Category: Words To Live By

Have you ever wished you could go back in time to prevent yourself from saying something that was said during the heat of a moment? In those situations, were the words that came out of your mouth downright nasty and unloving towards someone, maybe even towards someone you care about?

It’s so very easy to react to someone we love with a tongue that can spit fire when we’re at the height of an argument and our anger gets the best of us. I’m sure you’ve had at least one of those moments where your ego was feeling backed into a corner. It’s usually in those moments where the only thing to do seems to be the drawing of a dagger through extremely hurtful words where they’re aimed at this person’s heart. Everyone usually has at least one thing they could say in those heated moments that they know will stop the other person from cornering them, but yet they also know deep down it will truly hurt not only that person, but also themselves. In the long run, when the dust settles from that argument and those awful words have had some time to linger in the air, the damage is done and they can’t be taken back.

Some say that those words which are thrown like daggers in any heated argument are really the truth on how someone feels inside. Based upon my own experiences in life when I’ve said those kind of words that I’ve wished I could take back, I’d have to agree. A good example of this was with my ex partner. He and I had so many arguments while we owned and ran a bed and breakfast where the both of us found the deepest of ways to always wound each other with our words. The biggest dagger I always threw at him was about his financial instability as he had declared bankruptcy years earlier. When much of our business started to go belly up, I used that data from his past to blame him for what was happening, so sadly, this was my truth back then to how I felt inside about him. And usually, I had regret after each time I said it because I saw the pain in his eyes it caused. The truth was that my spiritual place in life was so low back then and I had no resistance to my ego’s process of lashing out.

The sad part about allowing one’s tongue, like my own once did, to spit fire is that sometimes it has such a damaging effect, that it can end a relationship for good with whoever they were directed at. Other times, while they might not permanently sever the connection with that loved one, they leave a scar behind that is often revisited down the road in another heated argument. With my ex partner and I, eventually there were so many scars that all we could see when we looked at each other was total ugliness and it was then that our relationship ended. But the unfortunate reality was that the true ugliness we were seeing in each other was actually within ourselves.

When words are spit with that fire from our tongues, where the only intention in saying them is to inflict major damage and wound someone else, it really shows just how ugly our insides have become. What comes out of our mouths is a great representation of what exists within us. When a person throws hate towards another during any heated conversation, it’s because they are filled with so much hate inside towards their own self. When I threw all those daggers day in and day out at my ex partner, I really hated myself. I hated who I had become. I hated what I was doing with my life. And I hated that I had become so unspiritual, unloving, and selfish. Thus, the words that flew out of my mouth in all those heated moments where really just a representation of all the hate that lived within me. And the more that I said them, the more I filled myself with hate. And the more I filled myself with hate, the more I became even more unspiritual, unloving, and selfish. It wasn’t until I met several more people down the road after that relationship who were filled with as much hate as I was, that I figured this out.

I went through several years of being close with those people who were great mirrors for myself. During those relationships, they threw out many hateful, spiteful, and damaging words in my direction and each landed with a gash to my heart and tears to my eyes only to get suppressed by my own hatred, anger, and rage. It was then that I began to see that no one wins when words like that are said. The person saying them loses out because they become filled with more and more hate as they say them. And the person receiving them loses out as well because they get wounded, then they start to despise those people saying them, which then turns into more hate from within.

The bottom line is that any dagger based words that are said in heated moments are only a reflection of the insides of the person saying them. They do nothing more than create more hate in this world both inside and around that person saying them. Unfortunately, there are no time machines that can take someone back a few minutes to prevent them from being said, but there is this thing called grace that my Higher Power helped me to develop which has helped in the total prevention of this behavior. Because of that, I’m no longer filled with hate inside nor do I have any desire to ever inflict again that kind of damage to any of the souls on this planet.

Maybe the next time when you are backed into a corner, you might try to take a moment, breathe, and ask your Higher Power for spiritual help in the situation. Realize that anything you are about to say in that heat of the moment could have potentially long lasting or permanent damage to a person who has a soul just like you. Whether they are someone you are close to or not shouldn’t matter. What does matter is that if you want this world to be filled with a lot more love and a lot less hate, then you can do your part by asking your Higher Power to guide you away from spitting that fire from your own tongue ever again.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

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