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Junkie Worm Blues #4 – Grounding Skills

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“Life can only be found in the present moment. Your true home is in the here and the now.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

The greatest challenge I have ever had in addiction recovery is being present in the here and now. If this is where my true home exists, there have been many days that I have spent on the road, even though geographically I am home. I become preoccupied with yesterday’s behavior, thoughts, and other people’s actions. I have engaged my mind for hours thinking about the anticipation of tomorrow’s activities and what I need to do or what I think about what the responsibility of others should be. Some days there is a nonstop ping-pong match between past and future that preoccupies my mind and keeps me from being just where I am. This mind mesh unmanaged triggers the junkie worm blues. 

In your recovery do you know this dynamic? It short circuits the serenity of sobriety. It creates a brown out from self empowerment. It breeds an environment that is ripe for relapse. Here are some short suggestions to manage past and future distractions that pull you away from the present moment. 

1. Practice noticing nature: We live our lives as if everything is centered around our perceived wants and needs. I am in the process of deepening my awareness that when I am distracted and stuck wallowing in past thoughts and behaviors or worrying about the future nature can bring me back to the present. Nature is sacred in this manner. Thich Nhat Hanh reflected “Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” Nature brings us back to the present. Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux leader, offered grounding in this description “What is Life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. The True Peace. The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this.”

Eckart Tolle said, “You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. Sometimes, letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.” The practice of noticing the nature around you cultivates the awareness of being present in the here and now. 

2. Slow down and do things mindfully. Meditation brings us back to center. Some people have found grounding by doing a walking meditation, feeling their feet connected to the earth, their bodies at one with the trees and animal life around them. They experience the energy of life by inhaling the breath of fresh air in the great outdoors and taking in the warmth of the constant sun. Recovery author Melodie Beattie wrote, “At no day, no hour, no time are you required to do more than you can do in peace.” Shifting to a slower speed can help you center yourself and promote a clear perspective in recovery. 

3. Pay attention to your purchasing patterns. It is easy to lose yourself in the frenzy of consumerism. We have all compulsively purchased something we did not need. There is an amazing number of people who have bought items that they don’t even take out of the box. It is important to ask yourself what the compulsive urge to buy something is all about. What emotion am I trying to avoid? Compulsive purchases not only block awareness of emotional needs, it will set you up to feed the junkie worm in your addiction.

4. Cultivate sensitivity to ways that you presume upon the people around you. If you are an addict and an entrepreneur, you must pay attention to this subtle yet dangerous dynamic in behavior. Are there people around you that you take for granted? Do you expect others to take care of your personal needs? In what ways do you presume upon those around you, your partner, family, colleagues, and those who work for you? It is easy to create a calloused expectation about those who are hired or in a relationship with you that subtly fuels entitlement. Celebrity status is dangerous this way. Most of us think of celebrities as Hollywood, athletic, or rock star status people. But, we are all celebrities in our own world. There are people who look to you and tend to put you on a pedestal no matter who you are or the world you live. Pay attention to the way in which you might presume upon them. The presumption always accelerates an entitled attitude. Entitlement comes from deprivation. Ask yourself what legitimate need must be met that when neglected triggers me to presume upon someone else to meet that need.

Sensitivity to the present moment, nature, and personal patterns that lead to destructive behavior are necessary grounding skills in managing the junkie worm that wants to be fed one way or the other.

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.

Taking What Is and Making It Work

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Feelings in recovery can be like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to the other. There are times that we are oversensitive and other times we are not sensitive enough. Sometimes we seem to work very hard to make something out of nothing and other times we need to take what we think is nothing and make something from it. For example, you can perceive someone’s silence as rejection in an instant, and then build what Mark Nepo describes as a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick. In this way, you make assumptions about what can turn out to be nothing. Other times you might go to a 12-step meeting that lacks the chemistry you hoped for. You don’t know anyone, there’s no coffee and you honestly feel turned off by everyone who is present. This becomes the time that recovery would require you to make something out of nothing. How many times have you walked away from a meeting empty and how many times did you shift your attitude and walked away with insights of gold? It becomes about attitude and your willingness to shift your spirit. 

