28 Temmuz

For years, we had rejected ourselves, our active addiction took us to places, we thought we would never go to. Sometimes we did things we thought we would never see ourselves doing. These strange twists of our personality was caused by us wearing different masks to fit our addiction.

Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off. I remember that I first needed the acceptance of others in N.A.

Eventually N.A. helped me not need to seek out that acceptance, but love myself for myself instead. When we first arrived to N.A., we're encouraged to keep coming back; we were apprehensive about letting anyone in. Most people we'd ever trusted had let us down, maybe even abandoned us. Through working the steps, we gained the Acceptance of ourselves, defects and all; and when we can accept our own imperfections, we learn to accept the imperfections of others.

We discover they're not so different from us after all. We learned in our Fifth Step that the masks have to go.

Self-Acceptance was our Solution; the Steps direct us to first Accept our disease and ourselves as addicts. We begin the Process of Self-Acceptance in Steps Four through Six, once we Accept ourselves as we are, we start to Accept others.

In This Moment: With this new-found Humility we stop feeling self-rejection and rejection from others.