Monday, December 30, 2013
Saturday, December 28, 2013
DECEMBER 28 V 23 TWELVE STEPPING WITH THE POWER IN THE PROVERB
He who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward
Than he who flatters with the tongue.
Than he who flatters with the tongue.
STEP 10 : Continued to take personal inventory and when we were
wrong promptly admitted it.
Well there you have it ! The truth and nothing but the truth will do. Telling people what they want to hear cannot and will not help them in the long run. True recovery starts with you being honest with yourself and especially others. Long gone are the days of making excuses and lieing to get what you want. Being honest with yourself will effect all of your relationships.My mom used to say your not fooling anyone but yourself ,looking back she was right. The Proverb mentions rebuking a man by telling him the cold hard truth. Speaking the truth admitting your mistakes will earn you humility, respect , trust ,and favor. Thirteen years of soberity and I am still discovering defects in my character that my wife loves too point out. It is stuff I never gave any thought too until she brought it too light.She is not trying too harm me ,back in the day that is what I thought ,but now I get it.Truth hurts especially if there is an area in your life that needs change. Using the Proverb and step ten will keep you sober !
KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE !
You Probably Have ADHD
Deceptive marketing and celebrity endorsements have created an ADHD culture, much to the delight of the pharmaceutical companies.
photo: Shutterstock
According to the CDC, childhood diagnoses of ADHD have risen from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million today and 15 percent of high school age kids are diagnosed with ADHD. These numbers represent “a national disaster of dangerous proportions,” according to Dr. Keith Conners, a long time proponent of recognizing and destigmatizing ADHD. Despite the numbers, Dr. Conners says that there is no ADHD epidemic. Instead, “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”
Every single major ADHD medication has been in trouble with the FDA for misleading advertising, some more than once.Pharmaceutical companies have spent the past two decades engaging in aggressive and sneaky marketing that has included diagnosis- and drug-pushing doctors, playing on parents’ fears, and involving schools in the effort to attract, diagnose, and treat kids who suffer (or who appear to suffer) from ADHD. Ads for ADHD medication targeting parents feature headlines such as “Reveal his potential,” and “Thanks for taking out the garbage.” One ad has a hand-drawn picture of a kid and in large, childish writing, states: “Today I got a good mark. And made a new friend. What a great day!” In one particularly manipulative ad, a cheerful mom appears under the headline “I am not a bad mom;” the mom explains that her son’s school was ready to throw him out if his behavior continued. After taking the ADHD medication, however, her son “has become a thousand times better" and she has presumably been exonerated from bad motherhood.
Every single major ADHD medication has been in trouble with the FDA for misleading advertising, some more than once.
ADHD medications are marketed to doctors by psychopharmacology experts such as Dr. Joseph Biederman, a Harvard University child psychiatrist who is a huge proponent of stimulant medication to treat ADHD. Dr. Biederman also believes that the disorder is significantly underdiagnosed, and that failure to medicate will almost certainly cause risks as serious as drug dependence and problems with the law. As an example of Dr. Biederman’s enthusiastic support of stimulant medication for ADHD, in 2006 he told Reuters Health, “If a child is brilliant but is doing just OK in school, that child may need treatment, which would result in their performing brilliantly at school.” According to the marketing efforts aimed at doctors, much of which has been based on findings from Biederman’s research, ADHD drugs will “allow your patients to experience life’s successes every day.” One brochure for Adderall XR contains the remarkable statement that “Amphetamines have been used medically for nearly 70 years. That’s a legacy of safety you can count on.”
A Senate investigation in 2008 found that Dr. Biederman’s research was largely funded by drug companies, including Shire, the manufacturer of many of the leading ADHD medications. He was also paid $1.6 million for speaking and consulting. Dr. Biederman denies that the money had any effect on his research.
The more insidious marketing efforts are the ones that are not obvious. The main advocacy group for people with ADHD is CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). CHADD was started in 1987 with the goal of bringing more attention to ADHD and its treatment. According to the group’s website, CHADD was founded “in response to the frustration and sense of isolation experienced by parents and their children with ADHD. At that time, one could turn to very few places for support or information. Many people seriously misunderstood ADHD. Many clinicians and educators knew little about the disability, and individuals with ADHD were often mistakenly labeled ‘a behavior problem,’ ‘unmotivated,’ or ‘not intelligent enough.’” CHADD offers advocacy, support, and a CDC-funded clearinghouse for “evidence-based information about ADHD.” They put out a magazine called Attention with articles such as “What’s in a Parent’s ADHD Tool Box?”
