November 17

GRATITUDE MONTH: DAY 17:”Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” Rumi

Wouldn’t it be lovely to do this? It brings to me a lovely image that I like to hold on to. Being a Cali woman, I must say I am cold a great deal more than most folks, so I love having warm things to wrap around myself. A nice warm gratitude cloak is appealing.

What would that feel like? Soft, kind, comforting, loving, safe, and nurturing. Yes, that would feed every corner of my life. How about you?

I believe that most of us, as little people in our earliest days, had to grab hold of some of those things that are called ego defenses in therapeutic communities. They are real, this is not psychobabble stuff. What the steps 4 through 9 are all about here is that we recognize how we use these dysfunctional behaviors and destroy our perceptions of life, along with the relationships we have with life and all the people around us.

So, we know we have broken perceptions of life and others. Now the job we have undertaken is to get rid of these old behaviors by changing the broken perceptions. Most of the time, these ego defenses are developed to protect us when we are not able to do so any other way. What we failed to do later; as part of healthy maturing into adult life; is relearn those perceptions and shift those ego defenses into adult, healthy and appropriate coping skills. That is why most addicts are stuck in very immature behaviors and thinking.

All we are trying to do is take care of our needs as people. Even though we are immature in how we do that, the goals are to be safe, nurtured, loved, held, and taken care of. SO, perhaps the thing we most need to do in our recovery is to practice, practice, practice gratitude!

As with most practices, we never get perfect at it, but we surely can get to a more adult and mature place in our thinking and behavior by recognizing that our old ideas (ego defenses) are inappropriate, ill-advised and outdated for dealing with our lives as adults.

My life is fed well by this…along with steps of recovery, principles of 12-step involvement, and the life that has flowed from these things. Recovery has grown me up, not all the way, but so much closer than I could ever have hoped when it all began. And the longer I do it, the more miraculous it becomes, and the more grateful I am, the longer I do it…you see where this goes!

I don’t find adults who act like petulant children to be appealing. Why on Earth did I think it was okay for me to live like that? I am so grateful when I see it happen in others and get a reminder to act like an adult who is complete understanding that I can only accept every gift and thank the Creator for whatever it brings to my life.

Quite often, I find that some situations are similar to a Trojan horse…there is much more to them than meets the eye. They are one thing and then continue to become another. Kind of cool, if you ask me. In retrospect, I can see how those gifts have gone on to color much more than I believed when they were originally received. Sometimes there are years of learning from one such opportunity.

As I learn about these connections and how we recover from various aspects of our personal development as addicts, it is so beneficial, because it deepens not only my own recovery, but what I do in the world, as well as those with whom I personally interact in life. How can that not be like a cloak that we get to share with others as well?