Nobody gets through this life without making a single mistake. We can tell ourselves that over and over again, but it is hard to remember due to our ego. Ego isn’t all about inflation and thinking that we are better than other people. More often than not, our ego actually takes on a sense of what is called false pride and thrives on inferiority rather than superiority. We think we are less than other people- sometimes, those people who we believe haven’t made much of a mistake at all even once in their lives. This kind of thinking stems from the ego because it takes us out of the universal truth of being a human on planet earth: everyone is on an equal playing field as a human being and on that playing field, everyone is making mistakes.
Active addiction brought us more mistakes than we might be able to even think about. With our brains impaired by drugs and alcohol, we weren’t able to think or act clearly. Somehow we think that once we get sober and our brains clear up, we won’t be making any more mistakes. More like those “other people”, we’ll be on some different plane of existence, some place of greater potential and possibility, where we transcend imperfection and leave flaw behind us. Unfortunately, this simply isn’t so. When we recover, we don’t become super human. We become a little more human, which doesn’t mean not making mistakes, it means realizing and fully accepting that making mistakes is something we are one hundred percent, inarguably, going to do at some point in time. Making a mistake is going to happen intentionally and unintentionally, many times over. We’ll make physical mistakes, we’ll make mental mistakes, we’ll make relationship mistakes, and we’ll make emotional mistakes. We’ll make choices we thought were the right choices and they’ll turn out not to work in our favor. We’ll make choices that we know are the wrong choices and sometimes they’ll be wrong, sometimes they’ll be right.
What we learn in recovery is that it is not the matter of whether or not we make mistakes which have the greatest affect in our life. Mistakes happen, inevitably. What matters is what we do with our mistakes, how we remedy them, and how we bounce back from them. We’ll discuss that more in our next blog.
Tree House Recovery of Orange County, California is a premier men’s addiction treatment facility that uses eight different modalities to help our men become the best versions of themselves they can be. We teach our men that every day of their journey is something to celebrate, and that recovery isn’t a sprint– it’s a marathon. By showing our men how to celebrate each day’s victories, we show them that self love isn’t about what we have or haven’t done. It’s about getting a little closer to where we want to be. To get started with Tree House Recovery, call us today at (503) 850-2474
