The blame game

I have heard in rooms of recovery the tendency to blame the disease of addiction, family members, supervisors, ex-whatevers, or even the government for bad personal decision-making or poor behaviors. This indicates an unwillingness to either admit to or accept responsibility for your wrongdoings. You must accept and embrace your role in the negative parts of your life, even if the part you play is simply a refusal to really deal with them.

The acknowledgement of addiction as a disease isn’t for the purpose of giving you a built in cop-out; it is to help you to understand that your particular method of acting out is but a symptom of a deeper mental and spiritual illness that must be addressed and treated aggressively.

Unflinchingly admitting your mistakes and being willing to be accountable for them is maybe the most difficult and crucial thing that I must strive to do on a regular basis. 12-step work helps you to realize the hand you play in every situation. There are but a few times in life wherein the blame for a negative event lies solely somewhere else. In my active addiction I was an absolute master at convincing myself that everything bad was anyone’s fault but my own and refusing to admit the severity of my mistakes in the rare instances I would actually own them.

No power in existence can force you to open a bottle and drink, or pack a bowl or cut out a line. No one can put a pill down your throat or force you to overeat (real life isn’t like the movie “Seven”). Porn doesn’t magically appear on your computer, nor does gossip force its’ way out of your mouth.

Until a person is willing to be accountable to themselves for the bad choices they have made or continue to make, no real progress can be made. The first step is absolutely to stop the behavior, but that’s just the beginning. Not drinking is not enough. You have to accept and understand that your real problem is you and your warped, twisted way of thinking. This problem must be addressed in order for you to have any real hope at true happiness.

Stop blaming others. Stop making excuses. Stop copping out. Stop doing everything the easy way. There’s no easy way out of this. You got yourself into this, and you must make significant changes to your daily mentality to even begin to get out. You will need to seek and accept help from mentors, friends and your higher power, but you must be ever vigilant over your mentality. You alone are responsible for your thoughts, words and actions and you will be the only one who must account for them.  

A few words of caution

Often, the newly recovering addict is riding on what is referred to as the “pink cloud,” spouting off the kitschy sayings and reciting word-for-word some of the things found in recovery literature. We are excited beyond belief about our new way of life and mistakenly expect that it is something everyone wants to know everything about, and by extension wants to take part in.

You quickly find that the support people may offer you is most often limited to cheering what you are doing and in no way is a cry for your help. In classic cart-before-horse fashion we attempt to evangelize the world before our own recovery has any real foundation, and this most often results in discouraging rejection and sometimes leads to a loss of belief in the recovery process and ultimately relapse.

You have to begin to surround yourself with the type of people who live the kind of lives for which you are striving. Don’t think for a second that you as a recovering addict are in any position to help anyone else with issues or baggage until you have laid down your own baggage and have begun to deal effectively with your own issues (with the help of your Higher Power). You can’t “fix” yourself and you cannot live under the illusion that you can fix anyone else. Keeping your side of the street clean is more than enough to keep you busy.

We must also understand that our sobriety does NOT necessitate anyone else’s, and other people sometimes have a harder time understanding that than the addict him or herself. Each person is different in this regard, but it really doesn’t affect me to occasionally be around people drinking.

Please understand that I don’t wish to make it a weekly thing, but I also won’t seize up at the sight of a beer bottle. I’m not going to relapse because anyone in my immediate vicinity consumes anything. Relapse takes place inside the mind of the addict and then manifests itself by an act, not the other way around. As long as I am doing the things I know to be necessary to my recovery, nothing in my environment should be a threat to it.

Now, sloppy-drunk people typically even annoyed the heck out of me when I was one of them and that certainly has not changed. However, the fact that I’m living a different lifestyle now doesn’t mean I would be upset with my wife for having a margarita night out with her friends. My sobriety necessarily doesn’t depend on anyone else’s, for if it was tied to anything human or humanly-influenced it would be set up to fail thanks to the fact that is human imperfection.

In short, I’m too busy today taking care of my own life and my own family to try and save the world because no amount of success in that endeavor is going to keep me clean and sober. Not taking a drink or drug and connecting with my Higher Power must be the mutual, symbiotic #1s on my daily To Do list every morning.

You ARE worth it.

Self-esteem is unfortunately one of the first things usually and mistakenly sacrificed by an addict who has made up his or her mind to get sober. You see, humility and low self-esteem are NOT the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. You don’t have to be humiliated to become humble, although that is often what it takes. A once-proud addict must humble him- or herself enough to be teachable because the process of recovery is one that involves lifelong learning and constant humble reflection and self-evaluation.

Addicts spend so much of their time beating themselves over the head about past or current wrongdoings that their self-worth is typically not where it needs to be in order to be mentally healthy. This causes us to allow ourselves to be treated poorly because we don’t feel like we deserve anything better, or that it is the penance we must pay for those years of mistreating others.

Often we have such a poor work record that we take and keep jobs that are very detrimental to our mental and spiritual well-being. The same thing goes for romantic relationships.  We unintentionally seek out these Jerry Springer scenarios because we don’t think we deserve better. We often stay in mentally or emotionally unhealthy situations while we mistakenly think we can fix them although we cannot even fix ourselves.

They are both situations where we allow all the bad for the occasional glimpses of the good, of the acceptance we so desperately crave and rarely find because we look in all the wrong places. This is a symptom left over from our active addiction; we subject ourselves to such unhealthy work and interpersonal relationships because we simply don’t know how to find the healthy ones without some help. We've never done it before, and if we somehow have we quickly found a way to screw it up. We are grasping for any shred of a glimmer of a sliver of positive feedback, so we settle for much less than what is acceptable because we think that it is the best we can do.

