forgiveness

Red Alerts to Relapse

November 10, 2023 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

Terry was clearly stuck in his recovery program. He had been doing weekly therapy for 5+ years. In the beginning, his sessions were life-saving. He clung to every word his therapist uttered. He would often tell his recovery buddies that his therapist saved his life and that he wouldn’t be able to remain sober without his counselor’s guidance.

Over time the newness and glitz of insight began to fade. Terry noticed that he lacked enthusiasm to employ interventions suggested by his therapist. He began to isolate and not talk much about his feelings to anyone, including his therapist. Fantasies about masturbating to old images of internet nudity popped up with intense euphoric recall. At first, he allowed the inappropriate thoughts to linger. He would try to distract himself to avoid further dwelling on them. However, without consultation and accountability, he began to fuel the behavior by surfing “eye candy” on the internet, described as women wearing scantily clad clothing. It wasn’t frontal nudity but the images did trigger uncontested sexual arousal. From there was a short slide to masturbating to full-blown pornography. Terry had identified that this behavior was clearly against his values, and historically he had been powerless to stop his compulsive engagement with porn. Of course, he kept it all secret from his recovery peers and his therapist. He was stuck!

Relapse is predictable and probable in recovery from addiction. Preparing to manage relapse is an essential modus vivendi for every addict in recovery. Those without a plan to address relapse are individuals who are inevitably vulnerable to a long-term slide into old and familiar destructive addictive behavior.

In recovery, building lengthy sobriety is a worthy admirable goal. However, I have learned that what is more important than never having left the center of recovery is having skills to return to the center. Bringing yourself back to center is a skill set that requires discipline and conditioning.

You will need to learn to manage your inner critic whose intent is to discredit and undermine who you are and every effort you have ever made to achieve sobriety or fulfill a worthy goal in life.

Here is a list of desirable skills that will help you tame your inner critic and return to center whether you are an addict in relapse or simply out of balance and need help getting centered.

#1: Condition yourself with focused breathwork. It is important to slow things down when you drift from center. We often don’t because it is uncomfortable to reign in your energies when your mind is racing, your heartbeat is pumping fast and your breathing is short. The good news is that breathwork is simple, not complicated. When you concentrate on the breath it is difficult to fail.

You may not be an accomplished Wim Hof or other noted breathwork gurus, but you don’t have to be them in order to achieve benefit. Simply close your eyes and inhale and exhale to the beat of every second— one thousand one—one thousand two, etc. As you breathe, notice the rise and fall of your stomach as you inhale and exhale. When you are distracted in thought, simply bring yourself back to focusing on your breath without criticizing yourself for the distracted thought. It will calm you.

There are many gurus to help you. I suggest that you utilize Apple Music, Spotify, etc, and download Jason Campbell’s music which is a musical arrangement designed to help you breathe. Just exhale and inhale each time you hear the bells or chimes. When the arrangement is over, notice how your breathwork helped you to slow your mind and heart. This is a simple exercise that requires regular daily discipline.

#2: Focus on what you love in life. When your inner critic is activated, you magnify everything you ever did wrong, including all the flaws about your life. For many this experience is paralyzing and accelerates anxiety. Rather, practice focusing on things in life you love. It can be a sunset or sunrise, the beauty of trees, and all forms of plant life. It might be the energy of a small child playing on swings at a public park. It might be a kind act that you witnessed as it unfolded toward an elderly person. Practice being grateful for all the things you love about the life that exists around you. It will take your mind off the mistakes you made and serve to help you return to center.

#3: Simply, do the next right thing. As I write this I sit on a plane, that I barely made, from Nashville to home in Phoenix. It was an early flight and we had spent time with my sister during the weekend. We got up extra early to make the flight. All was well until my sister noticed that she had locked her car keys in the condo and that she did not have keys to get in to get them. We were stuck. She apologized prolifically but we were stuck. Doing the next right thing meant calling an Uber which took an eternity to arrive. We made the flight albeit I was the last person to board the plane. I had to adjust my attitude and accept the reality that I could not do anything about the predicament except focus on doing the next right thing. Cursing the predicament, victim posturing about life, or running around like a chicken with my head cut off would not resolve my dilemma. When your inner critic tries to have its way with you, simply focus on doing the next right thing.

#4: Practice acceptance without dwelling on feelings of inferiority. Whether you want to admit it or not you are no less valuable after a relapse than before. You gave up your sobriety, not your value. You are an unrepeatable miracle of God whether you have relapsed or not. The challenge is that your inner critic is persuasive. It will convince you otherwise by beating you up over mistakes you made.

You must understand that you will never beat yourself up to a better place. So, why not practice acceptance? Accept that you are a mistake-making person. Accept that relapse happens. Accept that when you make a mistake that hurts someone else, repeated apologies are not necessary and tend to bury you in the hole of shame. Simply accept the circumstance as is and let go. Surrender promotes acceptance which provides peace that will lead you back to the center of your life.

#5: Practice forgiveness. Forgive those around you who have hurt you by first forgiving yourself. When you have relapsed there is a tendency to lash out toward others and the universe with anger. Anchor yourself in your predicament. Realize that you have done to others what they have done to you, not necessarily in like kind but in principle. Therefore focus on forgiving yourself first. Forgiveness means that you have embraced the pain that you have caused when you wanted what you wanted when you wanted it, and you have consciously chosen to not hold your egregious behavior against yourself. Seldom is this one and done. It is a discipline that you must invoke on a regular basis and walk in the opposite direction that your inner critic would suggest. Rather than beat yourself up for flawed behavior, practice self-acceptance and treat yourself with love. Forgiveness requires training. When you do the daily work of self-forgiveness, you can forgive those who have hurt you. Essentially, you will let yourself out of your own emotional prison.

#6: Cultivate the art of reframing life experience. The art of mental reframe is powerful. Rather than wallowing in the shame of failure, relapse, or forgetful mistake, reframe your thoughts so that you can participate in the best part of the party of life for you. Lamenting and shaming won’t change anything! Look for the meaningfulness in your mistake, failure or relapse. Concentrate your focus on that! Initiate a pattern-interrupt by reframing your experience that empowers you to climb out of the mud hole of relapse. Don’t let your critical voice dominate. Rather reframe your struggle into precious lessons that promote self-acceptance and personal peace. In this way, you can make real meaning out of every red flag experience in your life.

The Rendezvous with Traumatic Relationships

October 24, 2023 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

Take time to think about times you felt hurt earlier in your life in ways that resurface over and again. Traumatic relationship experiences have a way of recycling throughout the course of life. For many, trauma is like being lost in the woods and walking around in a circle. It is deja vu all over again.

It is familiar for some to consistently pick emotionally unavailable people to partner with and then wonder why they cannot connect or get their emotional needs met. This pattern becomes solidified throughout life. They marry someone who is emotionally unavailable to them. They work for a dysfunctional organization, they allow that employer to use them, thinking that if I go above and beyond then I will be appreciated. Eventually, they quit both the marriage and the job and then go find another job and partner and reenact the same dysfunctional relationship without realizing what is happening. Unresolved validation and unmet developmental needs from earlier times in life are played out in unhealthy repetitive relationships throughout life. As a therapist, I listen to people who are now in their fourth marriage relationship, all with abusive addicts who are emotionally unavailable!

Here are a few suggestions for ending this destructive relationship pattern.

#1: Drain the pool of pain by scrubbing the wound. As long as you clutch past hurtful experiences you will sully your present relationship experiences with misgivings. You must scrub the wounds of past experience and drain your pool of pain. It feels like wallowing in yesterday’s misfortunes. But, it is not. Attempting to ignore or avoid the pain will take you back to wallowing in yesterday’s mud hole. By scrubbing the wound, you embrace the pain and give back the shame that was perpetrated on you by a significant person in your life. You simply grieve the loss of protection and kindness, calling out the shameful message with the decision that you will not be dominated by the accompanying mistaken belief but instead, choose to move forward and act with self-empowerment. This experience is not a one-and-done event but a chosen lifestyle. Metaphorically, putting down the stones you throw or the gun you grasp for protection is the only way to give up the storyline that creates unhealthy relationships. You will begin to heal by establishing relational boundaries that empower healthy connections with care and love in relationships.

#2: Lean into the pain. This suggestion seems far-fetched! But, think of the Chinese handcuff. I remember as a young boy sitting in church trying to work my way through another long tedious worship service. In my pocket, I had a Chinese handcuff. I took it out and began to explore. So, I put my left and right index fingers into the ends of the handcuffs. The handcuffs were cylinder in shape and made of a straw-like material that was flexible. The more I tried to pull my fingers out the tighter the cuffs held me. A surge of panic struck and I pulled harder. But, the small cuffs would tighten further. But, then when I did the opposite and leaned my fingers into the middle of the problematic cuff, the small casing slackened and I could gently and slowly work my fingers free!

With relationship challenges, often the pulling in panic only handcuffs you further and tightens the grip of fear in your life. Running from the pain only deepens and complicates matters. Trying to think your way through only thickens the mental wool that snares you. Geniuses like Einstein or Edison when befuddled and stuck would take a break or take a nap and in surrender to the problem they discovered a solution. Leaning into the pain is facing what is real and allowing it to be, without panic. Sitting with the pain provides the eventual solution. Leaning into the problem that is gripping you will allow you to work your way free.

#3: Practice Forgiveness. Many of you have experienced painful past trauma. It was indescribable. The struggle to survive and the enduring suffering will never be forgotten. Sometimes it seems that if you heal it will mean that you will allow what happened to evaporate from the memory of those who need to be held accountable for your agony. So you believe the only way is that you must commit to reliving the awful experience daily or your suffering will be for naught.

However, you do not need to define yourself by past trauma. To give up this part of your storyline, you will need to forgive those who were responsible and those who could have intervened but did not. Without forgiveness, you will remain stuck in resentment which is a cancer that grows and will dominate your existence.

