7 Insights into How I Learned to Relinquish Control and Embrace Serenity
Since doing the 12-step recovery, I now have the ability to look back at my life before recovery and see it with crystal clarity in a way that was just not possible before. I’m frequently able to look back at various situations and see: here’s what I was thinking, here’s what I was doing, and here’s what my motives were. Meanwhile, at the time it was happening, I was completely blind to all of it.
One of the things I can see now is that the extreme desire I had to understand things was rooted in my need to control outcomes. I wanted to know all the facts, the context, and the variables that contributed to something. I can see now that that extreme desire to understand things was because I thought if I knew everything that was involved, I could manipulate the variables in such a way that things would come out the way that I wanted. In other words, I could control the outcome.
When it came to romantic relationships, I wanted to understand why “he” (whoever “he” was at the time, since I date men) did that or why he keeps doing that. I felt that if I got that, then I could get him to stop doing “it” (whatever “it” was that I didn’t like). I did all this without having any conversations with him, of course, since I didn’t know how to directly and clearly communicate, nor was it an option for me. I…
