Recovery In Focus

How many times have you been told to “See” the other perspective of someone? How many times have you been told that you never “Think” about someone else’s feelings? How many times do these questions make you feel enraged, or like you have just been cut through with a searing hot knife?

For me I have experienced all these just too often. You see, I have a focusing problem with my addiction. I act like it affects just me, even though I know very well it doesn’t. I act like it is just MY problem, when it is also the problem of those it seeps into around me. When my addiction is accelerating at a hundred miles an hour or is at a screeching stop, it simply is not “Just Mine”.

My addiction controls my perspective on the world around me. My personal relationships, my thoughts and feelings towards another person, towards myself. In my marriage, I can find myself turning into a manipulative person when my addiction tells me I am not getting the satisfaction I “Deserve”. It takes the God given love from it and makes it into a carnal act.

When this happens, it asks me to lash out, to have a foul attitude, and to mope. All in attempts to get my way.

This is when those power-packed questions come in and hit us with a fatal combo. In boxing, you could say it is the left hook, the right hook, and then the uppercut. “Why don’t you see my perspective?” “You NEVER think about my feelings!”, and that’s when the uppercut follows. The rage, the burning, the guilt, the shame. It is when this uppercut hits that our emotions become very large. Whether in anger or sorrow.

Regardless of how we are left feeling at these times, it is not those feelings afterwards that matter; it was our feelings before that did. For myself personally, I have wrestled like a wild man caught in quicksand when it comes to making myself see another perspective. I have never been good at stopping and thinking about others. Even when I caused pain through my addiction, I gave apologies to seek my own forgiveness, my own healing. Not the healing of the person I had harmed with my childish actions.

So that leaves us with a question: how do we change for the future? Trial and error. We aren’t always going to have glorious victories. When it comes to thinking about someone else, we must learn their thoughts and perspectives. We must communicate, even if we made a royal fool of ourselves, and especially if we think we are “Right”. There will be times when we do stop and think beforehand, a chance to talk about our feelings appropriately, without our inner addiction grabbing the reins.

In these times, we must thank God for giving us the strength and grace to do so. At other times when we fail and only realizeit after, we must ask God for his strength and grace to make it right for the other person. This is a growth process, and it will have growing pains because of it. However, this is a process that should be rejoiced in, for it not only heals those we have damaged, but it also will begin to heal traumas inside of us. The bruises of previous battles that have left our emotional landscape scarred and burned up.

If there is a key takeaway from this, it is that our thoughts and feelings are just one in billions, and each one is just as important as the other.

Addiction will make us look like fools, will make our perspective and feelings twisted and selfish. Recovery will begin to unwind our twisted selves, to unwrap the Godly perspective hidden within us, regardless of the growing pain that may follow. Remember that in the boxing ring of life, we need God in our corner. If all we have is ourselves, then we will never learn the patterns or attacks of the enemy, let God be our coach and perspective.