12 Steps to Recovery Essay Example for Free

12 Steps to Recovery Essay Addiction of any substance is an extremely difficult thing to accept. When we finally realize that We have a problem it is up us to admit it. Once we have accepted that we are addicted we have made the first and most important step to recovery. We learn that once recovery is what we want in our lives there are steps to take these steps is to mean we are ready to completely give yourself to a higher power. This higher power can be anything or anyone we want it to be, whether it be God or someone we can really trust and depend on. There are 12 steps to recovery that will help us stay clean and help us be successful in staying in recovery. This we call the â€Å"12 Step Program. † The first step to recovery is we admit we’re powerless over our addiction and our lives have become unmanageable. This means admitting weeven have an addiction problem. By saying your life has become unmanageable states that we don‘t want to continue living your life the way have been during your addiction. Our addiction has taken over our life, and admitting that we’re an addict helps us take responsibility for our actions instead of blaming others as we did before. The second step is we have come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity as we knew it. See more:  The Story of an Hour Literary Analysis Essay For most of us our higher power is god. We would give everything to our higher power and ask him for forgiveness. We then would recite the Serenity Prayer to help us. The Serenity Prayer is â€Å"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference! † This is a very powerful prayer as I feel today. The third step is that we’ve made the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand and know him. We allow him to guide us through the recovery process we are going through. He lets us know that we are not alone in this, and we will never be alone again as long as we have him in our lives. The fourth step is making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We look inside ourselves to find out what our morals are and to figure out what we believe in. We figure out what we stand for and learn what we think is right and wrong in life. In this step you must become brutally honest with yourself knowing that there’s nothing we can do to change the past. This does not mean you are a bad person but that you have made some bad decisions in our lives, that we as human beings are not perfect. The fifth step is when we have admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact natures of our wrongs we have done during our addiction. Completing this step gets the monkey off your back pursay. More than most people the addict lead a double life. This means we are only showing what we want people to see. Not being honest and showing our true colors. We still continued to lie and expected to be able to stay clean. Through this step we learned that this is not possible in order to stay clean and live a honest life through recovery. Those of us that belong to religious sanctuaries can confide in the proper person of that faith . Others that are not religious may find someone they can confide in such as a doctor or therapist. Someone that we can trust to keep what has been said in confidence. We cannot disclose anything to our family because we are not allowed to say things to them that will make them unhappy. We cannot save our own skins by making someone else unhappy. By doing so our fears come closer and we begin to realize that our life is opening up and showing what our life was really about . This is the scariest thing we will do. And the hardest step to complete out of all 12 of them. The sixth step is when we ask God to remove these defects of character. Which in turn means we surrender our whole self to God? When we are ready, we say to him something like this: â€Å"My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen† The seventh step we become willing to ask God to help us to remove all of our shortcomings. This is not a long step and like I said previously it’s not one of the hardest steps to do during recovery.

To Kill a Mockingbird: An Appropriate Classic :: Free Essay Writer

Do you believe To Kill a Mockingbird is an unsuitable novel for teenagers to study? To be perfectly honest I don’t. After reading the book and having repeated class conversations on chapters day after day I don’t see the improper language, violence or situations as a teen. Many people deem Harper Lee’s classic novel to be a wonderful insight into a time of prejudice, religion and courage, these people are right and that is why we have been studying it. If our teachers had seen it as inappropriate they wouldn’t have let us read it, if this were inappropriate why it is an all time classic and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, I have no idea. We have studied it to learn about the notion of powerful and powerless, To Kill a Mockingbird is an ideal novel for that topic, with the character and situations we read about we have a clear understanding of life in the 30’s and how class changed people’s lives. To Kill A mockingbird does not only explore the tumultuous times of racism, loss of childhood innocence and morality but is a pure and simple love story. What is so inappropriate about a love story? The fact that the bad guy gets what he deserves? Or that the only violence is the shooting of a disease carrying dog? Teens live in a world of prejudice, ignorance and are faced with events that ultimately change them into being mature and caring. Studying this novel helps teens discover what the worlds past is like and what makes our life and the people around it how we are now. By reading To Kill A Mockingbird we can learn what we could do right in the present, changing our attitude about life can come from a life experience but reading a novel which gives us specific ideas like ‘have moral standards and stick to them no matter what’ appears loud and clear from scouts experiences of sticking up for Atticus, to Atticus’ own courage in standing up for Tom Robinson against most of May comb County. We learn the principles of respect for law and justice, for fairness and rules and the need for integrity, honesty and compassion. Harper Lee suggests people can’t stand against the pressures that come along without a commitment to such principles. Learning life lessons through an enforced novel for English we are positively influenced and inspired. Atticus who in many ways, the novel is built around is recognisably human, not a hero as such but idealised enough to be a convincing model of right behaviour.