So much of recovery is about taking what is and spreading it around to make it enough. There are many things you don’t have to have to be successful in recovery. You don’t have to have the best addiction counselor in the field—you are not the best client, so why would you need the best counselor? It’s not imperative that you pay an exorbitant amount to the greatest guru or an arm and a leg for treatment that you really cannot afford. You don’t have to find a “kick-ass” sponsor. The list of imagined unnecessary requirements can be endless. 

There are some things you must have. You will need an attitude to do whatever it takes to be sober. You will need to employ the capacity to take what is spread it around and make it enough. These two ingredients will take you to where you need to go in order to access who you need to work with and to engage in what you need to face in order to be sober and find healing. Here are some considerations to help you cultivate these characteristics:

1. Embrace grit and grind in recovery: I am not a big fan of providing plush conditions for addiction recovery. I also don’t promote the opposite, that austere conditions are required for recovery. I just believe that what is needed to do sobriety is a willing attitude to embrace grit and grind. One of the spiritual virtues of the 12 steps in recovery is courage. Recovery does not happen by way of convenience. Addicts in recovery build their lives around recovery, not the other way around. Ninety meetings in ninety days require a commitment to a whatever-it-takes mentality. Recovery requires more than merely jumping through the hoops.  It demands that you tell on yourself at each meeting and that you not leave the meeting without getting one thing to help you remain sober and deepen recovery life. You then follow up with accountability by reaching out to someone to help you to incorporate in your recovery what you discovered in your last meeting. When you do these three things 90 times in 90 days, tell me you won’t get better!  Yet, it requires grit and grind because these things are simple but not easy to do. 

2. Practice gratitude: You will lose meaningfulness in recovery living if you do not practice gratitude. The challenges in recovery are so daily! Every day’s struggle to do the next right thing requires embracing the grit and grind. But, you won’t be able to remain consistent in this effort without practicing gratitude. Take your eyes away from the challenge and choose to be grateful for what is around you. Notice the birds around you, your kids, your pets, your neighbors, the intricacies of everything outdoors, your partner, and your job. The list of gratitude is endless. Yet, this practice will take what is and make it more. At the next meeting you attend, that doesn’t have what you are looking for, practice gratitude and see what you find in the meeting after doing so.

3. Practice being generative: Believe it or not, your recovery is not all about you! Living sober creates a foundation of living whereby you can become generative. Generativity means any activity that contributes to the development of others and to the life of the generations that come after you. It’s a way of living.  Addicts practice the 12 steps to end the crazy-making experience of addictive living. The power of healing is legendary. However, healing would be short-lived without the emphasis of Step 12.  Step 12 encourages addicts to pass along the hope for recovery to the next generation of addicts in need of healing. The 12-step program was never designed to be insular but inclusive.  Twelve-step generativity is about the mentality of sharing hope for transformation to those without hope. Addicts with experience in recovery point to promise and healing to the generations that come after them.  This is the nature of generativity spawned from the 12th Step. 

The story is told of a 10-year-old boy who loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When he went to get the peanut butter jar to add to his jelly sandwich, he noticed daylight at the bottom of the peanut butter jar. Dejected, he threw away the peanut butter and walked out of the kitchen with nothing. His dad called him back to the kitchen, took the peanut butter jar from the trash, scraped the sides so that his son had 1/2” of peanut butter rather than the usual 1”, slapped it with the jelly slice and his son now had something where he otherwise would have had nothing. 

Recovery requires that we take what is when resources are less than ideal and make something from nothing. This art form of recovery will require your personal grit and grind, the magic of your grateful spirit, and a commitment to generative recovery living. 

