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Recovery Contest Winner #8: The Way Therapy Opened Me Up

November 19, 2018 by Genius Recovery

In honor of Recovery Month, we asked you to send us your stories about the impact community, nutrition or environment has had on your life since you put down substances and picked up life. Winners are not only receiving copies of our book, The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery, but are also being published here on the site.

This week we have Karen G.

Community definitely played and continues to play the most important part of getting to celebrate six years staying on the alcohol recovery road.

It started with my medical community—particularly the physician’s assistant who stayed with me for hours as I totally broke down and admitted I needed help. She got me through the worst—making many calls, scheduling office visits, checking on me and acting as my therapist those first few weeks.

Swallowing my pride and ego, I went to a therapist to finally address my inner pain. It took four different therapists until I found the right one for me. She listened to me, gave me encouragement and kindness when needed, and tough love and honesty when I needed that too.

Over one-and-a-half years, she guided me, going backwards through my life until I thoroughly got through each painful incident. Surprised, I realized hidden in my subconscious was the day I was born, teased by my family because I made dad miss his favorite TV show, Gunsmoke. I unknowingly added my own words to the teasing of not being lovable, but an inconvenience.

She helped me face the pain within not only from others, but from myself and my own self-defeatist words I told my inner victim mind. Getting through that was one of the hardest, most painful things I’ve ever done. I’m so grateful I faced it, or I’d still be in that pain. It was cleansing—crying deeply in therapy and at home. I learned then that we need to release ALL the pain, or it still owns you.

I now have those memories but without the pain attached.

I’ve learned, when I start to feel like a victim, to stop and tell myself that those words don’t have a place in my life any longer and can’t stay. I let myself feel the pain, anger and sadness but then it doesn’t get to move in and take up residence any longer.

I’ve been going to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me in the top 10% of extreme generalized anxiety clients; I’ve also been diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a low dose of medication, which has helped me immensely.

Recovery has included a six-week beginning yoga workshop a few months after I stopped drinking, which led me to a different community of individuals I saw as “interesting” before. That started my journey experiencing different styles of yoga and meditation classes, going to two different healers, learning breath techniques and opening a whole new area of inner growth and tools to help me.

Finally, attending motivational self-help events and sharing with others during group exercises helped me realize I wasn’t alone in my painful experiences. I have become great friends with many who are my community now. Podcasts, Facebook Lives, other social media events and trainings also help to keep me on my new road of sobriety.

It’s not always easy not drinking, but I get to enjoy truly living again and creating new meaningful memories with my daughter, husband and so many others I’m so grateful for.

Stars Are NOT Just Like Us When It Comes to Staying Sober

November 15, 2018 by Genius Recovery

Demi Lovato. Ben Affleck. Whichever celebrity is getting a DUI this week.

There’s no shortage of news about celebrities and their predilection for substances. While so-called regular folks may shake their heads at what appear to be people who have everything but are intent on destroying their lives, the fact is the cunning and baffling nature of addiction can be especially challenging when you’re famous.

Why else would Demi Lovato throw away years of sobriety and come close to ending her life, as she did last July?

Even once stars are clean, the criticism doesn’t stop. According to Yahoo! Lifestyle, Lovato’s goal is to “’live a more relaxed lifestyle before she dives back into working.’” Still, the article continued, “Although most fans are happy to see Lovato looking healthy, the star has been the target of hurtful comments about her weight. ‘Damn she got fat,’ one person commented. ‘She turkied up,’ another added.”

Fat-shaming in itself is cruel but when strangers are criticizing the weight of someone who has been open about struggling with an eating disorder, the commentary steps over the line into abusive.

“’When I feel lonely, my heart feels hungry and I end up bingeing,’” Women’s Health magazine quoted Lovato saying in her documentary Simply Complicated. The magazine reported that “Demi traced her issues with eating back to her childhood, noting that she first began bingeing when she was 8, after her little sister was born and she felt like less attention was on her.”

“’The less I have to think about food, the easier it is to go about having a normal life and I don’t want to let anybody down so when I do have moments when I slip up, I feel very ashamed,’” she said, according to Women’s Health.

Those who work in the field of recovery understand how closely tied drugs and food are.

