Acceptance for me is the key to recovery. If I can't accept my disease, I will surely relapse. If I can't accept my dis-ease, I will continually look outside of myself to make me feel better instead of going within and accepting what I find there, in the moment.
Acceptance for me is always about in the moment, in today. Accepting what is, knowing it is subject to change.
I had someone tell me that acceptance had no part of recovery because it wasn't mentioned in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. To me this is total HOG WASH! For me, acceptance is a necessary attitude I must find in order to take Step One - 100%.
Acceptance is one of the principles of the First Step. It is also part of the grieving process. So whenever we go through change, which is a grieving process, we need to find that acceptance.
So much of what is in today is a result of choices made. I need to accept that what I put out, I get back, unfortunately, sometimes it is 10 fold. Which is good if I make a good choice but not so good when I don't make healthy ones.
I also need to accept the fact that when I see something negative in someone else, it is a reflection from something within myself. Step Ten keeps me honest. With that honesty, comes acceptance and surrender to a Higher Power.
The Serenity Prayer says it all for me. I am so glad I can't wear it out. It is the wisdom to know the difference that takes practice, practice, practice.
When I can accept me, I can live in faith instead of fear.
Early in recovery, I asked my spiritual advisor what I had to change and his response was "Everything!"
This was hard to accept. I thought I was a pretty good person once I no longer had the drugs in my system. I no longer drank so what was my problem?
What I had to learn to accept was that the problem was not the pills, the alcohol, or the men in my life, the problem was me?
What I had to change was my way of thinking. I had to accept that it had become warped by this dis-ease and I had to find a new way of living.
I had to accept that I could no longer look out of myself for people, places and things to make me feel better. I had to go within and I had to connect with a Higher Power.
I had to accept a Higher Power. It meant I had to accept a God as I saw Him, this God that I had been so angry with. This God who I thought all my life was going to never accept me because I had done all the things that the 'church' said I should do.
I had to learn to accept the people around me. Accept where they were at and recognize that either they didn't have a program or they did and were not using it, at least not to my way of thinking.
But the hardest to accept was me and what I found on that journey inward. When I got honest, I had to learn to surrender it all to my Higher Power and accept what I found there in order to recover.
It has been a process. I has taken practice, practice, practice. I had to accept on a daily basis that I can't take this journey alone, that just because I worked on something once before, it will come back again, and hardest of all was to accept was my humanness. The workaholic, the perfectionist, the know-it-all, the caretaker, screaming shrew, the shopaholic, overeater, the codependent, the gambler, and the addict, had to change. I was one of the 'really' sick ones.
I had to accept that I am still a work in progress.
