[bluidkiti]

February 14

Quote of the Week

"Feelings are not facts."

Early sobriety was extremely uncomfortable. A universe of feelings greeted me each morning when I woke up, and I laid in bed and obsessed over each one. My emotional life became unmanageable very quickly. Frozen with fear before my day had even begun, I called my sponsor, and he urged me to let my feelings go. Once again, he tried to convince me that feelings were not facts, they were just feelings. I still wasn’t buying it and insisted that it was a fact that I was having the feelings, and that made them real enough to me. I paid a heavy price for my stubbornness as my feelings would hit me like a freight train and drag me down their tracks.

After I got a little recovery, I learned to put some space between having a feeling and impulsively acting on it. I began to realize that my feelings only became facts if I acted on them. For example, if I felt like drinking that was just a feeling. But if I acted on it—by taking a drink—then that feeling became a fact in my life. What I eventually learned is that I could sit through and survive my feelings. Like clouds in the sky, they would always move on if I could just wait them out.

Today, I’m not immune to having a full range of feelings. Especially when life gets busy and stressful, lots of uncomfortable feelings still come up. But now with some recovery and lots of experience, when I see the freight train of feelings approaching, I simply step aside. Today, I sit and watch as the train passes, and sometimes I can actually feel the wind from it as it whizzes by. Today, I know my feelings really aren’t facts, they are just feelings. And if I pause long enough, they will always pass by.