Forgive means to give and to receive. You begin with receiving forgiveness. Often people wonder what I need to forgive, it was the other person who hurt me. However, it is important that you be able to identify in principle, not in like kind, how you have hurt others like you have been hurt. The one who hurt you wanted what they wanted when they wanted it, right? Think of a time that you wanted what you wanted, when you wanted it, regardless of its impact on others. Seek forgiveness for that. It might be something as obscure as forcing your way while changing from one lane to the next on the freeway. It’s not about comparing whose selfish want is greatest but just owning your own selfishness and forgiving yourself, which means not holding it against yourself. To do this you must sit with the awareness of how your hurt impacted others. This is defined as scrubbing the wound. Being able to sit with the pain of another because of your selfish behavior is necessary to create forgiveness of self. Once you do this you make a conscious choice to not hold your selfish behavior against you.

Now, for the one who hurt you. Once forgiven, you offer the same to the one who egregiously harmed you. Forgiveness does not mean you forget what happened. Rather, it means that you will not hold it against the other person but walk in the opposite direction of resentment to the freedom of thought about the past hurt. Rather than hate, you send positive loving energy to that person. You do this so you can be free from your own emotional prison. Forgiveness is a daily action before it becomes a reality of feeling. Seldom is forgiveness a one-and-done experience in life. You practice forgiving the one who hurt you every day, as it comes up.

You don’t have to engage by making friends with the person but letting go and walking away from resentment is your responsibility. When you learn to lean into the pain and scrub the wound through forgiveness you will end your rendezvous with trauma and stop building intimate relationships with emotionally unavailable people.

Only the Lonely

July 11, 2023 by Ken Wells

“Only the lonely, Know the heartaches I’ve been through-Only the lonely-Know I cry and cry for you.”
(Roy Orbison “Only the Lonely” lyrics)

Loneliness drives escapism. In an unsettled world there are a million different reasons to want to avoid reality. Traumatic experiences in home life can trigger the desire to travel anywhere but home to escape further stress and psychological harm. More than 15 million Americans suffer loneliness attributed to major clinical depression. Many will do anything to escape the dregs of emptiness, loneliness and anxiety that come with it. However, a temporary new environment is not the cure. Often, when this form of escape through travel is done impulsively, there’s a greater likelihood that symptoms will rebound or return even stronger than before. Lonely older adults are twice as likely to be prescribed an antidepressant compared to adults reporting no loneliness (27% vs 14%). This indicates that medication alone is not a cure to the challenge of loneliness.

Most addicts suffer from loneliness. For many, home was disastrous, chaotic, totally abusive and unsafe. People need to belong, experience sanctuary and be treated with dignity and respect. Addicts run from the fear that if they slow down they will have to face the anxiety and terror of coming home to themselves. The experience is devastating. For those who do not come to terms with loneliness, it is a shadow that follows and never releases its grip. Addicts in recovery must learn to manage the experience of loneliness. It is a major trigger for relapse. Here are a few considerations to help you work with this common malady that affects everyone.

1. Practice coming home to yourself: Addicts learn to lose themselves with busyness and activities that distract from the discomfort of anxiety and other difficult emotions. Thich Nat Hanh stated that sitting is an act of revolution. In the presence of the urge to rush and be active, it is counterintuitive to sit with your feelings. However, sitting with your feelings will cultivate awareness. It helps to separate your thoughts and emotions from your true nature. As some say, sitting helps you to see your true nature to be like the sky and your feelings and thoughts to be like the clouds that come and go away. Coming home to yourself is a way of connecting with yourself and accepting what is.

2. Quiet the clamor and clutter by putting away your electronic devices for a definite period of time each day. It has been said that in America, the average person spends 7 hours looking at a screen each day. Your computer and cell phone distract you from being connected with yourself. You would think social media would help you to connect with others. However, it is an illusion that social media helps you to connect with others when you do not connect with yourself. Technology does not help reduce loneliness. Take time each day to turn off your phone and all other technology each day to cultivate conscious awareness. Make it a deliberate act.

3. Connect with the here and now. Distractions keep you from being present. You might be doing something important but your mind is somewhere else. People go through their life distracted without being connected to the present moment. Poet T.S. Eliot penned “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. Many people will never experience this reality in reflection because they don’t know how to connect to the present moment. Don’t allow yourself to live a life of distraction from the here and now.

4. Go Inside. Loneliness is about feeling disconnected from others. You won’t connect with others until you connect with yourself. Becoming a social butterfly can make you popular with many acquaintances. Yet, you can be lonely in a crowd of people. Loneliness will disappear when you go inside. Learn to become an island to yourself. Buddhists teach that you go inside yourself through the in-breath and the out-breath. Hahn says that you tidy your home within by going inside. This is where you calm your spirit and connect with yourself. It all begins by cultivating a lifestyle of going inside.

5. Make peace with your loneliness. There is a wounded child within each of us that needs to be recognized and embraced. Loneliness is magnified when you busy yourself with activity and neglect the pool of pain that exists within you. People try to minimize this pain by comparing their life experience with others. This only isolates the wounded child and intensifies loneliness. Coming home requires that you focus on healing your wounded child.

