April Reflections

Being More Fully Engaged, Part 1 of 3

For me, healthy relationship looks like being more fully engaged in my own life and my experience of it. This is relative to being less engaged in what is going on in my life. I am not trying to set myself up as a standard, only to speak from my own experience, which has ranged widely between more or less engaged over 56 years of my lifetime.

According to this way of looking at relationship, my days of more addictive and obsessive behaviors would reflect my being less engaged and less healthy, while my more sober life of the last 20 years are what I would call my more engaged years. Hopefully, this latter part of my life is the one in which I am connecting to myself and others in more healthy ways. In 12 Step terms, this life practice is about ‘progress not perfection.’ I trust that any progress in my life toward more healthy has come from more spiritual based sober living and Recovery.

From these perspectives I see that not being fully engaged in my life is not healthy or sober. The specific way I was not connected for years, perhaps my entire adolescence and young adulthood, is that I became disconnected from my feelings. Feelings are an essential part of what I call my natural life experience in which I feel my feelings which then help me to understand and connect with my deeper needs, and with that information I can seek more healthy, constructive ways of taking care of myself and my own needs.

Healthy relationship with myself depends on my ability to be aware and present enough to feel my feelings, identify my needs and take care of myself! Taking better care of myself, in turn, promotes my own wellbeing, independence, and wholeness, which is a great place for me to attempt to connect with others in more healthy ways.

To be continued...