March 14

”Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction” Edward Teller

Someone once shared that keeping secrets is the principal way to stay in the addictive cycle. I’ve also heard other members share that their secret life was a large part of what they were addicted to; the ability to have a secondary life to escape from the pressure and stress of one’s normal life. In any event, most of us can agree that keeping secrets is not helpful or healthy in moving us towards recovery. It can be challenging to let go of our habit of keeping secrets. It has been such a large part of our identity and addiction; being able to have a self-created world where we seem to be the master. In recovery and in looking deeper within ourselves, we begin to see that our secret life is merely a delusion and its sole purpose is to feed our addictive behaviour. Honesty, primarily with yourself, is a key to changing our way of thinking and to make progress in the program. Without this change of attitude and behaviour, we are likely to struggle in removing ourselves from our secret life.

Affirmation Just for today I will keep no secrets, live in the here and now.

February 26

”We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.” Dale Carnegie

It is often said that we do not know what we had until it is gone. The same can be said when we look back at our past during periods of sobriety and see what we have lost, squandered or thrown away. The addiction promises a lot, to fulfill our needs, our wildest fantasies, but when things are realized, these promises are usually empty ones. As addicts we live to feed our addiction that does not give back what we put into it. Rather, it keeps demanding more, more time, effort, money, often to deliver even less to us in return. It’s hard to break the cycle, but when we manage to put healthy means of meeting our own needs, physical, emotional and spiritual the benefits are often much greater than our efforts. Why wouldn’t we jump at the opportunity to have more of this in our lives! This is part of the struggle of living in our addiction.

Affirmation I will be thankful for what I have today and be aware of the empty promises of my addictive behaviour.