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This is how shame changes into guilt. Doing a personal inventory, sharing it with another person, and beginning to make amends all help to abate guilt.
Omnipotence and Impotence
Important note...addicts thinking they have the full capacity to be in control..
Most people addicted to alcohol or other drugs eventually lose control over the substance; yet they insist they can control
This inability to admit loss of control in defiance of reality is characteristic of addictive thinking.
People who think of addiction as a moral failure, rather than as a disease, see failure to control drinking or using drugs as a character weakness.
In order to accept a Higher Power, whether it be religious or otherwise, addicts must realize that they are not in control of some aspect of life. Indeed, this is what hay fever sufferers do when they take a (nonaddictive) medication.
People who feel good about themselves are not usually threatened by an awareness of their impotence. But when people have no self-esteem—when they feel inadequate, incompetent, and worthless—they must protect themselves against what they see as another put-down: the inability to control substance use. Building self-esteem can help recovering addicts overcome this subtle yet powerful threat.
Admitting Errors
They can nevef admit when they are wrong because they truly believe "theyre always right"
Being Human Means Making Errors
Always defending themselves and there reoccurring episodes instead of taking accountability ...
As one surrenders the delusion of omnipotence, which is part of addictive thinking, one is then able to admit one’s errors.
Three Phases of Anger
Different phases of anger
Too often anger leads quickly to rage. Addicts seem to have particular difficulty with reacting to anger, even when not under the influence of a substance.
Anger is not the same as hatred. We can be very angry at someone we love, and we can hate something without being angry at it.
the natural purpose of anger is to preserve social order. Our feelings of outrage at someone being robbed, beaten, or harmed prompt us to take action to prevent such happenings. Without anger, we might defend ourselves adequately, but we might not make the effort to protect anyone else. Anger is an emotion evoked by injustice, toward ourselves or others.
Addicts often feel offended, belittled, and humiliated by everyone. Their families don’t love them enough, their friends don’t value their companionship enough, they don’t get enough recognition from employers for their hard work, and so on.
The problem, then, for addictive thinkers is not only in the severity of their rage reaction but also in the distortion of their perceptions.
when his wife shows attention to her friends, he may feel she doesn’t value him enough, and he becomes angry with her for “humiliating” him.
Exp of distortion of perception for addicts
Repression is an unconscious psychological mechanism that keeps a person from being aware of an unacceptable emotion or idea. At an unconscious level of the mind, the anger may be felt, but it doesn’t appear in the person’s awareness.
“Feeling Anger Would Be Sinful”
Nuns story ; trained herself not to feel anger..which could be very bad..
It is perfectly safe to decide not to manifest anger. But not to feel anger is something else.
Men Do and Should Cry When they have been hurt, many men become enraged rather than offended. It seems that they should be crying, but instead they explode with anger. Perhaps this is because the normal reaction of crying is not available to them. Why? Because they believe “men don’t cry.” Many cultures equate masculinity with stoicism. For example, local media may report that at a tragic incident, a man wept “unashamedly.” Why should a man ever be ashamed of crying when hurt? When deprived of the outlet of crying, the male psyche may seek another outlet, and this often results in rage. In
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Getting Rid of Resentments Phase 3, resentment, is managed especially well in the Twelve Step program. Recovering people are told, “If you hang on to resentments, you’ll relapse.”
Need to stop hding onto the past and let it go. This is one of the reasons why people relapse
Sharing perceptions and feelings with others and getting an objective perspective diminish resentments and may eliminate them altogether.
People are not apt to consider being an addict highly desirable.
Makes compete sense...i dont even find them desirable..more irritating if anything
The addict is like a porcupine who wishes to be in contact with other porcupines but fears that their quills will sting. Coming too close is painful but keeping too distant is lonely. The porcupine must therefore carefully calculate how closely to approach to achieve some companionship while avoiding being hurt.
