Let’s keep going with some more songs. Words have power, lots of power. That stupid old saying: "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me!" is an awful lie. I’ve been horribly hurt by peoples words and I’ve also been tremendously uplifted by peoples words.

The same is true about songs and that’s why I picked some of the songs I’ve picked. Tina Turner’s story is a great one and lots of her songs have recovery themes running through them. When I was first starting out in recovery, I’d hang out with friends at parties and gatherings in Minneapolis. We’d listen to music and I’d get such a kick out of some of the words. I’m a person who loves words as you already know.
You know the song; "Love Hurts" is that true? Do you believe that? If it hurts why do we pursue it so hard during our life? I’m a typical dork male and when I think of love I always go romantic. Love is a spectrum not an event. Love in my life has grown and I have lots of things now that I love.

When I was a kid I wanted the love of my parents. As I got older I wanted romantic love, the knot in my stomach, it hurt so badly when I fell for the first time. Every time the girl I loved walked by I felt my knees go weak. Every time I thought of her I got butterflies in my stomach. That type of love. Today I love lots of things especially my wife and my kids.

But as I’ve grown in recovery I’ve come to understand just how painful love can be. If it hurts why pursue it with such vengeance? If love hurts like the song says why even try?

I’ve wondered the same thing most of my life and every chance I get I sit in workshops that are focusing on love, relationships or marriage. I’m a big fan of marriage and I’ve been with my wife more than fifteen years now and we’ve been married for over twelve of those years now.

I recently had a chance to sit in a workshop that was going on to cover those three subjects. "Great" I thought. "I get to learn some more!"

I got to the workshop, met some of the others there and took my seat. The panel was seated and the person running the program introduced themselves and the three person panel. This was going to be an all day workshop and each person was going to get about an hour and a half to go over some of the subject matter they had brought with them. During the introductions each person paraded out their personal victories and some of the credentials they had to be on the panel.

The four people sitting on the panel had a combined time in recovery of about thirty-one years. The person with the most time had thirteen years. All of them had been divorced at least once and one of them had been divorced three times. Two of them were currently unmarried and both were living with someone else at the present time. "Wow, that’s just wrong!" I thought. Then I thought. "Why so judgmental you big poop?!?"

A pet peeve of mine is how rough recovery is on married people. The survival rate of marriages within recovery is really low. Recovery isn’t really marriage friendly and I got to see why at that workshop. Two times I’ve sat in on workshops where the presenters were people who had success. They shared what they had done to remain married and how they had gone the extra mile for their spouse.

I hate low expectations. No one can rise to low expectations so why do that to ourselves? I don’t get that. The workshop was on relationships and each time one of the panelists started to speak they had to qualify themselves with something like this, "I don’t really know much about good relationships but I do know what doesn’t work." "That’s true." I thought.
The ones that had children all said the same thing about themselves. They were all struggling with their relationships in the kid department. Each of them had something to say about love but in my mind it sounded a lot more like infatuation. Love is an awesome feeling but when squandered it turns into infatuation.

What about Love? Love is the feeling I get when I get to see my wife at the end of the day when we’ve both been at work. Love is the feeling I have when I’m walking with my kids and we’re singing really bad songs off key. Love is the feeling I had when I looked down at my father after he had died and I knew I was going to miss him.

Love is the feeling I have when I think about everything I have today because of the Grace God. I understand how much love the God I understand has for me today. I understand how much love God has for me when I’m actively doing His will for myself. Love is the feeling I get when I understand that I’m a child of God and that He loves me.

Relationships. "Joe, you’re mission is to find the girl whose holes in her head fit the rocks in yours. That’s your job and you may need to date lots of girls to find the right one." My dad told me that kernel of truth. It was a joke between us and it was one that he teased me about for years.

I understand better today what it takes to sustain a relationship. Just ask anyone who is in a long term committed relationship and all of them would smile when they thought about the amount of work it takes to keep it going. They all could write for a year and only share on a small piece of the puzzle that relationships are to some people. Why are they a puzzle? It’s really simple. When I tell the answer people get mad at me. The answer is fear. It comes down to the fact that people are fearful of looking at themselves.

