freedom

Recovery Lesson From A House Fly

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“Persistence does not mean banging your head against the wall repeatedly and hoping it shall break one day. That’s just going to break your head. Persistence is about having the common sense to come back with a sledgehammer to break the wall. If that doesn’t work, come back with a bulldozer. If that doesn’t work, use dynamite. If that doesn’t work, look around a little bit to see if there is a hidden door in the wall that you missed! If that doesn’t work, just find another damn wall or stop looking for walls at all.” 
―Anubhav Srivastava,

I was watching a common house fly bang up against the window pane in my living room. When I snuck up on it with my leather fly swatter, it took off into the hinterparts of my house only to return again and again to the light and warmth of the window pane, willing to face seeking escape from the fear of death of my leather fly swatter. The fly was quick and alert and I missed smashing him against the window sill many times. I thought to myself why doesn’t this fly realize that he cannot break through the window sill? Does he not know that sooner or later his options for escape from the swatter will run out? Why not look for a hole in the screen at the back of my house or wait till the door opens and then exit? This predictable pattern repeated itself until even the quick and savvy fly ran out of escapes and fell victim to a swat, becoming unrecognizable, smashed on the window sill. 

As I contemplated the demise of the house fly I thought about what keeps us stuck in behaviors that sabotage our recovery growth or trigger us toward unhealthy, high risk behaviors. Addicts are like house flies,  banging up against the window pane– seeking that which is beyond our reach and control. 

To the fly, freedom looked so clear through the window pane, feeling the warmth of the sun. It just couldn’t figure out that freedom was never going to happen by banging against the pane to avoid death!

I want you to think about what it is that deters and stymies your recovery growth. Why do you keep banging your head against the window pane in your life? Does the warmth of other suns from one more fling tell you that somehow you can break through the window pane once and for all and find your bliss? Does the junkie worm with con and cajole tell you ‘there’s magic just one more time’? Do you tell yourself that there is something richer, deeper than sobriety? Do you tell yourself that no matter what you say about who you are or what you do, you are never understood? Does lonely booking with an ugly shame-over trigger disconnect and make you want to forget the permanence of the window pane? Do you find yourself running as hard as you can with all the mojo you can muster to avoid the fly swatter? With whip and whimper, darkness and defeat, have you discovered that there’s no magic or mojo in your addictive pursuit? With all the meaning of life squeezed out, does emptiness reside with no escape route? 

Then try compassion which is love birthed inside before it makes its way out. Let it grow in the midst of struggle, in the heart that is weary with wrestle and wrangle. Embrace the turmoil of anger and hate and their powers that nag and rag and never let go with the strength of self love. When you face what you fear and embrace what you feel, you transform your insides—the rage and hate—to something that is real. It’s been the only thing I know that provides an effective escape route from the fly swatter.  It transforms a lot of hell into a little bit of heaven called sobriety.

How Does Believing in Who You Are Differ From Believing You Can Do Great Things?

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“None of us are defined by our worst actions that we have done.” — Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Nor are we defined by the worst things that have happened to us.” —KW 

I have been privileged to work with individuals who have demonstrated extreme self-confidence and belief in being able to achieve great accomplishments in their personal and professional lives. Some have accessed confidence and belief to create massive financial success while others have become elite in their professional sport, ability to entertain, or experiences of political power. They have engaged in visualization skills and affirmation to fulfill their goals. They were masterful in their achievements. 

However, there is a remarkable number of those who have achieved world-renowned feats who admittedly state they have less belief in who they are separate from what they do.  Some have even disclosed that they would be lost separate from what they do.  In other words, their professional craft and achievements define who they are. 

How bout you? Do you know who you are separate from what you do? Do your achievements define you? If so, then you have created a hamster wheel affect for your life. You will need to do more to keep from being less. 

There will never be a time when enough achievements will create fulfillment. You will never experience a sense of completion or enduring satisfaction because you will need to keep running for more and more. It’s the nature of the hamster wheel driven by your identification that who you are is what you do. Or, you will only know to identify yourself by what you did in the past or what you are planning to do tomorrow. 