“’It has been stated before that food is the most overused ‘drug’ to treat anxiety or depression, and exercise is the most underutilized antidepressant,” Dr. Vijaya Surampudi, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Human Nutrition who works in the Center of Obesity and Metabolic Health at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) told Healthline. “Many people then start to feel ashamed or hopeless to reach out for help so they start to develop disordered eating patterns to work on weight control.’”

Healthline continues, “For many people, disordered eating can be a lifelong battle. ‘It is unfortunately a lifelong struggle with their relationship with food once it starts so early,” she [Surampudi] said.”

But Lovato isn’t the only star battling the gossip mill. Since completing treatment, Ben Affleck has been the victim of constant rumors that he’s relapsed, even when he’s out promoting a movie.

“Several reports surfaced over the weekend claiming that the 46-year-old actor had re-entered rehab,” reported accessonline.com, “but a source close to the situation tells Access that they are 100 percent false. In fact, Ben was actually out at a Celebrity Fan Fest convention with his Justice League pals in San Antonio, Texas.

Ray Fisher, who plays Cyborg in the hit franchise, posted a photo with his co-star at the event and shared it on Twitter.

‘Catching up with this guy today in San Antonio @celebfanfest Come check us out! #BORGLIFE @benaffleck,’ Ray wrote alongside the smiling snap,” according to accessonline.com.

Affleck entered rehab in August, after photos surfaced of him accepting deliveries of large boxes of alcohol. (He had already made headlines for going to treatment in both 2001 and 2007.) While he’s now back at work (on Gavin O’Connor’s Torrance, where he’s actually playing a former All-Star basketball player who’s battling addiction), Warner Bros. seems to have pulled the plug on his Batman movie.

But gossip isn’t the only things that makes sobriety challenging for celebrities.

It’s also the fact that recovery requires humility and one of the greatest keys to success is the ability to understand that you’re just like everyone else. “Addiction takes people from Yale and people from jail,” says Darren Prince, a recovery advocate and the author of the bestselling book Aiming High: How a Prominent Sports Agent Hit Bottom at the Top.

Prince, who is over 10 years sober after a crippling addiction to opiates, is more than familiar with the travails of celebrities struggling to stay sober. He is, after all, the longtime agent to Dennis Rodman (not to mention Hulk Hogan, Magic Johnson and many others).

“When you have everyone coming at you all the time and a lot of yes-people catering to your every need, it can be hard to keep everything in perspective,” Prince explains.

That’s something that Affleck seems to be coming to understand. “Battling any addiction is a lifelong and difficult struggle,” the actor wrote on Instagram. “Because of that, one is never really in or out of treatment. It is a full-time commitment. I am fighting for myself and my family. So many people have reached out on social media and spoken about their own journeys with addiction. To those people, I want to say thank you. Your strength is inspiring and supporting me in ways I didn’t think was possible.”

Above that, he wrote, “The support I have received from my family, colleagues, and fans means more to me than I can say. It’s given me the strength to support and speak about my illness with others.”

“It helps to know I am not alone,” he added. “As I’ve had to remind myself, if you have a problem, getting help is a sign of courage, not weakness or failure.”

How Sobriety Led Me to a New Career

November 14, 2018 by Lisa Bennett

Getting stuck is one of my specialties. Over the years, I’ve been mired in circumstances, relationships and places, afraid to pick up my feet and move on. Change terrifies me because I know it will put my talents, skills, and toughness to the test—and I have long questioned whether I’m truly as smart and tenacious as I’d like to believe.

Countless times my friends listened to me complain about how stressed I was at work, how I just couldn’t take it anymore. And yet I stayed with that employer for nearly two decades. It wasn’t until I found myself sobbing in the shower one morning that I finally committed to finding a new job.

But my longest lasting rut was that of enthusiastic drinker. Talk about holding onto something that was getting me nowhere! I had to reach middle age before I could admit to myself that rather than enhancing my life, alcohol was holding me back. It was like continually putting the wrong address in my GPS and hoping it might lead me to the correct destination anyway.

In the year and a half since I quit drinking, I have experienced many of the predictable benefits of being alcohol-free—more energy, more time and less drama. One unexpected byproduct is a radically decreased tolerance for anything in my life that doesn’t serve me.

After that 18-year-long pressure-packed job, I stayed with my next employer for a comparatively brief five years. I believe sobriety helped me recognize earlier that it was time to go. Of course, it helped that my employer was planning a major reorganization and offered voluntary severance packages to those who were quick enough to say yes. Would I have jumped on that offer if I was still drinking? Possibly not.

Decision Time

My severance package allowed me to spend much of the summer contemplating what I wanted to do next. I am grateful for that opportunity, because I believe that many of us fall into careers early in adulthood and find it hard to change paths. Our jobs may take advantage of our skills and build upon our experience, but do they really suit us? If they don’t, we may stay regardless because we’re not sure if we can cut it financially.

I struggled with guilt over not wanting to go back to the marketing communications work for which I was highly qualified. Starting over would likely mean a significant decrease in salary, and I would be competing against people who had more relevant experience.

Was it fair to ask my husband to work with me to tighten our belts while I explored other options? At the same time, was it fair to keep pushing myself to apply for positions that made me anxious just reading the job descriptions?

Much like quitting drinking, it didn’t make sense to wait any longer. If I was going to try something different, the sooner the better.

Outside My Comfort Zone

As I suspected, my confidence is being put to the test. After working in offices at the national level my entire adult life, I am now working part-time at a local business while trying to build up a freelance writing portfolio. In both realms, I am well outside my comfort zone.

As I perform community outreach for my part-time job, I’ve discovered that I really like meeting and talking to new people. My heat still thumps as if I’m literally putting my life on the line by asking a stranger to partner with our business. But it’s a different kind of anxiety from the frustration I felt when I considered returning to my previous field. It’s a feeling of nervous, raw energy that signals discovery and creation.

Before I stepped out of my car the other day, it occurred to me that life is a lot like a workout routine. You can keep repeating the same exercises at the same speed and level of difficulty, but if you’re not being challenged, you’re probably not going to make much progress.

In every facet of my life, I’m only going to see results if I push myself harder.

Fuel for the Journey

As I try to live in the moment and enjoy the growth that I am experiencing, I will remind myself that nothing is permanent. If I find that my current job is not a good fit—after giving it a respectable trial period, of course—then I must not let embarrassment, stubbornness or fear keep me from expanding my search.

Trying to get my writing published and noticed is a whole other story—that process is always going to be scary and agonizing. Yet I refuse to turn my back on my potential any longer, no matter how stripped bare it makes me feel.

So, I’ve collected a few quotes that I plan to read as many times as I need to, and I’d like to share them with you:

“No one is coming to rescue you from yourself: your inner demons, your lack of confidence, your dissatisfaction with yourself and your life. Only self-love and good decisions will rescue you.”

― Jenni Young

“Respond to every call that excites your spirit.”

― Rumi

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

― Virginia Woolf

“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.”

― Maya Mendoza

“Fear is boring, because fear only ever has one thing to say to us, and that thing is: ‘STOP!'”

― Elizabeth Gilbert

Now here’s to embracing those quotes the way I’ve embraced my decision to quit drinking. Who’s with me?

Recovery Contest Winner #7: How Nutrition and Spirituality Keep Me Sober

November 12, 2018 by Genius Recovery

This week we have Kristine Pappone.

The question I always get is: How did you do it?

After 10 years of a serious daily diet of opioids how did you get off without treatment or 12-step program and not relapse? My response goes something like this: I focused on and constantly fed my want and I wanted my freedom. I told myself, “It’s not an option to do my drugs.” Even if it meant crying all day and letting the pain bleed out of me, it was not an option to reach for drugs.

The foundation of my recovery is my Buddhist practice of chanting one to two hours a day. Having a way to access my true self beyond the conscious mind is a true gift. And given I have little patience, chanting works quickly. Each day I am engaged in helping others do their human revolution through Buddhist practice and supporting our community dedicated to peace through individual happiness.

Nutrition played a key role in both my getting off and staying off opioids. Because I’ve been in the holistic health field for over 30 years, I had the knowledge on how to detox and eat healthy. For the first year, I focused on building my brain through high protein and good fats. I also rebuilt my biochemistry through high doses of vitamins and minerals as well as amino acids. Foods and supplements continue to be an integral element of my recovery. I often suggest to those in recovery, “If you do nothing else, drink a ton of good water with either sea salt or lemon.” Hydration is not an option. Simple drink. Clean water.

