I have something to tell you.  SHHHHH! The other shoe has already dropped!  It dropped when you reached the bottom in your disease.  The minute you reached out for help is when your upward recovery journey began.  Addicts are prone to feel as if they are waiting for some calamity to fall them.  This in some cases has become a habit for some of us.  We get addicted to negative thinking as well as to substances.

Addicts can become addicted to having a lot of drama in their lives.  If there is no particular current drama, they will create some!  For some reason having a lot of drama in our lives makes us feel as if we are important.  I mean just look at my life!  I have all these different problems going on says the newcomer to recovery.  It may be true that the newcomer has a lot of things going on in their life.  We learn to call them situations.  A situation is easier to handle than a problem.

In recovery we learn new tools for dealing with situations.  We try our best to stop giving dramatic presentations of our situations to others.  We learn to seek out help by talking with others minus the unnecessary drama which we have usually added to the dilemma.  We learn that we can seek out the help of our Higher Power in dealing with situations.  This by itself can help to calm our agitated minds.  In talking with others who may have been through a similar situation we are usually able to get a bit of clarity.  They may share something of a similar situation to ours but was much worse.  We hear how they dealt with it and what the outcome was.

This gives us hope for our own situation.  We are now calmly able to ascertain what we need to do, if anything.  As a newcomer we have generally made a mess out of our lives.  This leaves us with many situations that need our attention.  We learn that we didn’t create all this wreckage in a single day and that it won’t be rectified in a single day.  We learn to prioritize what needs to be done.  By creating some order of the importance of our situations we are able to quiet our minds to some extent.  We possibly make a list of what we need to do and then put it away until we can read it with a calm frame of mind.  We may have legal troubles; we may have warrants out for our arrest.  The IRS may be looking for us as well as our creditors.  We probably have issues with our spouse or partner if we still have one.  Our children may be in the custody of the State.  We may see the need to file for bankruptcy protection.  All of these things and more do require our attention as quickly as we are able to do so.  We talk to our sponsor and perhaps the two of you can come up with a game plan on how to approach each situation.  The first step may be to contact each entity that you have an issue with it and let them know that you want to solve the situation.  Most creditors and others will be glad to hear from you and will work with you to find a solution.

The bottom line is that Rome wasn’t built in a day and your solutions will not be solved in a day.  We need to find a common ground where we can find a quiet mind in order to follow through with our situations.  By listening to others who have solved similar situations we gain hope.  Hope that the mess we have made out of our lives can be fixed.  Once again this is life on life’s terms and it takes willingness to finally get our own life in order.