Restored to Sanity

It’s not new but it’s been worse than ever lately: I scare myself. I imagine these scenarios of things going wrong. A lot of it boils down to abandonment: “He will leave me”. “They will fire me.” “She won’t like me”. But the bad part is I work thru big scenes adding details and the script: He says, then I say, then he says… until I am a wreck and I am in my car in tears talking to someone who is not in the car with me.

Nutty. Really, really nutty. And not very productive either.

So I raise this as a topic in the meeting: “How can I stop this? How can I stop doing this to myself?”

And what I hear is surprising and good: You can’t stop this. The second step says that God will restore us to sanity, not that we restore ourselves to sanity. So I get it. When I am talking myself into a painful emotional frenzy what I can do is stop and ask God to help me stop this. Heal this part of me that wants to scare myself. Help me kinder to myself. Remove my fear and help me.