My practice of kundalini yoga and being an active part of the yoga community is also crucial to my recovery. Even if I only have 15 minutes a day, I make sure to breathe deeply. It will calm my nervous system without me having to think about it. Love it. A highlight of my recovery has been weekly EMDR sessions with a rock star therapist for the past few years. Healing the pain through EMDR has contributed to my human revolution and provided a peace within that I treasure.

I do my part of recovery with Buddhist practice, nutrition, yoga and EMDR. However, nothing is solo. My life mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, encourages me daily through his writings. And I owe each day of recovery to Dr. Gabor Mate. His wisdom and words have inspired me for the past eight years. As I come upon seven years of celebrating my freedom from opioids, I do so with a heart of abundant appreciation for all those who contribute to my recovery. And to repay my debt of gratitude through serving others.

Finding My Way in Gay AA—and Everywhere Else

November 7, 2018 by Sean Paul Mahoney

The first meeting I ever went to was not a gay AA meeting. Quite the opposite. It was a noon meeting in the library of a senior living facility in downtown Los Angeles. I’m pretty sure I picked one outside of my hip Silver Lake neighborhood because I was horrified at the idea of running into someone I knew.

Once there, I was greeted by an older man in a red sweater vest who hugged me and told, “I love this meeting! I’ve been coming here for 25 years.” My first thought was, “Oh crap. I have to do this for 25 years?!?” My second thought was I better make sure I find my people.

My people, I thought, meant queer people, cool people, gay people. Thankfully, getting sober in LA meant there were dozens of LGBTQ meetings happening every night of the week so surely my gay sober tribe was out there.

I often say I walked out of the closet and into a bar, which isn’t 100% correct because I was sneaking into bars way before I was officially out of the closet or even 21. But the point is being a gay man in the 1990’s meant you went to gay bars and lots of them as a right of passage into queer culture. It’s just what we did.

If you were a young gay man like myself who already had a problematic relationship with substances since the age of 14, it also meant you drank constantly and did a lot of drugs. For me, the two were so enmeshed with one another. Gay men got drunk. Again, it’s just what we did. So at age 36 when I was getting sober with my twink gay bar days long behind me, I was forced to reinvent what a gay community looked like without drugs or alcohol.

Oddly enough I can’t remember what my first gay meeting was but I’m nearly positive it was a meeting in the community room in a park in Santa Monica. It wasn’t filled with the trashy, cool kid types I used to share space on the nightclub guest list with; the meeting was more of the cozy variety. Everybody hugged each other. Everybody clapped for each other. Folks chatted around the coffee and cake. I think there may have even been a lesbian knitting. Look, I didn’t know if these were my people but they all seemed nice enough and they all talked about staying sober, something I didn’t know my people could even do, so I decided to come back.

What happened when I came back to that gay meeting and dozens of others in Los Angeles is I eventually found my people. The only thing? They didn’t look like the gays I used to drink and do coke with. Most of them looked even better. These people had relationships, jobs and in general their collective shit together.

Plus they laughed all the time, helped people just because they wanted to and stopped smoking years ago. In short, they intimidated me. But I was fascinated that these nice, happy queer folks could stay sober and some of them even wanted to be friends.

Now, I wouldn’t be exactly living a program of honesty if I didn’t admit that part of the appeal of going to gay meetings was the plethora of cute gay boys to be found in those places. Fairly quickly, however, I discovered two things:

1) It wasn’t exactly the healthiest dating pool on earth. As my friend once said about dating in AA, “The odds are good but the goods are odd.” Nine times out of ten, the guy I thought was the cutest in the room was also the person who’d share about having three days sober and being on his way to prison.

2) I wasn’t exactly the healthiest either! Let’s just say nobody wanted what this busted lemonade stand was selling.

It was best, I realized, to focus on improving myself and try for the first time in my life to have healthy relationships with gay men.

What queer meetings did for me was something gay bars were never able to do: give me a real community. Here were people from backgrounds like mine who knew what I went through, not only as a gay man but also as an alcoholic and addict.

