recovery

Trusting yourself looks like finding the courage to override the constant temptations to minimize the small but meaningful steps you’re taking to honor your intuition. Trusting yourself looks like depersonalizing setbacks. Trusting yourself looks like realizing that just because the thing you felt so certain about changed, that doesn’t mean you wer

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I have known many people who spent years in analysis and emerged with a detailed understanding of their major psychodynamics, yet experienced what they uncovered as shameful admissions rather than as expressions of their essential humanity in all its ordinary depravity and virtue

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.”

—Wendell Berry

I couldn’t quit smoking until I convinced myself that smoking was for losers.

Wasn’t enough to “want” to quit. I had to actively disdain it in an over the top way.

After the identity-belief changed, the rest was (relatively) easy.

Aaron Francis

When you don’t trust yourself, you’re waiting to catch yourself in a mistake so you can pounce on your own certainty about how unworthy of trust you are. You get petty. You become fixated on your mistakes, and you keep a tally of those mistakes. In contrast, when you notice you’ve been numbing out all week beyond a level you’re comfortable with and

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Addiction is a progressive narrowing

of the things that bring you pleasure.

Happiness is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. The former emerges passively.

The latter takes work.

Seems like one of the highest leverage stories for many ppl (me included) to reprogram is the one that goes like: >I am struggling >I am struggling and it is my fault >I am struggling and it is my fault and I have to deal with this on my own >I am going to isolate myself until I am presentable for other humans