To the family

The impact of addiction on the family and loved ones of the addict is unmistakably hard to quantify and impossible to deny. The addict is selfishness personified while whirling away recklessly in the throes of active addiction and as such he or she rarely if ever stops to consider the profound effect of our choices on friends and loved ones. Countless broken marriages, ruined relationships with children, shattered trusts and pains too deep to be easily forgiven litter the trail of recovery. The simple fact is that we are incapable of justly loving others while we are busy trying to kill ourselves.

Family members are right in the epicenter of “Hurricane Self,” a most apt description of the still-suffering addict. We make rash decisions based on little else outside of whimsical, fleeting impulse while damning the consequences. We don’t stop and consider the effects of our actions on any scale outside of immediate pleasure or pain.

We are enslaved by the need to place our own desires above anything and everything else and as a result we don’t really care what we do to others until the behaviors force us to pay consequences. We then miraculously sprout a conscience in the very same location burned bare by our scathing self-hatred and our guilt and shame know no limits.

The next phase is one of remorse accompanied by some form of expressing deep regret. We then fish for sympathy by telling anyone in earshot that we always screw things up and that we aren’t worth anything and probably never will be. We swiftly turn the focus from the wrongs we have committed to why you should feel as sorry for us as we do for ourselves. The rollercoaster won’t stop until we drive ourselves off on another binge that is destined to bring about this same dramatic sequence: stupidity, apology, and self-loathing. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I have no right to offer much advice to families of addicts, but I can say what I feel helped me start to turn the corner. Nothing short of unconditional love tempered by a refusal to validate my behavior was ever impactful in a positive way. You can love someone without co-signing on his or her self-destruction.

The tough sort of love, the firm-but-fair and unconditional type was all that ever made me feel okay about being me. That’s all that really works to this day. I still shut down in a very unhealthy way when confronted negatively or by nagging “suggestions.” In order to speak love into the life of an addict you must acknowledge our mistakes but make sure that we know beyond any doubt that you love us anyway. At some point we grant ourselves permission to believe you, and the healing has begun. Further down that same road we begin to internalize the source of our love and can then prove quite capable of loving ourselves and others as well. Admitting our wrongs and becoming willing to make amends for them must follow. Once we can begin to make those amends to our family members we have been put firmly on the path to living happily, feeling joyous and truly free. 

It's Been Awhile

Welcome back, long-lost readership. I have to confess that I took a break from posting because I’d really lost sight of the reasons and aims with which this particular blog began and I needed time to evaluate my ability to return to them. You see I had become dangerously egocentric in the author’s chair and was obsessively focusing on the views, comments, “likes” on Facebook and all the little metric tallies that don’t amount to much outside of an ego stroke in the grand scheme of things.

I began this blog to serve a twofold purpose: to educate “normals” and to help recovering and still-suffering addicts find benefit from whatever of experience, strength and hope that I have to offer.  At no point did I make it a goal to have a certain readership, and in all honesty the broad scope of influence I’d hoped to achieve was merely a function of increasing the levels upon which I fulfilled my purpose in writing. I never imagined I’d become so obsessive about how many people were reading my posts on a nearly minute-to-minute basis.

An addict must take great care to never place him or her self at the epicenter of much of anything, personal projects included. This blog can never be more about me than it is about the message I am trying to deliver. A few occurrences in my personal life helped serve to realign my perspective for the better and bring to light the limits of my personal ability to influence (read: control) other addicts or the disease at large.

The mental illness of addiction is one that cannot be treated by anything other than a willingness to change and the humility required to go to any lengths to stay sober. It’s been said (very accurately, I might add) that recovery from addiction is not for those who need it. Recovery is for those that want it. In the heat of the moment or the throes of desperation the addict will fall back to the comfort zone of personal manipulation and say or do anything temporarily to relieve the stress, strain and spotlight that accompanies a climactic event or confrontation of their illness.  This type of emotional manipulation is as natural as breathing and it takes great effort to avoid falling back into this behavior.

Without due care and attention to our recovery we all will fall back into another place of comfort known as the ego, the self and self-will. Without the mirror provided by some type of fellowship (i.e. AA, NA, or another recovery group filled with other people suffering from our illness) we often cannot see our behaviors for what they are and slip into a sort of emotional or mental relapse state, preceding only the physical response that is sure to follow if we don’t change the road we’re on.