You must understand that in spite of your past transgressions, you don’t deserve to be treated poorly in your personal or professional life. Never accept less than being treated with the loyalty, love and respect you had better be giving to others. Do the next right thing every time you have the chance, but do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of. You are worth it, and you always have been. It is not just “okay” to be happy. That is simply how it is supposed to be.

You aren't alone

Reaching out for help is a vital and conversely difficult necessity. You cannot recover from addiction alone; if you could, you would have before the insanity of the disease took a complete hold on your life and probably almost cost you everything (or perhaps did). In life, you have to humble yourself enough to know that you will never know everything about anything (especially yourself).

It goes against an addict’s very nature to seek the help of others. We are loners and naturally isolate ourselves, in addition to being egocentrics with self-esteem issues (paradox intended). It isn’t uncommon for an addict (whether active or recovering) to feel completely alone and isolated in a room full of people. We feel like outcasts and certainly play the role, at least in our own minds.

Pride is a huge issue many people battle, but to the addict who has yet to find humility pride is both his or her best friend and our constant undoing. It drives us onward at breakneck pace towards a cliff whose existence we vehemently deny. “That can’t happen to me; maybe everyone else, but not me. I’ve got it all under control. I can stop any time I choose.” For the addict, this is the prime example of false bravado mixed with hubris. Control is an illusion, and the sooner anyone can see past that façade the better.

Oftentimes people talk about an addict hitting “rock bottom” and the fact that everyone’s bottom is different. While this is true, I submit to you that for most of us our bottom directly correlates to the point where our ego is smashed and humility introduces itself. The bottom is when you have simply had enough and are willing to go no lower, to lose no more. Our pride typically has been dashed against the rocks, along with our hopes, dreams and aspirations (at least for the time being). Only when you have laid all of this ego down, lost every bit of it without finding it again are you able to accept the path you must take without any reservations.

Is pride holding you back? Do you need to reach out to someone for help, addiction or not? What are you waiting for? Lay down your pride and your chains together, because they are one in the same.

Three Things for My Three Years

For the uninitiated, one thing that you can be sure to hear if you are picking up a “year or multiples” chip in a twelve step program is “How did you do it?” In honor of my little sobriety baby’s third birthday, I want to set out for your scrutiny some things I have learned. Some things I have done have worked and some have definitely not. Some of the means by which I attempt to maintain sobriety and serenity on a daily basis contain nuggets of experience and hope that others in recovery may be able to mine out of the madness.

1. Taking things one day at a time is something that everyone probably thinks they do. Most don’t realize how often they do not do this simple mental exercise and how much serenity they are missing as a result. Move on from the past and don’t worry about a future that you can neither guarantee nor change today. Be concerned with the here and now, be present in the present moment and watch as the days become longer and more full, more satisfying to your soul.

2. One of the biggest obstacles I unknowingly faced was the idea that anyone or anything other than my own thoughts was a threat to my sobriety. My only true threat of relapse exists solely between my two ears. No person, place or thing of this world has the ability to control my thoughts or actions. I make my own choices and am solely accountable for them. I am ducking my natural responsibility for my own life when I begin to think that anyone or anything in my environment can truly threaten my sobriety.

3. The most ever-present, vital thing that has kept me sober is maintaining and enhancing my relationship with my Higher Power. Having faith in something, somewhere that can relieve a person of the madness and obsession is the cornerstone of the 12-step program. We addicts in recovery have to hold onto the faith that something out there has the power to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Faith, hope and love, not necessarily the brand of man-made extra-doctrinal religion that has tried to cloud our world today. Simple faith and spirituality and an effort for nearly constant and conscious contact with my Higher Power has been the glue that has held my life together when collapse and destruction seemed imminent.

I hope that helps someone, somewhere. Many, many thanks go to my family (new and old) and my dear friends. My Sigma Chi and Masonic brothers and my brothers and sisters at the SSF Submission Academy have all played a tremendous role in my recovery. My family at Grace Community Church has been vital to my happiness, growth and fulfillment as well. My loving and amazingly supportive wife Erica means more to me than I could have ever realized before I knew her. She lights up my life with her energy, creativity and love. Here’s to another twenty-four hours. 

Expectations or Acceptance?

Expectations can be as dangerous to an addict (or any person, for that matter) as a cyanide pill swallowed with a bottle of Drano.

Unfortunately we as humans have a tendency to let people down and to fail to live up to expectations. It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of being human, no matter how much we strive to be otherwise. It is in our nature to be imperfect, and once an addict builds expectations and gets disappointed it can often be followed swiftly by relapse and the well-documented consequences thereof.

One way that a person can insulate themselves against this disappointment and potential resentment is to begin to change their expectations into hopes. If you merely hope that a person will do the right thing or hope that an outcome is favorable, then you aren’t setting yourself up for an eventual, inevitable disappointment.

The fact remains that you will be hurt and disappointed in this life. No one is immune to these negative emotions, but you can choose how you respond when events conspire to drag you down.  That much is the only thing that is in fact within your power to control.

You can choose to accept that “it is what it is,” that you have no power to change the past or others and simply decide to relinquish your illusory control of the situation. Accept that you can only control your own thoughts and emotions and stop being as sensitive and reactive as you have been, and watch as life goes from “in the red” to cruise control.

As an addict, you must come to accept that there are certain things you simply cannot do as other normal people can.  This is such a hard lesson for the prideful, egotistical addict, but one that is absolutely necessary. The sooner you make peace with this as a fact and accept it, the sooner you can move forward less embittered and more empowered. Accept that there are things in this life that you can do absolutely nothing to effect and focus on the things that you can control, i.e. your emotions and your responses.

Expectations can often lead to disappointments. Acceptance inevitably leads to serenity. Which would you rather experience today?