Dealing With Impatience

[admin]

DEALING WITH IMPATIENCE
The First Step can help us immeasurably to recognize and express our
impatience. By simply admitting we are powerless to control what, when, and
where we feel inpatient, we deepen our awareness of the very nature of
feelings. We have no more control over any feeling -- mad, sad, glad, --
than we do over thoughts that pop in and out of our minds. We admit to the
unmanageability we feel when impatient. This is the First Step, the
beginning of awareness of our impatience.
After admitting to powerlessness and unmanageability over impatience,
we can come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can lead us to a
healthy expression of our feelings, to sanity, to wholeness; Step Two.
In the Third Step, we do not so much turn over our feelings over to the
God of our understanding but the attempts to control them by denying them,
by manipulating others or by blaming. God wants us to have our feelings, to
experience them fully; even impatience.
The Fourth Step can help us inventory how, in the past, we dealt with
our feelings of impatience. We can discuss this with another and admit to
him/her "the exact nature of our wrongs", the Fifth Step. When we come to
the Sixth and Seventh Steps, it's important we understand that impatience is
not a character defect; impatience is a normal, human feeling. What we do
or don't do with that feeling can reveal a character defect, but it is not
wrong to feel inpatient. Denial of impatience, blaming, resentments, and
manipulating others are character defects that result from not dealing with
our impatience in a healthy way. We are willing to have God remove these
defects and we humbly ask Him to do so. We are not asking God to take our
feelings, and this includes impatience, out of our hearts. By now, we can
return to people in our past, Steps Eight and Nine, and make amends, with
feeling, for not listening to their feelings or responding honestly to them
with our own.
The Tenth Step asks us to continue an inventory. This can simply
entail a periodic spot check on how we feel. Asking ourselves, "How do I
feel, right now?" can help us to become more aware of how subtly our
feelings connect us to others and our environment. Through prayer and
meditation suggested in the Eleventh Step, we seek guidance from others and
our Higher Power on how to best deal with impatience. As we become more
aware of our own feelings, we experience a more heightened sense of life.
Impatience helps us to see what we like or don't like. And just as sobriety
is the message we carry to others, the Twelve Step, so too, expressing our
feelings also carries a message.
--Received in email

[admin]

My experience with impatience and praying is in early sobriety I began to pray for help from God with my impatience. What seemed to happen then was that everything that could try my patience happened. A little later on I heard someone share that you shouldn't pray for patience or help with impatience because what I just said before this sentence is what happened to them.