Pharmaceutical companies know what they’re doing: in 2012, sales of stimulants reached almost $9 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 2002.I checked the website's funding, and found no mention of the fact that the group was started with seed money from Ciba-Geigy Pharmaceuticals, the primary manufacturer of ADHD drug Ritalin. Furthermore, the drug company provided funds to create “fact sheets” about treatment, one of which claimed: “Psychostimulant drugs are not addictive.”
CHADD has also lobbied the DEA to loosen government restrictions on stimulants and has worked on an educational video about ADHD with the Department of Education. The 11 main sponsors for CHADD’s 12th annual conference in 2000 were all drug companies. Shire led the pack, and was also revealed to have paid $3 million so that CHADD’s magazine, “Attention” would be delivered to doctors’ offices across the country.
Perhaps the most deceptive—and saddest—marketing efforts are the ones aimed at children. “What’s Up with Astra?” is a comic book about a girl who has trouble with school and friends because of her inability to focus or stay still. Fortunately, a group of superhero medical experts called “the Medikidz” show up to tell Astra that she has ADHD. They explain how the disorder works in her brain, and introduce her to “Nora and Dopey,” who teach her how she can treat her ADHD.
The Medikidz were created by two pediatricians who were frustrated by the lack of child-friendly resources available to explain medical conditions. In addition to ADHD, the comic books deal with diseases and disorders including brain tumors, cancer, and allergies. According to their website, “Credibility is the cornerstone to the Medikidz offering - professional medical writers and doctors write all the content, which is subsequently peer-reviewed by leading consultants in each respective field. Medikidz also gains the endorsement of established and well-regarded medical institutions, foundations and spokespeople.”
According to the New York Times investigation, however, credibility may not be such a strong cornerstone for Medikidz, at least in the case of the ADHD comics. Shire paid to have them produced. From the comic: “Medicines may make it easier to pay attention and control your behavior!”
Drug makers also enlist schools to help with their recruitment. Diagnoses are almost too easy when resources such as the American Psychiatric Association include criteria for ADHD such as “makes careless mistakes” or “often has difficulty waiting his or her turn.” The New York Times article describes the case of Andy Perry, a rambunctious child from Mercer Island. Andy’s public school teachers recommended to Andy’s parents that he be evaluated for ADHD and medicated with Ritalin. The school psychologist gave Andy’s mother a pamphlet which included the statement: “Parents should be aware that these medicines do not ‘drug’ or ‘alter’ the brain of the child. They make the child ‘normal.’” Later, Andy’s parents noticed the Ciba-Geigy logo on the back of the pamphlet. The school acknowledged that the pamphlets had been provided to them by representatives from the drug company.
Andy Parry was on Ritalin for three years even though, according to his father, he never had ADHD.“Somebody came up with this idea, which was genius. I definitely felt seduced and enticed. I’d say baited,” Andy’s father told The Times.
Pharmaceutical companies know what they’re doing: in 2012, sales of stimulants reached almost $9 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 2002.
How I Learned to Love the Holidays
Addiction is a three fold disease—Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Here's my way out of that obstacle course.
naughty or nice
photo: Shutterstock
I first tried to get sober during the months of autumn, with
the holidays looming, Round about late November, digging my bitten
fingernails into the bottom of a chair at yet another meeting, some old
timer croaked, "Alcoholism is a three-fold disease." Smoke curled above
his unshaven lip. Indeed, I reminded my newly-sober self, physical,
mental, and spiritual. The guy then delivered his raspy punch line:
"Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's." My feelings were mortally
wounded.
The holidays had always been special to me, and I now felt a flush of shame over enjoying what these occasions signified: tradition, a sense of togetherness, of belonging to a family, of being loved. What a hopeless square. Worse still, a slight scratch at the surface with those same bitten fingernails revealed a degree of denial that I denied I was denying.
Let me roll it back. I grew up in a family that was as Catholic as any other Catholic family, meaning Mass most Sundays, First Communion, Confirmation, weddings and funerals in church. I didn’t hate it and I wasn’t scarred by it, but neither was I particularly awed. This was just what we did. But Christmas was a big deal.
