Motivation
The Need to Question Gratitude
Quite often in an AA meeting or similar, you will hear someone announce themselves as my name is so-and-so and I’m a grateful alcoholic/ addict, or I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic/addict.
Equally, you are quite likely to hear someone say at a meeting something along the lines of a grateful alcoholic will never drink.
The Myth of Tough Love
Tough love is one of those expressions that has crept into the vocabulary of mental health and 12-step recovery in recent years.
It sort of implies that an action or directive is being given or taken which may on the surface seem a bit tough, but is being done from a place of love, for the benefit of the individual concerned even if they are unable to see it.
Why People Struggle with Being Vulnerable
People quite often like to categorise emotions as being good or bad, with emotions such as anger and self-pity being thought of as bad or weak.
Emotions such as gratitude and a positive outlook are thought of as good healthy emotional states. Truth is that judgement of any emotional state is itself counterproductive. Emotions are neither good nor bad themselves, neither strong nor weak, they simply are.
What Does it Mean to Respect Boundaries?
Quite a simple question in many ways, but one that many people struggle with, both in terms of trying to set boundaries of their own, and dealing with other people who don’t respect, or don’t seem able to respect anyone else’s boundaries at all.
The issue of boundaries is not unique to people in 12-step recovery but is perhaps more acute because so many of them have grown up either in alcoholic homes or enmeshed homes of one type or another.
What Does Rigorous Honesty Really Mean ?
The term rigorous honesty is used a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous, and in the 12-step recovery world generally.
Its original intent was to make clear the need for people to own and take responsibility for the reality of their lives, both internally and externally.