When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.
You don’t need to be a scientist to know how powerful your imagination is.
The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens.
Your life today is the result of a series of decisions you made that have caused you to arrive where you are.
If you examine your motive for doing anything, you’ll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.
The events that occur in my life are workout situations. They are there for my benefit so I can become strong and gain wisdom and information by working my way through those situations.
What determines each person’s state of happiness or unhappiness is not the event itself, but what the event means to that person.
You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.
Although you may have never sat down and defined what your philosophy is, it is fully operative and working in your life at all times. It deals with what you believe about the world in which you live, about its people and events, about how you affect them.
People who believe they have bad luck create bad luck. Those who believe they are very fortunate, that the world is a generous place filled with trustworthy people, live in exactly that kind of world.
You can be happy if you are willing to let go of your past and leave yourself unencumbered so you can fly freely.
There is only one way to achieve lasting happiness. That is simply: Be happy.
The true source of happiness is within each of us.
At the bottom of every person’s dependency, there is always pain, Discovering the pain and healing it is an essential step in ending dependency.
Every belief that you hold manifests itself in some manner by either causing you to take some form of action or by preventing you from taking action. If you don’t believe something is possible, you won’t even attempt it.
To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful and demoralizing.
How you conduct yourself along the path that is your life determines how your life unfolds.
Whatever you are trying to achieve in life, it is essential that you surround yourself with people who believe that what you seek and what you believe in are not only possible but also very probable.
I wrote this book to show you that a cure is entirely possible because I’ve seen it happen over and over again.
The answers are never ‘out there. ’ All the answers are ‘in there, ’ inside you, waiting to be discovered.
Even if it is painful and lonely, associate with worthy companions.