I have often pictured myself as a mountain lake. My lake is loaded with rabbits swimming around like fish. I know that rabbits swimming around like fish seems unreasonable. If the rabbits are a picture of my buried pain then the swimming rabbits are appropriate because their is nothing rational about me carrying around buried pain for years.
I have felt that the anger, sense of abandonment and unfairness were unworthy of me. They were a threat to my world. I deeply felt that if you knew who I was you would not accept me.
Under the water, the rabbits seemed to me to be a fierce fire breathing sea monsters. The consequence of that was every time one of the rabbits exposed just the tip of their ears out of the water I would desperately push that sea monster back down in the water as deeply as I could.
My sponsor made the same suggestion to me over and over again. She said “Every time you see those ears poking through the surface grab the ears and pull the that monster out of the water as quickly as you can and don’t turn loose. You don’t want that monster to get back down in the lake.”
Gradually I realized that if I grabbed those ears and yanked I would be so surrounded by the love and support of my family and friends I would be able to handle it.
Finally, I took a chance and grabbed those ears and yanked on them as hard as I could. I got a big surprise. I animal I was holding onto was not a sea monster at all. I was standing there holding a rabbit. It was filthy and smelly. It reeked and squirmed but it was after all just a rabbit. I knew I could handle a rabbit.
It took lots and lots of yanking on rabbit ears over and over but I finally got the hang of it.I learned that it was to my great advantage to me to get those rabbits out of my lake.
It seemed to me that my Higher Power was like a garbage man. If I would put my rabbit garbage on the curb, God would haul it away.
George Caywood 