vulnerability

A 5 Tool Relapse Recovery Plan: Tool #3

May 16, 2023 by Ken Wells

John Kennedy Jr. was killed in July of 1999 when he was caught in a deadly graveyard spiral while flying his airplane at night over the Atlantic Ocean. The official report suggested that Kennedy fell victim to spatial disorientation while descending over the water at night.

For pilots, a graveyard spiral happens when you become disoriented, have no visual reference to the horizon, and happen at night when you cannot see. The pilot mistakenly believes his wings are level when they are banked left or right. When the pilot does not increase back pressure on the yoke, the plane starts to descend faster and faster in a banked descent. Pulling back on the yoke, without bringing the wings level, tightens the spiral and in most cases, increases the rate of descent. The harder you pull back, the tighter the spiral, dooming the plane to ground impact.

Physiologically, the pilot can’t see the horizon. Most pilots are unable to feel the turn at the beginning of a graveyard spiral. When the pilot does not trust his/her instrument readings for whatever reason he/she is vulnerable to a graveyard spiral that quickly becomes fatal without course correction. Pulling out of a graveyard spiral requires that a pilot trust their instruments.

Addictive relapse is a graveyard spiral. When an addict fails to trust the instruments of recovery, a crash-and-burn relapse is inevitable.

Here is a list of instruments to be aware of that can prevent a graveyard spiral in recovery.

Accountability: Responsible recovery is built on accountability through cultivating purposed vulnerability. Addicts want to isolate themselves and live life in secret. Accountability intercepts dysfunction because it insists that you develop the commitment to tell on yourself. The strength of a sobriety contract is your willingness to be held accountable to people in your support network for what you put in your inner, middle, and outer circles. When this breaks down the graveyard spiral begins.

Living in Consultation: The 12-step community is a space to cultivate connection. Addicts deepen sobriety and clarify values by living in consultation with a 12-step group. Addicts lose their way when they distance themselves from connection with others in recovery. Your best-isolated thinking puts you into a graveyard spiral that creates crash-and-burn through addictive behavior. Living in consultation is a proven lifestyle that helps you course correct and avoid graveyard spirals. Awareness remains keen to addicts who are open to the considerations and guidance of a sponsor and other 12-step support people. When addicts withdraw, become defensive or compromise consultation, the light of awareness dims. Addicts are not pathetic nor do they lack the capacity to make decisions. However, it is critical to recognize the need to live within limits and seek the guidance of a recovering community. Consistent consultation increases awareness and relapse is avoided. No one cultivates relational intimacy alone. Building a foundation of recovery requires consultation.

Commit to telling on yourself. This tool is absolutely necessary to stay the course in recovery. Vagueness fuels the possibility of relapse. Checking the boxes in recovery is a setup for a graveyard spiral. Checking the box is doing recovery without connecting to heart. This happens when you engage the fringes of recovery community. It comes from a subtle shift in attitude. When there is an opportunity to be vulnerable and share discord and incongruence you gloss over the invite and remain at a surface level of communication. Recovery healing is only present when addicts tell on themselves. This vulnerability must be cultivated at every level of life. As an addict, when you are vague in your check-in, you are in danger of a graveyard spiral. Relapse doesn’t happen all of a sudden. However, when the conditions are right and mature, backsliding happens in an instant. Crash and burn happens quicker than any addict ever thought possible. It is critical to cultivate a resolve to tell on yourself about every aspect of living. Take time to reflect. Is there any level of life that you are vague or unwilling to discuss with your support community? You will know this by examining the stones in recovery that you have left unturned and not surrendered to discussion. Examine all the aspects of your life, your attitudes, your behaviors, and your decisions. If you are vague with yourself or others in your support community you may be in a graveyard spiral and not know it.

Awareness is the third critical tool to add to your toolbox of relapse prevention. It is a skill that requires rigorous honesty with self and a commitment to open-hearted sharing of every aspect of your life with your recovery support community. Examine the congruence of your shares. Are you accountable for your hypocrisies? Have you accepted your inconsistencies as casual without answering to your support community? These dynamics fuel a graveyard spiral that leads to relapse. Awareness is everything.

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.

Unpacking Your Storyline

March 24, 2023 by Ken Wells

My brother Dave always fought my brother Jimmy’s fights for him around town. Dave was three years older and looked out after him. Jimmy kind of had a mouth and Dave backed him up. He was a big fighter. Once, Jimmy was being picked on by Mike Sweeney who was sort of a neighborhood bully. When Dave heard about it he challenged Sweeney to a fight. They met behind the Etog Bowling Alley. Jimmy was with him but stayed in the car. Sweeney had a chain and wrapped it around Dave’s head. I remember seeing the blood from Dave’s head spurting everywhere. Dave went nuts. He picked up Sweeney and body-slammed him to the ground and hit him in the face mercilessly until Sweeney was unconscious. Dave kept hitting him. I remember seeing Sweeney’s lifeless body flop after each hit and thinking Sweeney was dead. It was horrifying!

