When I started my journey of recovery, I understood two emotions: ANGER and FEAR. That was it. As I’ve progressed on my journey to emotional sobriety, my emotional literacy has expanded dramatically. I no longer live in a world of concrete, black or white thinking where there are two ends of the spectrum that I swing between. I live in a world now of nuance, of understanding that ANGER and RAGE are two different experiences, of recognizing the difference between SERENITY and PEACE.
Several weeks ago, I was working on the Sixth and Seventh Step on letting go some old coping behaviors from my childhood (the AA literature refers to them as character defects). I found myself searching on Google for words to describe what I was feeling – there was new depth to the experience and I felt the need to get as granular as I could. As I worked my way through that process building out the list of maladaptive coping strategies in my journal, I realized that such a list might be helpful to others. So, I am posting it here.
As I started to write this, I realized that I probably should be working on truly comprehensive list of the healthy coping skills I want to develop and all the feelings on the assets list. This will be my next endeavor as seeing myself and my life through a positive lens is significantly more challenging for me.
I hope this compilation helps you. Let me know if there are additional feelings or behaviors that I should be adding to this document!
Today 