My favorite aunt resided with my grandparents a few streets away from where I lived. By the time I was five, I was walking those blocks by myself, and I’d kick off Christmas Eve by toddling to their house for lunch. I would also harangue my aunt into giving up my Christmas present. I knew she had exactly what I wanted, whatever the hot toy was that season, or later, record albums we spun on her stereo console. The dining room table was decorated with Christmas cookies and breads, and I was denied nothing. At that northern latitude, darkness set in around 4 o’clock. These were the days of Christmas trees fashioned from aluminum branches that came out of a box, and the two of us would lie on the floor, admiring the tinted light and shadows a color wheel projected onto the ceiling. Does it sound like I was spoiled? I was.
New Year’s Eves were spent overnight at the home of that same grandma and grandpa, ringing out the old to the strains of Guy Lombardo and his Orchestra (that’s right, Guy Lombardo) while my parents, having by then capitulated to the suburbs, sneaked off to get wasted at somebody’s house party. The last one awake, I smuggled my transistor radio under the covers so I could get a dose of Lombardo antidote, a countdown of the Top 100 songs of the past twelve months. One year, Marvin Gaye finished on top of the pile with ‘What’s Going On?” I’m old.
By my teen years the scene shifted to the house of an aunt and uncle, beautiful, generous people who drew the family into themselves and spent days laboring over Thanksgiving and Christmas. They loved cooking, and this particular aunt was never afraid to fail with a recipe; she often did, to her own bemusement. A blaze roared from the fireplace, and their house was so full of guests that two tables couldn’t contain them, a couple of stragglers consigned to a couch, plates in their laps. My uncle owned a festive polka dot shirt he mothballed until November, when out it came to flatter him and insinuate itself into our holiday tradition. At some inevitable pause between pies and nuts, he revisited the shoe box containing snapshots from his army days and the stories that went along with the buddies in the pictures, a Norman Rockwell kind of experience, Italian-American subgenre.
Alas, the shift in our holiday gatherings wasn’t merely one of venue. I was undergoing an internal realignment into delinquency and alcoholism. I remember draining a bottle of my uncle’s cognac, getting into somebody’s car to bring back another one, crushing that, and then passing out. Feeling sheepish, I brought a fresh bottle to the next occasion, intended as a gift. I drank it all. I once showed up so drunk my holiday ended at the door, and I spent the evening out cold in an upstairs bed. By the time I came to, the party was over. On one of our last Christmases together, I arrived with not one girlfriend in tow, but two. What a classy guy. It wasn’t as if I didn’t love and respect these people; I absolutely did, I just didn’t know how to show it. That aunt and uncle died young, two grievous losses within the space of a year, and I can still feel their sting.
True desperation and darkness lived among the Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come, when as an adult man beset by childish whims, I was surviving in New York City, awash on a sea of booze and drugs. I’d make it back to my diminished family if travel didn’t too terribly inconvenience my busy life, but that was so I could pick up some cash, from that favorite aunt for example. In the place of toys or record albums, it was now her opportunity to bankroll one of my holiday benders.
If I remained in town, it was with the best of holiday wishes. I muscled through a hungover and dopesick Christmas Eve to spend the day shopping and cooking, and then rendered the dish barely edible with some maniacal seasoning. The drunks I was cooking for were still picking at it politely when I slumped off to bed. Merry Christmas, boys.
Somewhere in existence there is a Polaroid shot of me in front of the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, dead drunk in the middle of the day, one eye pointed toward heaven, the other pin-wheeling the photographer into focus. I’m wearing somebody else’s coat, and thoughtfully sent the snapshot to that aunt, yes, that one, who remains to this day, perhaps not improbably, my staunchest ally.
The end of anything is hard, especially another lost year in which nothing happened, and so naturally, some of my grandest debacles occurred on New Year’s Eve. There are too many to recount here, but I can recall the utter numbness I experienced during the smallest hours of one brand new year, stupefied but not drunk, in a horrid dive off the Bowery. That precise moment is what I think of when I hear the jokey cliché about the Three-Fold Disease. I’m sorry to report that I was still years away from getting sober.
After that paralyzing New Year’s when I couldn’t get better and I couldn’t get worse, there were a handful of desultory Thanksgivings and depressing Christmases—the Rockefeller Center photo and the over-spiced dinner date from this era—and even after coming to a tenuous and brittle sobriety, the season when I first heard about The Three-Fold Disease, I was traveling back “home” for Thanksgiving to confront memories where there were once relatives. The fragmented family had its own issues and objectives, so I sat with four or five people at a table, carving up a supermarket turkey roll. Luckily, there were local AA meetings to dip into, where I could hear about Thanksgivings that were even bleaker.