Two weeks later, as friends, Dave and Sweeney got drunk and drove a 1963 MG into a concrete culvert with speeds in excess of 100MPH! Neither were killed but Dave got his eye gouged out. My mom used religion and got everyone to pray for Dave’s eye. During surgery, they put his eye back in and he was miraculously able to see out of it again.

Later I watched my dad, in a rage triggered by Dave coming home drunk, pull a leg off one of our dining room chairs and beat Dave mercilessly on his arms until they bled. Dave could have killed my dad but he just closed his eyes and took it.

These life experiences shaped my view about anger, violence, and fighting. I learned that fighting was always for survival and then you fight to the death. It always humiliated other people. I decided to never fight except to escape death. Even as an adult, I have always been unwilling to wrestle with my boys because of what I witnessed during my childhood.

Everyone has a story to tell. The magic of healing can be found in the stories of our lives that we share. The uncovered storyline can be the most important link to healing. Housed in every story is truth that can liberate. This is why Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been so powerful for so many for so long. Within the community of alcoholics, there are “shared stories.” Each unique story is tied together through a shared weakness.

I learned to change the storyline about fighting and to direct it away from violence and toward healing and justice-making for self and others. Do you know the storyline you tell yourself from experiences in your life? Is it life-affirming? What storyline did you learn from life experience? Is it life-affirming or do you need to redirect or maybe even give up the storyline altogether?

Listed are considerations for changing your storyline from destructive to life-affirming:

*No One Passes Through Childhood into Adulthood Unscathed–It is not uncommon to hear someone declare “I grew up in a perfectly happy childhood.” Usually, this signals that someone is minimizing significant hurtful experiences. Regardless, no one is able to go through childhood and avoid disappointment and other hurts. There are major traumas and minor traumas. Both are significant. While horrifying traumas can be obvious, minor trauma is often minimized and overlooked. Many times upon exploration, what is revealed are experiences of neglect and abandonment that have been normalized and marginalized. Frequently, people have learned to practice an unspoken rule in their family to “embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious.” Understanding the impact of these “minor” traumas in average daily living takes focused effort.

It takes courage to tell our stories and deepen awareness of what is real. We are often afraid to unravel the uneventful, uncomfortable times of our past. We fear that if we do this, preconceived notions of reality will disintegrate. Consequently, we fear that what we have always thought to be true has now crumbled into nothingness. Yet, personal healing demands that we tell our story to uncover the meaningfulness that exists in average everyday living experience.

*Authentic intimate connection happens by telling your story and understanding your storyline–It is scary to be vulnerable. I describe it as becoming emotionally naked. Perhaps people will accept what they experience of you or perhaps not. Being honest with yourself at the deepest level has always been a most difficult task. Yet without this honesty, the depth of meaningfulness in life is blunted. Average experiences in life remain just that—average with no depth of insight. Brilliance is unleashed in the depths of honesty. Yet, there is a great price. To become emotionally naked to oneself is courageous. To open your heart with that same honesty to another person is at best a risky encounter.

Without honesty, there is no authenticity. Without authenticity, average everyday experience fails to have impactful meaning. Living life unchallenged and with boredom eats away at the soulfulness of inner brilliance. Dishonesty becomes a way of embracing the improbable and ignoring what is obvious. It makes average experiences empty of brilliance and drains creative resources.

*Your story can teach you the fundamental basics of self-care in the presence of human struggle if you are willing to examine and change your storyline as needed. A common thread that ties all of us together is the story of struggle. Tragedy, death, loss, emotional and physical pain are common bedfellows regardless of how or where we live. We make up a storyline about our experiences in life. Are they affirming and life-sustaining or flawed and enervating? For example, I am getting old. In my old age, I can tell myself that the joints in my body are just going to hurt, so get used to it. I can tell myself stories about others whose lower back hurts just like mine and that it is just the way it is for old people. The stories I listen to from others are stories of folks who sit on a couch all day and don’t stretch or exercise. Well, what I know about that is when I do that, my lower back hurts. Yet, when I stretch, run or walk, my back is stronger and hurts less. So, if I want to change my storyline about getting old, I will need to look for stories of older people who have healthier experiences in life. Those who walk long distances and exercise are motivated to doing and being active. It is all about the storyline I choose to believe about my life experiences.

Strength and inspiration come in every-day moments when we change the storyline and share connection with the human spirit of others. There is genuine depth in soothing a broken heart when we learn to steady and stay in the presence of overwhelming discomfort. As we change the storyline of life experience we learn that the human spirit is resilient and has the capacity to transform the convulsion of wretched agony into the presence of poise and healing peace when discomfort and heartache is embraced and shared.

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