(((Bettina)))  Great topic and share on one of the biggest if not the most huge lesson in my recovery journey.  I thought I loved and then came to understand that I was carrying out lessons and experiences of others that came before me including my alcoholic family which had nothing to do with love.  It was unbalanced most of the time in either my favor or someone elses favor and then along comes Al-Anon...Wow!! when the student is ready the Teachers arrived and I had/have tons of them.  I learned about Higher Power love because I found the rooms when I wasn't looking for them and didn't know that I needed them or what to do with and in them however I understood that by being in the rooms and listening and learning the insanity was moving on and that was a miracle made to happen because I was being unconditionally loved without exception often when I didn't earn it.  I was often hard on the fellowship durinig the first 5 years of recovery.  I learned from the inventory steps that it wasn't love that I brought to the addict and then alcoholic/addict and many others I touched during the disease...it was fear and I was doing what I did not because I love others but because I feared them.  Learned that well from inside my addicted family.  The most I learned how to do was care...thats as close as I could get to love and then caring is conditional then for me because I would stop caring when the fear arose and the pain of hurt arrived.  I learned during the inventory stages of recovery that I had never truely loved and so I was open to shock and awe lessons.  One lesson came from a member at a Wednesday night meeting who shared how she was loving her alcoholic husband and I just couldn't get it so after the meeting I chase her down to her car and told her I needed her definition of love.  "Love is the complete and total acceptance of every other human being for exactly who they are".  That definition went way beyond alcoholic only, centered more on unconditonal acceptance and spoke to me about personal character...I wasn't a loving character...I was something else...far off.   I was told also "Love cannot exist without some dimension of justice",  which brought me to the understanding that what I was doing and what I was receiving wasn't mutual at all...there is not justice in loving a self centered, "taking only" person.  I had been married to two of those and we were not practicing love...something way off from love; it wasn't inside of our characters.  I learned then about the way my HP loved me and loved others and could find no difference between the how...HP loved/s me just like HP loved/s everyone else...there is unconditional acceptance right there...I am not special or have to be special for HP to love me unconditonally and that leveled the playing field for me because the titles I had for people in my life that put them in "special" positions in my perceptions fell away and HP was the father/creator of everyone equally...everyone was either brother or sister and unconditionally accepted and I started feeling the freedom of understanding.  I love others as I love my wife and while she has special privelege in my life she is not loved more or less as a person.   There came the lesson of love you versus need you and that blew the doors of understanding even wider because a friend who I loved shared with me a story of a man and woman separated from marriage and he wanting to come home again.  My friend worked with this woman and told me that she hear the woman tell her husband..."I love you and I like having you here...and I don't need you".  What a powerful powerful lesson...in self love "I am a complete person in my own life...you can be with me and not add or subtract from me.  That story drove me crazy for a while and I had to be alone to digest it because it was impossibly mixed up from what I understood about love and companionship and identification and then I got it and I am grateful that HP used my friend to get that message to me.  Just imagine...I told that to my present wife before we married and before she came 2600 miles across the Pacific Ocean to be here and then stay here more steadily and grow continuously into being a major child of God without reflection back to me and with out once being justified to say I owe it to my husband.  We agreed from the start that our most important relationship individually was a vertical one...not a horizontal one.  I love her as I love everyone else...yes there was early expression of jealousy and not any longer.  My most recent lesson on love has been just between HP and myself.  I reviewed old information and lesson from when I was very young which told me then and now that "The name of God is Love"... "Love God with your whole mind and soul...and your neighbor as your self" and upon examining that I realized that the Al-Anon lessons were "walk" lessons...I was being taught to love me as others loved me and in justice do the same to others...12th step.  I also learned that to love was to practice acting as God...not a God...and as God. When I asked HP how it was that I could be continuously loved after all of the unloving things I did during the disease years I understood the meaning of unconditional and absense of fear.  I stopped loving because I was afraid of being hurt...my HP was never afraid of being hurt and "Loved Anyways"  there is an easy read book with that title written by Mother Teresa...get it and read it cause she knew a l l about it.  I came to understand the opposite of the lesson also...when I am afraid I cannot love...it is impossible to do both at the exact time.  Today I'd rather go without fear and understand what fear is for me, and I learned that in Al-Anon also, than to stop the character of love from growing.

Sooo let me throw those experiences into the examination and then listen to what evolves.   Just a great subject...Mahalo ((((hugs))))