Category: Words To Live By

Why is it such a human trait that when a mistake is made by someone, they often go into the negative process of beating themselves up afterwards? I often asked myself this question for a number of years because I too was one on those who liked to self-flagellate by mentally and emotionally beating myself up when I thought I made any mistake. Through many sessions of therapy, meditation, prayer, and work surrounding my recovery from addictions, I discovered that my metaphorical process of picking a bat up and beating myself senseless when I thought I did something wrong, all stemmed from growing up in a dysfunctional family where I usually took the blame for everything.

Some of the most painful memories from my childhood are of my parents suffering from their own alcoholism and mental imbalances. In many dysfunctional homes where the parents are sick from any disease of addiction, the children often get blamed for anything that goes wrong, regardless of whether it was their fault or not. Most that suffer from addictions don’t like to look in the mirror and see that they are the cause of their own misery. It’s easier to put that blame on someone else and make them as miserable as they are. In the case of my own family, this often proved to be true. My sister and I were often the blame for the slightest of things that in most healthy homes would never have even been an issue. Both of us were punished quite a bit for even the slightest of mistakes that we did make. And unfortunately, the two of us spent much of our childhood years apologizing for every single little thing that went wrong in our parents lives. Sadly, that pattern continued even after we left home to venture out into the real world on our own.

When one is beaten down with regularity on any level, whether it be mentally, emotionally, or physically, it becomes very easy to start doing that same pattern to themselves when they encounter a triggering situation. One example of that could simply be when a person makes a similar mistake as to one they made during their childhood which resulted in them being punished. I once found it was much easier to put myself down long before someone else got the chance to scream and yell or seriously discipline me from an apparent mistake I made.

It’s taken some seriously hard core work to understand that there are a lot of things in life that aren’t ever my fault. It really is sad that people have a tendency to just place the blame on someone else because they can’t face it within themselves. I’ve gotten much stronger now to see many of those times when that’s happening so that I don’t go into the process of picking that bat up and beating myself up for something that’s not my fault.

On the other side of the coin, there are also those times when I really have made a mistake that affected myself or others negatively. But I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to beat myself up in those situations either. Everyone makes mistakes. EVERYONE. And when I make them, I try to love myself now through it, instead of beating myself up mentally. God has helped me to see that all of that punishing my parents did to me as a kid for those mistakes I really did make, never really helped me to become a healthier person. In fact, it did just the opposite. So for all of those times I spent beating myself up in my adult years, it was only reinforcing the same negativity I experienced as a kid when my parents were doing that to me.

I find that many people in recovery meetings seem to do a lot of this pattern of beating themselves up. There, they speak of how they have been a scumbag or a loser or use some other terribly negative word to describe themselves with how their addiction took over their lives. And they talk about how bad of a person they got to be. But what they don’t realize is that the only thing they are doing at that moment is hurting themselves even more when they are saying those words. Deep inside each of them is a little kid who from the start, only ever wanted to be loved and cared for, and is still waiting for that. But for many of them, like it was in my sister’s and my life, this never happened. Instead we became punching bags for our sick parents and then when they were no longer in control of us, we became our own punching bags by continuing to beat ourselves up, which only kept ourselves sick and miserable.

The process of beating ourselves up over any mistake, whether it really was our fault or not, is seriously unhealthy for each of our souls. It doesn’t help us to grow and it won’t increase our levels of love and light within us. So the next time you make a mistake that is your fault or find yourself being in receipt of someone else’s mistake, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and remember that you don’t have to beat yourself up in either case.

For those situations that really were your mistake, try practicing forgiveness for yourself and all others who were affected as that is the most loving action to do. And for those situations that weren’t your fault, stop taking ownership of them by asking God for the strength to deflect that negative energy being aimed at you. Send love instead to those sick people who refuse to look in the mirror at their own problems.

In either case, you’ll find in following these simple suggestions, that you’ll be beating yourself up a lot less until you no longer want to ever do it again.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

There’s a lot of people out there who I know of both in the recovery circles and outside of them who really struggle with the concept of prayer. For some it has become relatively synonymous with religion, which is considered poison in their minds, so they they want nothing to do with it. For others, it’s the process of how to pray that overwhelms them, so they don’t ever even try. I understand and relate to both of these points of view, but have come to see that a prayer can really be as simple as just saying four words: “God please help me!”

Prayer is defined as “a solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship.” While that may indeed sound religious and lofty, the truth is in saying those words, “God please help me!”, that a powerful prayer has already been spoken and nothing more has to even be said. What’s funny though is that I once thought prayer had to be some great Shakespearian prose.

That probably stemmed from having grown up in a religious family who attended church week in and week out for many years. There, I heard many prayers that never made much sense to me and most were just words being read aloud. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t attend any church currently as I never feel my heart is being stirred when listening to someone else’s prayers or reading them in unison with others from a piece of paper. To me that just feels like there are specific rules or formats to praying and I don’t believe that there actually are. I feel that prayer is an intimate experience that’s different for each and every individual who utilizes it.

