An Attitude of Gratitude

Some days are there to just teach us that we need to depend on God. To remind me I am nothing without him. Yesterday was such a day. I'm glad its over and I am ready for today.

Day 23: Love Always Protects

Remove anything that is hindering your relationship, any addiction or influence that's stealing your affections and turning your heart away from your spouse.

This got me thinking. When does my heart start to turn away from my spouse? It is when I start to focus on what he is lacking instead of his many good qualities. When I am in an "attitude of gratitude" frame of  mind, I have hope. This is what I need to start the healing process. It is so easy to slip in the quagmire of despair when I loose site of what blessings I have been given. The many tender mercies the Lord gives me to remind me he is there and cares about me. I think Satan loves it when I focus on the negative. Then I am more open to destroying the family unit. I don't want to give him the satisfaction of that. He has already had to much pleasure at our families expense.

I think gratitude is a vital ingredient in Step 2. Believing that God can restore us to complete spiritual and emotional health. When we are grateful we open ourselves up to what God has in store for us. When we are ungrateful we are shutting him out of our life. Yesterday, I slipped back into my old pattern of trying to control my husband. I didn't like myself. That isn't who I want to be. That isn't who I am going to be. I had to let go and let God. Then I started to feel hope and gratitude. But when I was in the funk I felt awful and dark. I love these steps. They help me to stay focused and get out of my funky mood more quickly.

So today I am going to be grateful for everything God has given me. There is a reason for it all.

I am not my Savior.

I don't think that I understood the Atonement much before going through the 12 Step program. I am still working on understanding it actually. One thing I have got down is, I need the Savior. I can't make it back to God on my own. I can't even make it through the day without him.

Deep down I knew I needed him, but then I forgot about him helping me and I tried to do everything on my own. I need his mercy and his grace just to survive. I tried to do everything on my own. No wonder I was exhausted. The worst thing is the example that this set for my kids. At least I still have some home, they can see the change.

One thing I needed to accept before I could heal was that I needed help. I have always been independent and never wanted help from anybody. So it was even hard to admit I needed healing in the first place. But when your life feels so out of control you don't want to be a participant  in it anymore, maybe a viewer from afar, well then you need help. So I've turned my life over to God. I'm trying to listen to him as to what he wants me to do this time around. I've turned my kids over to him. I can't control what they do anymore.  I've turned my husband over to him. I can't control him that's for sure or he  would have been cured years ago. I will say for a control freak like me, this was hard. Admitting  I couldn't do everything. But could there be anybody better to turn it over to?

I'm just so glad he will let me repent and try again. I would hate for him to make my mistakes, mark me for life like the scarlet letter. I want to change and grow and he will let me. In fact, he encourages it. I wish everyone was like that, never reminding me of my mistakes. Heck I wish I was that way. I remember them and have a hard time sometimes letting them go. But I can't heal when I do that.

So step one, I accept the truth and reality that I am powerless over my spouses addiction and that as a result of my emotional responses toward their addiction, my thoughts and behaviors had become unmanageable. Now I'm ready to move to step two.

Prideful, Me?

I've been thinking about pride alot lately. I've decided it may be the key to any healing in either ours or our spouses recovery. Think about it, as long as we are prideful we can't be humble. If we aren't humble we can't honestly admit our thoughts and behaviors have become unmanageable. We can't honestly evaluate what we need to change about ourselves, because we aren't honestly looking at who we really are and what we have become. Maybe we are seeing ourselves better than our spouses. After all we aren't the one with that awful addiction. We must be better then them. Well that is pride.

I honestly don't know what I found so appealing about pride that I held onto it for so long. It isn't comforting. It didn't bring me peace, joy or happiness. It actually caused anger and frustration. I'm wondering if it can be a little addicting itself?

It was so painful for me to admit my faults to myself let alone anyone else. It took me a while to come to terms with who I really was as opposed to who I thought I was. It hurt. I mourned and then I started getting help and healing. The good new is that it gets easier and easier to admit my failings and that I don't know everything and that I need God. He knows me better than I do and it's time to let him take the lead.

Self-esteem, What's That?

When I found out about my husband viewing pornography, I would say my self-esteem, plummeted to almost zero. This addiction is hard to not take personal. I still fight with that as you will see when I write "my story." (I'm working on this, it will be up this week.) However, a healthy self-esteem is something we need to help us heal and to help others.

 So how do I work on it? This has been hard for me especially since I haven't received much positive anything from my spouse. The place I have found the most help is from God. In my prayers, which seem anymore to be almost constant, from my scripture study and positive readings that I have to fill my head with. My daughter in college found a quote she emailed me and I typed it up and have it hanging on my mirror in the bathroom. I read it daily and it reminds me that it is okay to work on me. So I thought I would share.

"Since self-esteem controls ultimately our ability to love God, to love others, and to love life, nothing is more central than our need to build justifiable self-esteem. Self Contempt is of Satan; there is none of it in heaven."  --Neal A. Maxwell

I read this and it reminds me not to let Satan win another battle in my life. I know he wants me to be negative and not like myself. What good am I to anybody when I'm like that? I've lived like that for far too long and I'm not going to any longer. Sure I will have moments, okay days, where I will feel like I've been run over by the bulldozer of negativity. But I will no longer stay there. I will fight back to keep my thoughts above ground. I realize now this is war. A literal war I feel Satan is waging within my family. I will not let him win!