6. Liberate yourself from the prisons of the past. Addicts live with a vacuum inside that makes them uncomfortable connecting with others. Their wounded child has been betrayed and let down by others. They don’t trust themselves or others. Dominating their brain are mistaken beliefs that keep them inside an emotional prison. Liberation requires an act of daily forgiveness which simply means that you will not hold this egregious destructive behavior against yourself any longer. Every day you come home to yourself and make this agreement. You then walk away from destructive behavior and embrace healing and practice being helpful to others. Addicts who choose to live this way liberate themselves from loneliness effectively. They learn to use their eyes to look at others with compassion and eliminate criticism.

Polarization

July 4, 2023 by Ken Wells

Polarization is a problem in the world. Us versus them is a mentality that has always existed. The criteria for who is in and who is out are determined by those who have the power. Historically, the criteria for acceptance has been tragic. Jewish people were rejected by the Third Reich in Germany, who determined that the entire race should be exterminated. African Americans were once considered only 3/5th human in America simply because of the color of their skin. Racism, sexism, patriarchy, ageism, etc exclude some and include others because of someone’s definition about who is acceptable and who is not.

When I was a kid I tried to hang out with only Cub fans. If you liked the St. Louis Cardinals, there was something wrong with you. My dad was a blue-collar worker and we were Democrats. We prayed for those who were Republicans and wondered why! We thought that the Pope was the antichrist. There were 3 areas of our town: Elm Ridge, where the rich people lived; Grant Park, where the poorest lived, and then the rest of us. We learned to categorize people by their address. We looked up to the folk in Elm Ridge as successful. They were the “haves.” We fought to keep our address out of Grant Park where the “have nots” lived.

Judgmentalism has separated people throughout my life. There was the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950’s. Famous people like Paul Robeson, who was a great black athlete and actor, was ostracized and accused of being Communist because he refused to bend to popular opinion. There were Christians who thought the world was going to end in a ball of fire in the early 1960’s. They were scoffed at by scientists and ostracized as Holy Rollers. Now, scientists push the alarm of a catastrophic global warming, and many of those same Christians scoff and ostracize the scientists.

Polarization is a challenge to recovery. Healing requires integrating both the best and the beast within each person. In community, us versus them undermines the healing process. Judging others’ social status or recovery progress paralyzes the potential for transformation. It requires each person to recognize their own dark behavior in order to have compassion for other people’s struggle. It is by recognizing compassion and identification that transformation occurs.

No one escapes childhood unscathed. I have learned that working through abuse requires the acceptance of a victim/victimizer dynamic that exists in those who have suffered abuse. When you have been victimized it is important to face ways that you have victimized others, perhaps not in like kind but in like principle.

It is critical to confront behavior where you selfishly wanted what you wanted when you wanted it. It is important to face the impact of feelings and consequences that your behavior created for others and experience the gravity of their plight because of your actions. Then, you focus on forgiving yourself which simply means to let go and not hold the behavior against yourself. It also means to stop the hurtful behavior. When you do this, you become less polarized from those who have victimized you. By accepting your own dark behavior you can create compassion for the dark behavior of others who hurt you with perpetrating abuse. Through common shared brokenness you can experience healing and forgiveness which can produce freedom from the abuse.

Essentially, this controversial process can be framed as a way of getting out of an emotional prison that an abuser’s behavior created. Some have described it as a healthy selfish way of forgiving the son of a b**** who perpetrated pain and devastation in your life. You don’t have to be friends with someone who has hurt you. However, polarization is less likely because you have addressed in principle the victimizer dynamic in yourself that also exists in the perpetrator who has hurt you.

When this does not occur, communities remain fractured and polarized. Perpetrators, like sex offenders, are excluded from their communities. Some people think that if we segregate, isolate, or polarize people, then somehow we become a safer community. I don’t see evidence that this is true.

Through my work at Psychological Counseling Services, we have witnessed transformation and healing by bringing victims and victimizers together. When sexual abuse is the issue, careful consideration of healing factors are assessed for both victim and victimizer before such integration takes place. Through 25+ years of engaging this process, I have observed and facilitated healing and transformation for both victim and victimizer. Regarding betrayed partners, we have integrated them with addict betrayers for many years. I have listened to partners who have shared that listening to the heart of an addict who is not their partner has been helpful to cultivate compassion and healing toward their own addict partner. On the other side of the coin, I have listened to addicts state that hearing the heartache of a different betrayed partner helped them to deepen empathy toward their own betrayed partner.

When we face each other’s pain we promote healing and transformation and eliminate polarization. This makes far more sense to me.

I do not think there is just one way to heal trauma from abuse. There are many alternatives. I do believe that polarization has splintered communities throughout our country. Judgmentalism through categorizing and labeling people has been detrimental to healing in our country. I suggest that we overcome judgmentalism and polarization toward others through identification of common-shared brokenness with shared accountability and consequences.

Take time to be curious of someone who is unlike you or represents a position you vehemently disagree with. Notice how judgment comes up and simply sit with gaining an understanding of another person’s plight and position about life. You don’t have to change your mind about how you think. But, you can find a way to connect with someone who sees things different than you do. A way to overcome polarization is to integrate common-shared brokenness through listening to a different perspective.

I Can’t Believe What I Just Did!—Relapse

June 23, 2023 by Ken Wells

“Slowly I began to recognize that many of the boxes I found myself in were boxes of my own making.”— Melodie Beattie

Relapse isn’t a reality for every addict. Yet, for most, it has happened. Once sober you tell yourself ‘never again’ and you mean it. You’ve tasted the sweetness of sobriety and you shake your head wondering how did you ever think acting out was a better life? Yet, it happened! At first, it seemed like it was out of the blue. You had been doing so good. Then it felt like someone pulled the rug out from under you. Cravings hit you like a big Mac truck. It didn’t come out of the blue but it just as well had. You were not prepared nor paying attention to the details of your recovery life and there you were—acting out again!

The taste of acting out is bitter. There are times it makes your mouth dry as cotton. There is a sick feeling in your stomach. Sometimes you wonder how it could possibly have happened. Yet it did. There are cascading self-accusations that rattle in your brain like a machine gun. You feel overwhelmingly down and discouraged. The hangover from acting out leaves you feeling dull with brain fog. You walk through life activities hollow inside feeling dreamlike about the experience. You know you have to tell on yourself but you want to lie and keep it all a secret. How do I ever rebound from such an awful place?

Here are steps back to center that you must consider:

1. Admit the obvious. Addicts learn from their family of origin to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. They are great at pretending. When you relapse you must tell on yourself and be accountable to your support group including your partner. This is where you wobble. You can tell people in your 12-step group but my partner?! Are you kidding me? Secrets and dishonesty are breeding grounds for addiction behavior to flourish. Best to tell support people in 12-step recovery before you disclose to your partner so that you don’t minimize what you did in relapse. To do otherwise risks creating a disclosure disaster. Hold your feet to the fire and tell on yourself.

2. Do the next right thing. This is obvious but bears underscoring. The next right thing is to get yourself out of harm’s way. Address vulnerability to continue acting out by reaching out in a 12-step meeting and/or recovery friend. Lay it out in living color exactly what happen. Don’t piecemeal your truth. Let the love and acceptance of the group or support person become a shroud you wear. You have hurt yourself and are wounded. It doesn’t mean that you don’t need to face consequences. It is important that you surround yourself with love, support, and genuine care in the presence of white hot truth-telling.

3. Do an autopsy on your relapse behavior. Once you’re out of harm’s way and surrounded by support, figure out how relapse happened. If you don’t, be prepared to do it again. Examine program neglect: (1) stopped going to meetings: (2) isolated—not telling on yourself to group/sponsor or support; (3) stopped doing the steps because of busyness; (4) procrastinated facing a truth that you don’t want to face; (5) wallowed in shame, resentment, loneliness, anger, hate; (6) marinated in mistaken beliefs that block intimacy and sabotage recovery. Do the work of unpacking how you put yourself in the box that led to your relapse. If you can figure out how you got into the relapse box, you can figure out how to get out.

4. Fortify your commitment to recovery: Once clear about why you acted out, fortify taking the next healing steps. Create filters that will keep you from porn and acting out. Don’t just put a cork in the bottle, get rid of all alcohol in the house. These are examples of next right steps. How many times have I heard addicts confess to relapse with no plan for next right steps. When you fortify your commitment to recovery, next right steps become obvious.

5. Act on positive self-affirmation regardless of how you feel. When you relapse and feel like all hell has broke loose, it’s hard to take yourself by the nape of the neck and pull yourself from the mud hole you created. You can only do this with determination to act on treating yourself as you hope to be. It is painful but you must forgive yourself and let go of the negative feelings that accompany relapse behavior. These steps are always painful. As you act in the way your destiny beckons, the painful shameful messages will fall away in time. You will become congruent merging your behavior to positive beliefs about self.

6. Don’t let the little boy/little girl run your inner life. You cannot expect a small child to figure out addiction. Shame dominates in relapse behavior because we empower the little boy/girl to make adult decisions about recovery. Put in charge, the inner child will conclude that you are a piece of shit who is destined to never get it right so why try. This is because a little child is unable to navigate the narrows of addiction recovery. However, when you take the reins of responsibility and place them in the hands of the powerful adult in you, the results are dramatically different. As an adult, you can face consequences of destructive choices, choose to care for self, and hold your feet to the fire of bringing yourself back to center. It will require the adult-you to fend off the negative shameful messages and to embrace and act on positive affirmations that will fulfill the destiny of sobriety.

Relapse is always found in the box of your own making. Hopefully, these steps will help you step out of the box and take steps toward solid sobriety and deepened serenity.

A Five Tool Relapse Recovery Plan: Tool #2

May 12, 2023 by Ken Wells

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”. E.M. Forster

Addiction hurts but it is a familiar pain! It wraps around the life of an addict like a warm blanket. Peeling away the layers of destructive behavior is a painful process and can be messy. Stopping any form of destructive behavior requires transformation. It is a painstaking action that must be addressed every day.