Sabotage: Feeling Good About Feeling Bad

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“I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.” – Craig D. Lounsbrough

I played one year of football in high school. It was my senior year. It was memorable for all the wrong reasons. We were bad — not just bad but pathetic. If Charlie Brown were playing and Lucy was the coach, you’d want to place your bets with Charlie’s team. We had a 300-pound ex-NFL player for a coach who was not as inflated as were the expectations that year for our football team. I had never played organized football prior to that year. Other guys on the team were not much better. We printed twenty thousand “Go Go 9-0” bumper stickers — one for every person in our small town, signifying a perfect season. 

We accomplished the goal—backasswards! We went 0-9. Our closest game was our first, with a school that was about half our size. From then on, we considered ourselves to have a good game if we stayed within 3 touchdowns of all the rest of the schools we played. We seldom scored. Whoever it was that crossed the goal line, stood there in a trance. There was no dance in the end zone. It was like what am I supposed to do next? Even when we did good things, we would talk ourselves out of it with a series of penalties that sabotaged all reason for hope. 

Self-sabotage is a common undermining experience in recovery from addiction. Most addicts experience thoughts of recovery likened to the experience with football that was just described. Euphoric pink clouding fuels inspiration with motivating beliefs of “I got this!” only to be crushed in debilitating defeat with an addictive binge. Addicts often feel uncomfortable with sobriety. Not using seems too saintly. Leaving old patterns is like leaving old friends. Oddly, it can feel like betrayal! Successful sobriety with accompanying peace and calm begins to feel boring without the chaos of out-of-controlled living. Frequently, I listen to addicts share that it feels familiar, even good to feel bad!

There is a certain companionship and camaraderie with self-destruction. Rock bottom is a surprisingly comfortable place to lay your head. Looking up from the depths of another low often seems a lot safer than wondering when you’ll fall again. Falling feels awful. Addicts can willfully shoot themselves in the foot to protect themselves from confronting their own shortcomings.  Micromanaging others, passive-aggression, chronic lateness, and perfectionism all undermine the stability of sobriety. Some addicts can even argue that these traits are strengths and not weaknesses.  Yet, they prevent the addict from blooming sobriety and serenity. 

Here are a few considerations that can be helpful in working through self-sabotaging behaviors.

1. A zero-sum mentality fuels self-sabotage. Life perspective is damaged when we reduce our vision of people in the world to winners and losers. Mohammad Javad Zarif observed “If you look to the international scene over the past many years, we haven’t been able to resolve many problems and many crises, because we have approached them from a zero-sum perspective. My gain has always been defined as somebody else’s loss, and through that, we never resolve problems.” Self-sabotage is empowered when I adopt this mentality which reduces life to winners and losers. When you define the essence of life as either winning or losing, you set yourself up for self sabotage. When being a winner makes someone else a loser, life becomes “us” versus “them”.  We become like crabs in a bucket, any of which could easily climb out, except that others will claw the one climbing out over and again, securing that none escape. A zero sum mentality will reduce the self-confidence of others who succeed with envy, resentment, and conspiracy. It will sabotage the success of the other. Sobriety is not about comparison or competition. There is enough sobriety for everyone to experience and the depths of serenity have yet to be mined to exhaustion. Only a short-sighted perspective sabotages the reality that each person is an unrepeatable miracle of the universe.

2. Overcoming self-sabotage will require that you love yourself. Shame undermines self-love. When you go against your values and hurt others you sabotage loving yourself. You set in motion the operation of self-sabotage. Hating yourself for hurting others only activates the self-sabotage of continuing the same hurtful behavior toward self and others. It forms a wicked vortex that cripples with self-destruction. This contributes to the reason addicts struggle to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage. They don’t love themselves. Addicts become wired to the attitude that any reason is a good reason to hate yourself. Addictive ruin seals the deal. This is the most difficult challenge for every addict—to LOVE YOURSELF NO MATTER WHAT the outcome or behavior. You don’t beat yourself up to a better place. But, you can love yourself into a new reality about life. The sole factor that determines long-term sobriety and deepening serenity is when an addict learns to love him/herself unconditionally. This is not a black-or-white experience. You practice moving from hating yourself to hating and loving yourself, to loving yourself predominantly by learning to transform self-hatred into self-love. It happens when you give yourself some time, stop wallowing in the mud of misbelief, embrace affirmation and ignore the critical voice that sabotages your destiny. This will require ongoing conditioning. There is no shortcut.