Most people usually picture a person kneeling with their hands clasped tightly together when it comes to prayer, except that’s only one of an infinite number of ways that people can pray. There’s also standing, walking, driving, eating, playing, lying down, jogging, running, hiking, working, and so on, are you getting my point? There really is no specific position, place, or format on how to pray. All it really takes is to just start. And for much of the past few years of my life when the excruciating pains that I’ve been going through are overwhelming me, I have struggled myself in doing that. But one day I heard a friend in AA speak at a podium who changed my own viewpoint on prayer. He said that in his weakest moments, when he feels most overwhelmed in life, and has no clue on how to start praying, he just raises his hands up in the air and says the words, “God please help me!” and then finds the rest of the words come forth.

Since hearing that man speak in AA, I have applied this countless of times in my own life on all those days when I don’t feel like I have the energy to go on anymore. I have lost track of how many places I have found myself crying out those words of “God please help me!” And I’ve come to see that in many of those times, I not only feel closer to God in saying them, but I find a whole conversation with God is then able to pour out of me.

Prayer doesn’t have to be a religious thing nor does it have to be filled with exalted words. It doesn’t have to be done in any specific format nor does it have to be carried out in any certain place either. Prayer truly has no boundaries, and there is no right or wrong way of doing it. Sometimes, all one needs to do when struggling with prayer, is to just take a moment to think about the difficulty their facing, then breathe deeply, and say those four little words of “God please help me!” It really IS that simple.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I’m really not one who is that hip on using any type of slogans throughout my life, but in the case of an episode that happened recently with my landlord, the phrase “Good Things Come To Those Who Wait” applied magnificently.

I did some research to try to find the origin of this phrase and discovered it actually is considered an English proverb that was most likely derived from a Biblical verse (Lamentations 3:25) that read as follows, “God is good to those who wait for him, to the one who seeks him.” Ironically, it was used and adapted several thousand years later by Heinz for the adverting of their ketchup back in the 1980s. Since then, it has become a widely used English phrase that people seem to use quite often to extol the virtue of patience. And with regards to my landlord, that is a virtue I have been seriously challenged with.

My landlord, who is also my roommate, most likely falls on the exact opposite side of the spectrum as me in regards to maintaining household chores in a timely fashion. Vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathroom, and doing laundry are all things I normally keep up with before any of their maintenance gets out of control. And thankfully, I have the complete ability to stay on top of all of those things within my landlord’s home without any of them ever getting out of control. But unfortunately, there is one task that is not within my own ability to maintain and control and that’s the mowing of the yard outside.

I like to spend quite a bit of time outside in the backyard of any house I’ve resided in. Last year, my landlord paid me to cut the grass and keep up the yard maintenance so this was never an issue. Much of the summer of 2012, one would find me out back enjoying the sunlight, or having a fire in the pit, or just keeping the grounds looking nice. But this year, that changed as he took it upon himself to add the yard maintenance to his long list of things that he already had trouble staying on top of. I still haven’t figured out to this day why he struggles with keeping up with his own laundry, cleaning, and various other chores, given that I see him with plenty of time where he’s just watching television or surfing the internet. But I have come to a place where I have had to accept the fact that we are just two very different people and that’s just who he is for right now in his life. Sadly though, this has seriously affected my usage of the yard this year as the grass has gone for many weeks at a time without being cut.

There are days that my patience has worn thin when I’ve seen my landlord sitting around the house on a beautifully sunny day where the grass was six inches high or greater. And sitting outside in that high of grass is never much fun as it draws a lot of bugs. The control issues I continue to work on within myself have at these times taken over and led me to verbally judge my roommate and start an argument about the yard. Most of my attempts to ask if I could just cut it myself have been denied and instead, day in and day out, it remains uncut. I’ve often wondered if its a pride thing for my landlord but I have no data to back that up. These past few weeks, since returning from my last trip to my partner’s house, I have forced myself to try a different path that didn’t involve my attempts at control and confrontation. And instead, it involved patience. Day in and day out, I’d return home and see the grass was still uncut. As the anger stirred within me, I’d immediately start sending love, forgiveness, and peace to my roommate through my prayers. Ironically, after three weeks of this, with the grass still not being cut, he finally reached out and asked me if I could cut it for him and he’d even pay me $20 to do so. I was shocked at first but then became extremely grateful to realize that good things really do come to those who wait. Through those many prayers and patience, I was able to expel all the anger from within me and reach a moment where God intervened and somehow motivated my landlord to ask me for help. So I did just that and got a nice cut yard to enjoy some moments being in again.

The moral here is simple. If you are finding yourself struggling with any aspect in your life, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and try to practice a little bit of patience with whatever it is. The more you do this, the more you might just find as I did, that good things really do come to those who wait.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson