“Hurt”

Regardless of all the people who’ve hurt me over the years, I’ve hurt myself the most. This idea comes up somewhat when doing step work in AA, but I like how it’s explicitly in the readings at NA meetings. It’s easy for me to do stepwork, clean up my side of the street, and call it ‘good’. Much more difficult is recognizing that the work on myself, of making up to myself the harm that I have caused myself, never ends. It would be a never ending story to list out all the ways I’ve hurt myself over time, but some general examples do jump out.

The literal self-harm—burning myself with cigarettes—comes to mind first. Even though it’s been a number of years since I’ve done that, the scars are still there and I can still remember how it felt. I remember being asked once why I did that to myself. I’d answered about how it gave me something else to focus on besides the pain I felt. I can see why the person I told that to didn’t understand. What sense does it make to say that I hurt myself to avoid feeling pain? None at all, unless you’ve been there, in which case you know all-too-well exactly what I’m talking about.

There are all the opportunities I’ve missed out on in life, ones I either turned away from or wasn’t open to, choosing my addiction instead. How many jobs did I not even bother to apply for because it was more important to me to be loaded all the time? How many relationships—romantic and friendships—have I failed or let fail because it was more important to me to be fucked up? Or because of my deeply insecure raging egomaniac of a shackled self-esteem I couldn’t—wouldn’t--bring myself to admit it when I was wrong?

In some ways, though, I think the most damage I have done to myself has been in my own mind. I’ve shared in meetings that I don’t need anyone to verbally abuse me, I can (and do) do it to myself all the time. How many times have I told myself I was worthless? Or that I didn’t deserve something I wanted—like love, kindness, or being happy? And even now, today, I still struggle with this mental game the Disease plays with me. I get so exhausted from all the imaginary conversations, all my attempts to control others by creating scenarios in my mind where they say what I want them to, or life happens the way I think it should. And why is that so particularly harmful to me? Because it’s a denial of who I really am and how I really feel.

I don’t burn myself anymore, and I’m pretty good about seizing opportunities when they come up now, but this mental game is still a challenge for me. Fighting the Disease in my mind, fighting back against this vicious force that loves nothing more than to tear me down and tell me I am a worthless sack of shit, that battle still rages. Maybe it always will; maybe not. Maybe the making amends to myself is nothing more than continuing to get better and better at not listening to that voice which keeps insisting I am worthless.

And there’s one last thing, to: all of this is not to say that making amends to others, owning up to the wrongs I’ve done and making it up to them (where possible), hasn’t been an important part of my recovery. It has. My point here is what good does it do me to make amends to others if I continue harming myself?

“Dee-FENCE! Dee-FENCE!!”

I continue to work on this issue of my defensiveness. It’s a struggle, naturally. Separating out my part in things can be really hard when I feel justified in my actions, thoughts, or emotions. Let’s say someone I know is constantly fucking with me; I feel I’m justified in being pissed off at them and reacting like an asshole. Or maybe I’m feeling on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop at work because my boss is erratic; then I think I’m justified in adopting a siege mentality—no matter how exhausted and crazy it makes me. Or take an older example, like when my ex-wife would push and push me until I exploded at her. “See? You have anger issues,” she would say.

Well, yes. Yes, I did have anger issues. And yes, yes I have issues with defensiveness. I’m working on it, just back off already! ;-)

It helps to try and laugh at myself. It helps, too, to remember that I didn’t become this way by accident. As it is with other character defects, even the Disease in general, who we are is who we had to become in order to survive. I wasn’t born defensive, I became this way as a result of what I’ve been through in all the different parts of my life.

The head-shrinkers who practice cognitive-behavioral therapy would say that what happened in the past isn’t nearly as important as what our actions are in the present. If you want to change a behavior, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why you behave that way. The action is changed first-period. If you change the action, the thinking will change as well. I’ve taken enough psychology classes to know that this is true, thoughts follow action far more easily than the other way around. For myself, though, I still like to know the why behind the what.

For me (and maybe this is because of my spotty memory more than anything else), I like to know why I am how I am. I want to know the reasons behind what I do. That helps me to change. Understanding how I got to where I am, seeing how I developed a character defect—in this case, my defensiveness—helps me to change. I can look at my life now, see how the circumstances are different now than they were before. This defense mechanism I’ve got, which served its purpose and has now outlived its usefulness, is easy for me to deal with the more I know about it.

There’s something in here, too, about feeling caught off-guard. I hadn’t realized to what degree this issue was a problem, and maybe that’s leading me to overreact to the issue. So, I find myself in the absurd place of feeling defensive about the fact that I’m defensive. This Disease of ours is so sick.

And it’s all compounded by some very unclear boundaries. What if someone likes to push other people’s buttons because they’re childish or have poor personal boundaries of their own? Someone’s erraticism might not be a tool to manipulate, but instead is borne out of their own insecurities? And the need to push someone until they explode can come from a discomfort and inability to deal with emotions in general.

So I have my stuff, other people have theirs. But I’m not responsible for other people’s stuff, just my own. Right…

That’s one thing that’s making this difficult. For some reason, the defensiveness is really tightly interwoven with my boundary issues. As in, I’m thinking that I learned to be defensiveness as a coping strategy, and part of that was learning to be acutely observant of those around me. Or maybe they’re even the same thing. To use an analogy, a child who gets abused learns to be hyper vigilant, watching for signs that another round of abuse is coming.

Hrm. It suddenly occurs to me that I’m writing this with the unspoken assumption that I’m going to reach a conclusion of some kind. But I’m not LOL. This is ongoing work. And it’s good to have the opportunity to do it.

“Breakthroughs and Breakdowns”

Here’s a funny story.

The other day, I was working with my sponsor. As an aside in conversation, I talked about my music and how I don’t play live shows. I said that the reason why is mostly because I feel so vulnerable, how when I play music, I’m opening myself up to others, and that I have a really hard time taking criticism when I do that. I can get really defensive. The slightest critique gets blown way out of proportion; I usually take it way too personally.

My sponsor thought this interesting and came back at me with questions about that same response playing out in the rest of my life. I told him I didn’t see it in the rest of life, just music. He pressed me on the point, and very soon I felt like my back was up against the wall. Before long, I had to admit that he was right. To an outsider, the conversation could very easily have seemed like this: me—“I don’t take criticism very well”; my sponsor—“yeah, you do tend to be a bit defensive”; me—“what-are-you-talking-about-I’m-not-defensive-at-all-how-could-you-suggest-such-a-thing!!!!!!”

*Sigh* Most of us don’t like looking at our character defects. This particular one of mine might very well be the one I dislike the most about myself. I dislike it so much that (more often than not) I’m in denial about its even existing. I’m often blind to it when it’s happening. I think that happens with those of us in the program too—denial is so second nature to us, we truly depend on our fellows in the program to call us on our bullshit.

I won’t speak for anyone else, but I absolutely love my bullshit. I love the rush I get when I feel self-righteous anger. Oh yes, the thrill of being Right. And of course I’m right! How dare you question me? Don’t you know who I am?! I can sit in that and stew in it and just eat it up all day and night. And does it ever stink!

Having my sponsor not just point out this defect of mine, but really make sure that I looked at, was ego-bruising for sure. It may hurt, but I know it’s what I need. I can’t work on what I don’t know is a problem (or what I refuse to admit is a problem). I’m not saying it’s easy, not by a long shot! Even acknowledging this particular fault of mine filled me with intense feelings of failure—almost to the point of tears.

Fortunately, this is what the program is all about: giving us a way to deal with ourselves. As it’s said in the rooms, “we’ve got a step for that!” I know right off the bat what a big chunk of this particular character defect of mine is about—it’s fear and insecurity. I can look into my past and see where it comes from.

It’s important to remember, as we do the work on ourselves, that who we are didn’t come about by accident; we are who we are because it’s who we had to become in order to survive. It’s not our place to pass judgment, even on ourselves. Looking at our defects, asking a higher power to have them removed is a continuing process of Humility. And we don’t do it just for the heck of it, we do it because these defects, the way we have lived, no longer works for us and we need to find a way to live differently.

“The Addict Response”

In the fall after I turned 20, I went through a series of unfortunate events that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Before those events, I would occasionally smoke a cigarette. After going through all that I went through that fall, I was a full-blown smoker. One time, not long after, I was dating a woman; then met another and realized how unhappy I was with the one I’d been seeing. So I got drunk. And there was another occasion where I remember very specifically thinking about how life was going to fuck me over no matter what I did, so I might as well be loaded.

These examples from my early 20s are just a few examples of the Disease playing itself out in my life. In general, I could fix/use/get loaded for any reason, good or bad. But I definitely did it in response to discomfort. (Hm... that’s a really sterile word to describe feeling that life is going fuck you over no matter what you do). I remember thinking how that was what people did. If shit happened, you got fucked up and that was how you dealt with it.

Almost as an aside, here, I want to admit that I really have no idea where I got this crazy impression. No one in my home used growing up (this is not to say the Disease wasn’t present, but that’s another story). I wasn’t around any active addicts or alcoholics that I noticed. I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that that was what you did. Maybe I got the idea from TV or movies?? I really don’t know.

But it makes sense to me now that I should think this way. This is the addict response to life. An inability to accept life on life’s terms. Something happens that I don’t know or don’t want to deal with? Get loaded; escape. I’m feeling a way that I don’t like or don’t want to feel? Get loaded; escape; get out of self. Whatever it takes, just don’t actually do anything about the situation or the feelings. Definitely don’t accept them and follow through on the ramifications. Ignore. Deny. Find a way to blame somebody or something else, whatever it takes!

And even now, I know the Disease is still with me. Every once in awhile someone will ask me if don’t sometimes feel like just having a drink or two. Don’t you feel like just getting loaded once? Just one more time? I always have to laugh at that, because no—no, I don’t feel like that. I don’t want to have a drink or two—I want to get hammered. I mean, that’s why people drink, right? No, I don’t want get high one last time, just have a quick hit, or whatever—I want to get fucking blasted and I want to be blasted 24/7.

That yearning to reach for any substance (the specifics aren’t important) to avoid dealing with life or take me out of my self, to escape what I’m feeling or what’s happening, that yearning never really goes away. I may not physically reach for the stuff, but my brain still does. I don’t think about getting just a little tipsy, I think about getting righteously plastered. That’s how I can know without a doubt that the Disease is still there. Because getting a little altered doesn’t make any sense to me. At all.

“November Thoughts”

This recovery thing is interesting, to put it mildly. As time goes by and I continue to work the program, I find new things about myself to discover. There are still issues which need addressing. The layers of the onion keep peeling. The work on ‘me’ is never finished. Something that’s been a struggle lately for me is feeling bad.

It feels weird just to write that. After all, once upon a time I spent every waking moment feeling this way—a wretched emptiness, the god-shaped hole, as some call it. Like so many others who suffer from the Disease, I sought escape from my own feelings in a substances-induced stupor. I doubt I will ever forget the release that being intoxicated brought. At long last, I felt good. Or was it that I just no longer could feel the bad? It didn’t matter.

Then came recovery. With my mind no longer under the influence, I had to learn how to deal with all that I’d been suppressing and repressing for so many years. The ‘bad’ feelings came back with a vengeance, but by working the program I found a way to deal with my feelings. By working steps, going to meetings, and becoming a part of the fellowship, I found a way to allay the long-reigning emptiness. I began to actually deal with me, with my life, who I had been. I discovered, too, that I could forge a new me. And bit by bit I began to stop feeling bad and began feeling good. It’s even reached a point where I feel good more often than I feel bad, and on those times when I do feel bad I have ways of dealing with it that are healthy.

Still, I won’t claim to enjoy feeling bad. In fact, I’ll go ahead and stake a claim right here: I still really hate it. A lot. It’s been a learning process to understand that life has its ups and downs. There will be good times and there will be bad times. And sometimes, the bad will persist. And persist. And persist. And I can do all the 12-step program working in the world and STILL the bad feelings will stay because that just happens to be what life is doing. Did I mention the part where I still don’t like it?