It is not uncommon for those who find their identity in what they do, to feel a great sense of emptiness and despair immediately after performing a great feat. I have heard several share that their deepest darkness happens when they are off stage and alone after performing. Some have even shared that it has been a huge trigger to act out with their drug of choice while others have indicated vulnerability to suicidal ideation. 

Identifying who you are other than the results of what you do or will do requires that you have a sense of presence in the here and now with an emphasis upon “being”. This requires that you be able to sit with what is and make meaningfulness from it. 

It suggests that you are able to separate what you do from who you are. It can be scary. You learn to focus on meaningfulness by simply being you separate from what you do. 

When you are all about the results of what you do then the idea of coming home to yourself and sitting with your feelings, thoughts and presence is frustrating and likely confusing. 

Yet, it is necessary to detach from the results of what you do. Even, when success bombards your world and seems to flow freely. Eventually, you get to a point of realization that you cannot control the end result. It is beyond you! 

But, the alternative to the detachment of results is to embrace uncertainty and all of its unwanted feelings and thoughts. Not a very attractive alternative. However, when you practice this free fall in life experience you encounter unparalleled freedom. You learn that uncertainty and freedom go together. Eventually, you discover that unwanted feelings subside or become transformed into the magic of gratitude and other feelings of peace. You experience the unconditional confidence of going down with all the feelings of discomfort knowing that you will rise again with the awareness of freedom to be who you are.

This is no small feat. When this is practiced both praise and criticism received for the things you do is recognized as an imposter to the real you. 

Here are considerations to anchor your identity to who you are rather than what you do.

1. Know the values of your heart and don’t betray them. Be more concerned about being true to those values and less concerned about successful results. 

2. Affirm that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. For many this sound like too much fluff. Many would want their result to speak for who they are. The paradox is that when you know who you are before an endeavor, the results do not determine their essence. You will not let an outcome define you. You will embrace all of yourself- the good, the bad, and the ugly. You will understand that life is a tapestry that weaves the sweet with bitterness and triumph with tragedy. No victory will add to this reality and no defeat will take away from it. This reality must be etched in stone that exists within your heart. 

3. Create a list of affirmations about your being, not what you are good at doing. Religiously bathe yourself in them every day as mental hygiene in the same way you take care of your physical hygiene. This is often overlooked. Endless practice prevents most people from realizing their destiny. To know who you are you must feed yourself with the clarity that separates being from doing. Give yourself permission to be a mistake-making person, the only kind that lives on this earth.  Be the one who takes something meaningful from every mistake into your future. This is an endless practice. 

4. You won’t understand your sense of self from a distance. You will need to be willing to embrace going deep within to know your being. For most this is scary. Socrates stated that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. You must be willing to do the uncomfortable. it requires intentionality. Sitting with challenging emotions and understanding their message to you about who you are requires persistence and tenacity which many prefer to avoid. 

5. You will need to be courageous as you embrace your being. You will need to make a decision to be true to yourself when everyone around you is pressuring you to be different. You must be brave, anchoring your identity in your being. You will be tempted to lose yourself in what you do. There will be failure but you must bring yourself back to center. As Maya Angelou wrote in her poem Still I Rise, “You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

    When you learn to believe in who you are as a stand alone belief, what you do or how much you do will pale in comparison to the uncovered brilliance that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. This truth about being is a stand-alone truth that will stand the test of the ages. 

    When The Load Seems too Much

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    Someone remarked that Atlas was not forced to hold up the world, he was convinced that if he did not, the world would fall. This kind of magical thinking is a trademark for children between the ages of 3 and 11. If dad were to wake up and announce to his five-year-old that the sun was going to come up from the west and be bright blue, it is likely that son would say “OK, if you say so, Dad!” He would believe it because at that age he is highly impressionable and vulnerable to illogical conclusions. 

    During this time it is so important that parents recognize the vulnerability of their children during early susceptible years of childhood development. Often, children make up that they are responsible for adults in ways that are distorted. 

    Children listen to the interaction between parents. When parents fight unfairly, the kids conclude it is their fault. Parents almost literally are God to young impressionable children. So when they fight, kids conclude that it is one thing for a child to have a problem but if God (mom and dad) have a problem it is untenable. So, they make up that the reason mom or dad are fighting is their fault. Or, they believe that it is their responsibility to fix the problem. Often, one or both parents seek out emotional support from the inadequate child. When parents lament about the other or use the child to be a receiver of everything that is wrong in the world, the child concludes that it is their responsibility to fix their parent. It could be that the parent complains about the other partner in the relationship. It might be that the parent pours out fear and anxiety about finances, health, world economy, politics, religion, dismal results about their favorite sports teams, or whatever. Like a vacuum, young impressionable kids suck it all in and magically conclude that it is their responsibility to fix the problem that mom and dad complain about. 

    Subtlety, the parent-to-child role begins to shift whether intended by the adult parent or not. Children take on a role that they cannot fulfill. Even though they cannot fix the adult by their behavior, they still try.

    When adults get stuck in immature childlike behavior, they are vulnerable to allow the child to fix the problem. They allow the child to attempt to fix the problem by letting them listen to them lament and/or depending upon the child to offer emotional support and love. This dysfunctional behavior cements into the brain of the child that it is their responsibility to be the parent to their adult parent. Children take on this impossible task and adopt a family role to be the fixer or hero in ways that never work. They lose themselves in their role and maintain the role in their adult relationships after they physically grow up. 

    This patterned behavior contributes to intimacy-disabling behaviors in their adulthood. The lack of early child development of healthy boundaries created by unhealthy parents fuels dysfunctional adult behavior. The child grows up believing that the only way to be OK is that they have to fix everyone around them. They are set up to absorb everyone else’s hurt, disappointment, and difficulties, and that it is their responsibility to fix. They need to be the hero in order to be validated. So children who needed to fix their parents are prone to seek out heroic type jobs as adults. They become medical professionals, entrepreneurs, and CEO’S of companies with an emphasis to prove their worth by fixing problems. Their tendency is to find their identity in how well they can move mountains, fix problems, and conquer conflict because that is what was required of them when they were children. Dysfunctional childhood expectations are usually very subtle and unnoticeably powerful. It is a set up for desperate outside validation. The only way you know that you are worthwhile is that you are able to fix, conquer, or create solutions for problems that other people have. No matter how much money they pay you, if you do not fulfill this role of fixing others you will not be satisfied. Even though you know as an adult that intellectually you cannot solve other people’s problems, you have wired yourself that this is the fixated role you must play. Unnoticed, you become Atlas convinced that if you do not hold up your world it will indeed fall apart. 

    Here are a few considerations to ponder if you feel stuck being Atlas.

    1. There is a distinct difference between sharing someone’s pain and bearing it. Children from dysfunctional families learn to practice carrying mom/dad’s and other’s pain. In doing so, they succumb to overwhelm. They may grow up to be successful in their professional pursuits, but in their relationships they continue to believe it is their job to carry another person’s problems with the accompanying pain. They never learned to walk alongside and witness another person’s struggle without carrying their pain and compulsively needing to fix the problem. It is necessary to allow others to feel and have their own struggle without your interference. 

    2. It is necessary to look backward and undo your dependency to your parents or caregivers around the dysfunctional roles you learned to play as a child. You will not be able to detach from your unhealthy role through simple recognition of what is happening dysfunctionally with your partner, friend, or professional endeavor. Recognition is a necessary beginning. Yet, to transform your behavior you will need to address the past parental/caregiver enmeshment. Grieving is necessary regarding the role reversal in relationship that mom or dad unintentionally did with you. Shame is the dynamic that keeps the old role in place. Empty chair work often is helpful. Sitting your parent down in an empty chair without them being actually present, and describing the impact of their past behavior is always helpful toward creating resolve. With this exercise, you can practice saying it straight without edit and move the energy of all your feelings from the parent/caregiver to the issue of injustice (you being their for them in an adult responsibility rather than they being their for you) and then further to your own personal empowerment to initiate healthy boundaries and self-actualized care. It is powerful to do this with your parents/caregivers in person as long as you are not expecting anything from them in their response or lack of response. 

