Central to being Sonia is self-acceptance. I read about self-acceptance in the AA Daily Reflections book:
"I pray for the willingness to remember that I am a child of God, a divine soul in human form, and that my most basic and urgent life-task is to accept, know, love and nurture myself. As I accept myself, I am accepting God’s will. As I know and love myself, I am knowing and loving God. As I nurture myself I am acting on God’s guidance. I pray for the willingness to let go of my arrogant self-criticism, and to praise God by humbly accepting and caring for myself.”
To remain sober it is necessary to be of service to others. But you cannot be truly of service to others if you do not love yourself, are not of service to yourself. Drinking alcoholically is intrinsically self-destructive. My drinking was self-destructive to the extreme. Lots of people come into the program and get sober right away or shortly after, some of us go through years of relapsing before we get sober. I strongly suspect that one of the reasons I have relapsed so many times is that I have a strong penchant for self-destructiveness, because I’m much more comfortable with suffering, which is familiar, than with feeling well, which feels odd--I haven’t really felt that I deserve to feel that way. I have plenty of other self-destructive traits, which need to be removed from my life just like alcohol was. The most urgent task in early sobriety for me, has been learning to take care of myself. Like many an alcoholic, I’ve had trouble with eating properly, personal hygiene, beating myself up over small things, negative thinking and so on.
On the topic of self-nuturing, one day when I was in psychoanlysis, working on the issue of not feeding myself even when extremely hunger, but happily eating if fed (so not anorexic), I mentioned the issue to Hervé, who I’d just begun seeing. He looked at me thoughtfully and replied: “Imagine you are holding a baby which is hungry, and you are that baby, what would you do?” I immediately visualized throwing a baby to the ground and shouting: “I don’t want this baby.” No wonder I have such trouble feeding myself! I’ve been throwing myself to the ground, and rejecting myself, for years. To come to believe that I am a child of God, whose “most urgent life-task is to accept, know, love, and nurture myself,” takes a giant leap of faith for me. Maybe it doesn’t have to be one giant leap. Each day, it takes a concentrated effort on my part to take care of myself in so many ways that I can’t possibly concentrate on acquiring them all at once. Baby steps, I must remind myself constantly, baby steps. Through prayer and taking these baby steps on a daily basis, I will be able to make that leap gradually, I will come to fully come to believe that I am a child of God. When I can fully accept myself, and be truly of service to others, all will be right.
"I pray for the willingness to remember that I am a child of God, a divine soul in human form, and that my most basic and urgent life-task is to accept, know, love and nurture myself. As I accept myself, I am accepting God’s will. As I know and love myself, I am knowing and loving God. As I nurture myself I am acting on God’s guidance. I pray for the willingness to let go of my arrogant self-criticism, and to praise God by humbly accepting and caring for myself.”
To remain sober it is necessary to be of service to others. But you cannot be truly of service to others if you do not love yourself, are not of service to yourself. Drinking alcoholically is intrinsically self-destructive. My drinking was self-destructive to the extreme. Lots of people come into the program and get sober right away or shortly after, some of us go through years of relapsing before we get sober. I strongly suspect that one of the reasons I have relapsed so many times is that I have a strong penchant for self-destructiveness, because I’m much more comfortable with suffering, which is familiar, than with feeling well, which feels odd--I haven’t really felt that I deserve to feel that way. I have plenty of other self-destructive traits, which need to be removed from my life just like alcohol was. The most urgent task in early sobriety for me, has been learning to take care of myself. Like many an alcoholic, I’ve had trouble with eating properly, personal hygiene, beating myself up over small things, negative thinking and so on.
On the topic of self-nuturing, one day when I was in psychoanlysis, working on the issue of not feeding myself even when extremely hunger, but happily eating if fed (so not anorexic), I mentioned the issue to Hervé, who I’d just begun seeing. He looked at me thoughtfully and replied: “Imagine you are holding a baby which is hungry, and you are that baby, what would you do?” I immediately visualized throwing a baby to the ground and shouting: “I don’t want this baby.” No wonder I have such trouble feeding myself! I’ve been throwing myself to the ground, and rejecting myself, for years. To come to believe that I am a child of God, whose “most urgent life-task is to accept, know, love, and nurture myself,” takes a giant leap of faith for me. Maybe it doesn’t have to be one giant leap. Each day, it takes a concentrated effort on my part to take care of myself in so many ways that I can’t possibly concentrate on acquiring them all at once. Baby steps, I must remind myself constantly, baby steps. Through prayer and taking these baby steps on a daily basis, I will be able to make that leap gradually, I will come to fully come to believe that I am a child of God. When I can fully accept myself, and be truly of service to others, all will be right.
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