RESENTMENTS & THE PASSIVE SHIT LIST

Todays Just For Today reading has to do with resentments and what a burden they can be to those who carry them. In meetings they have been described as putting poison in a glass, drinking it, and saying "Take that!" to the person resented. It's also been described as hitting yourself in the head with a fist or hammer, and doing the same thing as the poisoner: saying "Take that!" to the person so resented. There are three points to make here:

1. Resentments don't affect the person resented.

2. Resentments hurt the resenter.

3. The disease of addiction uses your resentments to fuel your way back to the nightmare.

What's the big setup? If I get miserable enough, eventually I'm going to use. My disease, therefore, focuses on ways that I can make myself miserable, resentments being number one on the going-back-to-Hell hit parade. In early recovery I thought I understood this. That's why I developed my Passive Shit List.

Here's how it works: I'm not going to give this person free room in my head, deviling my thoughts from sunup to sundown. For all practical purposes, I've let go of that. However, if the guy should be crossing the street in front of me while I'm driving a car, how much trouble would it be to run over the sonofabitch!

When I explained this new letting-go program tool to my sponsor, he stared at me for a full thirty seconds, stared up at the sky for another fifteen, then looked back at me and said, "The main thing to learn about letting go is to let go!  Now, let's go and work on that."