Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) moves from practical early-sobriety logistics into the spiritual side of recovery, asking listeners to reflect on ways they adopt a victim stance. She argues that addicts often use self-pity and resentment to mask deep shame and guilt, and advises identifying recurring resentments, accepting personal responsibility where appropriate, and actively challenging victim-pattern thoughts to support recovery.
Chapters
You know, so far we've covered a lot of the practical, logistical matters that are very important for to have a really strong foundation in your recovery. I mean, how do you actually get sober? Stop drinking and using. But today I'm going to ask you to dig a little deeper because we're going to start on the next section, which is more of the spiritual journey of this whole thing. What I'd like you to do today is do a little reflection about the ways that you make yourself a victim in life. Here's the deal. I know you do it, we all do it a little bit, but addicts and alcoholics, we just do it a lot more. In fact, the way that I measure how addicted someone is is how much self pity they've got going on. And the reason why this is such a key ingredient, I mean, they have like a whole bunch of steps I even wrapped up around this. It's because it's the way that you're masking your shame and your guilt. What we do is when we feel bad about ourselves, that's like the worst, most uncomfortable. Shame is the most uncomfortable human emotion that there is. And we'll do just about anything to make that feeling go away. Think about it. Think about something you've done that's like embarrassing. Okay, so embarrassment is like the most, smallest, littlest form of shame. And if I just think about something I've done that's really embarrassing, that makes me super squirm. And that's not even talking about that deep shame that you've probably got stuffed way down in there. The way that you're very likely dealing with that is to build resentment. It's because we're going to justify those bad behaviors, those bad things that we've done, because on the surface it's making us feel better. More like avoid the feeling of the shame and the guilt. So you've got to identify all those little resentments that you've got going because it's making you feel sorry for yourself. So basically that can look like it's not fair. Everybody else gets to do whatever or, you know, it's not fair. My mom is like the most naggiest, critical, uptight lady ever. Or it's ridiculous. I don't drink near as much as my friend, but my wife's always on my case about it, or I hate my boss or whatever it is, or the coach was mean to me, or my teachers were mean to me or whatever, or you didn't get that red bicycle on your fifth birthday. You need to identify what those are and confront them, because it's likely that you're using that, especially if you think about it a lot. I'm not talking about every little time you've ever done this. I'm talking about those big ones that you dwell on and you think about a lot. Because when you're doing that, you might be doing that to avoid looking down on the inside at what you've done. You've got to come to terms with your own responsibility and things, because that's the first step in feeling a lot better. Spiritually identify those victim patterns that you've got and confront them head on. And they're going to come back, they're going to creep in your head. But when you feel them creeping in, just push them right back out and just say, you know what, I'm not a victim, or I had a part in that, or what was my responsibility in that? I'm not saying nothing bad ever happened to you. I'm saying dwelling on it, thinking about it over and over and over again, is keeping you stuck from making the changes that you need to make. So you've got to confront it.