    3. Check to see whose baggage you are carrying. When you are traveling and check in bags at the airport you are given identification tags so that you are sure to pick up the right luggage at the end of your destination. More than once someone has mistakenly left with the wrong luggage. In relationships, you need to be sure that you are not carrying other people’s baggage. Sorting out what is truly yours and what is not is never-ending work. Some people don’t feel at peace until the emotions of everyone around them are managed and tended. If this is you, then you are walking out of the airport with someone else’s luggage. Bring it back to them. They cannot go home without it. Though confusing, you cannot be responsible for other people’s emotional response. Until you realize this you will continue to go home with someone else’s baggage, wondering how do you fit into their life expectations, solve their problems or essentially live their life. It is like opening the luggage once home and trying to fit into someone else’s clothing. It just doesn’t work!

    Rather than continuing to mimic Atlas in your life, discover the amazing freedom of letting down, letting go, and allowing the world to carry you.

    Caged

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    “The saddest feeling is knowing you deserve freedom and still feeling caged.” – Janelle Gray

    It is common for people to feel like they live in a cage. Worldwide some people feel caged by repressive governmental regimes. Sometimes, moms feel caged trying to do the heroic task of raising children. Addicts feel caged as do entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs remarked, “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

    That said, many of us still do. We become enmeshed and stuck comparing our insides to other people’s outsides, wishing we were something other than who we are. People get stuck on the hamster wheel, not getting off even when they recognize the endless futility of it all. Like the hamster, they feel caged!

    There’s a famous Rumi story repeated by many over the centuries of time. “Once upon a time, there was an Indian trader who went to Africa to acquire some local products and animals. In the jungle, he saw many colorful talking parrots. He decided to capture a talking parrot and take him back as a pet.

    At home in India, he kept his parrot in a cage, fed him honey and seeds, and treated him very well. When it was time for the man to return to Africa, two years later, he asked his parrot if there was any message he could deliver to his friends in the jungle. The parrot told him to convey to his friends that he was very happy in his cage and to pass on his love.

    When the man arrived in Africa, he delivered the message to the other parrots in the jungle. Just as he finished his story, a parrot with tears welling in his eyes fell over dead. The man was very alarmed but he thought the parrot must have been very close to the parrot in the cage and this was probably the reason for his sadness and death.

    When the man returned home to India, he told his pet parrot what happened. As he finished his story, the pet parrot’s eyes welled up with tears and he kneeled over dead in his cage. The man was astounded but he figured that his pet died from the grief of hearing the death of his close friend in the jungle. He opened up the cage and tossed the dead bird onto the trash heap.

    Immediately, the pet parrot flew up to a branch on the tree outside. The trader said to him “So you are not dead after all, why did you do that? You tricked me.” The parrot responded, “The bird back in Africa sent me a very important message.” “What was the message?” the man asked. He told me, “If you want to escape from your cage, you must die while you are still alive.”

    This idea of dying while you are alive is a paradox reflected on by spiritual leaders around the world. Jesus once said “You have to die to self daily, and by dying you actually live (Luke 9:23) and the Apostle Paul referenced that he must “die daily.” What does this metaphor mean? How do you die while you are still alive? 

    The third step of the Twelve Steps in Recovery gives insight. It says “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” The implication is to surrender and to let go of what you cannot control. What you cannot control is other people and the world around you. Letting go to a God as we understood Him is problematic. What if you don’t believe in conventional perceptions of God and reject the very word “God”, let alone feeling offended that someone might reference all of what God might mean to “Him”? It all seems so problematic! Yet the oft repeated Serenity Prayer proclaims “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Accepting what I cannot change requires a certain metaphorical death while you are still alive. Acceptance of what you cannot change means to let go of what you want different!

