There’s a trick you can use when you’re feeling a feeling you don’t want to feel. Anger, for instance, or fear, or resistance. Instead of trying to stop the feeling, you fully step into it, feel it all the way—and then exaggerate it. Take it up a few levels. Feeling angry? Close your eyes, clench your fists and feel it as rage. Really ratchet up the intensity of the feeling. And then hold it as long as it needs you. Eventually, it will let go of you. When I’ve done this with anger, it has often turned to actual laughter. I don’t know why this works. But it does.
Before I got sober, my biggest fear was that I was an alcoholic. That if I kept drinking, my drinking would kill me. That I couldn’t drink normally, or even close, so I couldn’t drink at all. That seemed so scary to me that I wouldn’t let myself think about it. But when I finally decided I was going to tackle sobriety, I went right for the jugular. I walked right up to it and held its gaze—the one I’d spent decades of my life trying to avoid. I had to call myself an alcoholic first, to drain the fear out of that torturous word, out of that sinister label. Like sucking the poison out of my own blood to save myself.
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