When we’re stuck in resentment, we’re fused with our thoughts. We believe them completely. We don’t just think about what happened—we relive it. The tension, the anger, the hurt—it all floods back like it’s happening right now. In this way, resentment has a way of pulling us under, dragging us back into old wounds and making us relive the same pain over and over again.

Ultimately, Steps 2 and 3, like commitment in ACT, are not one-time decisions but ongoing practices. Each day, we reaffirm our choice to trust, to let go of control, and to move forward in recovery. We do this not because it is easy, but because it is the path to a life of meaning, connection, and true freedom.

The First Step—admitting powerlessness—can feel like an act of defeat. But in reality, it is a freedom and a relief. When we accept that our willpower alone will not free us from addiction, we can stop fighting a battle we were never going to win and start focusing on what we can do: seek help, take guidance, and step into a new way of living.

What matters most is helping clients achieve the balance and contentment they seek, regardless of whether they frame it as "control," because for me, balance reflects a congruence between our internal processes and the external realities of our lives. My work with clients is about cultivating a state where their thoughts, emotions, and actions feel aligned within their moment-to-moment experience of living.

Reconnecting with this sense of love and kindness within ourselves is our goal when we seek help from a counselor or therapist. This is the project we struggle to articulate when we reach out for help because things don't feel right—we're full of anxiety, dread, sadness, and insecurity. We feel unbalanced. At the core of this imbalance is a struggle to identify what love and kindness mean within ourselves and in our relationships with others.

We become committed to crafting an emotional environment around them that serves to propagate what we assume they want, often rationalizing this to ourselves as being something they “need,” generating an environment that reinforces this assumption. Thus, we begin to have a relationship not with the person as they are, but with a version of them that we’ve constructed in our minds.

Reorienting our focus from wherever our minds have drifted to present moment awareness is significant because it’s the only way we can hope to fundamentally modify our relationship with the emotions and thoughts that unsettle us. Our minds instinctively and thoughtlessly carry us away all the time. We daydream, ruminate over past conversations and conflicts, and worry about future interactions and outcomes.

This was my first conscious experience of dropping in to the present moment to notice what was happening with my thought process, quasi-removed from the distractions of my thoughts

By accepting that these “negative” elements are woven into the tapestry of my conscious experience, that they have been a part of what makes up my personality In addition to all of the wonderful, “positive” elements of my brain chemistry and personal experiences I was able to begin a new relationship with them.

Detachment is about stepping back and observing our experiences without becoming enmeshed in them. This perspective helps us navigate our inner world with greater clarity and less distress. By detaching from my negative self-talk, I could see these thoughts as just thoughts, not truths.

Pragmatically, what viewing the self as context boils down to is an acceptance that we are not prisoners of our past experiences nor to the thoughts and feelings we experience in any given moment. We are dynamic beings, capable of growth and transformation.