Monthly Archives: January 2013

Befriend The Darkness

Posted on by under Acceptance, Feelings, Non-Resistance

     Feelings don’t have to stop us…

     We addicts need to learn to sit down beside our dark feelings and befriend them. We cannot let our feelings control, overwhelm, or have power over us. We must stay in the middle lane, do what we would normally do, and let our feelings fluctuate around us. Our feelings will always change, up and down, but they do not have to stop us and they do not have to have power over us. Whether good or bad, painful or joyful, the trick is to walk right through our feelings and push forward.

     Winston Churchill said astutely, “If you’re going through hell, keep going… Never, never, never give up.” Precisely. What are we going to do, stop in the middle of hell or turn back only to start all over again? I’m all set with that. If you fight your thoughts and feelings, they will only persist, and perhaps grow stronger. But if you let them just be, they will gradually dissipate and move on. And by letting them be as they are, by accepting them and gracefully moving through them or moving next to them, we grow stronger. We gain character.

     We don’t become strong men and women by wimping out, turning back, refusing do things that make us uncomfortable, popping a bunch of pills, pouring booze down our throats or shooting a spoonful of heroin. Nope. We grow strong and become free inside by walking right into our fear, our darkness, and our despair. Addicts must confront themselves to unlock the chains they are bound in.

God, teach me to accept and embrace ALL of my thoughts and feelings. Teach me to take the middle road, not too high or too low… 

Humility

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     As addicts, it is very important for us not to engage in any sort of “I am a victim” attitude, as if life is so tough for us, and oh the burden that we have to endure being addicts. Um, we made ourselves addicts, remember?  We chose to use over and over again like a pig until we broke ourselves. So nothing made us addicts except for our cowardice. It is equally important for us not to pat ourselves on the back or give ourselves medals for getting better, or rather, for choosing to stop hurting others. And finally, it is imperative that we do not take credit for what we have done. The truth is that we BARELY deserve what we still have, and if we have any chance of rebuilding our lives, we must live in humility. We must forever remain under God, repelling arrogance of any sort.

     The moment we begin bronzing trophies for ourselves, it is game over. The moment we begin taking credit for recovering and for the blessings in our lives, it is game over. This doesn’t mean that we go around hating ourselves, self-deprecating or being someone else’s doormat. On the contrary, true humility is real strength. Humility means that we have the right attitude.

     But the moment we get cocky is the moment we get sick again, as our ability to be honest starts crumbling. Then we lose awareness of what we are thinking, saying and doing. We begin failing to see how we are affecting others. We stop feeling how we are affecting others. Then we are insane, and if we haven’t already relapsed at that point, we relapse. Then we’re on a full blown run until we either wind up in detox again, or in jail, or in the graveyard. And now we can really pat ourselves on the back for we have managed to once again rip everything and everyone to shreds, break the hearts of those closest to us, sabotage everything good in our lives, and bring enduring shame to our family and any semblance of a good name we once had. Good job.

God, please give me the willingness, courage and strength to live by Your principle of humility…

Frothy Emotional Appeal

Posted on by under Uncategorized

     “Frothy emotional appeal seldom suffices.” 

     Translation: People can’t keep us sober or fix us. That is, nothing anybody says has the power to restore us to sanity… so trying to plead with an addict is entirely a waste of time.

     “Frothy emotional appeal seldom suffices. The message which can interest and hold these alcoholic people must have depth and weight. In nearly all cases, their ideals must be grounded in a power greater than themselves, if they are to re-create their lives... Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive, that while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks… and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.” -Alcoholics Anonymous, The Doctor’s Opinion, xxviii, xxix

“Charlie, why do you drink when you have so much potential?”
     Huh?
“Charlie, why do you use drugs when you have so much talent?”
     Are you serious?
“Charlie, we love you so much. Isn’t that enough?”
     Nope.
“Charlie, now that you have this beautiful, wonderful wife and child, that should be enough, right?”
     It should be, but you people have no idea how sick I really am.
“Charlie, with all of your loving friends and family, plus all of our resources and modern medicine at your disposal, you should be able to get sober and stay sober, right?”
     Wrong.
“Charlie, the doctor says you will die if you continue to drink.”
     Um, can I borrow some money? Oh, and thanks, that’s great about the doctor thing.