3. Mistaken beliefs will fuel self sabotage. Your shaky sense of self sits on a foundation of mistaken beliefs. You cannot be intimate with yourself when your head is full of crap. You have to stalk your mistaken beliefs. Know them like the back of your hand. Make friends with them. If you learn to respect them, they will teach you how and where to love yourself. Don’t bullshit yourself. When a mistaken belief is activated, listen to what hurts that makes the mistaken belief operational. Then address it with gentleness and affirmative belief about yourself and the situation at hand. Practice reframing the negative cognition into inspirational insight and positive affirmation. The art of reframing the negative into something positive is often overlooked by those in recovery. It helps to take what is and make it work, simply by the way you choose to think about yourself. Most mistaken beliefs do not go away but they can be managed and transformed into empowered belief that overcomes self sabotage.

4. Give up the story line of Victimization. The truth is that we have all been victimized in the world we live. It is not helpful to minimize and ignore this reality nor does it create a resolution to wallow in the throes of resentment, disappointment and holding a grudge toward those who have the power or have persecuted with their agency. Sometimes the victimization is complex and requires an ongoing clarion call toward action and systemic change for healing and transformation. Yet ultimately, overcoming personal/collective injury will require that you give up the storyline of victimization in order to address self sabotage. Giving up the storyline does not mean you pretend that the violation never occurred. Giving up the storyline is accomplished when the injury is recognized, and then you grasp self empowerment to address those who have been injured and demand negotiating wants, needs, and expectations for healing and respect. When this healing is enacted, you are able to take what is and create meaningfulness in living. It does not mean that I accept domination and control from another. Rather, it suggests that I refuse to give my power away to another’s insensitivity, as I power my way into a new reconstruction of reality and transformation with confidence and equanimity. The hegemony of another is overcome by the embrace of your own power changes the storyline from one of victimization to one of recognized empowerment and efficacy. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless but to develop strategies for acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them.

    Sabotage is a common thread experience that ties us all together- People who want to lose weight, get a degree, exercise, run a marathon, make peace with relatives, drain the pain of childhood trauma often wallow in self sabotage. Many people stop short of attainment because they listen to the voice of self-sabotage that tells them they do not deserve the results of successful completion. It can be more familiar and comfortable to sit with victimization than it is to give up the storyline and live life free of addictive demand, resentment, grudge and victimization. Self sabotage can be like going to the candy store to pick out any candy that you would like and walking away with a sack of Horehound candy. It’s bitter and hard but it’s what I am used to. Inner peace will be achieved when you stop looking for something to change on the outside and you create a change in perspective on the inside. 

    The Importance of Resilience on the Road to Recovery

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    “Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling

    Most of us in recovery have our own description of “rock bottom”.  Some have lost everything while others’ experience of failure led them to a place of spiritual bankruptcy and despair without losing it all. In recovery, without resilience, every lapse or relapse becomes a “rock bottom” experience. Like a helicopter that loses its ability to sit in midair and drops from the sky with a thud, an addict can do the same. Triggered by failure to maintain sobriety, an addict can cyclically wallow with despair and anxiety. This pattern is unsustainable for long-term sobriety. The standard course correction requires an infusion of resilience. The capacity of resilience is defined as the ability to recover quickly from difficulty. It is the elasticity to bounce back from the adversity of failure. Without resilience, long-term recovery is impossible. 

