Every day in this program I feel I am making progress.  I have been utilizing the God Box and that really helps me to hand things over or let them go.  I'm learning to focus more and more on myself and my actions.  I realized that I was having difficulty with sleep and I wasn't really doing much to improve it.  My sleep issues were a bit complicated (or so I thought) and I would find myself staying up late stewing over things, focusing on things that were not productive or just worrying. Or other times I would wake up in the middle of the night and find myself wide awake immersed in worry.  One of my very old ingrained beliefs has been "if I worry about, talk about, focus on a problem long enough I will come to a solution".  By spending so much time doing that I was literally losing sleep over my problems.  And the more sleepless nights I had the worse it got even if I wasn't worried about something.  I am slowly learning that that old belief is not true.  It is counter productive and harmful to  me.  Yet I never thought to take any action to try to improve it.  I just thought that was how my life was going to have to be.  Then we had a worklife balance training at work and the trainer asked us about our biggest challenges and encouraged us to look at them and try one thing, make one step towards improving the situation.  So I went to someone I know who does a lot of work with people on improving sleep.  She identified quickly that I drink a lot of coffee especially in the afternoon.  We discussed the problem and I decided that I was going to try one small thing I was going to cut out coffee after 1pm instead of my usual cut off time of 4pm.  And I slept!  I had an almost perfect sleeps for almost a week. Only one night did I have a significant disturbance.  And I am thankful for that one day because I felt horrible (my norm at least 4 or 5 nights a week before) and it helped me see how bad I had been feeling on a daily basis.  The biggest thing I noticed was how low my mood dipped in the afternoon.  I really believed that my sleep problem was so complex that something that simple couldn't fix it.  I cannot even tell you what a difference being able to sleep has made for me.  I think that because I've been letting go of so much it allowed me to focus on myself.  The letting go also allowed me not to worry so much about things at night.  If I wake up in the middle of the night and I find myself thinking of something I tell myself to let it go until the morning.  I do what I can to hand it over to my HP.  The lack of caffeine left me actually feeling tired from my busy day. Now that I am sleeping better I feel much saner.  I have energy to do the thing I wasn't able to do before.  I"m focusing at work and getting so much more accomplished. It's not perfect but it's a lot better.  The whole letting go aspect of the program has helped me not to take things personally.  Not to try to control other's actions.  I put my AHs drinking in my God box and now I feel very little need to monitor, count, wait for a moment to point out his drunkenness.  But what I do notice is he doesn't seem to be as intoxicated as often.  He's taking on more responsibility at home and has actually cooked dinner for the family completely on his own and he's enjoying it.  The God box didn't fix things all at once but it helped me to let go of focusing on the negatives in my life that I have no control over and helped me start focusing on those things I can change.  Myself, my sleep, my own sanity. 

Thanks for reading.

Practice, Practice, Practice...that is what I was taught and continue to do on a daily basis 37 years later.   This works for me.   (((((hugs)))))    great share.