Whenever a person becomes involved with someone else they run smack up against themselves. Everyone knows the simple analogy of the spiritual axiom. Whenever something makes you mad, it has to do with you. That simple analogy gets tossed around and lots of heads nod when the subject comes up. But get outside and start rubbing up against the world and it’s amazing how fast the axiom is gone.

Just look at the amount of relationships you’re in and be honest. Not only do you see the bad in yourself reflected back at you, you also get the good reflected back. Every time you share anything with anyone you see yourself reflected back in that relationship. The clerk at the store is mean and it’s a rare person that looks at themselves and then has empathy for the clerk. Most people just get mad back and think, "That person is a jerk! Why are they putting that stuff on me! Who do they think they are?"

My wife works in a job where customer service is mandatory. She also happens to be in a job where most of the people are sick and if they’re not sick they are in pain. Everyday people want to be mean to her. The trooper that she is sees past the meanness and sees the pain. She sees the fear in their lives.

Her comment to me was this. "Joe, it’s really sad. There are so many people who do everything they can to cover the fear in their life. They would rather feel any emotion then feel fear. They know how to deal with anger easier then fear. So they would rather be angry. It’s my job to let them be angry and hopefully as they feel better they will settle down and feel better."

In my own life I had to learn a lot about myself and I had to learn how to stop avoiding fear. I had to learn how to feel all the feelings in my life and I especially had to learn to express the correct feeling that I had at that moment.

Just a simple thing such as this, I got tired of people frowning at me all the time. I went to my sponsor and whined about it. "Stop frowning at them then! You want people to smile at you, smile at them." It never once dawned on me that people were just reflecting back at me what I was sending. I had instant fear. God, now I have to change!

I started practicing smiling as I walked through my day. It worked! Instead of people frowning at me, people were smiling. With time I found myself a lot more approachable and people liked me better because I smiled most of the time. Did it help me overall? Absolutely!

I really wanted to be dating and I wanted to date a certain type of woman. I was picky and I had my list of the right woman and how she needed to be. She had to be athletic. She had to be interested in recovery. She needed to be healthy. She had to be..... You know what I mean, everyone has their list.

Here’s the reality of my world at that time. I had nothing. I was broke. I drove a beat up car. I was behind in all my bills. I was over-weight and not exercising. I lived with my best friend way out of town. It was a half hour drive at warp speed just to get into town.

If my work started at eight in the morning I would have my alarm go off forty-five minutes before I needed to be there. It was a race and I always lost. I loved stress and I did everything in my power at that time to increase the chaos in my life so I could avoid working on myself. I was in my twenties and I just didn’t want to deal with who I was.

My sponsor and my friends just laughed at me about my desire to date. "You want to date! What the heck do you have to offer anyone at all? You’ve got nothing. You’re a total vacuum, you only have the ability to take from people, and you have nothing to give in return." That was my sponsor for ya! Lay it out there, don’t sugar coat it, hurt me!

I was young and dumb back then. I was only just barely out of the narcissistic stage of life. At that age I don’t think anyone can really look at themselves with intelligence or perspective. Gladly I started to grow and I did come to realize, that I had to become who I wanted to attract. It was back again to my father and his old, "Joe, your job is to find the girl whose rocks in her head fit the holes in yours."

I had to clean up my act. I had to keep jobs instead of losing them. If I wanted someone who was athletic then I needed to become athletic. I had to become the things I desired in my potential mate. Talk about fear. Wow, was that scary. Looking at fear and then embracing that fear so I could overcome it was hard to do. I had to work the steps in depth. I had to come to believe one hundred percent that the God I was coming to believe in wouldn’t leave at the end of the road He was leading me down. I had to learn how to trust God and believe in Him.

Fear stopped being the Boogey Man in my life. I started learning how to take fear out of the dark hole where he hid in my mind. Fear loves the darkness and it loves flourishing under the ignored garbage of life. Fear is probably recovery’s biggest enemy. Fear claims more people then I can comprehend.

I’ve sat in lots of meetings in several programs and underneath every story of "Why I went out..." is fear. Fear is the enemy that needs to be beaten back. What beats fear? Love, the love of one recovering member reaching out to another. The love that is felt coming from God when we turn towards Him and away from addiction.

Does love really hurt?