    During my time in recovery, I’ve seen that the folks who do not learn to bounce back when they have screwed up usually wallow with shame in defeat and failure. What usually happens is that they become swamped with shame in their failure, which typically adds fuel to the flame of further relapse. To complicate matters, when the addict’s support system observes the chronic relapse, they may become discouraged and doubt that the addict is taking recovery seriously and think the recovery plan is ineffective. This response has a boomerang impact on the addict who might descend into deeper despair believing that recovery and sobriety are unattainable. Addicts who get caught in this downward spiral can be swept away and quickly re-engage in an old mindset of acting out patterns that have often permanently derailed attempts at recovery. This fragile house of cards of support in recovery can collapse and the chances of bouncing back, getting traction, and moving forward are jeopardized or destroyed.

    There is no addict who is not vulnerable to the possibility of relapse. Regarding sexual addiction, it is common for an addict to relapse. A key question is, will an addict recognize this possibility, address it and purposefully bring himself back to the center of his recovery?

    To do this an addict will need to establish a strong position in keeping the shame of the act out on the behavior and away from his or her sense of being. No easy task.  Acting out is about behavior and not about who you are as a person. As a person, you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. The acting out behavior is an aberration to who you are — not who you are. When this perspective can be maintained, it positions the addict to be able to protect his or her own personhood with healthy emotional self-care. It helps the addict to transform the shame of the behavior into compassion and care for the one who was injured as a result of acting out. This balanced focus can only occur through conditioned training of the heart and mind. However, when this skill set is cultivated it empowers a shift from wallowing in despair to solid grounding skills that will help to bring an addict back to center and create long-term recovery. 

    Recovering addicts who have established long-term recovery have learned to bring themselves back to center no matter how much they want to lament or engage in self. Rather than beat themselves up they decidedly move back to center and adopt self-care. This is the difference that I notice between those who have long-term sobriety and those who suffer chronic relapse. 

    Resilience is commonly mentioned as a positive characteristic of recovery but often overlooked as being critical to the development of long-term sobriety in recovery.

    Honesty is an Action: Not Just What You Say

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    Secrets and dishonesty plague recovery dreams. The two behaviors create a breeding ground for addiction to flourish and abound. Honesty is the antidote to hiding and deceit. That said, for most people, it is very difficult to master. Some people struggle with telling bald-faced lies. They manipulate the truth to create confusion so that the populace might embrace the improbable and ignore reality. The goal in this endeavor is to trigger doubt and to question the truth. It has been a threatening and sad state of affairs when leadership is tainted with deceit. Many people say one thing and do another. Honesty is more than what you say. It is found in your actions and follow-through. 

    Sobriety begins and builds with honesty. Twelve-step communities foster an environment for truth-telling. It encourages each addict to say it straight regardless of attitude or behavior. Getting honest with self and others requires vulnerability. It emphasizes that an addict needs to be “emotionally naked” and practice sitting in that space with others who are also recovering from denial and making excuses for dishonest behavior. Honesty is confrontational and holds each person’s feet to the fire to face oneself and move forward with actions that address the need for change. 

    However, practicing honesty is a difficult challenge. Facing insecurity at a deep emotional level is one of the great challenges in recovery. Most people live incongruently. They discover honesty but resist acting with integrity because of fear, anxiety, or a host of other reasons. Everyone is hypocritical about something. You say one thing with conviction but you live differently than what you avowed as important. People also struggle with being inconsistent whether it is about food to avoid/eat or a myriad of other things that you declare are important. It is human nature to be inconsistent, hypocritical, and incongruent. 

    When addicts get stuck in this dynamic they relapse. Saying one thing, feeling something different, and then acting differently than what you say fuels a double life. Without accountability and consultation, addicts lose themselves in destructive living. 

    Many people try to control their image and what other people think of them. They will find out what others approve of and then mimic those behaviors in order to get a smile of approval. This leads to a form of dishonesty that is habitual. Some people don’t even know that they do this behavior or even who they are or what it is they want. They automatically register what fits in with approval from a desired group of people. They never know who they really are because of this blinding sense of emotional dishonesty. 

    Honesty is the answer to a double life. When an addict slows down a chaotic duplicitous lifestyle, then they stop playing head games with themselves. “Macho” no longer matters. Trying to be a hero to others is no longer important. They are able to better see their victim posturing and excuse making. 

