“When resentful thoughts come, try to pause and count your blessings. After all, your family is reunited, alcohol is no longer a problem and you and your husband are working together toward an undreamed-of future.” (Chapter Nine, Big Book)
“That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday’s and sometimes today’s excesses of negative emotion—anger, fear, jealousy, and the like. If we would live serenely today and tomorrow, we certainly need to eliminate these hangovers.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
When negative thoughts assail me, I have a choice: indulge them or reject them.
Any thoughts can be rejected, and anyone can turn their mind to another topic.
What does success look like?
Not the absence of assailing thoughts: but the refusal to indulge them.
A successful day might therefore be a very rough day, with hundreds of instances of refusing to indulge a negative thought and actively turning my mind to another topic.
This need not be a cause for distress or gloom, however; distress and gloom would themselves fall into the category of negative thoughts and be subject to the same regime.
A failed day is a day in which I have entirely indulged negative thoughts.
A mixed day is a day in which I have indulged some and rejected others.
What I do tells me what I want and will.
Success or failure therefore boils down to a question of wanting and willing.
A mixed day is thus a day of mixed wantings and willings.
Part of me wants and wills to get well.
Another part of me wants and wills to indulge negative thinking.
No one is responsible for my wanting and willing but me.
A mixed day is therefore an indicator that I haven’t yet picked a side: I’m still trying out both sides.