    A Christian woman the late Corrie Ten Boom used to talk about letting go with palms down and fingers spread wide so that she could not hold on to anything! The concept of God is what you can control. Do the Step 2 work in digging within and figuring out what you understand about God. Perhaps it is very different from all conventional ideas. Perhaps you will reject the name God and all accompanying ideas of its meaning. Perhaps, you will conclude that you are atheist and want nothing to do with the word spirituality. Your conclusions are helpful and you can be clear for you. That said, there still lies the dilemma of dying daily while you are still alive. There remains things you cannot change. You must let go and you can by going within your existence and summoning the necessary help from self and others to let go! It seldom is one and done—thus, those who speak of dying daily! 

    The prayer pleads for “The courage to change the things I can” which always are many! Dr. Angela Davis declared that she is “No longer accepting the things she cannot change.” She is changing the things she cannot accept. This is where courage to change comes into play. It always costs to embrace courage to change what you can. As an adult when you die to what you cannot control, there is a demand to courageously change what you can! The prayer suggests this two-fold process— let go (die to) and embrace responsibility for you. The energy and wisdom of a group community and the anchoring of private practice is necessary to fulfill this adult assignment. The prayer is tough to actualize but necessary. Dying while you are still alive will manufacture humility. When you don’t embrace Step 3, you will manifest a certain degree of arrogance— that is, I will rely upon my willfulness in a situation rather than surrender. Don’t be surprised if you don’t have another parrot in the cage you created. 

    Questions:

    1. What life experience has become a cage that you feel trapped?
    2. What would it look like to die while you are still alive in this experience?
    3. What is it that you clearly cannot change and what is it that you must courageously do to experience the promise of peace about your caged experience? 

    The Provocative Power of Self Belief

    “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

    ― Eleanor Roosevelt

    Belief is an Anglo-Saxon word that means “to live in accordance with”. People of religious faith tout that belief is the action word that puts arms and legs to the exercise of their faith practice. Believing in something, someone or yourself requires more than words, it engages action. Belief is powerful. It is the stuff that makes up miracles. People have overcome overwhelming terminal medical conditions, crediting their capacity to believe. Incredible feats and accomplishments in political movements, business, sports, and treks of outdoor pursuit have been achieved stoked with the fuel of belief. 

    Many have endured hardship, struggle, incarceration and so much more simply because of a deep belief that something would change or be worth dying for. Dreams are not realized without this important action step. 

    You can believe in God without believing, or with a minimal belief, in yourself. An addict can stop acting out with minimal belief in self. The secret to seeing your future self is contingent upon your capacity to believe in yourself. Believing is an action word that must be exercised in order to expand.

    There are varying degrees of self-belief. An addict would never experience a single day of sobriety without believing that they can go to a meeting, say no to the junkie worm, call a support person, or reach out rather than act out, etc. These steps require a certain level of belief in oneself that I am worthy of this basic action toward sobriety. 

    Addicts and others must tear down and remodel their false belief in self. False belief in oneself denies limitations and ignores personal boundaries. People with misplaced beliefs operate their lives from a blind spot. They fail to recognize constraints and controls and the need to resource the energy of wisdom outside themselves. They are blind to the power of humility. True belief in oneself recognizes personal boundaries and realizes the need to go deep within to unearth the limitless power of belief that exists within the depths of the self. When personal energy is focused deep within, personal transformation becomes reality. It culminates from the reserve of brilliance given by the universe that lies immeasurably within. 

    Methods toward excavating your own brilliance of personal belief are countless.