    Addicts in recovery learn to shift from focusing on external controls of impression management and concentrate on internal controls of being honest, listening to their inner voice and establishing true authentic relationships. They become more sensitive and connected to their own feelings and inner needs. They recognize their own limitations and provide rest for their mind and body. They learn to prioritize and cultivate a piercing awareness of personal values. They live by those values that are much deeper than mere sobriety.

    Honesty helps an addict engage in a spiritual awakening toward becoming real. With accountability and consultation, they learn to tune into their inner voice that guides and protects. As a result incongruence readily gives way to congruence. Hypocrisy is transformed to genuine authenticity. Inconsistency is curbed with follow-through and completion. Honesty promotes inner awareness that helps you create a real connection with your Higher Power, yourself, and the people you engage in your life. 

    Honesty is more than what you say. It’s the action you take. It’s fleshing out where the rubber meets the road that creates honest sincere recovery transformation. 

    Recovery Conundrum When You Want What You Say You Don’t

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    In 12-step meetings, I have listened to addicts reflect about times they adamantly proclaimed they never want to act out again, while secretly plotting how they would act out as soon as they got out of the meeting! Are these addicts insincere and crazy? Maybe, but for sure, they define the conundrum of cunning deceit that underlies addict behavior. It’s the double life. It’s the Jekyll and Hyde description that baffles those who love and care for the addict. 

    It’s not all that difficult to comprehend. It is common to listen to people declare they are going to lose 10 pounds while they ask for a piece of delicious carrot cake. Do they really want to lose 10 pounds? Yes. But they also are powerless to the thought of carrot cake melting in their mouth. Take this dilemma and magnify it 10X and you gain insight about the powerful Catch-22 that exists with addictive behavior. 

    How do addicts resolve the dilemma of wanting what they say they don’t want? 

    1. Don’t bullshit yourself. Say it straight. When you are scheming to score, to get a hit, and plan to act out, tell on yourself. Make the disclosure raw and unedited. Put it on the table just as it is in your brain. If you made an inspirational statement about sobriety in a 12-step group and you are acting out even while in the group. Stop it with honest disclosure at that moment. I like to think of doing a 12-step MRI (Meaningful Revelation In Vivo). It’s the only way to nip in the bud what you say you don’t want.

    2. Dialogue with the devil. Having a responsible conversation with your demons is a powerful way to manage addict-stinking thinking. Sit down with your sponsor or another addict in recovery. Let them be the devil or the voice of addictive craving. Tell them what your addictive rationale is saying about why it is OK to act out. Have them say it raw and rugged and argue with your sober thinking. Then practice being the mature responsible addict in recovery.  Be the assertive voice of sober reason. Each time the devil tells you why you need to act out, you respond with sober rationale and action until craving and urge dissipate and gives way to mature sober thoughts and behavior. It will move you to a more solid space and restore serenity.

    3. Change the curse to a blessing. Don’t run from craving. Get out of the path of the whirlwind of illicit urge but don’t run from craving. Transform it into a blessing. Once you are out of harm’s way listen to the legitimate need that must be met in a healthy way. Be the mature adult that clarifies the need underneath the craving. Then parent yourself by reaching out to your relationship partner and others in recovery to meet the legitimate need. In this way, you transform the curse of addictive craving into the blessing of recovery intimacy.

    Load up on recovery steroids. A play on words. Recovery steroids are a metaphor for affirmations. Most addicts don’t invest enough time working to change the way they think. What you think about expands. Hammering out deep belief statements is transformational. Practicing and meditating on these newly inspired beliefs will revolutionize the way you live. It infuses strength that enables you to work through powerful urges when you want what you say you don’t. Affirmations are an antibiotic to shameful mistaken beliefs. The more you steep yourself in affirmation the weaker the voice of addictive craving and mistaken belief. It requires ongoing daily conditioning.

