Just in case you were wondering…

What does an Al-Anon recovery journal have to do with dinosaurs?

Absolutely nothing.

So why is it called Recoverysaurus?

There’s no deep, compelling backstory here. I just liked it. Adding ‘-saurus‘ to anything makes it sound infinitely cooler, if you’re five years old. Also, well, a little silly. That keeps me from taking myself too seriously.

I really need that reminder not to take myself too seriously. Do I take my recovery seriously? Yes. My emotional sobriety? Yep. My spiritual health? I’d better, or I’m going to end up on my butt in the ditch faster than I can say Resting on laurels.

But taking myself seriously–my ego, my expectations, and the pitiful noises Old Me makes when she doesn’t get her way–that’s disaster too. ‘Learning to place our problem in its true perspective’ involves me removing myself from the center of the universe and letting my Higher Power take His rightful place there. I am not the center. My alcoholics aren’t, either. Nor are my feelings about them. Nor are my feelings about anything else, for that matter.

My sponsor said, after patiently listening to my one million and forty-seventh rant about something I could have chosen to ignore, “I think your superpower is making big things out of little things!”

Oof. She’s not wrong. (I think she’s going to fire me if I start talking about the laundry again, but that’s a story for another day.)

I tend to hyperfocus on things. That survival mechanism served me well as a little kid surrounded by the effects of alcoholism; now, not so much. When the object of that hyperfocus is a mess of my own ‘irritable and unreasonable’ diseased thoughts, or worse, whatever the alcoholics are doing, it can only bring misery.

My life contains a lot of that kind of misery. It sucks. And guess what? I did it to myself. It’s not the alcoholics’ fault. My thoughts and feelings are my responsibility. Time to practice a better way to live.

I’m very slowly starting to make friends with the idea that I don’t have to hyperfocus on whatever fresh hell the day brings. Especially when that hell is just me overreacting to my own bad moods. I can choose to take things a little less seriously instead of seeing today’s crappy feelings as proof that ___________ (fill in the blank with the lie your disease tells you: I’m a failure, life sucks, things will never change, this is hopeless, nobody cares).

I can learn to say, This too shall pass. On a bad day, I can start to recognize that my inner child probably needs a snack and a nap more than a scolding or a spanking. I can try to talk to myself the way I would talk to a friend who was having a bad day, instead of beating myself up for having feelings.

Most of all, I can choose to accept that I am powerless over the feelings I wake up with on any given day, but not over what I choose to do about them. Maybe I don’t need to analyze them to death or see them as portents of doom. Maybe I just need to get moving, use my tools, and stop taking myself so damn seriously.

No dinosaurs, then?

Nope. Sorry, dinosaur fans. We’re going to focus on emotional sobriety: facing and naming character defects, changing unhealthy patterns, and living life on life’s terms.

Will there be dinosaur-related content in the future?

Not unless dinosaurs happen to come up as a meeting topic. Unlikely, but not impossible. If it happens, you’ll be the first to know!

Keep coming back!