The anger, self-centeredness, inconsideration, and irresponsibility make the addict’s company undesirable. Although addicts act in ways that make other people avoid them, they nevertheless resent the isolation that results. Loneliness becomes more grist for the mill, another reinforcer of their poor self-image, and addicts try to escape by increasing the use of anesthetizing substances, perpetuating a vicious cycle.
The characteristics of addictive thinking are the tools the addict uses both in erecting the defensive wall and in maintaining it. With proper treatment, the vicious cycle is interrupted; and, as misperceptions are corrected in recovery, the entire wall can eventually be eliminated.
Managing Feelings
Have difficulty with both positive & negative emotions
ADDICTS MAY HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTY with their feelings. Negative feelings such as anger, envy, guilt, and hate are not the only ones difficult to manage. Even some positive feelings—for example, love, admiration, and pride—may baffle the addicted person, sometimes even more so after stopping substance use.
While some people use alcohol or other drugs to get high, others use substances to feel normal. Mood-altering drugs are essentially emotional anesthetics: They numb feelings.
When people stop using substances, those emotions that were primarily numbed by the substance are going to be keenly felt.
Depression is one of the painful feelings that the addict may have anesthetized with alcohol and other drugs. It is little wonder that a newly abstinent person is apt to feel depressed. Abstinence unmasks previous feelings of depression. And the clarity of mind that follows abstinence allows the person to see the havoc that alcohol or other drug use has wrought on family, job, financial status, and physical health.
“The ‘Joy’ of a Cigarette Burn”
When you remove the substances that were shielding your emotions and making you numb; everything hits you at once and the pain is intolerable.
Emergence of Emotions
not being able to control ll the feeling coming at once because of having numbed those feelings for so long (maybe months or even years)
From Gray to Rosy
Addicts feel like something is missing from there reality when they become sober;
with alcohol : there world is colorful and beautiful/exciting.
without alcohol/substances: there life has no meaning or purpose and its just Gray..colorless and boring.
A sensory experience is personal and subjective. It is almost impossible to communicate your sensory experience to another person or to quantify it objectively. If two people taste the same dish, hear the same melody, or see the same sunset, there is no way that one can know exactly what the other is feeling.
when nonaddicts try to understand the addict’s use of substances, they may be at a loss. What in heaven’s name is wrong with this person who has a fine home, a good marriage, healthy children, and a rewarding job? they ask themselves. Why the dissatisfaction? Why does this person drink or use drugs so often? The answers may not be easy to accept.
So important. No shoes fits one all and you will never know how a person is feeling inside. To the outside they appear like they have the perfect life.
Why the dissatisfaction? An addictive thinker’s outlook on reality is distorted. Being chronically dissatisfied, addictive thinkers do not feel they are experiencing what they should experience. Life is not providing enough gratification, and alcohol or other drugs seem to bring color to it all. The grays seem to change into dazzling colors. Now they feel what others must be experiencing in life. They feel normal.
How Clinical Depression and Addictive Depression Differ
Well i have a little piece of mind in this
Little wonder that psychiatrists often diagnose the condition as a major affective disorder or clinical depression and prescribe antidepressant medication. For newly recovering addicts who do not have clinical depression, these medications are notoriously ineffective and can be threatening to sobriety.
A major affective disorder is essentially a biochemical disease. In other words, something has gone awry with the neurohormones, the chemicals that relay messages among the brain cells. The biochemical changes may be the result of severe stress to the system or may be due to genetic factors. The symptoms of clinical depression have a fairly well-defined beginning. The person previously enjoyed life, was active, and had interests until some particular time when things began to change. Sometimes the change can be related to a physical event such as childbirth, menopause, surgery, or a severe
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What depression is and how its diagnosed and some causes
With addiction, the “depressive” symptoms often do not appear to have even an approximate beginning. Many times, the person always felt that way, even as an adolescent. Addicts are likely to say they never believed they had a fair shake and that everyone else always had more or better things. They may have been thought of as thrill-seekers or hell-raisers. More often than not, addicts will say they had been dissatisfied with life for as long as they can remember.
