First, be grateful for the people around us. Our families. Our friends. Our employers. Our brothers and sisters in recovery. Those who bring our food to the market. Those who prepare our food when we eat out. The workers who maintain our highways and the power grid. The police who help keep order. You could add hundreds more to this list.
I bring this up because sometimes we addicts feel alone. Like we're not part of anything.
Our interaction with the world may have caused us pain. Our drug and alcohol use isolated us from the mainstream. Our families and friends rejected many of us - and for good reason.
Yet we only feel the sting of rejection. We don't look at the whole equation and realize that we earned their anger. We shattered relationships with our self-centered behavior.
And because of this rejection we want to be alone. We don't want to risk hurting ourselves again. We're living in a cocoon to protect our tender insides.
But gratitude will cut through these feelings of rejection. It'll make us feel a part of the human race. We'll stop feeling sorry for ourselves and stop nurturing our pain.
That's how we can start the weekend.
Click here to email John
