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.