     Unfortunately, non-addicts don’t understand addiction. It doesn’t matter how much shit I have, or who I have, or what potential I have. You could give me a billion dollars, my dream job, a mansion on the water, an angel wife, two beautiful kids and the best of friends… and I think I’ll go get jammed out of my fucking skull. I’m an addict. I use. That’s what addicts do. No pile of “frothy emotional appeal” is going to do the trick.

     Here’s the deal: Yes, addiction is plain and simple a physiological disease. We have broken our bodies and can never again use normally. But the reason why we can’t STAY sober has nothing to do with our bodies. There is no physical craving of drugs when we’re sitting there butt sober. We only begin craving drugs or alcohol AFTER we start drinking or using.

     So no, the reason why we can’t stay sober has nothing to do with the bio-chemical illness of alcoholism or addiction. The reason why we can’t stay sober is because we have a spiritual problem. We have a moral problem. Yes, a moral problem, along with the insanity of the mental obsession. Do me a favor… go out there and try to stay clean while acting immorally. Try to stay sober while lying, cheating, manipulating, being selfish, angry, depressed and abusive. Good luck with that. You will need luck because it doesn’t work.

     Once we become addicts and realize that we have a serious problem, the only thing keeping us actively using is doing the wrong thing. If we were living by spiritual principles, there would be no need to use. We would know how selfish we are, and we would go and fix our broken minds. We would have an entire psychic change, find God, restore ourselves to sanity, and never again suffer from the random mental obsession to drink or use drugs.

     So if you’re an alcoholic or an addict out there and you plan on staying sober after you pat yourself on the back for going to detox, you better change the person you are. You have no chance of staying clean if you do not embrace spiritual principles and live a moral life. Drinking booze and using drugs is 100% connected to morals, or lack thereof. Do we really think the average alcoholic, heroin addict or crackhead out there is living right? Please. So when you get a pamphlet or an article that some clueless PhD wrote about how addiction is not a moral problem but rather purely a physiological phenomenon, you are absorbing information that will undoubtedly lead to relapse, and perhaps your eventual death.

God, teach me to live by Your principles of love, honesty, patience, tolerance, courage, compassion, strength, honesty and service…

Pills & Science Can’t Help Addicts

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     “We doctors have realized for a long time that some form of moral psychology was of urgent importance to alcoholics, but its application presented difficulties beyond our conception. With our ultra-modern standards, our scientific approach to everything, we are perhaps not well equipped to apply the powers of good that lie outside our synthetic knowledge.” -Alcoholics Anonymous, The Doctor’s Opinion, xxvii

     Translation: You cannot fix an alcoholic or an addict without fixing him morally and spiritually. Pills and science cannot change addicts, turn them into better people, make them act right, or give them what they truly need to effect lasting recovery. Does taking a pill give you meaning and purpose? Do taking a pill give you principles and morals? Do taking a pill give you God? Nope. There is utterly no hope for alcoholics and drug addicts to get better if mainstream treatment methods and attitudes continue pumping medication as the solution.

     Believe it or not, there are doctors out there who specifically treat drug addicts. I know of one. In fact, he asked me to work for him at one point, running groups in Brookline to supplement his program of methadone, suboxone, seroquel, clonodine and God knows what else. His mission is to prescribe for drug addicts. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get sober to become a puppet or a guinea pig. Let’s just have a look at that phrase again:

     Prescribe for drug addicts.

     Huh???

     Addicts or alcoholics who go to one of these guys or to some pain clinic have either a) run out of money but are still trying to get high or b) are trying to appear to their families or spouses that they are working on themselves but are getting high at the same time, which isn’t possible. You can’t work on yourself in any way, shape or form while jammed on some elaborate cocktail of mind-altering drugs. Try writing a thorough, honest and insightful inventory after re-wiring your brain with methadone, suboxone or some insane psychotropic. Better yet, try praying or meditating. That should be fun.

     Why do you think the DSM was created?
   
     Psychiatry has, of course, been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry and the government. It seems like they want every man, woman and especially child in America to be medicated to the hilt. I personally don’t believe it ends with the pharmaceutical industry and speculate the agenda is deeper and perhaps more devious. It’s the same with our educational system as well as our monetary system. Needless to say, healthy economies don’t run on massive debt bubbles. Healthy economies run on savings and production, not debt, taxes and consumption.

