I’ve definitely changed my tune over the years.
As much as I’d like to think recovery and God can be beaten into others, it cannot. I try to offer what I can and educate through experience, but I cannot actually change anyone. Nobody has ever recovered because of me, nor will they. If you recovered because I helped you, the truth is that you would have recovered anyway. The truth is that you were looking for it and someone just happened to be there to lay the solution at your feet. If not me, it would’ve been someone else. You were simply meant to recover.
The best you can do is pray and take care of yourself. Just like we must give our own lives over to God, we must also give our loved ones and even our children over to God as well. Even if you try to hold on, it is pointless, for they belong to God anyway. Control will be ripped out of your hands like a thief in the night. If we come to truly understand and accept this, it really is absolute freedom.
You can’t stop fate.
When push comes to shove, no matter how much you try to manipulate something, if someone is going to become an addict, they will become an addict, and they will use as long as they are meant to. If they are going to recover, they will recover. If they are going to die, they will die. Nothing you think, say or do is going to interfere with our ultimate fate.
Forcing your will accomplishes nothing. Never has, never will. Control is just an illusion. The addict will only change if he or she is meant to change. Some do, some don’t. Sorry. All you can really do is observe the present. Reality is your ultimate fact. If your addict is still an addict, that is meant to be because that is what’s happening. You can’t argue with what is, with the way things are.
I still believe that if someone gives their whole life (not 99%) to the Steps and to God, they will not fail, but what is also true is that some of us will just never do that, and that is the fate which I speak of. So you can try to beat it into us all you want but it is a waste of time. I just tell people now, “When you’re ready get better and change, give me a call. Otherwise, don’t call me.” Some of us are not chosen to recover. Yes, chosen.
So even if you think that your intervention is what saved some addict, it isn’t. If he or she recovers, they were going to recover anyway, intervention or not. And if an addict does not recover, they were never going to, so don’t beat yourself up because nothing you could have done would have prevented the outcome.
I know I always say that cause and effect exists and that what we do creates and shapes the world we leave behind, and while that is certainly true to an extent (in the shorter term) and while we can certainly alter our own personal direction, in the larger sense, it is somewhat irrelevant, for we will probably wind up in the same place.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. We think we can manipulate things, but we cannot. We think we can manipulate the entire world, but the world is going where is the world is going. Though we may like to give ourselves credit for influencing certain outcomes and changing, it is just a figment of our imagination. We cannot touch the power behind natural cycles, the power behind the forces of nature and its inevitable trajectory.
There is a blueprint. There is an order to things. The chaos is actually quite organized.
I know this concept is hard to grasp but we should come to grips with it to mitigate the internal agony of expectation, and also so we don’t get totally slaughtered out there in the real world. This is why people lose so much money trying to invest, or maybe that’s just because they are trusting some money manager at a bank or investment firm, which is a guaranteed loss. The only people who make money understand and respect cycles. And all of this doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to sit on your ass, because it is. We should work hard regardless of the outcome, just for the sake of working hard, just because it is the right thing to do…
See also: Posts Geared for Parents, Spouses & Codependents
God, please remove any delusions of grandeur I may have in thinking I can control and manipulate that which lies outside of myself…
1. Being compassionate and offering advice/a shoulder may not change a trajectory, but it may change how someone feels/support a breaking heart. Sometimes that is worth more.
2. Have you ever seen the movie The Premonition? This kind of reminded me of that. Once you change something to the way you think it should be corrected, you really are only just changing it to what it already was going to be anyway – your interruption is already figured in.
Interesting. Sort of the long version of “it is what it is?”
Someone will recover if they are chosen to recover – okay, chosen by whom? God? Does that mean God chooses some people to have a wasted life and have an early death? Please forgive me if I have misunderstood. I thought if a person recovered or not, depended on what they themselves chose. We all have a free will.
So I just erased what I first wrote, as I was annoyed at someone else close to me from earlier today. At any rate, what I meant is that two guys can go up North as I did, do the same amount of work, give it 100%, and one has a spiritual experience that restores him and the other does not. One guy's obsession is lifted while the other's is not, and I can no longer answer as to why that is, other than perhaps fate. I used to be convinced that the guy who was not touched must have left something out or not really given 100%, but now I'm not so sure. Plus I know other guys who sort of half-assed it and were still touched by something and their obsession was removed.
Understand that I sit down in the bathroom or something and write a these posts in a couple of minutes. Many of them are just my thoughts at the time, so feel free to take what you will and also feel free to leave the rest. As you astutely commented, the choice is yours! 😉
Exactly, Lor! And yes, I saw Premonition, cool movie. We cannot escape the inevitability of the very cycles which define us and all of existence… I guess. Who knows?!
Okay, thank you for clarifying. That makes more sense to me. I am not sure that I believe in Fate, but I understand what you are saying.
Hey no problem, thanks for writing. I'm not sure I do either! 😉 I have changed my life… would that have happened had I not done the work I did in treatment and afterwards? Definitely not.
Also, sorry if my first comment sounded snarky – I too was having a bad day yesterday. I discovered my SO, who I thought had been dry for nearly a year, has been hiding bottles around the house. No matter how many times that happens it's heartbreaking every time.