Plus, since my people are inherently extra in the best sense of the word, gay meetings are extra too. Many have Rocky Horror-style responses when the 12 steps are read. Others have an extensive, nearly catered snack table. I even went to a gay meeting in the Valley that had a pianist who would play intro music before the meeting started and “Happy Birthday” for people celebrating sobriety milestones. But the main thing I found with gay meetings in LA was an honesty that cut right to the chase of all the problems that plagued me and caused me to drink for decades. I laughed a lot in those rooms but I also cried a lot and learned how to call myself out on problematic behavior.

It was the sober gay men in AA who told me that I was going to be okay when I got my HIV diagnosis.

It was the queer people of AA who showed up for me when I celebrated turning a year sober.

By doing so they taught me how to show up for others too.

The more meetings I went to in my first year of sobriety, the more I discovered that all recovering addicts and alcoholics were my people, regardless of their sexual orientation. The tolerance and honesty I learned in gay AA meetings bled over into my attendance at mixed meetings. This was a good thing, especially when I moved to Colorado where 12-step groups are decidedly more bro-filled. The longer I stayed sober and the more straight meetings I went to, the less it mattered if the crowd was straight or gay. Besides, any meeting with me in it is a gay meeting. Now my tribe suddenly isn’t just queer but all kinds of sober people who accept me and love me for who I am.

Currently, I am blessed to be surrounded a group of gay men who I get to walk alongside as we deal with life sober. It’s now my turn to tell them that they can stay sober and that no matter what they’ll be okay. Miraculously, most of them have stayed sober. This is no small feat when you consider the numbers (SAMSHA data from 2015 suggests that sexual minorities—lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gay men like myself—are far more likely then there straight counterparts to struggle with addiction, mental health and to commit suicide.) It’s a staggering thought but if gay AA has taught me anything it’s that we don’t have to do it alone, we don’t have to live a life of dishonesty and we don’t have to do it without piano music.

Recovery Contest Winner #6: Sharing My Story Gives Me a Community

November 5, 2018 by Genius Recovery

This week we have Nancy Carr.

I’ve been sober for over 14 years. My prior life was a cesspool of drugs, alcohol and dispensable people that I used to get what I wanted. I was okay with my lifestyle, even thought it was pretty cool at times.

What I didn’t realize was how much I truly didn’t like myself. I just accepted that this was how my life was going to be. I kept searching for the right guy, the right job, the right town to fix me. I thought my problem was that I needed a husband. So, that’s what my quest was, and what I found were people I wouldn’t want to be seen in the light of day with…along with an alcohol and cocaine problem.

I got sober after my second DUI, and even though I didn’t think my problem was that bad, in actuality it was. I walked into a 12-step meeting to get sober, and haven’t looked back since. In my first year, the changes were so extraordinary. Waking up with money in my pocket, knowing where I was in the morning and not hungover gave me a completely healthy and happy outlook on my life and how if I stayed the course, would remain.

During my first year, which by far was the most important, I had a number of “A-Ha” moments, mainly because I was going through the 12 steps and learning how to be whole again. Being around my family who drank, and going to concerts, and celebrating my birthday and holidays—sober was a complete change from how I lived my live for over 22 years.

I never worked out before I got sober. I would do the occasional walk or hike with friends, but I didn’t care about my body and I was always too tired or too busy partying to care. When I got sober, I started doing yoga, running, and hiking, and taking care of my physical body for what it was and to start loving, nourishing and embracing it. Even the parts I don’t like—belly, thighs, butt; all of it is a work in progress.

What I found out about myself when I got sober is that I’m a pretty likable person who has a valuable purpose. I found my purpose early on and that was to share my story with others and to let them know it’s okay to be scared when you know you have a problem with alcohol or drugs. All you need to do is reach out for help. And that’s the hardest part…getting honest and asking for help.

Before I even got sober, I started writing short stories and essays to just keep on my laptop. Then when I started getting sober I began journaling about my story. What came out of that was my own memoir, Last Call, and a blog where I can share my sober life experiences.

Is Media Use the Next Habit I Need to Kick?

