got us into trouble.... Recovery is an active change in our ideas and attitudes.
Basic Text, p. 55
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In active addiction, the world probably looked like a horrible place. Using helped us tolerate the world we saw. Today, however, we understand that the worlds condition wasnt really the problem. It was our ideas and attitudes about the world that made it impossible for us to find a comfortable place in it.
Our attitudes and our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see our lives. If our glasses are smudged or dirty, our lives look dim. If our attitudes arent well focused, the whole world appears distorted. To see the world clearly, we need to keep our attitudes and ideas clean, free of things like resentment, denial, self-pity, and closed-mindedness. To insure our vision of life is in focus, we have to bring our ideas in line with reality.
In addiction, our best thinking kept us from clearly seeing either the world or our part in it. Recovery serves to correct the prescriptions in our attitudinal eyewear. By stripping away our denial and replacing it with faith, self-honesty, humility, and responsibility, the steps help us see our lives in a whole new way. Then the steps help us keep our spiritual lenses clean, encouraging us to regularly examine our ideas, our attitudes, and our actions.
Today, seen through the clean lenses of faith and recovery, the world looks like a warm, inviting place to live.
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Just for today: I will view the world and my life through the clean spiritual lenses of my program.
During active addiction, my thinking was messed up in many ways. I was in deep denial about my addiction and how it was affecting me and others. I also had a very negative attitude about the world and society and was very self-centered. To get well, I had to start changing my ways of thinking. This began when I had a moment of clarity in which I got honest with myself about my addiction.
This is such an important part of recovery. While difficult, being able to change your perceptions and your way of thinking can be the difference between relapse and recovery.
