AWG Secular 12 Step Self-Esteem Group 🚀
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Code: 781927
Meeting description
It is not mandatory to turn on your mic or camera. Coming to listen is totally fine.
By taking part, we hold space for others, and ourselves, to participate in a way that is manageable for us as we exist right now.
It is not necessary to actively be doing the AWG 12 Steps in order to be a full participant.
Any contact with the group and its resources can be beneficial as long as it’s sustainable for each of us as individuals. Many of us participate simply by attending meetings.
As we participate in this meeting over time, we might find ourselves seeking to…
• Find our own concept of self-esteem and grow toward it
• Come to understand personal boundaries, their roles in our lives, and how to develop and maintain healthy boundaries
• Understand the concept of nonviolent detachment and how and when to enact it
• Develop more manageable lifestyles
• Develop a sense of self that leads to more health, well being, and manageability in our lives
• Release others from the responsibility of defining or reinforcing our sense of self-esteem
• Form personal goals about self-esteem and self-concept based on our own understanding of our own needs, as they exist today
AWG 12 Step Self-Esteem Readings
Overwhelm and self-esteem part 3: Personal values
Trigger warning: Overwhelm
Step 8 asks me to examine the concept of personal values. When I cross that with the concept of overwhelm, it shows me some of my unresolved issues. For example, I was raised to value productivity, fitting in, pushing past my comfort zone, and not "making excuses". When I'm overwhelmed, my state of being is in direct conflict with all four of those things.
Several years post-identification, I can see the ableist side of each of those four "values". But I genuinely do still value them. When I'm not overwhelmed and can live them, they bring me a sense of fulfillment and pleasure. When I'm overwhelmed and "can't" live them, I find myself acting in ways that violate other values: secrecy, lying, self-hating, blaming others, and more. That hurts my self-esteem. So how can I resolve the conflict between those values and who I am when in a state of overwhelm?
One thing that has helped is to recontextualize those values in a non-ableist way. For example, when I'm overwhelmed, I can be productive… in helping myself to recover. I can fit in… with so many other late-identified autistic people from my group, whose experiences of overwhelm I identify with so much, and who I know identify with mine. I can push past my comfort zone… of ableist thinking, to a place where I can accept myself. I can "not make excuses"… excuses to ignore myself or give in to ableism.
How about you? How do your values intersect with your experiences of overwhelm?
Share questions:
- Does being in a state of overwhelm ever make you feel like you are in conflict with your own values? Please describe.
- Do you ever feel like acting on your values is what led to you being in a state of overwhelm? Can you share an example, either real or hypothetical?
- Do you ever blame yourself for having values you find ableist? What is it like?
- How do you cope with feeling like you're in conflict with your own values when you're overwhelmed?
- Do you have any special values you can live
ONLY during times when you're overwhelmed?
- Any tools, resources, or strategies to share?
- Anything else to add?
AWG 12 Step Self-Esteem Workbook
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3