October 31, 2018 by Lisa Bennett

Long before my first sip of alcohol, television offered a reliable way to escape anxiety or boredom. I could avoid chores, homework or my own thoughts by plopping in front of the TV, which was always on in our house as I was growing up.

Our TV was on a stand with wheels so that we could swivel it around to face the dining table while we ate meals and then back again to the living room. My childhood was filled with cartoons, Disney movies, sitcoms, dramas, variety shows, talk shows—you name it, I watched it.

The Real Housewives wasn’t around back then, but the soap opera Guiding Light allowed me to indulge in other people’s lives that were both fancier and way more messed up than my own. If I wanted to fantasize about being part of a big family, I could watch The Brady Bunch or Eight is Enough. And if needed to laugh, reruns of Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy were almost always on.

Before there was YouTube, my friends and I were glued to MTV watching music videos for hours after school. And pre-Netflix and Hulu, cable made it possible to watch movies without having to wait for them to air on fuzzy UHF channels.

My TV habit followed me throughout my life. During college and for a few years after, I spent more time partying than viewing. But by my mid-20s I had settled into a simple routine: If I was home and awake, the TV was on.

I even had a Sony Watchman—a portable TV about the size and shape of a cordless house phone—that I carried around with me in the late 1980s. It worked like a transistor radio (with an antenna), had terrible reception and the display was black and white, but I loved that thing!

More Screens, More Distraction

The arrival of the home computer and internet access were mixed blessings. I could play around on my desktop and actually produce useful things, unlike the passive practice of watching TV. But it was so easy to sit down at my computer with good intentions and then spend hours surfing websites and feeding my obsession with fonts and clip art.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time uploading music from CDs to my computer and creating the 1990s equivalent of the mixed tape. Once iTunes and iPods came along, it was even easier to get lost in the challenge of putting together the perfect playlist.

With the introduction of smartphones, I now had constant stimulation and diversion at my fingertips 24-7. It didn’t take long for me to ramp up my usage and develop an itchy hand, automatically reaching for my phone at any pause in human interaction.

The new normal became: Wake up and check email, social media and the weather app while still in bed, and then turn on the TV to watch the news. Listen to podcasts on my commute to and from work. Check my phone throughout the day at the office. Turn on the TV at home as soon as I walk in the door. Binge watch my favorite shows or channel surf while also scrolling through my phone. Watch late night talk shows in the bedroom and then check social media one last time. If insomnia rears its head, my phone is always a grasp away on the nightstand. Sound familiar?

Struggling to Moderate

About three years ago I began admitting to myself that alcohol and media consumption were stealing time from my life—time that could be spent doing so much more. Despite this knowledge, I struggled with moderating both habits.

With alcohol, it became clear that I was not going to achieve my personal goals without removing it from my life entirely. But I wasn’t yet prepared to drastically limit my TV and social media use.

I started with a few simple objectives:

No more TV in the mornings
Keep the TV off as much as possible on the weekends
Appointment TV only—no more surfing and watching whatever seems tolerable

I’m pleased to report that I achieved victory on all three! That said…

I still watch about one to two hours of TV in the evenings, every night, plus about 30 minutes of talk shows before bed. It’s how I relax and spend time with my husband. I am much more rigorous now about adding new shows to my schedule—they really have to knock my socks off. Given the quantity and quality of programming, however, it’s not hard to fill every night of the week with worthy shows.

Much like with drinking, I feel like I’ve discovered my TV threshold—the lowest I can go without quitting altogether. At this level, I am no longer consumed by my viewing, but neither am I totally free. I’m feeding my habit just enough to keep it alive.

Social media has proven even more difficult to moderate, and I know I’m not alone. I’ve seen many people announcing that they’re taking digital breaks only to come back sooner than planned.

Numerous times I’ve instituted periods where I allow myself to scroll through social media for only two 15-minute periods per day. I almost always cheat and then quickly go back to business as usual. The fact that so many of us use social media for our careers and to stay up-to-date on the news makes social media fasting seem near impossible.

Reasons to Quit

Quitting drinking a year-and-a-half ago was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I suspect that abandoning my media habit would also produce amazing results.

