Well, the Strengths exercise may have fallen a bit flat at work, but it's certainly clarifying my recovery process for me. My 5 Signature Strengths are Discipline, Intellection, Empathy, Input, and Learner. Re-reading the descriptions of these themes with a recovery lens, I can see why I enjoy and need certain activities of recovery (and why perhaps a traditional 12-step program has not worked, on its own, for me).
The Big 3 that are resonating most with me at this moment are all related to learning. To mental processing, exercising the muscles of my brain. I like to think deep, and think often, with a desire to improve myself and/or know myself better. And to not only process what I learn, but to share it with others. I do this in my work. And now I am doing this in my recovery. This is why the thought of doing a blog on sobriety, which occurred to me one evening last fall as I was walking through a favorite park (one of my favorite ways to process, btw), kept coming back to me. It not only is an outlet for me to process information and gain clarity, but it's also an archive of my experience (people with Input as a theme like to collect "things" and archive). These strengths are why I am constantly searching out books and podcasts and other blogs on sobriety and recovery. It's why my therapist once told me that for me, sobriety may be more of an intellectual exercise-- it has to "make sense"; I need to understand it on an intellectual level, not just an emotional level. And it may explain why parts of me are in fact so resistant to 12-step programs that ask me to accept powerlessness (I still struggle with this notion, and yes, I've been reading up on this, and trying to think through what this actually "means" for me.)
It also explains why recovery feels exciting to me, beyond the obvious benefits of being alcohol free. If we allow it to be, recovery can be a process of never-ending learning and discovery. And that resonates deeply for me.
A “process of never-ending learning and discovery” is exactly the way that I view this path of recovery to be. I remember hearing someone at a meeting say, “My sobriety comes first because I know that I’m never cured of this dis-ease, and that I will spend the rest of my life in these rooms.”
ReplyDeleteI thought that was a rather bleak way of looking at the healing we’re trying to do here. My sobriety IS contingent upon working a recovery program (out of the AA primary text) but it isn’t dependent on attending meetings. The way I view meetings is like this: When I walk into one, it’s not just some church basement, it is the hallowed halls of the world’s finest university where the tuition is free and no matter how many times we fail, we’ll never get kicked out.