Just For The Day
Just For The Day
#3 - August 14, 2025 - Examining Limitations
We explore how examining and letting go of self-imposed limitations is a crucial part of the recovery journey, particularly through Step Four's moral inventory process.
• The limitations we carry often come from childhood experiences and family rules
• Step Four helps us discover which rules and beliefs we want to keep and which no longer serve us
• Limitations, like perfectionism, often tie self-worth to actions like productivity and performance
• Recovery allows us to identify, examine, and gently let go of limitations when we're ready
• Sitting with discomfort rather than escaping it can lead to growth and deeper self-understanding
• The program is gentle – we tackle what we're ready for and leave the rest for when the time is right
Just for today, let go of your self-imposed limitations and open your mind to new ideas.
Question: What limitations have you held onto from your childhood?
Jay and Diane's Just For The Day podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Just for Today, any 12-Step program, or any other recovery-based product or organization. They should not replace your regular group or sponsor meetings.
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Welcome back to another episode of Just for the Day. I'm Jay and I'm a recovering addict.
Speaker 2:I'm Diane and I am codependent. Today is August 14th and the topic of the reading is letting go of our limitations. We don't have to settle for the limitations of the past. We can examine and re-examine our old ideas.
Speaker 1:Most of us come to the program with a multitude of self-imposed limitations that prevent us from realizing our full potential, limitations that impede our attempts to find the values that lie at the core of our being. We place limitations on our ability to be true to ourselves, limitations on our ability to function at work, limitations on the risks we're willing to take. The list seems endless. If our parents or teachers told us we would never succeed and we believed them, chances are we didn't achieve much. If our socialization taught us not to stand up for ourselves, we didn't, even if everything inside us was screaming to do so.
Speaker 2:In Narcotics Anonymous. We are given a process by which we can recognize these false limitations for what they are. Through our fourth step, we'll discover that we don't want to keep all the rules we've been taught. We don't have to be the lifelong victims of past experiences. We are free to discard the ideas that inhibit our growth. We are capable of stretching our boundaries to encompass new ideas and new experiences. We are free to laugh, to cry and, above all, to enjoy our recovery.
Speaker 1:Just for today, I will let go of my self-imposed limitations and open my mind to new ideas. This is great. Just to clarify step four, because it does reference it, is we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. I actually really like how that frames that, because oftentimes when I think of the moral inventory of ourselves, it's focused on the wrongs the wrongs that we've done and the wrongs that we've received. And what this is suggesting is it can also be the limitations. It can be the things that we are imposing on ourselves from things that we picked up, but also the things that are imposed upon us by our upbringing, the cultures that we've experienced Like. I think that's a fascinating way to view that.
Speaker 2:And I love that. I just watched you take a look over at our bookshelf. Were you thinking of the book the Four Agreements?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I was that we have been raised with certain beliefs and ideas and we take those beliefs and ideas and we internalize them and we believe that they're true. Right, yeah, I remember a friend of mine who's a college professor and he had a bunch of kids and he said one of his kids they bought a house. You know, 50 years ago they bought a house in in the hood, in in a back area. That wasn't really a great area, and one of his kids took on the belief that he was no good because of where his neighborhood was Right.
Speaker 2:And how many times do we do that? I have so many limitations that I brought into adulthood.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So many ideas of social expectations, how I was supposed to behave, what I was supposed to say or not. Say right, Don't air your dirty laundry. I wasn't supposed to talk about anything that happened behind closed doors. There's a lot of expectations that our family gives us that we just accept because we're young and we don't know any better.
Speaker 1:Well and like, let's not demonize it because we're young and we don't know any better. Well and like, let's not demonize it. This is that process is to help you survive, right? We just simply cannot think and we cannot take the time to process everything we're going through. So we create rules that we teach our kids, without even thinking about it, to help them make decisions that we think leads to the best life. Well, the problem is, most people haven't taken the time to think oh, why did I pick that rule up?
Speaker 2:And do.
Speaker 1:I like that rule that I'm playing out.
Speaker 2:It's like the woman who was cooking a turkey and she cut off the chunk of the turkey and put it into the roasting pan.
Speaker 2:And somebody asked like why do you do that? And she's like oh, I don't know, we just always do. And then she asked her mother and she said I don't know, we just always do. And then they asked the grandmother and she said, well, because my roasting pan wasn't big enough, but they just took it Right, and I think that that's very true. It's hard. There's a tendency to want to judge our parents for the things they taught us that that are wrong, when, if we take a step back, we can recognize what they're teaching us. Maybe their survival, maybe that's how they navigated the world and where they, how they got to where they are. And so they're actually trying to pass on treasures of knowledge to us, but those treasures might be outdated or they might be for a situation that has nothing to do with our potential situations, and so they don't always fit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can for yourself. The first step, though, is identification. Right. You eventually need to accept those things and move forward with them through forgiveness. That's the process of the 12 steps, but initially it's just noticing, saying oh, that's interesting. So I guess that would be my question. So what limits have you noticed over your recovery journey that you imposed on yourself or that you picked up from other people that necessarily needed to be outdated? I'm asking myself the same question, but yeah, no.