When you ask people why they do destructive behaviors, which they know don’t work, they become stubborn and strong-willed in their explanations. By the time they finish telling you why, you can see they have a vice grip on behaviors that sabotage sobriety and give them what they really don’t want. They gaslight themselves that what hurts isn’t all that bad!

Recovery is about giving up what doesn’t work. Once you let go and surrender to a program of recovery, the attitude of resistance disappears like a helium balloon released into the atmosphere. Surrender dissolves resistance. To overcome resistance you must surrender your ego to a better plan, and the thought that you can have your cake and eat it too, and that those who have surrendered are not the enemy but your friends. As long as your ego remains in charge you have not surrendered and your destructive behaviors will be operative. Resistance to suggestions made by sponsors is commonplace. What are you resistant to do in your recovery life? There is a Zen proverb that says “Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong”. Surrender is seldom one-and-done but is a daily transaction.

Defensiveness is a decision. It grows like mold on every addict. It blocks recovery insight because it is preoccupied by what others do to hurt you. You can become defensive about how others treat you and things that go wrong in your life. It becomes a vortex that blinds all other alternative actions. Defensiveness is an outside focus that blocks your inward view of your own behavior. Defensiveness accelerates with momentum as you attempt to blame others for your hurt and shortcomings. Lao Tzu once wrote, “Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner”. As long as others are responsible, you don’t change. You give away your energy trying to convince someone else they are responsible for your dissatisfaction. Your growing frustration only increases your defensive attitude and keeps you stuck in destructive behavior. Recovery requires that you give up your defensive storyline and embrace responsibility for your actions regardless of others’ thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. If you are stuck in defensiveness, you will need help to see it but you will need to take action to surrender and accept responsibility for your own well-being.

Valerie Cox wrote a poem, The Cookie Thief, about a guy who in an airport she thought was stealing from her bag of cookies. She never said anything but gathered feelings of despise and resentment toward him. However, in the end, she realized she had packed away her cookies in her own bag and was eating from a bag she mistakenly thought was hers but was his bag. It turned out she was the ingrate, the cookie thief. This poem reflects on experiences of recovery from addiction. Addicts easily become ensued with judgment toward others around them.

Judgmentalism serves as a way of giving yourself a pass. People say they don’t go to church, to a 12-step group, nor engage in other community groups because of the hypocrites. Yet, we are all hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a part of being human. This reality doesn’t make it ok. It calls for accountability and a commitment to live in consultation. Jesus said before you comment on the splinter in another person’s eye take the plank out of your own. The problem in recovery involves the challenge to surrender our judgments about others and ourselves. The Dalai Lama wrote, “Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace”. Forgiveness is a process of letting go of the hurts that others have committed toward us by embracing, in principle, the same behaviors we have done toward others. It means that we let go of our judgment and walk in the opposite direction of the hurtful behavior we have done as well as that which has been done to us. We do this with love and compassion extended toward self and others. Again the Dalai Lama wrote, “From my own limited experience I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion”. Take inventory of your own judgmental spirit toward others. In what ways have you been cynical and judgmental toward others? These judgmental behaviors must be surrendered in order for recovery to flourish.

There is a well-known Sufi story about a man who was walking through the forest and saw a fox that had lost its legs, and he wondered how it lived. Then he saw a tiger come up with game in its mouth. The tiger ate its fill and left the rest of the meat for the fox.

The next day God fed the fox by means of the same tiger. The man began to wonder at God’s greatness and said to himself, I too shall just rest in a corner with full trust in the Lord and he will provide me with all that I need.

He did this for many days but nothing happened, and he was almost at death’s door when he heard a voice say, “O you who are in the path of error, open your eyes to the truth! Stop imitating the disabled fox and follow the example of the tiger”.

Recovery requires that we let go of imitating the disabled fox with defensiveness and judgmentalism of ourselves and others. It insists that every day we let go of our resistance toward giving up what does not work and follow the empowered way of the tiger. This tool requires that you take time to assess whether you have been imitating the disabled fox or are you willing to follow the example of the tiger?

Stalking the Lion King

April 14, 2023 by Ken Wells

There is no life experience that disconnects us faster from our personal brilliance than shame. During the course of life, we all struggle with shame. It doesn’t matter if you are poor, wealthy, famous, or infamous. Shame stalks everybody at some point in life.

Shame can be buried in many places. It can be uncovered in anger, blame, denial, workaholism, perfectionism, drinking, and anything else you repeatedly employ to make yourself feel better. Somehow, if an addict could practice vulnerability and embrace the pain of shame, he/she would discover that there is no place left for shame to hide. It would disappear in that moment of time.

You must learn that you cannot beat yourself up to a better place. Addicts confess to me when they have relapsed and feel dominated by shame, that they can’t believe they have made the same mistake again. They suffer despair and hopelessness. Some addicts have even committed suicide because they cannot stop berating and beating themselves up. Death seemed better than this continual beating up of self. Instead of verbally berating themselves, addicts must practice forgiving themselves. They must commit to practicing walking “as if” they are the person their destiny calls them to be—an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. Addicts who suffer chronic relapse have not mastered this critical recovery tool. Beating yourself up only exacerbates relapse potential and probability.