The Return: Shadow Souls Chapter 4

â€Å"You're shaking. Let me do it alone,† Meredith said, putting a hand on Bonnie's shoulder as they stood together in front of Caroline Forbes's house. Bonnie started to lean into the pressure, but made herself stop. It was humiliating to be shaking so obviously on a Virginia morning in late July. It was humiliating to be treated like a child, too. But Meredith, who was only six months older, looked more adult than usual today. Her dark hair was pulled back, so that her eyes looked very large and her olive-skinned face with its high cheekbones was shown to its best advantage. She could practically be my babysitter, Bonnie thought dejectedly. Meredith had high heels on, too, instead of her usual flats. Bonnie felt smaller and younger than ever in comparison. She ran a hand through her strawberry-blond curls, trying to fluff them up a precious half inch higher. â€Å"I'm not scared. I'm c-cold,† Bonnie said with all the dignity she could muster. â€Å"I know. You feel something coming from there, don't you?† Meredith nodded at the house before them. Bonnie looked sideways at it and then back at Meredith. Suddenly Meredith's adultness was more comforting than annoying. But before she looked at Caroline's house again she blurted, â€Å"What's with the spike heels?† â€Å"Oh,† Meredith said, glancing down. â€Å"Just practical thinking. If anything tries to grab my ankle this time, it gets this.† She stamped and there was a satisfying clack from the sidewalk. Bonnie almost smiled. â€Å"Did you bring your brass knuckles, too?† â€Å"I don't need them; I'll knock Caroline out again barehanded if she tries anything. But quit changing the subject. I can do this alone.† Bonnie finally let herself put her own small hand on Meredith's slim, long-fingered one. She squeezed. â€Å"I know you can. But I'm the one who should. It was me she invited over.† â€Å"Yes,† Meredith said, with a slight, elegant curl of her lip. â€Å"She's always known where to stick in the knife. Well, whatever happens, Caroline's brought it on herself. First we try to help her, for her sake and ours. Then we try to make her get help. After that – â€Å" â€Å"After that,† Bonnie said sadly, â€Å"there's no telling.† She looked at Caroline's house again. It looked†¦skewed†¦in some way, as if she were seeing it through a distorting mirror. Besides that, it had a bad aura: black slashed across an ugly shade of gray-green. Bonnie had never seen a house with so much energy before. And it was cold, this energy, like the breath out of a meat locker. Bonnie felt as if it would suck out her own life-force and turn it into ice, if it got the chance. She let Meredith ring the doorbell. It had a slight echo to it, and when Mrs. Forbes answered, her voice seemed to echo slightly, as well. The inside of the house still had that funhouse mirror look to it, Bonnie thought, but even stranger was the feel. If she shut her eyes she would imagine herself in a much larger place, where the floor slanted sharply down. â€Å"You came to see Caroline,† Mrs. Forbes said. Her appearance shocked Bonnie. Caroline's mother looked like an old woman, with gray hair and a pinched white face. â€Å"She's up in her room. I'll show you,† Caroline's mother said. â€Å"But Mrs. Forbes, we know where – † Meredith broke off when Bonnie put a hand on her arm. The faded, shrunken woman was leading the way. She had almost no aura at all, Bonnie realized, and was stricken to the heart. She'd known Caroline and her parents for so long – how could their relationships have come to this? I won't call Caroline names, no matter what she does, Bonnie vowed silently. No matter what. Even†¦yes, even after what she's done to Matt. I'll try to remember something good about her. But it was difficult to think at all in this house, much less to think of anything good. Bonnie knew the staircase was going up; she could see each step above her. But all her other senses told her she was going down. It was a horrifying feeling that made her dizzy: this sharp slant downward as she watched her feet climb. There was also a smell, strange and pungent, of rotten eggs. It was a reeking, rotten odor that you tasted in the air. Caroline's door was shut, and in front of it, lying on the floor, was a plate of food with a fork and carving knife on it. Mrs. Forbes hurried ahead of Bonnie and Meredith and quickly snatched up the plate, opened the door opposite Caroline's, and placed it in there, shutting the door behind her. But just before it disappeared, Bonnie thought she saw movement in the heap of food on the fine bone china. â€Å"She'll barely speak to me,† Mrs. Forbes said in the same empty voice she'd used before. â€Å"But she did say that she was expecting you.† She hurried past them, leaving them alone in the corridor. The smell of rotten eggs – no, of sulfur, Bonnie realized, was very strong. Sulfur – she recognized the smell from last year's chemistry class. But how did such a horrible smell get into Mrs. Forbes's elegant house? Bonnie turned to Meredith to ask, but Meredith was already shaking her head. Bonnie knew that expression. Don't say anything. Bonnie gulped, wiped her watering eyes, and watched Meredith turn the handle of Caroline's door. The room was dark. Enough light shone from the hallway to show that Caroline's curtains had been reinforced by opaque bedspreads nailed over them. No one was in or on the bed. â€Å"Come in! And shut that door fast!† It was Caroline's voice, with Caroline's typical waspishness. A flood of relief swept over Bonnie. The voice wasn't a male bass that shook the room, or a howl, it was Caroline-in-a-bad-mood. She stepped into the dimness before her.