     We passively agree and believe what we see and hear on TV, but the truth is that we are being medicated, manipulated, dumbed down and fleeced economically. Yes, I know that is off-topic, but it is so important to our future that we begin to wake up to the de facto banana republic that we are blindly endorsing. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to change course. Mark my words, a storm is coming…

God, please keep me close to You today…

Illusions of Psychiatry (Article)
Doping Kids with Ritalin (Article)
Ritalin Use for ADHD Children Soars Fourfold (Article)
Raising the Ritalin Generation (Article)
Unhinged – The Trouble with Psychiatry (Book)
Anatomy of an Epidemic (Book)
Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (Site & Link to PDF)

Caution! AA Sponsor Approaching

Posted on by under God, Meetings, Sponsorship

My job as a sponsor: Hook you up with God and then get out of the way.

Action to Take: The Twelve Steps as they are laid out in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Not my job as a sponsor: Call you, Drag you to meetings, Take you out bowling on Saturday night, Talk to you for hours on end about your problems and feelings.

Am I your friend? No.

Will we become friends? Perhaps, if and when you recover.

Will I ever tell you to do something that I haven’t done myself? No.

Will I make decisions for you? No.

Will I tell you what colored socks to wear? No.

Should people who haven’t taken Steps and recovered become sponsors? Absolutely not.

Do they? All the time, unfortunately.

Why shouldn’t they become sponsors? Because their advice might actually kill you.

God, please take my will and make it Your own. Teach me how to be useful to others…

Reasons Don’t Exist

Posted on by under Action, Reasons, Spiritual Problem, Spiritual Solution, Therapy, Triggers

     Just like triggers, reasons don’t exist either. The choice to use is a selfish one. Nothing makes us want to use. Regardless of what’s happened to us or how miserable we are, WE choose to use and therefore WE are the reason. Nothing else and nobody else is the reason. This is why therapy is useless for a drug addict. Finding reasons why we use just gives us excuses to keep using.


     Wanh… I’m sad, angry, depressed, hurt, abused, victimized, blah, blah, blah… so I HAVE to use. See, now you know why I do what I do. You would do the same exact thing! Wanh, wanh, wanh…  
     Drug addicts use because they are selfish and want to use. Go ahead, send them to a therapist to work out their emotional issues. Trust me, once they’ve got it all figured out, they are going to go get high. Addicts don’t need a reason, nor the resolution of a reason, to use. I’m telling you that even the happiest kid from a loving family will turn into an addict for no reason at all. He becomes an addict simply because he chooses to pick up and use over and over again until he or she is broken. It’s that simple.
     And it’s the same even if we have been hurt. Plenty of people have been hurt and don’t mutate into hopeless drug addicts. And once we become addicts, you are spinning your wheels trying to talk it out of us. We need to go from being insane (missing chip) to sane again (chip re-inserted), and the truth is that no amount of talking and no amount of medication can accomplish this. Addicts need nothing short of a psychic change via a spiritual experience. We need to replace our addiction with something as powerful as the addiction itself.
     Reasons allow us to sidestep responsibility, and believe me, if you give an addict a chance to avoid it, they will. Regardless of whether the reasons we discover and give to ourselves are true or not, drinking and using drugs is wrong if we have lost control. Instead, we should be told that we no longer have the right to use, no matter what happened to us, no matter how we feel or how we (with dramatic emphasis) ache so.
     I’m not saying therapists can’t help people, I’m just saying they can’t help drug addicts – the most manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, selfish and pathologically infantile group out there (besides borderlines and narcissists, or sociopaths). And we need to especially watch out for psychiatrists. Believe it or not, they actually have the balls to prescribe drug addicts more drugs. Great solution. What an absolute joke. See you in the next life after you overdose.
God, help me remember that if my problem is spiritual in nature, than so must be my solution… 

Tao Wisdom 22, 24

Posted on by under Tao Te Ching, Tao Wisdom

22
If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

The Master, by residing in the Tao,
sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn’t display himself,
people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove,
people can trust his words.
Because he doesn’t know who he is,
people recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goal in mind,
everything he does succeeds.

24
He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.

–Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu
 Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Tao Te Ching

Any Lengths?