Becoming again a more active participant in my own recovery, as well as the perspective that accompanies the fellowship of other addicts have served to enlighten my thinking in regard to the unhealthy internal focus I’d adopted with this blog. You see, I was delivering the message but I was not keeping my motives in check. One without the other is never good enough for very long. I have decided to divorce myself from the wrong motives, serve the right ones and persevere in my mission while regularly checking my ego at the proverbial door.

That’s all for now. I truly hope that I’ll be seeing you again soon, friends. 

The Holi-daze

The Holiday season provides many of us with a yearly celebration of family, friends and beautiful memories. There is laughter, joy and love overflowing. We sing carols, eat hearty meals and hug our loved ones and we are left above all with a heart full of gratitude.

There are also many for whom the holidays offer no real or lasting happiness. For that segment of the populace, this is just a time of the year to get through as unscathed as possible. Haunting memories and bitter longing plague this scene. If I’m not careful I can take the seat reserved by my past on my behalf right on the front row of this show.

In spite of your own view of what the holidays mean or the lovely memories they represent, everyone doesn’t share your experience. Many people carry years of emotional and mental scarring from tumultuous holidays of their youth that have carried over to affect those of their adulthood. Others have had serious difficulties and loneliness (some of that is self-inflicted, of course) as an adult and the holidays only seem to serve as a reminder of the emptiness of years past.

For many, the holidays serve more as a stark reminder of those who have been lost than as a time to enjoy the fellowship and love of those who remain. The dismal quicksand of woeful recollection swallows whole any joy or gratitude that lives in the present and he or she often feels left with no comfort outside of chemical or behavioral distraction. The beauty and wonder of the here and now are mortgaged against the brokenness of yesterday and the present is often forfeit as a result.

Our disease has we addicts convinced that our sole comfort lies in the next drink, drug, box of cookies or stranger’s caress. Like any good spree of bad behavior we are left with more questions than answers: How did this happen again? Why did I yet again run away from both the good and the bad and leave such destruction in my wake? How can I repair all the collateral damage for this latest binge? What now, and what lies ahead?

The key here is to attempt to realign our focus. All the negative memories and feelings produce energy, and if this energy is not redirected than the consequences can be dire. We must figure out a way to get out of “self” and get in to service. This time of year more than any other offers a multitude of opportunities to go in either of those directions, and by our CHOICE we can either drown in our bitterness or help ourselves be set free from the bondage of negativity.

If you find yourself wallowing in the negativity of the past or present, get up and get going in the direction of another person you can help. You’ll find that much like a morning frost in Tennessee, your negativity will be gone before you know it. You just have to decide to get out of your own head and get into service of your fellows.

How can you be of service during the holiday season?

What Might've Been

The rooms of recovery offer a fantastic opportunity to revisit the end stage of my active addiction and my early sobriety. It is of great value to pause long enough to remember just why I had to change the road I was on and just how desperate I was for a bit of hope to which I could cling. Without those timely reminders and quick trips back in time to that fall and winter of 2009, I would surely be lulled into a false sense of security in my own ability to hold my life together. I may even toy with the idea of being able to drink or use again in a controlled way if not for these stark trips down memory lane.

The addict has a unique ability at time to see the past through rose-colored glasses, turning a blind mind’s eye to all the pain and suffering our drinking and using wrought in our lives. Sometimes my mind wanders into a “what might’ve been” scenario.

What if I hadn’t left my Financial Aid/ Adjunct Faculty gig at then-Draughon’s Junior College to take on a role that was truthfully so much more demanding?

What if I hadn’t gotten caught with liquor on my breath at Miller-Motte that day and been able to keep pressing on in a tough situation, although with progressively worse drinking and using sure to follow?

What if I had just gone right back out to find another job after I was let go from that job instead of agreeing to go to rehab?

What if I’d come out of treatment, gotten a job and tried to embrace that good ol’ controlled drinking fallacy once again instead of embracing my sobriety?

Then, there are some more positive and affirming “what ifs” that followed the pivot point of my life:

What if I’d never walked into the SSF Submission Academy?

What if I’d never walked into Grace Community Church?

What if I’d given in and relapsed like I wanted to so many times while I worked and wallowed at the motorcycle shop?

What if I had stubbornly chosen to keep diving headfirst into the proverbial meat grinder of unhealthy and ill-advised romantic relationships?

