Category Archives: Action

Don’t Care How You Feel & Don’t Care What You Believe

Posted on by under Action, Beliefs, CBT, Feelings, Talking, Therapy, Whining
Spirituality isn’t about trying to achieve constant rapture. It’s about facing reality and being human. 
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     Charlie, we really don’t care how you feel. Getting better has nothing to do with feelings. It’s all action…

     That is by far the most helpful thing anybody has ever said to me. Often when I start working with someone, they go on endless rants about how they feel – “Yeah but this, yeah but that…” It’s always that somehow their addiction makes sense because of how they feel. And the best is that I don’t understand. I don’t understand how they feel so screwed over by someone, so unheard, so misunderstood, so alone, so weak, so useless, so depressed, so not living up to their potential, so blah, blah, blah. Um, yeah, I get it. I whined too about how nobody understands. I justified using drugs and alcohol like an absolute pig because of the way I felt. “Well, you would be drinking and sniffing heroin too if you went through what I went through!”
     Um, no, sorry. Most people don’t do that. And yes, they even suffer, too.

     This is why therapy is such a joke. Addicts who I sponsor say, “Yeah bro, the Steps are great but I also want to dig into my stuff, my feelings. You need to know how I feel, man!” No, I don’t. And fine, call me a sociopath but I really don’t care. CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has it completely backwards. Addicts and alcoholics are so fucked in the head, we can’t think our way into right action. We just need to shut up and start acting our way into right thinking…

     I also don’t care what you believe. It really doesn’t matter compared to what you do. You can believe in the most noble, lofty principles in the world and still be a useless sack. You can believe in every good thing in the world and never truly evolve or grow spiritually. You can have your doctrine of choice memorized front to back and never really change at all. You can be one of those religious show-offs who throws passages around like no other and still be a deranged monster. What matters is what we do, not what we believe.

     Bottom line: Getting better has nothing to do with our feelings. In fact, our feelings quite often prevent us from getting better. The most important thing any addict wanting to get better can do is to drop his preoccupation with SELF. Stop focusing on how you feel because the truth is it doesn’t matter and nobody cares anyway. We need to walk through our feelings without broadcasting them on the nightly news. It is action, not feelings or beliefs, that will ultimately give us freedom.

God, please give me the willingness and the power to grow along spiritual lines…

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… 

Don’t Care How You Feel

Posted on by under Action, Beliefs, CBT, Feelings

     Charlie, we really don’t care how you feel. Getting better has nothing to do with feelings. It’s all action…


     This is by far the most helpful thing anybody has ever said to me. Most of the time, when I start working with an addict, they go on endless rants about how they feel – Yeah but this, yeah but that… It’s always that somehow their addiction makes sense because of how they feel. And the best is that I don’t understand. I don’t understand that they feel so screwed over by someone, so unheard, so misunderstood, so alone, so weak, so useless, so disable, so depressed, so not living up to their potential, so blah, blah, blah. Um, yeah, I get it. I whined too about how nobody understands. I justified using drugs like a pig because of the way I felt.

     “Well, you would be drinking and sniffing heroin too if you knew what I was going through!”

     Bullshit.

     This is why therapy is such a joke. Addicts who I sponsor say, “Yeah the Steps are great but I also want to dig into my stuff, my feelings. You need to know how I feel, man.”

     No, I don’t.

     And fine, call me a sociopath but I really don’t care. I also don’t care what you believe. All I care about is what you do. What actions are you going to take? Bottom line: Getting better truly has nothing to do with our feelings. In fact, our feelings quite often prevent us from getting better. The most important thing any addict wanting to get better can do is to drop his preoccupation with self. Stop focusing on how you feel because the truth is it doesn’t matter and nobody cares anyway. We need to walk through our feelings without broadcasting them on the nightly news. 

    Getting better has nothing to do with feelings. It has everything to do with action. CBT has it completely backwards. Addicts and alcoholics are so fucked in the head, we can’t think our way into right action. We need to just shut up and start acting our way into right thinking…

See Also: Don’t Care What You Believe

God, give me the power, strength and willingness not to let my feelings stop me…