    Self Belief—Key to Long Term Sobriety

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    “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh

    Addicts stop believing in themselves. In many cases, addicts never had anyone who ever believed in them. So they give up and succumb to mistaken beliefs about themselves that are not true.  They live a life of self-sabotage and self-fulfilling prophesy. Unless they learn to believe in themselves they will die an addict without recovery.

    I learned to stop believing in myself when I was a little kid. The only thing I had going for me was that I was pretty good in sports, but was never noticed for the goals I achieved. My older brothers expressed a lot of false bravado and lived a false self. When I competed with them they would rig the game so I would not win. If I still was able to figure out how to win, they would destroy the game so it would not happen again. I surrendered to believing I was not good enough and slumped to accepting ordinary results. Later in childhood, I stopped trying out for sports. I was average at best in academics at school. I was chided as not being special and buried deep in my soul that I was not good enough to go to college or be successful in life. 

    Even though I completed college and engaged in success in my professional life it was never enough because I learned to not believe in myself. I had this push within that I had to be more to keep from being less.  In very early childhood I learned to masturbate to numb out the pain from not believing in myself. Looking back, I thank my lucky stars that at least I had something I could resort to that would anesthetize the emptiness and pain of misbelief. 

    I got lucky when I met and married my wife Eileen. She believed in me. When I was a pastor, I never preached a sermon she didn’t like. As a professional counselor, she always believed in who I was and what I did. As an addict, she never gave up on me. She refused to believe that my acting out was about her.  She believed that I would overcome the mistaken beliefs that drove my addiction. She believed in me. In time, it became infectious. She says I taught her to believe in herself. As a codependent I probably did. In our 46 years of marriage, there has been a slow sunrise of awareness that has emerged that I could believe in myself. Of all the addiction interventions I have experienced, none is as profound as learning to believe in me. 

    Belief is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. I am so glad it does not mean to feel in accordance with. Throughout my life, my feelings have been all over the map. If I only acted on what I felt I would be an inconsistent mess. 

    Feelings are paradoxical. In recovery, I learned to recognize and listen to my emotions which helped me to identify important needs and address them in healthy ways. I also learned to not allow my feelings to define who I am or how I would behave. Through conditioning, I learned to recognize my feelings and thoughts while controlling my actions to create what I wanted in my life—like early morning runs. Often, it took a mile or so for my feelings and thoughts to settle into acceptance of the action of exercise that I wanted to do. It all hinged on the action word of belief.

    Recovery is the same. Addicts must learn to recognize their effect and resource themselves through healthy self-parenting skills. This takes time and hard work to achieve. They must learn that what they feel does not determine who they are or how they behave. In learning to resource themselves they must recognize that incongruent behavior is an aberration to their belief of who they are. Even though everything within tells them they have failed and will never get it right, they must bring themselves back to their center of self. This will only happen through practicing and strengthening belief in self. In the presence of lapse or relapse an addict must act on what they believe is their true self. They must condition themselves to ignore the mistaken beliefs that scream they do the opposite which always results in more self-sabotage and destructive behavior.

    The secret to long-term sobriety and the creation of serenity is to believe in who you are. There is no greater gift that a parent gives a child than to believe in who they are. It is taught by the way you role model your own self-belief and not through your words. I am grateful for those in my life who believe in me. However, sobriety and long-term transformation require that I believe in myself. I think of myself as a late bloomer in self-belief.  It is never too late for an addict to believe in who they are in recovery.

    Self Sabotage: The Common Undoing of Every Addict

    by

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

    “You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”
    — James Baldwin

    Through the years of working with addiction, self-sabotage offers the most common cause of why recovering addicts relapse. First-step stories are replete with examples of addicts committing blatant behaviors that clearly describe someone desperately wanting to be found out. Self-sabotage comes from what we learn to believe about ourselves. It comes from the thousands of hours of thought introjects that our parents have told us during the young impressionable years of life. These are the beliefs that are formed by our family, our religious beliefs, and the culture that we grew up in. Baldwin is correct that if you are treated by a certain behavior long enough and embrace a lifestyle effective enough, you will begin to do the same things to yourself and others because your worldview and personal beliefs will make it so. What you think about will expand. It’s the very property of thought.