Speaker 2:And I think that when I think through what limitations I've discovered in my recovery, I think that I definitely started with looking at my inventory of my strengths and my deficiencies, right. And as I went through those strengths and deficiencies, and okay, where do I sit on this continuum of loyalty? Where do I sit on this continuum of hard work? Where do I sit on this continuum of trust? Right, I started to kind of go back through my childhood and say, okay, why am I, why am I so proficient in loyalty and hard work and so deficient in trust? Right, and that kind of causes you to go back into your childhood memories and pull out relevant experiences. And from those relative experiences, I think we really do pick up some of those limitations, some of those ideologies that we've been conditioned to believe.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For me, definitely there's a perfectionism. I have this, I think Ernie Larson back in the 80s he was, he was, he was before the Bren Brene Brown. He was the forerunner for her okay, right, ernie Larson, and he explained it so beautifully that basically, I had this idea that my self-worth was dependent on two things one was how much I produced, and the other thing is how well I produced.
Speaker 1:The quality.
Speaker 2:So there is a belief that if I don't work hard enough then I'm worthless. But the other thing is, if I work hard and I fail, I am also worthless. There's that perfectionism and so I took that into adulthood. I was always a really hard worker. I have high expectations. I, as a teenager, and even as a child actually, my parents put me into piano and they put me into swimming lessons and karate and all these different things that weren't really my interests because they didn't really know me very well. But they put me into different things to try to make me happy or get me some sort of skills or whatever, and I would quit if it didn't come naturally to me right because better that I quit, then I try and fail yeah because there's something about looking bad.
Speaker 2:There's something about being inadequate. There's something about looking bad. There's something about being inadequate. There's something about a vulnerability that makes me weak and worthless.
Speaker 1:Where did you pick that up? Can you pinpoint to where you picked that up from?
Speaker 2:Oh, my childhood, Just so many accumulative experiences. I've shared before with you the memory of getting one of the leads in my high school play and I was so excited and I nailed it the first few nights and on, like the last night, my parents showed up and when the show ended and I was all excited, I ran down to greet them, to ask them, because they never came to any of my school things and they had shown up to this one and it was surprising that they were there and I was so thrilled. They supported me and I wanted to share this with them and the first thing my dad said was you sing through your nose. Did you know that you sing through your nose? It was really nasally and I I just as I think back on it. I remember just my shoulders slumping and me being like oh, all the wind just left my sails.
Speaker 2:And as we walked away from my parents, one of my best friends said don't listen to him, diane, you did such a great job, but that's the environment I grew up with. You got 82%. What happened to the other 18%?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, right yeah.
Speaker 2:It was never good enough. So you had to strive for perfection to avoid the disappointment when it wasn't perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:What about you?
Speaker 1:Well, there are so many. It occurs to me that they're like when you talk, talk about those limitations, we probably couldn't number them.
Speaker 1:The one that's coming to me right now is what I'm working on, right now what I have been working on for a number of years is that it's okay to be, not okay things that I was feeling in the moment. So I worked with my own self, the parts of myself that were unsatisfied, promising them hey, we're going to, we're going to get to that point where we can talk about it, but right now we've got to wait. And so, rather than just being in a stress and seeking an escape, I sat and tried to observe and there is so much richness in just sitting in the struggle like that it's okay, it's okay to struggle, it's okay not to be. And I used to not feel that way. I used to feel very, I had very much perfectionist tendencies, just like you described. Right, but it was not okay to, and I was actively escaping things when I was feeling distressed, rather than just sitting there.
Speaker 1:And it's okay. So like there's so many different limitations, and so you know that I love this, reading is really powerful. The topic is just letting go because that's what you need to do right. Those limitations are things that you have picked up, whether you knew you did or you didn't. You were given, sometimes, them without knowing, and the question is why are you still hanging on to them? Have you noticed why you cling to them and are you ready to let them go?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of them we're gonna find as we dig that there's a feeling of safety and we hold on to them because that survival instinct in us is still. It's afraid of what happens if we let it go.
Speaker 2:I think that's a very big one. Um, I love in here. It says we'll discover. We don't want to keep all the rules we've been taught, and it's true. I think that, just as as going through a fourth inventory, there are some things that we are willing to take out, kind of take off the shelf, examine and let go of. But there's other things we take off the shelf, we examine, we're like, yeah, I'm still going to keep holding on to that, and we put it back on the shelf, and I think that that's true with limitations, and I think that's okay Because it's also a gentle program. Right, and you're going to hear us say this all the time it's a gentle program.
Speaker 1:We this all the time.
Speaker 1:It's a gentle program we tackle what we're ready to tackle and what we're not ready to tackle. Eventually, we'll tackle it when it's time to tackle it. Yeah, and be okay with that, right, just take your time. I love that. Well, I love this little new insight to the fourth step, cause, again, I always think of it. As you know, the wrongs that were done to me and the wrongs I did to others, and what it's also can encompass things about the limitations and the things that I've accepted, the things that I'm still clinging to and not letting go of.
Speaker 2:So that's great. Okay, any other thoughts? No, that's it, let's wrap it up.
Speaker 1:Just for today. Let go of your self-imposed limitations and open your mind to new ideas. Thanks for joining us, guys.
Speaker 2:We'll talk with you tomorrow.
