One of the common traits of an Adult Child is growing up with a pervasive sense of emptiness. The inconsistency in the family environment and its resulting loss of trust leaves one feeling empty. When the emptiness becomes so great, and the pain of that emptiness becomes unbearable, we tend to reach for whatever comes along to fill it. That’s due in part because, as another result of our dysfunctional childhood, we had come to believe that any fulfillment was fleeting and transient, and so scarcity becomes a framework of thinking. In short, we learned to settle.

Oh, how we settled. We settled for people who were toxic to us, but in our minds it was better than nothing. We settled for treatment that a healthy person would not tolerate for a minute, yet we tolerated mistreatment for years, if not decades. We settle for drugs, alcohol, food and/or sex, or maybe we go to the other extreme and become health nuts, living in the gym and spending money we don’t have on “miracle” foods, vitamins and treatments. We settle for the nonsense spouted by the guru of the week. We work too long and too hard, or we can’t keep a job. We live in isolation, or we surround ourselves with people constantly because we can’t stand to be alone with our own thoughts.

We try and try to fill the emptiness, but nothing seems to work...or to last.

Then a miracle happens: we stumble into recovery. We find a community of people who are wounded in ways similar to us, yet are committed to working on healing, and we are welcomed unconditionally. We begin to get to know our Higher Power and come to understand that this Power wishes us to be made whole. We learn of the Twelve Steps as a path to that coveted healing and wholeness. For many of us, for the first time ever, we begin to put good things into that emptiness.

As I move forward in my own recovery, I'm getting an increasing appreciation for the importance of what I choose to put into my mind. I am cutting way back on my consumption of news media. I've begun to avoid websites and blogs that feature topics that tend to just make me mad, instead preferring to find recovery-themed or uplifting sites for my surfing enjoyment. And in the big picture, I'm trying to approach this as an act of self-care, not a "problem that needs to be corrected."

Here's to giving ourselves Good Things!