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Do you ever wake up cranky for no reason?
One of my favorite movie scenes is in When A Man Loves a Woman with Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia. When the good Al-Anon husband finds that his alkie wife, just out of rehab, is particularly cranky one day, he asks what the problem is and if he can help in some way and she says something like, "Can't you understand that I don't need a reason to feel like this.
In early sobriety, I had a lot of mood swings ranging from feeling OK to feeling like I was going through the floor emotionally, generally for no reason I knew of. Fortunately, they eventually evened out over many years to the point where I feel good almost all the time now.
When I was still on the emotional roller coaster, about all I could do was to try to ignore my feelings and just concentrate on what I was doing, like getting to work and meetings. I later caught hell when working for a rehab when I told someone that his feelings didn't matter, but it seemed sensible for me to ignore my feelings when they couldn't tell me anything useful. I have often thought that they were like unlabled indicators on a car's dashboard that kept flaching to tell me there was something wrong, but woulddn't tell me what it was so I could try to do something about it.
It helped to learn that feelings are not facts. I might have had a feeling of implending doom, but that didn't mean that doom was impending. It just meant that my feelings were screwed up and quite unreliable.
My feelings are no pretty useful, although there is still the occasional false alarms or one I can't quite recognise, particularly when I seem to be getting false information. Now if I feel guilty, I can ask myself what I feel guilty about and try to do something about it such as making amends, stop doing something or start doing it differently. I can welcome the messanger and not try to kill him as I did while drinking.
A mental health self-help group here has a saying I like. It is:
"Feelings make good servants and even better friends, but terrible masters. |