The topic for tonight is facing up to resentments.
The Big Book tells me that the number one cause of relapse is resentment.
I know for me my resentments were eating me up from the inside out.
They were festering wounds that leaked the poisons of anger, jealousy, bitterness, and so many other “secondary emotions” that drove me to greater acts of insanity.
I would say and do things that were way out of line.
I would hurt others, sometimes very intentionally, because of my resentments.
Talking about people behind their backs, starting or feeding into rumors, pointing out and making issues over any mistakes they made were some of my standard ways of making myself feel bigger and better than “them”.
I tried to turn others against the people who I resented. I tried to prove how superior I was to them. I spent so much energy and thought on it… Wasted so much is a more honest way of saying it.
As I worked my steps, especially my 4th and 5th, I could see how most of those resentments were either rooted in my egotism or my fear/insecurity.
Most of them were my childish attempt to make myself feel safer, better…lies I told to myself and others to build those walls I wanted to hide behind.
Walls that isolated me even further from others and drove me even deeper into my addictions.
As I look at the truths about myself, heal the wounds within, do the work to grow up and learn to be a functional part of the world and start to serve a will greater than my own I find less need for resentment, and less comfort in it.
Last weekend I went to a men’s retreat (had a blast and did some healing and growing).
I ran into a guy that I realized I had resented for sometime. I always saw his life, his recovery as just too good.
He had advantages of family, opportunities for school, great looks, recovered young with the support from a lot of family and friends…
Damn I hated his lily white upper crust butt!
But as I got the chance to know him and learned that he too had problems, issues, and all the other challenges that come with growing up around this family disease and then learning to try to deal with life with alcoholism and all the baggage it carries…
And then to find out he was jealous of me and the more adventurous life I had lead!
Him! Jealous of me! HOW DARE HE! 
It made me see how much of it was simply me comparing my insides to what I wanted to see as his outsides.
It made me see how little my resentment of him was about him. And how much of it was about my insecurity and my desire to wallow in my disease.
I wanted to cop a resentment over how he busted my resentment!
Facing up to resentments… What a way for me to learn about myself.