And the seemingly not-so-positive:

What if I hadn’t somehow mentally broken and tapped out with 3 freaking seconds left in the round?

What if I’d gone to visit my sister and her family as often as I should have before she was killed?

What if she had just worn her stupid seatbelt?

People can “what if” themselves to the point of institutionalization or worse. I learned this the hard way after my own car wreck in 2001. You see, things have unfailingly unfolded in exactly the manner in which they needed to even when I can’t make sense of it all. The truth is if any of those critical scenarios had turned out differently I’d be nowhere near the place in my life that I am today. In many of the above cases, had they turned out differently I’d have no place in life because I probably wouldn’t be left among the living. Relapse for me is a death sentence.

There is an unbelievable peace that accompanies the realization that right here and right now you are exactly where you need to be. No matter how blindingly confusing it is at the time, even those life-defining moments that seem to be so awful in the midst of the moment can become an amazing positive force in your life if you so choose. You must resolve to press on and stay in the fight when you’re hardest hit. That’s largely what separates a life well lived from the chasm of what might have been. 

Pain Pt. 2: Find Your Pain, Find Your Purpose

While day-to-day pains are an obstacle to overcome in this life, there is also the presence of the behind-the-scenes bigger sources of grief to negotiate. Those big-picture scenarios that make you cringe or cause your heart to beat a bit faster are usually inauspicious evidence of your life’s necessary direction. The remnants of childhood scars or early adulthood trauma reverberate through your consciousness in a way that should compel you to act. These associations represent purpose, provided you don’t allow yourself to become paralyzed by them.

All grown people on this Earth have something that particularly stirs them; something that hits close to home each time they hear a story related to this particular place of pain. I am a firm believer that this painful association is a guidepost on the path down which we are individually called to tread. It is a shining beacon that calls us to act and to do and be something more than we are today. It is our purpose.

A person who was bullied or harassed as a child has a few choices to make as an adult: curl up into a ball every time they hear or see such behavior and encourage others to do the same, or become so enraged that they act impulsively and perhaps become bullies themselves. Another choice is to positively impact other former victims and to sew the seeds of self-defense, knowledge and high-mindedness amongst a new generation.

A person whose life has been touched by emotional, physical or sexual abuse can choose to be crippled by that pain (and no one could or would really blame them for being so affected, at least for a time) or they can recover from it and allow the experience to help them work to prevent that same abuse from befalling others. Their pain can push them into a place of advocacy and care that can positively impact hundreds or thousands of lives.

Finally, we come to my pain: addiction and compulsion. As a recovering addict whose addiction manifests itself in countless substances and behaviors, I know that I am in a unique position to be a voice of reason, experience and hope for others in recovery or those still struggling. I know this to be a particular part of my purpose in this life.  For a time, the humiliation of my struggle kept me from feeling like I was in a place of helping others, but I know now that all those hard times were simply forging the foundation of my life’s aim.

What is it that uniquely stirs in you a particular passion? What has been your struggle? Once you pay necessary mind to your pain, I urge you to look beyond the hurt and find your purpose and ACT on it. Life takes on a particularly meaningful glow from that point forward, just as it is supposed to. 

Turning Pain Into Progress

Life on planet Earth will forever be touched by pain and tragedy. No one is immune, regardless of race, belief or socioeconomic status. Much of the time we allow this pain to suck us in and keep us in stasis. We sit in it, mired in the muck of it until something or someone comes along to shake us from our stupor and help us remember the fundamental fact of life: it is meant to be lived.

Pain can become an excuse for dispassionate inaction. It is used as an excuse to disregard the outside world in the same way that a small child thinks you cannot see them if they cannot see you. It is (perhaps most unfortunate of all) an excuse to hurt others. We quite often will give another person a proverbial pass for terrible behavior because we think we may be just as bad to others if we ourselves were in the seat of suffering.

Inasmuch as pain can be a great burden, it can also be a fantastic motivator. You see, in the crucial moment we decide for ourselves which role it will fill in our lives. Pain reacts differently in the hearts and minds of different people, but in the time after the initial reaction our choices determine its’ effect. Pain can pull you down or it can push you into action.

Understand that the source of the pain can determine the initial course of action. If your pain is the result of a relationship gone awry, you first must distance yourself from the relationship. Then you have to become very intentional in your effort to redefine what qualities you are willing to accept within a relationship. If the source of your pain is an addiction or compulsion, the initial step is to stop drinking, using or acting out. Once you are removed from the haze of the high, you can look upon your life through clear eyes and with humility and open-mindedness you can move towards a better life.

