Recovered alcoholic here, and truly grateful for all my blessings. One of them is getting to be a part of such a special program to get reprogrammed back into what God intended for me to be. Drinking is but a symptom, in AA we do not treat symptoms-we treat the core-continuously. That involves living a life that requires rigorous honesty, courage and strength. It's not for everybody-even though it is, if they want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to get it. No one was going to do this for me. You can advise me, encourage and comfort me-but nobody was going to fix, entertain or enable my antics. "You want it, cool, you don't there's the door-or sit there and listen."
I think the biggest AH HA moment was just that nobody was begging me to stay-or kicking me out. So it was completely out of the wheelhouse of my normal living life based upon those two extremes. Rebel, run, repeat. God's way is less dramatic depending on how far off the mark I got in my adventures downward. If you had told me I was "blessed" in any way I would have thought that you were a ignorant simple minded holier than thou smiling jackass.
"Can't you see what I am going through? Look at what's wrong in the world?? How intellectual I am that I watch the News and parrot back to you the does dose of talking points?? Can't you see that I am a tormented and terminally unique outcast because I am so special and misunderstood?? You would drink too and no, I have zero blessing in my life!!"
Fortunately I had sponsors that wanted no part of that and wouldn't even allow me to talk for the most part. If I did start a pity party rant she recalibrated canceling out the noise with her comeback-"Ok, well what are you grateful for??" HUH?!? I honestly didn't know how to respond. I was like wow, I have the wrong sponsor-she heard nothing about what I said...How could I be grateful considering ALL I am going through and all I have been through?!? She literally had to suggest to me what to be grateful for because I was that blocked.
From that point I started to to text her 5 things I was grateful for a day along with something beautiful I never noticed before. So even though I was still "going through" my stuff and learning how to live life sober, I was counter balancing the pity with program beauty and gratitude. Eventually the scales tipped in favor of program and noticeable blessings poured in. Blessing that were tangible at the time included acquiring a 1989 Thunderbird that was ugly as hell, but it got me to a better job that wasn't so difficult for me. Then I just kept receiving. Thankfully I had fallen so far that I could truly appreciate the blessings that were coming in.
The moral of my story is that I had to lean toward gratitude for what already was to allow the blessings in so that I could begin to see how I had actually always been blessed. I couldn't experience or feel those blessings because of my indentured servitude to self pity and resentment which alcohol fixed for a couple of hours. Repeat this enough you will accumulate quite amount of defects which can only spawn from such a lowered state of mind and body...a state of hopelessness is hell.
The program teaches us how to process and extract all that false information so that we can attune and align to the Will of God which keeps me on the up and up where the light is. If I'm marinating in SH*&, then no, I will not feel grateful-let alone see my abundance or know blessings.
May you all have blessed, content and peaceful day basking in the sunlight of the Spirit!