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     “Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps.” -Alcoholics Anonymous, p.58

     Sad that this paragraph from the Big Book has become a common preamble in AA meetings. Why? Because its rote recitation further diminishes its meaning and interpretation… and therefore its implementation.
     We “disclose our stories in a general way…” Really? Because the laundry list of war stories and sob stories I hear spewed out so often doesn’t sound too general – “I did this, and I did that, and can you believe I did this, and could you believe I did that! Man, I used to drink a 30-pack a night!” I never heard general anything when I used to go to meetings, unless by general we refer to a lack of sophistication and understanding of one’s problem and what to do about it (i.e. a really dull, general story that is generally incoherent and has zero usefulness). I never heard a summary of the alcoholic mind and body… what it means to think, feel and drink/use the way we do.
     I also never heard the “what happened” part because nothing did happen. There was no summation of recovery or the process underwent to achieve it. And “what we are like now” was for the most part frightening. “If you have decided you want what we have…” Question: Have you ever gone to an AA meeting and seen something that you wanted? I guess I should ask what we want? Mere physical sobriety? I’m all set. I want to be strong, centered, grounded, balanced, confident, calm, content and free. I want to be giving and useful and loving. I want to be sane again.
     “… are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps.” When we hear this in meetings, unless we have been taken through the Big Book by a recovered expert, then we undoubtedly won’t have a clue what this really means. Ready to take certain steps does not mean that you make some meeting your home group, become the treasurer, make coffee, set up chairs and just keep comin’.
     Taking certain steps means that we embark on a rigorous Twelve Step process – we get up, leave the meeting, and actually take the actions involved in the Steps to expel a lifetime of poison within. We change who and what we are. We restore ourselves to sanity via a spiritual experience in order to equip ourselves with the tools and the condition necessary to go help others. The point of the Twelve Steps is solely to get to that Twelfth step – to go out and help another alcoholic/addict recover by taking him through the same, mystical process we just went through.
     So “willing to go to any length” means that there is nothing we won’t do in order to become recovered. There is nothing we won’t write about in our inventory. There is nothing we won’t unearth or admit because of the shame or embarrassment we have. There is nobody we won’t make an amends to. There is no part of us – our stubbornness, our pride, our ego – which will prevent us from having faith in GOD and from believing that we cannot do it without His help.
     Willing to go to any length means that there is no feeling or thought, no matter how horrible or dark or powerful, which will prevent us from doing the right thing. Going to any length means that even if you have recently gotten sober and you are still a miserable prick, you don’t let your self-pity and your selfishness stop you from growing and taking actions that need to be taken in order to achieve and maintain spiritual health.
     It would be great if one of the chairmen/women of the local meetings around here would stop when he or she reads that line and look everyone in the room straight in the eye and ask if they are really willing to go to any length to get better. Because really, we have no excuse not to. We owe it to ourselves, our families, our spouses, and to the entire world. We owe it to God. The program is about humility, not stories and stature and “how much clean time you got, kid”. Put your sobriety chip away until you’ve done some work on yourself. And even then, the only chip we really need is a 24-hour.
God, teach us to love and accept ourselves so that we may love and accept each other and do Your work well…

The Privileged Addict, pp.154-155

Posted on by under Uncategorized

     “What can I do? I’ll do anything. We’ll do anything. What’s it gonna’ take? You name it, any doctor, treatment, medication, rehab, anything. There must be something I can do!”      
     Back then I didn’t know how to tell Mom that there was absolutely nothing neither she nor anyone else could do. There was nothing I could take, nothing I could learn, nothing that could be beaten into me, nothing that all the money in the world could buy that would cure me. My problem wasn’t even really drugs and booze, but what happened to me in their absence. The truth? I was missing something, and it was now time to fill up the abyss. It was time to rely on something other than my fucked up head to guide me through life. It was time to evolve and to learn how to pray. 
     So I took a 3rd Step. I wrote it out on a piece of paper to make sure I did it perfectly, and then met some fellow junkies in the chapel. I brought a pillow for my bony knees because I was still a little wimp. We knelt down and held hands. Sadness overcame me and I began crying as we recited the prayer together.    
     “God, I offer myself to Thee – to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!” Alcoholics Anonymous, 63. 
 -TPA, pp.154-155