I eventually made the decision—holiday travel becoming increasingly awful anyway-- to stay put and grind out the season in New York. I was graciously invited to a Christmas Eve open house that started early and ended late in an Upper West Side apartment that, New York being New York, was peppered with actresses and musicians and comedians. I wore a green shirt two sizes too big and a red tie that cost five dollars. The spirit of the thing, you know. Somebody read “A Visit from St Nicholas” while doing a Kirk Douglas impression. It was a big hit. A piano sat in the living room, and guests crowded round it to sing carols. It was like "Hannah and her Sisters" without Maureen O’Sullivan, and although I can’t be positive, she might’ve been there, too. This was traditional all right, but it was somebody else’s tradition. I didn’t belong to it, and it didn’t belong to me. In the middle of all this generosity and gaiety, there was something missing and I didn’t know what it was. I went home to my drafty studio and I cried.
And then one year soon after, while flipping TV channels, I stumbled across “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Bittersweet, quiet and unquiet down to the bluesy-jazz soundtrack, the tone of the program had always struck me, even in childhood, as pitch perfect. The season finds Charlie Brown in his usual, and given the circumstances, understandably downcast funk when Linus takes the spotlight and quoting from the gospel of Luke tells his pal, quietly again, what Christmas is all about.
And then I got lucky. At the last possible minute, I married a lovely woman, and with mere seconds left on the clock (for me, anyway) we were blessed with a baby girl. These two facts have everything to do with what I’m about to write. The hopeless square is back, and he’s not apologizing. While I feel compassion for those moody souls who dread the holiday season, it’s my favorite time of year.
I’ve left the Three-Fold Disease behind not by evading it, but by embracing it, like Charlie Brown getting straightened out by Linus. Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, and I’ve returned to the deepest roots of my own tradition through his essential message. To wit, and in the contemporary argot: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was cold and you gave me your coat, I was sick and you took care of me, I was locked up and you came to see me. I was lonely and you took me out for a cup of coffee. I was broke and you hit me off with a few bucks. I made up those last two. They didn’t have coffee shops in the time of Christ. They didn’t have coffee either.
You don’t have to be a Christian to reach out for those ideals. You don’t even have to believe in God. What the Teacher was talking about was the measure of our humanity, which does seem to emerge in sharper relief around the end of the year, when it’s only natural to be taking stock. I’m sure he wasn’t saying charity should be held off until December.
I’m no self-flagellating penitent. Neither do I float above the New York streets in a state of religious ecstasy. I get high on the commercial buzz of the holiday season, too. I gape at the store windows along Madison Avenue, lusting for possessions I will most likely never have. I ramp up my credit card balances on Christmas presents, then spend the next quarter of the year paying them down.
I invited so many people to Thanksgiving dinner that I had to borrow a table and some chairs in order to seat them. In front of the oven, and channeling my uncle in a festive polka dot shirt of my own, I wiped a bead of sweat from my temple and surveyed the hungry looks on the expectant faces of my guests, believers, non-believers, apostates, heretics. This, I thought, is exactly what’s it supposed to be. A Three-Fold Disease? Not around my house. Not any more.
The holidays had always been special to me, and I now felt a flush of shame over enjoying what these occasions signified: tradition, a sense of togetherness, of belonging to a family, of being loved. What a hopeless square. Worse still, a slight scratch at the surface with those same bitten fingernails revealed a degree of denial that I denied I was denying.
Let me roll it back. I grew up in a family that was as Catholic as any other Catholic family, meaning Mass most Sundays, First Communion, Confirmation, weddings and funerals in church. I didn’t hate it and I wasn’t scarred by it, but neither was I particularly awed. This was just what we did. But Christmas was a big deal.
My favorite aunt resided with my grandparents a few streets away from where I lived. By the time I was five, I was walking those blocks by myself, and I’d kick off Christmas Eve by toddling to their house for lunch. I would also harangue my aunt into giving up my Christmas present. I knew she had exactly what I wanted, whatever the hot toy was that season, or later, record albums we spun on her stereo console. The dining room table was decorated with Christmas cookies and breads, and I was denied nothing. At that northern latitude, darkness set in around 4 o’clock. These were the days of Christmas trees fashioned from aluminum branches that came out of a box, and the two of us would lie on the floor, admiring the tinted light and shadows a color wheel projected onto the ceiling. Does it sound like I was spoiled? I was.
