Meditation Moment

Take a few minutes to read and ponder this quote:

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver

Breathe. Allow this question to inform you.

Social Inventories

An inventory of your social instincts can be completed by listing your painful social connections in the first column, then answering the following questions:

1. What happened to make this an inventory item?

2. How did this affect you? What do you perceive it cost you?

3. How did you react? What shortcomings of yours were revealed in this situation?

Our social instincts are super important because we are created to be part of community. How are you doing on that front? Have a community? Are you helping your community thrive? Are you allowing your community to help you thrive?

Communities that Support and Strengthen

We are custom-designed for sociability. We were made to live within a community. Each of us, I believe, is created with a certain capacity for virtue and our respective communities need what we have to offer. But like most things under stress, these social instincts can be tainted.

We may feel compelled to love our product (what we crave) and use people. This is bass-ackwards! We are created to thrive when we love people and utilize things to make the world a better place for everyone.

When our social instincts get too compulsive, our natural inclinations turn into obsessive compulsions. We don’t just want to belong, we want to run the group. We are no longer content to collaborate for the good of the group, we compete for resources. We gulp down the resources to feed our endless pit of need. This need may show up as financial, sexual, emotional or material. But however it manifests itself, it distorts our better selves and turns us into greedy gluttons for more more more.

This, obviously, has the opposite of our desired outcome. We sabotage our chances as the group grows weary of our cry for MORE. Intimacy is impossible and settling for merely being an acquaintance is unsatisfying at the deepest spiritual level.

If our desire for social connection is out of proportion with reality, we may make foolish choices. We may go to absurd lengths to feel accepted. But is this manipulation really satisfying? No, because it is manufactured. And too aggressive.

A healthy social instinct supports the reality that each of us is enough, and enough is good. Together, we build a community that supports and strengthens the whole. As we continue our quest for transformation, we develop not only the skills needed for resilience, our presence strengthens any community that we choose to join.

Relational Inventories

How about an inventory of your relationships? Your columns for this inventory include:

1. List all your personal relationships in which there have been recurring problems.

2. Next, list the primary feeling/s you experience when this person’s name comes to your mind

(pain, fear, guilt, joy, sadness, anger, resentment, etc.).

3. How has this relationship affected you? What has it cost you?

4. What shortcomings does this situation reveal about you?

Remember - do not filter yourself! If a person’s name comes to mind - write it down. Just write!

Emotional Security

Another list involves wrestling with our need for emotional security. First off, we are created to long for and receive emotional support. We are created to be interdependent, working together to depend on one another as the situation dictates. The Kingdom of God is all about providing all kinds of support, including emotional support, to everyone - especially those for whom the world is least likely to be gracious.

The problem arises when we become obsessed with grabbing for emotional security. This problem takes on many forms. We can become overly dependent on other people to meet needs we are supposed to be taking care of for ourselves. We can allow others to control us, which is also a problem. Or, we might be exerting our compulsion for security by controlling other people.

Overly dependent people may get jealous, use relationships as crutches, and may even resort of disrespect, emotional and/or physical abuse to grab for security. This is confusing for everyone. The dependent person is looking for love and is quite startled when others find their clinging ways disturbing.

Whether you have been a clinging vine or an authoritarian control freak, eventually this causes other people to distance themselves from us. If they are unable to leave, they will certainly become resentful or even afraid. None of this provides emotional security - just an illusion of closeness.

These are descriptions of two extremes are used only to illustrate the spectrum upon which we can evaluate our relationships. Whether we are clinging or clung to, bossy or being bossed, these issues around relationships can have a serious impact on not only our sobriety, but on our overall quality of life.

Created to be both loved and loving, learning how to have healthier relationships is an essential element of recovery work. Before we start working on that in later steps, we must get honest with assessing our current relationships.