AINYF SHORTS

Fight Temptation at the Root

Dealing with underlying emotions is the key to recovery

Anger is a secondary emotion.

Repeat after me: Anger is a secondary emotion, and if you can identify the primary emotion, it will enable you to overcome your addiction.

If you don’t deal with the primary emotion, you will be prone to relapse from not dealing with the underlying causes of your addiction.

This is the story of every addict. It is my story.

I didn’t overcome my addiction until I began to deal with the emotions beneath my addiction. If you’ve never been to a recovery group, that’s why people sit in a circle during an open share and talk about their feelings.

We are trying to deal with the “triggers” to our compulsive behavior.

My First Recovery Meeting

My first night at a recovery meeting scared the crap out of me. It was a Christian Recovery group called Celebrate Recovery that met at a church and the leader that night shared a Bible passage with a recovery theme.

It was about a person whose house had been swept clean of an evil spirit, and when the evil spirit came and found the house unoccupied, it brought seven more evil spirits to reside there and I instantly saw the connection to my life.

The point was: If we stop an addiction, but we never deal with the emotions triggering our compulsive behavior, we will be prone to a relapse because we are sweeping our house clean without attempting to deal with the underlying causes.

We have to not only sweep clean our lives by no longer drinking, but we also have to learn a more effective way of dealing with our hurts, and this means deal with our secondary emotions.

Anger’s secondary emotion

Usually, the secondary emotion to anger is being hurt by another person and this was the emotion I had to learn to grapple with in my life.

Depression is suppressed anger turned inward, and I had to first learn to acknowledge my hurts and to no longer stuff or bury my emotions.

You can’t heal from a wound if you pretend it doesn’t exist.

When I started dealing with the hurts in my recovery, the grip of my addiction began to loosen in my life because I had a way to deal with my emotions.

Now when I get angry and feel hurt my first impulse isn’t to act out my addiction. It is to feel the sting of the hurt and to express what I’m feeling to myself, to another person or to God and to let that painful emotion go.

I let the emotion pass through me instead of letting it to trigger me to return to my addiction.

That’s what my first night at a recovery meeting taught me: If I didn’t learn to deal with the root cause of my addiction, I would forever walk a tight rope of temptation from not dealing with my hurts. And I realized I would most likely relapse after a while if I didn’t learn a new way of dealing with my hurts.

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