As I weigh my next move, I’ve been building up the rationale for a total TV blackout and a strict social media diet:

Time: I will gain a minimum of seven hours a week for writing and other activities if I give up TV viewing. Halting the practice of picking up my phone every few minutes will help me focus and get tasks done faster.

Calm: News and political opinion overload is stress inducing. I can literally feel my blood pressure rising as I engage in pointless online debates. Whenever I step away from this kind of interaction, I feel less anxious.

Growth: Immersion in media/tech leaves little to no time for self-reflection and can interfere with personal development. I’ve learned so much about myself in the time since I stopped drinking.

I’ve already tried changing my home screen to grayscale, and I plan to experiment with other “take control of your phone” ideas on the Center for Humane Technology’s website.

There’s so much inspiration out there, and within, if we just tune in to the right sources. I’ll end with a quote from the book Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge:

“I tend to think about silence as a practical method for uncovering answers to the intriguing puzzle that is yourself, and for helping to gain new perspective on whatever is hiding beyond the horizon.”

Recovery Contest Winner #5: Community, Nutrition and Environment in Recovery

October 29, 2018 by Genius Recovery

This week we have Mike Mather.

After 30 years of alcoholism, the prelude to the sober journey was quite unglamorous—with two-and-a-half years of relapsing, valium, AA and church in a vicious, delicious and delirious cycle.

Then the penny dropped.

Completely out of the blue I realized that I had to do 90 meetings in 90 days like they had been telling me from the beginning, and start praying and meditating. I shipped myself off to a Buddhist Centre that I accidentally found out about and went to AA meetings every day.

My demented mother had been my career for the year that passed since Dad had died. I now began to take the helm, and I enrolled in a Diploma of Business too.

Having devoured mountains of books on nutrition and alternative health practices, I began to implement some nutritional supplementation along with mindful eating.

That was week one.

For a while, I believed I had discovered a secret that only a few would ever know. My sobriety was going to be different, special, unusually brilliant. I know now I’m more than a little bipolar, and also prone to delusions of grandeur.

I have remained a strict vegetarian now for 10 years.

Having successfully completed the Diploma of Business, I plowed heavily into service work at AA. Then last year I had a calling to study again and I am enrolled in a Bachelor of Environmental Science degree. I had mediocre success in the first year and am currently taking a break and writing about alcoholism and Buddhism on my website and podcast.

My recovering alcoholic girlfriend, Heather, just turned 65 and is two weeks short of her first academic accreditation: Associate Degree of Arts. We sometimes don’t see eye to eye because she is a Zen student and I am Tibetan. C’est la vie!

We still don’t know what to do when we grow up. She seems to have a leaning towards Ayurvedic traditions maybe, but I believe that I was born to be an author.

Since reading The Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery, I wake up and brush my teeth at 5 am each day (nearly) and the results are astounding so far as my blogging and podcasting work is concerned. My girlfriend has been an early morning yogini for years though.

We still are frequent meeting goers. We are mindful of our environmental impact and eat very nutritionally. If I could give advice to newcomers to recovery, I would definitely say that looking after the mind and body is paramount to success.

What Do We Do with a Gray Area Drinker?

October 24, 2018 by Lisa Bennett

When I decided to stop drinking in May of 2017, I knew I would eventually write publicly about my journey. Even before I made the choice, I started jotting down my thoughts about alcohol—the hold it had on my life, the challenges of drinking moderately, and the reasons why quitting was starting to look like the obvious solution.

Three months into my recovery, I revealed to Facebook friends and my blog’s tiny audience that I had managed to stay sober for the longest period yet in my adult life. I posted again at the five-month mark, at which point a few people suggested that it was time for me to congratulate myself and move on.

I don’t think so.

I’m rarely shy when it comes to sharing stories about my life. Nearly two decades of working in communications for a political organization helped me develop a pretty thick skin. I learned that no matter what a person says or how they say it, someone is going to find something in their words to criticize. But that shouldn’t keep us from speaking our truth.

My concern about writing on this topic stems not from a fear of being judged but from a suspicion that I don’t belong in the recovery community. You see, I’m what’s called a “gray area” or “high bottom” drinker. While I believe that I had an alcohol dependency, my habit never escalated to the level typically associated with people who quit drinking.