     Here are a few considerations:

    1. Face your mistaken beliefs: Misbeliefs must be rooted out. It requires confrontation. You cannot ignore mistaken beliefs. You must face them. When I awaken every day I am confronted by a chatterbox of over 26 mistaken beliefs that I have inventoried through the years. The beliefs chirp at me daily, not all of them, but many. Over the years some have disappeared. I have learned that by facing debilitating beliefs, I can practice ignoring them and focus on inspiring intimacy, acquiring beliefs that fulfill my destiny. Activating these inspiring beliefs demand training and action. You will need to practice your inspiring beliefs every day. The world outside won’t see your work. They will only observe it by the way you live. Face your misbeliefs.
    1. Cultivate deep abiding hope and confidence with the conviction of self-believing affirmations. Do you believe that you are “an unrepeatable miracle of the universe”? Really believe it? Then the way you treat yourself must be congruent with this belief. Self-degradation must stop! It is inconsistent with self-affirming belief. Cultivating self-believing affirmation requires commitment, not perfection. When your behavior and attitude stray from a deep belief in self, gently make amends and bring yourself back to center. You must act on the conviction of self-belief regardless of feelings notwithstanding your critical voice. This requires a daily commitment to rolling up your sleeves and doing the blue-collar work of acting on self-belief even when the outside results tell you it is not working. Remember, you are affirming your being, not the results. Ultimate results you do not control. Your response to them is where you cultivate unconditional confidence and belief in yourself.
    1. Self-belief is creative. Craft your own path. Ultimately, belief is personal. Listen to the storyline of others who have deepened belief in self. There is no one way to believe. Self-belief becomes the way. My personal pathway has involved physically going back to locations of personal hurt and abuse, giving back the shame that stifled self-belief, and reclaiming my own self-empowerment. 

    For example, I attended my 50th college class reunion. I graduated from a small conservative church-sponsored university. My advisor at the business school who was the chair of the department, would regularly chide me with negative beliefs. He told me that I would never amount to anything special and that I would simply be a “nine to fiver”. He told me to be average and just go home and make a living. At the time I was vulnerable and didn’t know how to believe in myself. I allowed his negative messages to dominate me for many years. But then I became determined to prove him wrong. What I proved was that I could be a workaholic and that my workaholism fueled my sexual addiction. I learned to self-sabotage self-belief. 

    Through the years I learned to detach from the shame of misbelief. I learned to affirm my sense of being and not to allow my performance to determine my worth. Part of my recovery journey was to give back the shame to the department head. He has been deceased for several years. Creatively, I went to the school of business and went to the room named after him. I did a kind of “seance” and invited him into the room named after him. I envisioned him as I recalled 50 years ago. Once seated, I read him an emotion-focused letter and gave him back the shame that I had carried for so many years. I then read to him selected poems that I have authored about shame, personal uniqueness, and empowered living. I celebrated my sense of being rather than my accomplishments. I shared feelings of anger, sadness, relief, and joy. Though I had addressed the mistaken beliefs years before, the ceremony of giving back the shame was powerful and deeply meaningful.

    I then walked over to the religion department. Even though I was a business major and not a religion major, I sat in an empty room and invited a man named C. Paul Gray into the room in the same way. During my first year of college, I confided in Dr. Gray about the physical, sexual, and religious abuse that I endured throughout my childhood. He listened and admitted that he did not have any answers for me. What he did do is validate me and treated me with dignity, respect, and compassion. He looked me in the eyes and told me that he believed in me. He believed in me when I did not know how to believe in myself.  

    On my trip, I shared an emotion-focused letter with him. I thanked him for his support and deep belief in me. After reading the emotion-focused letter, I read to him inspired poems that I have authored that anchored self-belief. I left the empty room filled with inspiration that affirmed my deepest belief that I am an unrepeatable miracle of the universe!

    You will need to create your own way. You may want to cobble together bits and pieces of other people’s journeys. Just make it your own. A deep belief in self paves the way to self-acceptance regardless of gender, race, religion, or economic status. You will need to practice being who you are and saying what you feel. Fulfilling your destiny will help transform our world. Thoreau is right when he emphasized that when you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams, and endeavor to live the life which you imagined, you will meet with a transformation unexpected in common hours. It all hinges on deep belief in yourself. 

    Stalking the Lion King

    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.