Six Simple Steps

People can relate to addressing shame through the use of metaphor. I like to use the metaphor of shame likened to a lion who hunts and stalks her prey. I suggest there are six simple steps to stalking the lion. Simple doesn’t mean easy. Each step will require ongoing conditioning and practice.

Step 1 – Recognize the nature of shame: Shame is like battery acid. When the acid is contained in the battery it is useful to start your car. Put the acid on your body and it will burn. When the energy of shame is directed to hurtful behavior it can be transformed into compassion. When it is directed to your sense of self, like acid, it will scar and mar. Shame is an energy that requires an addict to direct it away from self and to hurtful behavior. Only then can it be transformed into compassion and empathy.

Step 2 – Identify the presence of shame: Shame often appears in camouflage and is covertly operative. It can be concealed within the context of other feelings/behaviors, such as approval seeking and even show up as pain in your body. Recognition often requires journaling, meditation, and sharing your feelings with others. Shame can be carried from generation to generation through secrecy.

Step 3 – Identify shame’s message about you: The message of shame can become lost or garbled in your reactive response which can include defensiveness. Yet, the reactivity is triggered by an essential message about yourself that is provoked. This message is derogatory to your sense of self. Things that I tell myself in the moment that are destructive, “I’m not enough”, “I deserve to be abandoned”, or “I’m not worthy of love” are examples of shame messages.

Step 4 – Identify the Voice: Most often we track the voice as our own destructive messages. However, the message of shame is historic and can often be traced to primary-care givers. In order to redirect the shame you must recognize whose voice it is that is speaking the hurtful message down deep inside.

Step 5 – Redirect the energy of shame to its original source: Frequently, the message of shame comes from a source that is not even present in the here and now. The message and voice must be recognized if you are going to be able to marshal the direction of shame away from you and back to its original provider. Shame is nothing more than an energy source housed inside a personalized thought. Your assignment in this step is to direct the shame away from your sense of self and to its original source and the hurtful behavior. This can be done through emotion-focused letter writing, empty chair conversation, anger expressive work, and many other alternatives.

Step 6 – Conditioned listening and visualized action response: After I give back the shame to its originator, the negative voice of shame continues to stalk. Every addict must practice conditioning their inner ear to ignore the voice and to tune into the positive affirmative truth within that motivates a powerful response toward realizing a positive destiny in behavior. Stalking the shame demands a conditioned response established through ongoing practice.

The dynamic of shame is powerful in all of our lives. Addiction living kindles the flames of shame as much as any human condition. As an addict, I have found it important to reflect on the impact of shame throughout my experience in recovery. I give you these reflections in the form of poetry.

STALKING THE LION KING

There’s a lion and when he roars he’s telling me I ain’t no good—
It’s not just what I could but he’s bitching what I should.

Every day I look at the struggle I experience in every way—
the shame of the game that drives me insane
the sin—the stain—the emotional pain
a place where the guile and the denial of addiction flow like the river Nile.

I try to find the strength to say what I think—
to admit where I have been and say it straight—
there’s nothing left about me—
that once you know—
your only response is going to be hate.

Simba stalks me and reminds I can never measure up
Seems useless to try, do program, be true blue—I just want to give up—
My mind dances ‘cross the horizon of thought,
A.D.D. races on and on and drives me to absolute distraught.

I look into your eyes and see the hurt—
the disgust of betrayal
that incredulous sense—
that what was just told can’t possibly be real.

Innocent trust is gone—an irretrievable loss
Safety—warm embrace—are gone like clouds in my coffee
Triggered by double cross.
Shame and blame seem to be my one constant friend.
Agony, torture, gut-wrenching torment—
you’d think I’d never do it again.

Intrigue is a drunken dreamland—with bewitching charm—
It fades connection—
pushes peace so far away—
Ecstasy eats at reality—
Undaunted enchantment numbs with empty possibility
Playing charades all over again—
drags me back to where I started my day.

Like a hard-nosed hound, the lion never ends its chase
It lures me to the dance, as I look to hide my face
The monkey’s talkin’ trash in his deep clear voice
He talks about a paralyzed paradise–I quickly lose my choice.

I scream in remorse with self-condemnation
It seems to matter little
the junkie inside rules, craving total resignation.

I do it again and again, proving I’m dead inside.
I look at your red-rimmed eyes and wonder why I haven’t cried
But, the lion is roaring, though every time he’s lied.

Shame’s a game that gets played in your head
The chatterbox of blame, in the end, wishes you were dead
It’s acid that bleaches out what should be instead.

People wanna say you’re a Miracle of God
With scoff and scorn, the lion barks—you’ve always been flawed
The Monkey is master—powerfully Jones will always prod
He’s the shame that beats you down—
belittles and prompts that you’re the clown.

In darkness, the lion is prowling.

