My New Awareness
Feeling the Humanness I’d Stifled for Years
December 26, 2011
Three years into my sobriety and I’m still sometimes taken aback by the range of emotions I can feel. What’s more, I am surprised by what I can access and what I allow myself to feel from deep within. I’ve undertaken a lot of emotional reconstruction on this journey in recovery and although it hasn’t been easy, I’m simply glad that I can feel at all. I’m contented with the fact that I’m able to observe myself in an emotional state, even if it’s a difficult or angry experience. And once the initial reaction happens, it’s like I’m able to have a meta-emotional experience. That is, I can observe and review the reaction I’m having and feel the humanness in that reaction, the goodness in a healthy emotional response. Even when the response isn’t so pleasant.
For example, I was sharing with my sponsor just before Christmas Eve, which is my favorite day of the year, how upset I was with my wife. I was out shopping, getting her gift, running around between jobs and cobbling money together to get the few items I could afford to. I told my sponsor that although I was upset, it was clear to me what my part in my tension with my wife was, and what was hers. In a way, without overdoing it, he congratulated me. He said it was good to hear that I knew my boundaries and kept them with my wife, and that’s all I could do. I didn’t compound our difficulties with codependence or rage.
None of the resolve, none of the acceptance I felt around my issues with my wife could’ve been possible without this program and my therapy. It’s why I refer to it as “meta-emotional,” because in sobriety, I can have the experience, then have my reaction to it, good or bad, then have a growing sense of acceptance around whatever it is. I now can utilize what I’ve learned in three years of recovery. I have so many tools picked up by listening to the experience, strength, and hope shared by my sponsor, my therapist, and my fellowship. Their recovery and wisdom help me sort my own emotions when they become tangled.
Contrary to before recovery, I am open to feedback from my support network and from my own introspection, utilizing my new awareness. Not only do I not isolate physically because I’m not acting out, but I don’t isolate emotionally or spiritually. I turn to others, I turn to God, and I get help in seeing my own recent experiences in recovery as a feedback loop, all of which highlights the fact that, God bless it, I can feel again.
In sobriety, I can feel my emotions again. And difficult or not, that’s a beautiful and healthy thing.
