How To Handle Emotional Changes During The 12 Step Process

How can I handle emotional changes during the 12 step process?

In some cases it's fear, but I'd say it's generally wanting to avoid pain and wanting to enhance pleasure. Sometimes the pain is fear, and if you project that fear into the future, it's anxiety. Sometimes it's anger. It's self-righteous indignation. How dare life do something to me, or how dare that person do something to me. It could be the desire to connect with people. What starts out as maybe a positive desire to connect becomes an obsessive kind of behavior when it turns into sexual addiction. It's not necessarily fear, but it is about avoiding pain and increasing pleasure. As long as you're alive you are still going to be coming up against your emotions and you're going to be experiencing uncomfortable emotional states, and you're going to be experiencing loss and change throughout your entire life. That's what we're all given - whether we're addicts or not we have to face that. There are ways that we can come to terms with that are maybe more healthy and less destructive than some of the others. It involves making a decision about what is most important to me. That's where a recovery program is important. It's not about where I'm going to be in five years, it's about where I'm gonna be at this moment. Most of the time, and meditators will tell you this and anyone that goes outside and is just struck by the beauty of the world, when you're in the moment, you generally don't have a lot of problems. You can pretty much deal with what's ever there. It's when we get into our heads, or get into our projections into the future or are ruminating over the past that we start to have the problems.