It would be easy for me to cut-n-paste from gratitude sites on the web or paraphrase them. What is more difficult for me is to write about my thoughts and experiences from a perspective of gratitude. Reframing the language from what I achieved to the gifts I have been given is readily done in my head. Writing that down knowing that others will read my write is stressful for me in a good way. It makes me think more about what I am doing and be accountable for what I write.
Growing up as the youngest of four kids in a dysfunctional family, I learned to not share my dreams and aspirations since they would torn up and attacked as if by harpies. A huge part of my 12-step recovery is learning how to feel my feelings instead of suppressing them. 12-step recovery has a zillion slogans typically consisting of sentence fragments from the literature. One slogan is especially apt for me is that we are only as sick as our secrets. When I share my secret thoughts with others, the thoughts lose power to create a self-destructive OCD-like repetition in my head.
I am grateful for having learned these new skills to help me find a much better way of living my life. It was a huge amount of work on self-improvement to get to where I am. The odds are at least 9:1 against a real alcoholic getting long-term sobriety. Life as sober alcoholics is often described as a miracle. It is not clear why some get sober and others die a slow humiliating painful death on skid road. Willingness to do whatever it takes to get sober is a crucial component. I have been blessed with the gift of being that willing. Willingness is quite likely the most important personality trait in my life. That is a god-given gift I am grateful for getting.
It was a great year for helping others in early recovery that could use the help that I had to offer. I have never helped anybody so much in my life as I helped "D" in 2010. She went from being a homeless alcoholic panhandling for money at an intersection to having her own apartment in Seattle and then moving to Arizona for the winter. At one time, D had 5 months of continuous sobriety before she drank again.
Watching D be overwhelmed with the tasks of basic living such as paying her bills on time, planning her work and then implementing her plan was an eye-opening experience. That made me extremely grateful for the skills, abilities, resources, sobriety and spirituality that have been given to me in my recovery.
In my readings on gratitude, studies have shown that those that experience life-changing trauma often go on to be some of the most grateful people. A classic example is the ambitious type-A executive that experiences a heart attack in his 50s that changes his life from being career-focused to being family focused. While I was never the type-A executive, being paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 22, in June of 1981, and having a crack-addiction in my 30s were certainly traumatic experiences.
I will be a paraplegic drug-addict for the rest of my life. What I can change is how that impacts my life. Rather than focus on what I have lost, I can focus on what I have. I have been blessed with economic security from a pension that pays the bills including medical insurance that covers 100% of the health-care costs of primary and secondary impacts of being paralyzed. I live in a nice apartment in a quiet neighborhood with excellent access to business, medical and community services that are important to me. My relationships with my friends are the best they have ever been in my life.
Being gratitude-oriented helps me feel better about my life. Heck, I even exercised and journaled today. Toss in a lobster for dinner, watching part of a New Year's day college football game (Urban Meyer/Florida won over the legend Joe Paterno/Penn St), a possible new roommate, finding audio ebooks on gratitude on the King County Library website and today was a great way to start the new year.
In future writings, I will give Naikan a try.
A Buddhist exercise, called Naikan self-reflection, asks people to ponder daily:
What have I received from…
What have I given to…
What trouble have I caused…
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