I was doing well at work, and my personal relationships were intact, but my dreams were stalled. Drinking had made my life repetitive and stagnant. My writing career and love of trying new things had been put on hold. This went on for decades.

Like many gray area drinkers, I tried all the tricks designed to keep alcohol at arm’s length but still within grasp. I counted drinks, tracked how many nights in a row I stayed dry, diluted my wine with seltzer, only drank when I was home or only drank when I was out, and so on. Nothing worked. My mind was more preoccupied than ever with thoughts of alcohol.

When I finally quit, I did so with the knowledge that I didn’t have to hit a disastrous rock bottom to recognize the negative impact alcohol was having on me. As a writer, I am eager to share this news with the world. As a longtime activist, I want to help others make the same realization as soon as possible.

But I worry that by talking about my “recovery,” I am claiming ground that belongs to those who have struggled more. The insecure, anxious woman who turned to alcohol for confidence and comfort is panicked at the thought of stepping on anyone’s toes.

Feeling like an outsider was a monster that haunted me throughout my childhood, adolescence, and into my adult years. The beast is clutching at my ankles again, even when I’m feeling my sharpest and bravest.

The only way I know to get past this fear is to march directly through it. So, I am sharing with you what recovery means to a gray area drinker like me.

Liberation

My drinking habit was like carrying a backpack full of bricks at all times. I could function, but something was always weighing me down. I often felt tired, cranky and frustrated with myself. Hangovers stole hours from me on weekend days when I should have been having fun or getting errands done. And when it had been a couple days since my last drink, I was consumed with thinking about my next one.

Taking off that backpack allowed me to wake up every morning with zero worries about what I’d said or done the night before. By the end of my drinking “career,” I wasn’t going out and doing crazy stuff anymore, but I was still capable of picking fights with my husband, drunk dialing friends and posting nonsense on social media.

Being clearheaded and liberated from the effects of alcohol is truly a gift.

Perspective

When I was deciding whether to quit entirely or continue trying to moderate my drinking, I worked hard to put aside my emotional attachment to alcohol and appeal to my logical side.

Despite overwhelming evidence that I felt better when I wasn’t drinking, I kept at it. What if I did the same thing at work, employing an ineffective strategy over and over? My boss would have taken me aside long ago and demanded that I try a new tactic.

So, as my own boss, I gave myself a “needs improvement” performance review and chose sobriety as the answer. The results were so successful that I am applying this lens to other aspects of my life. This means examining other deep-rooted practices and asking if they are serving me.

In the quest to live my best life, perspective is everything. Sobriety changed my vantage point.

Self-Respect

How many hours, how many nights did I spend drinking? Some of those events included laughing and bonding with dear friends, but many of them were more about getting drunk than anything else. What if I had spent even half of that time writing and taking on new challenges?

Alcohol allowed me to do things that would have been boring or foolish if sober. Some were minor infractions, like waiting at the bar for a table, getting buzzed and skipping dinner to get trashed. Some were more consequential, like barely making it to an early morning doctor’s appointment and then sleeping off a hangover in the back seat of my car.

Now that I’ve removed alcohol from the equation of my life, I find that I value my time far more. And what do we have if we don’t have time? In recovery, I’ve concluded that valuing your time is the highest form of self-respect.

Peace

Since girlhood, my brain has been full of obsessive thoughts—fear of death, fear of embarrassing myself, fear of being seen as unworthy of attention or respect. My first therapist put me on Zoloft to help me focus in our sessions. But alcohol was my favorite form of self-medication.

Drinking to slow down my mind was effective but not without serious side effects. Even worse, it was getting me nowhere. I was not learning how to deal with my stress or my penchant for latching onto a sense of dread and letting it flood my body and spirit.

Sobriety didn’t automatically bring peace to my mind. I had to take up meditation and yoga. I had to remember to pay attention to my breath in moments of distress. Taking away alcohol made space for these more productive solutions.

The transformation I am experiencing is slower and less noticeable than guzzling two or three glasses of wine. But one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t experienced that panicky feeling in weeks. I still get lost in worry and self-doubt on occasion, but I have the tools now to acknowledge those thoughts and then carry on.

Sharing these breakthroughs is why I am proud to take my place in the recovery community.

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