Self Will Run Riot

Addicts are prime examples of what can go wrong when the insanity of mental and spiritual sickness takes the reigns.  Case studies in impulse control issues, addicts often make horrendous decisions and later blame everyone and everything except themselves when their lives fall apart.

In rooms of recovery, a favorite saying is “My very best thinking is what got me here.” Before we become truly aware of our plight, our obsessive self-centered thinking causes us to destroy our lives and most of our relationships, so our own decision making process has quite literally left us with no choice but to set ourselves to the work of recovery or languish in misery until we die. The maturation in recovery is often indicated by the realization that addicts’ troubles are almost solely of their own doing, and that simplifying the decision-making process is a necessity.

You see, the mind of an addict is perverted by all-encompassing selfishness and self-centeredness. We are so egocentric that left up to our own devices the addict (both active and in recovery) can literally tie any and everything that happens in the world to him or herself.  It’s a twisted and paranoid form of the Six Degrees of Separation game, and the only spoils of victory are isolation and mistrust. 

We are masters of conspiracy theory and our tendency towards fixation makes us chronic over-analyzers. Surely everyone is out to harm us or “get” us, especially those teetotalers who keep trying to convince us that we have a drinking (or smoking or snorting or pill-popping or chronic masturbation) problem. Surely none of these bad things that have befallen us can be of our own doing. Surely our attempts to control everything can’t have resulted in our crumbling and insecure existence.

All these mental and spiritual issues make surrendering our will and the care of our lives to our conception of a Higher Power a necessity. We have to simplify our decision-making to “doing the next right thing.” You see, if we can compartmentalize our lives into segments of a day, things don’t seem so overwhelming and impossible. If all I focus on is doing the next right thing when the opportunity comes, it doesn’t leave me with much room for worry or the frightened anticipation of horrible events that probably won’t ever come to pass except inside my own twisted imagination.

Thoreau encourages us all to simplify our lives, and simplicity is exactly what the addict needs to make it through the day.  Keep it simple, and you just might make it through another 24 hours clean and sober and happy.