Especially in the world of addiction work, we often hear the idea that we are powerless. And we are, I think, to some degree. We are powerless over certain things and certain situations and certainly when it comes to other people. But to what extent? To what extent are we not powerless? To what extent do we effect other people? To what extent are we effected by others? To what extent can we tune in to and work with our thoughts? Where are our power lines?
We all have a natural human flow of thought that moves through us. And we are powerless over those thoughts as they initially run through us. But we are not powerless over how we respond to them. We are not powerless to increase our awareness of them. We are not powerless to question them, slow them down, examine them and decide if they are true or false, or if we are assigning good and bad to them based on how we think of them. And we are certainly not powerless over putting or not putting ourselves in places, or with people or in circumstances that we know will trigger thoughts that we may not want to have running through us. We are not nearly as powerless as we think we are, or even as we might like to be sometimes. I'm not saying that its easy necessarily, but I am saying that life can look pretty different and so many things can get so much better when we open up to the idea of opening up our minds to how we see things and what we believe.
Many times while we are unpacking the pain and examining the thoughts and the stories and our assignment of good and bad to things, we bump into our own inner competing priorities, needs, parts, morals and desires. It's not always easy to sort it all out, but we stand a much better chance when we at least have some idea of where our power lines are.
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