Recovery is a beginning

Recovery is a decision to live and not die. Recovery is a correction to a failed path. Recovery is God's blessing for saving your life. Recovery is proof in the existence of God. Recovery requires gratitude for the breath of life. Recovery is life and life is recovery. Recovery is a new beginning, a new day, a fresh start. Recovery is proof that all things are possible and in fact achievable with God. Recovery is acceptance that I did not have the solution to the problems facing me. Listen as Trent explores the fact that recovery is a beginning for him.

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Welcome to Recovery is a Process of Decisions podcast. This is Trent Thomas, your recovery peer support specialist. This week's episode is entitled Recovery is a beginning. Recovery begins with submission to life and all its hills and valleys. Recovery reveals that life happens. Life dishes out a roadmap filled with misery and confusion. Sometimes monthly, weekly, daily, and in some instances minute to minute. Life is circular. What goes around certainly comes back around. In recovery, this translates to knowing what tripped you up in the past will present itself again. Life does ask questions. Questions that we don't always have any answers to. In life, we attempt to manage and provide an answer to every question or situation that presents itself to us. This force of conquering the space of life we find ourselves in is natural and necessary. As we mature and grow older, we express ourselves as a time lapse of actions against the forces that present itself against us. As we venture into life, we are asked to rise up and conquer with tools of management. We are asked to learn skills to progress in the society we find ourselves in. We are asked to make a living and provide. Providing is essential. Often it comes with sacrifice, sacrificing our time management, our mental health. Our life skills often do not include processing our feelings, especially for men. Men are expected to live in spite of how they feel. Men are judged on their expertise for providing. Feelings are inconsequential to the process of progress. Most often men are not equipped with the complete root system to provide emotional language. I, for one, was never taught by my father how to express my feelings or even how to deal with feelings. What we don't receive as boys, we cannot give as men. For men, anger is the first and strongest emotion. It is most often the go-to feeling for disappointment, for anxiety, for fear, for loss. Men in each generation have processed feelings in their own method. For men in the 50s, love was expressed through providing. It was how they were taught. Love was expressed by providing a home, food in the refrigerator, a bed to sleep in, clothes on your back, shoes on your feet. This was the lesson of love for men, for their children, for their family. For the boys being taught for men of this generation, we must be mindful that you cannot do what you do not know. You are the sum total of your learning experiences. Life is the grand orchestrator of experiences. From others, we learn what to and what not to do. Our life experiences mold us and structure us for giving and for receiving. Through our life experiences, we are prepared for the life we are finally presented in. We are students always. We learn from our own mistakes and from the mistakes of others. From our parents, we learn what to and what not to do. There are no perfect parents. There are no parents that teach perfection because they are not perfect themselves. As humans, we are prone to make mistakes, to error, to sin, to miss the mark, to fall down. However, as humans, we are also made to recover, to do better, to improve, to build upon past mistakes, to imagine better, to inspire above and beyond our starting point. As children, we are expected to rise above the mistakes of our parents. In fact, in spite of, or rather because of our parents' mistakes, mistakes teach us what not to do. Mistakes teach us what better is and how better is achieved. My father once told me he had nothing to give me but what not to do in life. He in fact gave his life as an example of the consequences once suffered if I would do as he had done. He gave his life as a martyr of mistakes. Doing better meant not doing what he had done. Today I strive to do better by not following in his footsteps, but by rather walking in a different direction, a better path. Today I choose a path with less consequences and more rewards. For me, I learned what not to do by the actions and life choices handed down to me by my paternal father. Today I choose recovery. I choose to live and not die. A sin is missing the mark, to be off-center. If you're at the shooting range of bow and arrows and you miss the center, you simply reload your bow and shoot again and again. Each attempt teaches you how to position your hands and how to position your body to achieve the desired results. Your actions have a finite relationship to how or if you are successful. This paradox is how we achieve success in our missions of life. Recovery is a correction to a series of bad decisions made while under the influences of disease of addiction. Recovery is a process, one decision after the next. In fact, recovery is a process of decisions. Recovery is a beginning, a recharging of the battery of life, a redirection on a course previously followed. Recovery is our beginning, a new day in our lives, an emission of wrong decisions made in our past and a striving to just do better today. Doing better today prepares us for success tomorrow and the day after. Recovery is a beginning of a state in which we strive daily to just do better. This is Trent Thomas, and I would like to thank you for listening to another episode of Recovery is a process of decisions podcast. You can now subscribe to this podcast and receive rich deep episodes from subscribers only, as well as a private personal email account to communicate directly with me for comments and show suggestions. Also, I would like to invite everyone to check out my personal self-help peer support recovery website at transnetrecover.com. Join me on the road to sustain recovery with my recovery jumpstart program. I also would like to offer my ebook publication entitled Recovery: The Seven Steps to Sustain Recovery to anyone who is looking for a formula to sustain recovery from someone who has walked the walk. This ebook is available at Amazon.com. As always, your inspiring comments can be left at transnetrecover.com forward slash podcast. Please feel free to follow me on Facebook and Instagram. Thank you and have a blessed day.