Feelings...nothing more than feelings (hear the music?...just had to do that) Feelings...Emotions...not facts and still real.   Thank God for the program and the hours upon hours and meeting after meeting sitting and listening to the elders and the masters whose work and experience was passed on to me/us.  I learned that because body language is the  major  part of communications that I could never hide my feelings and with proper work I acknowledged that to be true...I had all of the people I had spent significant parts of my life with to prove it.  I also learned that what I thought I was doing with and for the alcoholic was love until I came to understand that much of what I was doing wasn't even close to a discription of love.  I thought and said I was loving and my actions, behaviors and body language told her(s) and others that I was expressing insane anxiety at not getting "my" way in trying to force "them" to do it my way.  I wasn't loving.  I learned I was as cold and calculating and manipulative as the alcoholics and addicts while pointing to the evidence that I drank and used different than they did as proof of my innocense.  

I learned the lesson of the "three fingers pointing back at me" while I pointed that one powerful one at the alcoholic(s) and addict(s) and did the "Al-Anon hand shake". Did i sweep my feelings under the rug?  If you could stand outside of me and watch what was happening and then tell me accurately what I was feeling...they were not under the rug.   I know about being overly responsible for others or said another way less responsible to and for myself.  I know about  putting my life on hold while the alcoholic and addicts seemed to demand more and more of my time and efforts and that was about thinking that they were less than and needed "Higher Power" ....me.  I knew alot about expressing my anger, rage, confusion, impatience and all those other negative emotions not so much in what I said and how I said it.  I know how to miss express and name my feelings in "you" terms and rather than say honestly "I'm tired and need time off" to "You're always the bitch and if I didn't pick up after you all the time you'd have nothing"!!  I know that at times others (like the police) had to describe my feelings to me so that I would understand without having to go under the rug.  I didn't know as much then about feelings as I do now "(They are inward reactions to outside events)"...thanks to my VA Alcoholism Counselor who had no idea that I didn't know and didn't know that I didn't know...feelings are for sissies.  I was too physical and violent to be a sissie...I thought.  

I thought I was self loving when I was helping someone else...siginifcantly my alcoholics and addicts...be better off for the relationship we had.  I didn't know or acknowledge that they had their own set of skills and strengths...I focused mainly on the "me" side of the relationship and was not practicing the respect of it. I took the "contract" too literally and translated my spouses out of it by judging them less than and assuming I was supposed to carry it by myself until they woke up and came around...they just used more and drank more and got sicker because of my disrespect...I wasn't allowing them the dignity of the consequences of their choices and interfering in their journey toward health...mind, body, sprit and emotions.  I was superman and didn't like it.  

How did I learn?  How did I ever reach any level of recovery?  Had it not been for the women in the program...the ladies who loved me unconditionally even at times when my thoughts, feelings and behaviors mimiced their alcoholics and addicts and at other times I was asked to leave the meeting because I my acting out was unacceptable?  

I was re-raised by the women in Al-Anon who showed me the other side of the coin...who set me up and told me that I was "going to have to get in touch with my female side".  I wasn't in for that...it didn't sound right and I wasn't clear on what that required of me.  I thought in error that somehow, someway I might have to appear like or sound like or act like a gay man...I didn't know anything about that all the way around and so I started to learn...I had to learn.  I got the definition of emotions from my counselor.  I found out that males generally come from "the head" while women come from "the heart".  My sponsor taught me to listen to the "similarities of the shares in the rooms and not the differences" and when women started to share their feelings and not their thoughts I started to connect with them on that level and I wanted to run while at the same time wanting to sit tight and listen to these awesome heroic people talk about feelings I could never identify, not because they were under the rug but because I denied I had them at all and also denied they were so important other than my weak definitions of how I "thought" about things.  "Thoughts are not feelings and feelings are not facts" isn't that what they continually started and then finished up on with me?  Yeppers!!

I cannot sweep my feelings under the rug....never could, never will, never want to.  Feelings are markers in my inventory of where I am at a time and what is going on with me honestly.    Men use thinking to try to get in and around and over and thru whats happening...that for me isn't feeling and for me it was about drawing the wrong perspective of my life at any one moment.  I never learned how to use my head until Al-Anon showed me what box my brain was still in and when I reacted to it asked me "So how do you feel about that"?  Then they told me what feelings might be appropriate for the discovery.  

I wear my feelings on the outside...where they are easy to see and interpret...ask my spouse and the people I work with and the strangers who I meet almost on a daily basis.  Still often I need to get feedback on what they are seeing so that I'm clued in with them.  I am fully a man who uses his head first out of gender habit and then from the heart source as the female gender has taught me.  Thank you God for women and what they have invested in me and my recovery.  I am truely amazed and totally grateful.

What's under my rug is dirt, soot, dust in between vacuumings.  My feelings live right in the core of me.    I love this subject.   ((((hugs))))