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My whole life, I had been setting goals that had to do with the addiction – like “I will remain sober for 14 days” or “I will be sober long enough to make it to the temple”, or even worse “I’ll never do that again.” Since I had no control over the addiction (step 1), I was making goals that dealt with outcomes that I had no control over. Not too surprisingly, this would usually end up in depressing failure after depressing failure.  It was similar to me making goals for someone else to complete – if I have no control over it, I can’t commit to it.  And when my goals are tied to external, shifting things, then when I reach the goal (like going to the temple or taking the sacrament again) I end up either self-sabotaging the goal during the stressful last weeks leading up to it, or I end up reaching the goal and then fall afterward because the crutch is immediately gone.  Sometimes those crutches can be motivating, but I’ve had to be very careful and focus on working recovery one day at a time instead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I first came into the program, I started changing the types of goals that I made for myself.  I started making goals about recovery: completing certain steps, getting to a certain number of meetings per week, and reading scriptures and praying daily, etc. These are different than the old goals I used to make because I have control over the outcomes of these goals. I can work on the steps five minutes per day or complete Step 4 by the end of next month or attend at least two meetings each week. I had control over these things; and therefore, I had a say in whether I achieved these goals.  What a concept!

Because of this change in the types of goals I was making, I started seeing success in meeting these goals and started seeing a correlation between my efforts and my successes – something I rarely saw when working on goals that dealt with my uncontrollable addiction.  The old addiction-related goals didn’t work. The new recovery-related goals work.