    The concept of “stinking thinking” that so characterizes an addict’s thought process around his addiction is developed very early in life. Many addiction specialists contend that the environmental influence experienced by the mother during the period of gestation has a formative influence on “stinking thinking” that later appears in the life of addiction. This pattern of thought is often traced from the deprivation of developmental needs in early childhood to an impending mentality of entitlement in adulthood. While this dynamic is not the only contribution to the development of addiction, its prevalence can be clearly seen with a rationale that fuels addictive behavior.

    In recovery, an addict is challenged to confront the “stinking thinking” that sabotages sobriety. 

    Immediately, changing the way you think, how you see the world, and experience relationships with community transforms your behavior and you begin to accomplish what was thought impossible—-the capacity to live one hour, one day, etc, without addiction dominating as the organizing principle of your life. The euphoria of that moment, experiencing the release and relief from the grips of addiction is remarkable. In recovery, we call it “pink clouding”. The crash on the other side can be devastating when overconfidence produces slippery unchecked behavior that leads to relapse. At this point, I no longer need my parents or the world around me to oppress me. My own addictive thinking becomes my oppressor. I am stuck in my own self-sabotage.

    A way out: Self-sabotage behavior is so profound and powerful that addicts need help to get out of their own way. Twelve-step communities have been so liberating for millions over the years, helping so many get out of their way of self-sabotage thinking and behavior. Yet, many more have attended and left unaffected, continuing their self-sabotage and destructive behavior.

    Here are some suggestions to help release the grip of sabotage.

    1. Be coachable: Though bruising to the ego, surrender control of your recovery to someone who knows the way out. Do whatever that someone tells you to do. Often, that someone is identified as a sponsor. I won’t forget the early days of my recovery when I questioned every step of the way. My sponsor cleared his throat and spoke “Ken, you should shut up and do what you are told”. Though this advice was blunt, once I got over my hurt feelings, I used it to save my life from self-sabotage. 

    2. Rely upon collective wisdom: While I don’t believe that a 12-step group takes the place of therapy when needed, I have experienced the depth of wisdom that comes from the collection of community wisdom. The way out of self-sabotage requires that you have a consultation community who will tell you straight and confront all forms of self-sabotage thought and behavior. Many maxims express this view but the one I like is “If 8 people tell you that you’ve got a tail, then check your ass in the mirror!” Honest, frank feedback is the deepest form of love to guide an addict out of self-sabotage. 

    3. Unearth mistaken beliefs that fuel self-sabotage: This is where therapy can be so helpful. Unpacking mistaken beliefs developed in early childhood from neglect, abandonment and all other forms of abuse will help trace the trail of shame that must be exposed if self-sabotage behavior is to be re-wired. You will need to work through tendencies to minimize, defend, and dismiss the impact of parental influence. There is a difference between understanding where self-sabotaging beliefs originate and placing blame. Understanding the origination of mistaken beliefs will create the possibility of letting go of shame and reversing self-sabotage.

    4. Cultivate a lifestyle of self-affirmation: Belief is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to “live in accordance with”. Self-sabotage behavior is overcome when an addict carefully composes a vision of living life that is not dominated by an addictive response. Rather, when an addict chooses to live a life that is aligned with the call and vision of inner destiny, self-sabotage thoughts and behavior release their grip. They fall away like in the movie of Forrest Gump when the braces fall away from young Forest as he runs from the bullies whose intention was to dominate and pick on him. Thoreau put it this way, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”  

      This becomes a reality when I bathe myself every day with positive affirmative thoughts that condition toward positive fulfillment and weed out the “stinking thinking” so prevalent in self-sabotage behavior. There is quiet empowerment bestowed on the addict who learns to practice the skill of affirmation. Baldwin is correct. If you create a world in recovery in which you tell yourself what you want to believe and act on long enough and effectively enough, you will begin to make that part of your world free from oppression.

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