Attention Cognitive Psychology - 1575 Words

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbents filter theory of attention (1958), which set the†¦show more content†¦This buffer was a temporary memory store in which the unselected information could be held in parallel for short periods of time (Styles, 2006). Information can remain in the buffer for processing at a later stage, if this is not the case, it corrodes and is then lost (Martindale, 1991). It is only when the â€Å"information passes through the filter into the limited capacity channel, which is a serial processor, that it is identified† (Styles, 2006, p19). The indication is that therefore, selection from the parallel input is made at early levels of processing, and is consequently an â€Å"early selection model† (Styles, 2006). A number of theorist’s have, however, introduced models that completely reject Broadbent’s Filter model. An example is that of Deutsch and Deutsch’s attention model (Martindale, 1991). Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) offer a model in which all stimuli are fully analysed, with the most significant message determining the response (Eyesnck, 2010). This theory proposes a bottleneck, as the filter is placed closer to the response end of the processing system. This model is recognized as a late-selection model (Deutsch Deutsch, 1963). The Deutsch and Deutsch model was later modified by Norman (1968) who alleges that sensory inputs are processed routinely and instinctively before we consciously know about them. Norman suggests that no signal is filtered out but all are processed to the point of activating the storedShow MoreRelatedBehaviorism And Behaviorism Theories Of Psychology Essay1322 Words   |  6 Pagescredited as the founder of American psychology. He believed in observing everyday psychological experiences such as attention, memory, and reasoning. James also believed that the mind way very active in nature. Behaviorism says that you have to look at psychology in a way that is observable and objective. The main focus was on how we react to stimuli. Unlike Ebbinghaus both James’s view and behaviorism stray from introspection as opposed to observation. 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