"I'm Not Hungry"

((This is TOTD blog #100! Cool...))

Ah guilt. My favorite saying about guilt goes like this: if someone is giving you a guilt trip, think of it like they're serving you a shit sandwich. All you have to do is say, "no thanks, I'm not hungry."

Those of us with this disease can serve up shit sandwiches, too. One of the worst is to throw our Recovery back in someone's face. Maybe we got into recovery because one of our loved ones threatened to leave us. The process takes a while. When there isn't immediate improvement, our loved ones can become just as frustrated. When we are new, we haven't address issues of behavior yet. We're focused solely on staying clean and sober, one day at a time. Our loved ones might get impatient at the apparent lack of progress. Maybe they say something to us about our behavior or our attitude and we react. Poorly. We might even tell them something like: "Back off! I'm doing this for YOU". File that under 'F' for 'fucked up'.

We don't do Recovery for other people. We do it for ourselves, because we don't want to live that other way any more.

Our families can really serve up those shit sandwiches. They have known us longer than anyone else. They know how to push our buttons, manipulate us. Our romantic partners do, too. My ex-wife used to push and prod and poke me until I blew up at her, then point her finger at me and say, "see!! You DO have an anger problem." Or maybe they try to make us feel guilty for not going to a family dinner that we didn't want to because we knew eveyone there would be drinking. Maybe our families are extremely codependent and only know how to communicate through using guilt.

Guilt is evil shit. Sorry to be so profane here, but it's a worthy topic for it. It's one thing when we feel legitimately guilty for harm we have done. It's something else entirely when others try to make us feel guilty when we haven't done anything wrong. It's a tool of a manipulation. People try to control us, make us do what they want us to do or feel the way they think we should feel. It's works both ways. We can do the same to others, but we don't have to.

Any time we attempt to control something we can't control, we feed our disease, make it stronger. When we let others control us, our self-esteem suffers, and that feeds our disease, too. We don't have to let others control us. No one else gets to tell us what to think or how to feel.

Standing up to guilt takes strong, healthy, boundaries. That's something not many of us know when we start our Recovery. Thankfully, it is something we can learn. We can learn to recognize when someone is trying to make us feel guilty. We can learn that we don't have to go there. We can learn to see that shit sandwhich being served up and say, "no thanks. I'm not hungry."