Things become a little more difficult when the external “sources” of pain are stripped away and you begin to get honest with yourself about the fact that you may actually be the source of your own pain. Once you have come to realize this you have taken the first huge step in the direction of turning your pain into personal progress. You must know and understand why you’ve done the things you have done, and then you must address those root issues humbly and with a willingness to change.

Pain can fuel progress or paralysis, and it’s never too late to change the road you’re on as a result of making the choice of allowing your pain to consume you. Life is a series of choices. Even the most important of those choices can be redeemable when you decide that you want something better. Choose progress, and by so doing choose to live your own authentic life rather than settling for simply being alive. 

Four for 4

“Birthdays” don’t keep us sober, but taking a moment to recognize the milestone affords us the opportunity to positively reflect upon just how far we have come in the days and years since we last picked up the drink or drug. My life is nothing short of a miracle on even the worst days.

At the time of my birth, there was a genuine risk of being stillborn or brain dead due to my body’s position during the delivery. A bit more than twenty years later my life nearly ended on a grassy highway median. More than once in the years that followed I drank or used enough of other substances to have killed a person on multiple occasions. In spite of all this, I am still here. I’m alive and for the last four years I have really lived as well.

The days leading up to my sobriety birthday tend to both threaten and reinforce my sobriety. As counterintuitive as that may seem, you should certainly expect that type of duality from any addict. The weeks preceding November 4^th tend to find me emotionally drained as flashes of my old life and especially of that final binge play on the movie screen of my mind. If I am not mindful, I will begin to drift into a really negative and dark place. A time that should find me especially gracious and grateful will instead find me curt, angry and trying to isolate if I make the choice to focus on all that drinking and drugging took from me instead of all the things that sobriety has given me.

Gratitude is certainly one of the cornerstones of my sobriety and sanity; it is necessary to remain grateful in the constant battle against guilt, shame, self-pity and remorse. Gratitude is choice about your way of thinking and your way of living. Your ability to remain grateful in even the worst of times says a lot about how much you’ve grown emotionally or how much growing that still needs to be done.

Another of my cornerstones is the expansion of my spiritual life. While I am wholly faithful to my beliefs I am secure enough in them to allow you to have your own as well, even if they directly conflict with my own. Nothing about my life or my sobriety necessitates anything from anyone else, which helps me in my effort to stay clean and to stay I my own lane. I choose to live and let live; I also choose to pray for the very best for all of you at every chance I get.

A third cornerstone for me has been crafting a life that I no longer want to escape. It goes hand-in-hand with dealing with life on life’s terms and makes it a bit easier to do. You see as an active alcoholic and addict I was operating in cowardice behind a veil of bravado and hubris. If I could convince you of how great my life was, maybe I could eventually convince myself as well. I viewed everything through a lens of negativity, anger and pessimism and was so busy feeing sorry for myself that I forgot that I alone was responsible for the life I make for myself. When I got sober I learned that I had to stop blaming others, grow up and be willing to accept the consequences of my choices, good or bad. I made the choice to do what I could to make my life what I wanted it to be and that has made all the difference.

Last but not least is that which has been by far the most difficult and necessary part of this journey: becoming willing to love myself enough to want more out of my life than what I had become. I honestly struggle moment-to-moment each and every day with the two wolves inside my mind: one representing self-love and the other, older and stronger one that is representative of my self-loathing. While I choose to try and “feed” the self-love, the self-loathing has never known a moments’ hunger. My days consist of a million instantaneous decisions about how I’ll feel about myself and I don’t always make the right choice. Today, though, I at least have a choice to make. I am no longer bound and a slave to the hatred with which I regarded myself for far too long.

This has all been hard to reconcile at the most difficult times of these past four years; no one will ever tell you that life gets any easier when you get clean and sober unless they happen to be a pathological liar. Bad things happen in this world every day to nearly everyone. Life does, however, get better as you begin to understand what “normals” intuitively know from a young age: that this life is less about what happens to you than it is about how you handle it.  

Thank you to all who have chosen to walk this path with me, in person or in spirit. I would not be the man I am today without your patience, love and support. I hope and pray that we continue this journey for many, many more turns around the sun.