New Year’s Eves were spent overnight at the home of that same grandma and grandpa, ringing out the old to the strains of Guy Lombardo and his Orchestra (that’s right, Guy Lombardo) while my parents, having by then capitulated to the suburbs, sneaked off to get wasted at somebody’s house party. The last one awake, I smuggled my transistor radio under the covers so I could get a dose of Lombardo antidote, a countdown of the Top 100 songs of the past twelve months. One year, Marvin Gaye finished on top of the pile with ‘What’s Going On?” I’m old.
By my teen years the scene shifted to the house of an aunt and uncle, beautiful, generous people who drew the family into themselves and spent days laboring over Thanksgiving and Christmas. They loved cooking, and this particular aunt was never afraid to fail with a recipe; she often did, to her own bemusement. A blaze roared from the fireplace, and their house was so full of guests that two tables couldn’t contain them, a couple of stragglers consigned to a couch, plates in their laps. My uncle owned a festive polka dot shirt he mothballed until November, when out it came to flatter him and insinuate itself into our holiday tradition. At some inevitable pause between pies and nuts, he revisited the shoe box containing snapshots from his army days and the stories that went along with the buddies in the pictures, a Norman Rockwell kind of experience, Italian-American subgenre.
Alas, the shift in our holiday gatherings wasn’t merely one of venue. I was undergoing an internal realignment into delinquency and alcoholism. I remember draining a bottle of my uncle’s cognac, getting into somebody’s car to bring back another one, crushing that, and then passing out. Feeling sheepish, I brought a fresh bottle to the next occasion, intended as a gift. I drank it all. I once showed up so drunk my holiday ended at the door, and I spent the evening out cold in an upstairs bed. By the time I came to, the party was over. On one of our last Christmases together, I arrived with not one girlfriend in tow, but two. What a classy guy. It wasn’t as if I didn’t love and respect these people; I absolutely did, I just didn’t know how to show it. That aunt and uncle died young, two grievous losses within the space of a year, and I can still feel their sting.
True desperation and darkness lived among the Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come, when as an adult man beset by childish whims, I was surviving in New York City, awash on a sea of booze and drugs. I’d make it back to my diminished family if travel didn’t too terribly inconvenience my busy life, but that was so I could pick up some cash, from that favorite aunt for example. In the place of toys or record albums, it was now her opportunity to bankroll one of my holiday benders.
If I remained in town, it was with the best of holiday wishes. I muscled through a hungover and dopesick Christmas Eve to spend the day shopping and cooking, and then rendered the dish barely edible with some maniacal seasoning. The drunks I was cooking for were still picking at it politely when I slumped off to bed. Merry Christmas, boys.
Somewhere in existence there is a Polaroid shot of me in front of the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, dead drunk in the middle of the day, one eye pointed toward heaven, the other pin-wheeling the photographer into focus. I’m wearing somebody else’s coat, and thoughtfully sent the snapshot to that aunt, yes, that one, who remains to this day, perhaps not improbably, my staunchest ally.
The end of anything is hard, especially another lost year in which nothing happened, and so naturally, some of my grandest debacles occurred on New Year’s Eve. There are too many to recount here, but I can recall the utter numbness I experienced during the smallest hours of one brand new year, stupefied but not drunk, in a horrid dive off the Bowery. That precise moment is what I think of when I hear the jokey cliché about the Three-Fold Disease. I’m sorry to report that I was still years away from getting sober.
After that paralyzing New Year’s when I couldn’t get better and I couldn’t get worse, there were a handful of desultory Thanksgivings and depressing Christmases—the Rockefeller Center photo and the over-spiced dinner date from this era—and even after coming to a tenuous and brittle sobriety, the season when I first heard about The Three-Fold Disease, I was traveling back “home” for Thanksgiving to confront memories where there were once relatives. The fragmented family had its own issues and objectives, so I sat with four or five people at a table, carving up a supermarket turkey roll. Luckily, there were local AA meetings to dip into, where I could hear about Thanksgivings that were even bleaker.