Scrubbing the Wound

April 11, 2023 by Ken Wells

One of the most tortuous experiences of healing in life are stories told from those who have suffered with injuries that require their wounds to be scrubbed. Emergency room doctors have shared experiences of cases involving car accidents that have required scrubbing the road rash covering the back of a victim, triggering immense pain. Burn victims describe a healing process that demands cleaning and scrubbing the wounds every day. The pain from the necessary cleaning procedure is unbelievable, yet necessary. Without the cleaning process, infection takes over and provides a negative outcome, including death. As a child, I remember, my mom, washing a wound that I incurred on my knee with a washcloth. I recall the searing pain from the scrub and the application of merthiolate (that red stuff that was later banned) and crying out “Don’t touch it mom” and wanting her to blow on it as she did her cleaning work. No one wants to sign up for this much-needed task of scrubbing the wound.

Since I have been an emotional healer, the analogy of scrubbing the wound is one that has made so much sense. It is one of the first things that is required for emotional wounds to heal. Forgiveness often doesn’t get traction unless the emotional wound is scrubbed and cleaned. The concept of “scrubbing an emotional wound” involves embracing the emotional pain rather than avoiding it. It always includes a deepened embrace of grieving the loss, injustice, despair, and disappointment. While wanting to lash out is a common human response, scrubbing the wound often means sitting with the pain in all of its severity. It suggests that you walk through the reality of violation, tragic loss, etc, and steel yourself with the support of caring others, without escape but with embrace. As a healer, I have observed that when people are willing to do this, the healing of devastation occurs more rapidly. When people choose strategies to avoid the pain through blame, and tactics to find an escape from pain through other relationships or endeavors, then the healing process becomes stalled and at times is never completed.

During my healing journey, I am certain that going through the hell of losing 45 pounds in six weeks in major clinical depression and sitting with the painful reality of sexual, physical, and religious abuse was necessary to stop the destructive life of dysfunctional behavior that included addiction. Through 25 years as a counselor. I have observed that there is an inbred desire to seek instant relief from physical pain, emotional discomfort, and personal struggle. We tell ourselves that life would be better if we could just find that instant fix! Yet, most times there is no lightning in a bottle. Transformation and healing require that we scrub the emotional wound and drain the pool of emotional pain.

It has been my conviction and belief that there is no magic bullet. Embracing emotional struggle and scrubbing the emotional wound is a counterintuitive measure that creates fulfillment in life and clarifies meaning and purpose in the presence of pain and discomfort in ways that are missed by those in search of a magic bullet.

Here are a few practical considerations regarding scrubbing the wound.

You will need a safe place to embrace all of your feelings. For me, it began in a psychiatric ward at Columbine Psychiatric Hospital. It later included Marilyn Murray’s studio office with a tennis racket wearing loose-fitting clothes that were conducive to expressing all of my emotions. Today, it includes my own homespun safe place with plenty of options to express sadness/anger/hate/shame, etc. You will want to be proactive to create your own safe place.
Scrubbing the wound requires a commitment to express all of your feelings around your hurt, unedited and without reservation of expression. Take time to write emotion-focused letters for your eyes only (or a therapist), saying whatever comes out about someone who hurt you without edit or protection. Emoting words of pain with explosive expression (hitting a pillow with a tennis racket, etc) in your safe space and doing it as many times or over a protracted season of time as is necessary will be important. Often, it is helpful to have an unbiased support person present to give “fair witness” to your scrubbing the wound.
Scrubbing the wound will often require more than one healing session. Be willing to scrub your wound as often as needed. Remember, scrubbing the wound for a burn victim is a daily experience. Scrubbing resentment, hatred, and shame will need to be a daily ritual with more intense emphasis on some days and less on other days. It is a process of cleaning out the infection of toxic feelings and that is emotionally healing. Be willing to scrub for as long as is necessary.
Scrubbing the wound calls for you to cultivate the capacity to sit with the pain of your wound and tolerate discomfort. What happened to you was painful. The accompanying emotions hurt and will require conditioning and discipline to embrace. Sitting with the pain is a way of culturing wisdom. Angelina Jolie wrote ‘Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.” Life becomes meaningful for those who learn to sit with the wound they have scrubbed.
There are many modalities that will help us scrub the wound but ultimately it will depend upon your willingness to go there. Seeking a sensational fix or searching for a magic bullet is a testament to attempts to avoid the scrub. Therapeutic modalities are abundant and new ones are being introduced all the time. Some individuals are great at knowing all the latest therapeutic interventions including all kinds of psychotropics to all sorts of experiential therapeutic modalities. Yet, the only ones that are really impactful are the ones that you have determined to embrace. When it is all said and done, you will have to decide that you are willing to embrace the pain and scrub your emotional wound.
After scrubbing, dress your emotional wound with loving kindness and positive affirmation. Emotional scrubbing is a difficult and vulnerable undertaking. It is an exercise that must be done at various times throughout a lifetime. Once an emotional scrub has been completed it is necessary to cultivate gentleness and bathe your emotional self with inspiring and positive affirmations affirming the reality that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. The combination of scrubbing the wound and dressing it with positive affirmation is key to deep healing.

Leaning into painful experiences, big and small in everyday living is a pathway to meaningfulness and discovery of the depths of human brilliance.

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