I eventually made the decision—holiday travel becoming increasingly awful anyway-- to stay put and grind out the season in New York. I was graciously invited to a Christmas Eve open house that started early and ended late in an Upper West Side apartment that, New York being New York, was peppered with actresses and musicians and comedians. I wore a green shirt two sizes too big and a red tie that cost five dollars. The spirit of the thing, you know. Somebody read “A Visit from St Nicholas” while doing a Kirk Douglas impression. It was a big hit. A piano sat in the living room, and guests crowded round it to sing carols. It was like "Hannah and her Sisters" without Maureen O’Sullivan, and although I can’t be positive, she might’ve been there, too. This was traditional all right, but it was somebody else’s tradition. I didn’t belong to it, and it didn’t belong to me. In the middle of all this generosity and gaiety, there was something missing and I didn’t know what it was. I went home to my drafty studio and I cried.
And then one year soon after, while flipping TV channels, I stumbled across “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Bittersweet, quiet and unquiet down to the bluesy-jazz soundtrack, the tone of the program had always struck me, even in childhood, as pitch perfect. The season finds Charlie Brown in his usual, and given the circumstances, understandably downcast funk when Linus takes the spotlight and quoting from the gospel of Luke tells his pal, quietly again, what Christmas is all about.
And then I got lucky. At the last possible minute, I married a lovely woman, and with mere seconds left on the clock (for me, anyway) we were blessed with a baby girl. These two facts have everything to do with what I’m about to write. The hopeless square is back, and he’s not apologizing. While I feel compassion for those moody souls who dread the holiday season, it’s my favorite time of year.
I’ve left the Three-Fold Disease behind not by evading it, but by embracing it, like Charlie Brown getting straightened out by Linus. Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, and I’ve returned to the deepest roots of my own tradition through his essential message. To wit, and in the contemporary argot: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was cold and you gave me your coat, I was sick and you took care of me, I was locked up and you came to see me. I was lonely and you took me out for a cup of coffee. I was broke and you hit me off with a few bucks. I made up those last two. They didn’t have coffee shops in the time of Christ. They didn’t have coffee either.
You don’t have to be a Christian to reach out for those ideals. You don’t even have to believe in God. What the Teacher was talking about was the measure of our humanity, which does seem to emerge in sharper relief around the end of the year, when it’s only natural to be taking stock. I’m sure he wasn’t saying charity should be held off until December.
I’m no self-flagellating penitent. Neither do I float above the New York streets in a state of religious ecstasy. I get high on the commercial buzz of the holiday season, too. I gape at the store windows along Madison Avenue, lusting for possessions I will most likely never have. I ramp up my credit card balances on Christmas presents, then spend the next quarter of the year paying them down.
I invited so many people to Thanksgiving dinner that I had to borrow a table and some chairs in order to seat them. In front of the oven, and channeling my uncle in a festive polka dot shirt of my own, I wiped a bead of sweat from my temple and surveyed the hungry looks on the expectant faces of my guests, believers, non-believers, apostates, heretics. This, I thought, is exactly what’s it supposed to be. A Three-Fold Disease? Not around my house. Not any more.
Friday, December 27, 2013
December 27 v 21 TWELVE STEPPING WITH POWER IN THE PROVERB
The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold,
And a man is valued by what others say of him.
STEP 4 : Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
Words are weapons !When used correctly they can build and shape someones life.The Proverb is comparing words to the process of refining precious metals by removing the impurities.Growing up as a kid I was always told you will screw it up .Eventually with hearing that all the time ,I became afraid and isolated . I cut myself off from the outside world. Addiction for me was a crutch it helped me deal with the fear and anger that ruled my life. In the process of using that crutch I became a liar ,thief and a monster hated by everyone in my life or at least so I thought. I made a choice to let the words spoken in my life shape me into the monster I had become.To avoid the pain of those words my heart began to harden and I built walls so no one could hurt me anymore .The problem with that way of thinking and living is when someone does come along who truly wants to help you they cant get threw because of the walls you have built , leaving you stuck in that prison facing the death penalty for some else s careless use of hurtful words. Using the steps as a hammer begin to remove the bricks . Give God a hammer and let him help you (Step 1 2 & 3 )! Once your at 4 take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror , and tell yourself I have become what they said I would become but now its my turn to say who I am , and what I will become. God says you are a overcomer and a special treasure .Make a choice who are you going listen to them or GOD.
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