* * *

We talk often in recovery about the aching emptiness that goes hand in hand with the Disease. What many call a ‘god-shaped hole’ inside themselves, I prefer describing more simply as loneliness. God has never been far from my life. In recovery, I pursue my work of increasing my conscious contact with my higher power frequently throughout each day. I am not one of those who turned against god or felt that god had turned against them. Being in the program, I have worked to foster my relationship with god, increase it, deepen it. I consider myself fortunate to have a higher power that works so forcefully in my life. And yet, the hole inside me has not been filled by god; it is filled when I am in communion with others.

When I sit in a meeting and listen to others share the deepest part of themselves, whether its pain or joy, that’s when I feel connected and that’s when I feel the emptiness inside myself lessen. It’s when I’m having dinner or coffee with fellow members after a meeting, and we’re talking about our lives, noting the similar things we think and feel and experience—that’s when the loneliness subsides.

* * *

I’ve written before about how it seems that, no matter how I might progress in my recovery, I always still feel ‘different’ from other people. It’s like a comment I heard another member say once at a book study, that they keep on waiting to feel like they’ve ‘made it’. It’s more than just how life takes work. It’s more than my experiences in life have separated me from others. It just feels like there’s something different about me. This isn’t a feeling I particularly enjoy, either, by the way. It’s lonely, isolating. Sometimes I don’t feel it. Sometimes I do feel it and I don’t mind. Right now is one of the times when I feel it and it bothers me. It hurts.

I have not had a lot of friends in my life. Real friends, people I’ve felt truly close to, have been few and far between. There have been those times, too, when I thought I was close to someone and it turned out the relationship was mostly in my head, or that the relationship had been deliberately fabricated—that I’d been taken advantage of, manipulated, for one reason or another. Those have been some painful experiences. I imagine they are for everyone; no one likes to feel used, or to learn that they were deceived by someone they took the risk in trusting.

And as I think about these things, my thoughts turn also to relationships I’ve said ‘no’ to, times where I chose instead to let go. I think about these and remember my reasons why. Perhaps because my trust was betrayed, or because the relationship had proven itself to be a risk to my self or my sanity. Maybe my integrity was threatened, or I was just plain unhappy and it didn’t strike me as fair to string someone else along. I don’t know; I think I’m waxing philosophical on all this. I’m not even sure I have a point, except perhaps that being lonely is not something I enjoy, and how strange that is considering how much of my life has been spent feeling lonely.

* * *

I’ve been writing on this blog off and on for over three years now. It’s not a record of my recovery journey, exactly, just as it’s not a public journal or diary of my life experiences. There are elements of both, of course. I have been told, strike that, accused of keeping a dairy in this space, that this blog is very personal. People have expressed to me how impressed or amazed they are at how much I reveal here.

I always find these comments somewhat strange. It’s the same way with people who tell me how much they appreciate the depth I share in meetings. I’ve learned to not look at folks like they’re crazy when they say these sorts of things, but that hasn’t changed my inner response.

For me, I may reveal much here or in meetings, but there is so much more inside that doesn’t get shared. Sometimes it feels as though my consciousness is bursting at the seams. Sometimes I think it is in this way that I am different; sometimes I chalk it up to my home environment as a child and the lack of boundaries so familiar to the family structures of those of us who grow up with the influence of the Disease.

(Almost as an aside, I wonder: was isolating something I learned from parents who were themselves isolators, or was it instead a solution I discovered in my attempts to find separation from a home where boundaries weren’t present or respected?)

* * *

In the end, I suppose this space here is little more than my own place for letting out what I think and how I feel. Does that make it a diary/journal? Perhaps. The traffic to this site has always been light, and I’ve never tried too hard to increase it. I’m not a psychologist or an addiction therapist. This space is mine where I get to say what I think. Occasionally, it helps someone else. And so after all this long documenting of what’s been rolling around in my clean and sober noggin lately, what is the point?

Where is it written that I have to have one?

But here, for those who have made it through this diatribe, I offer a condensed version to takeaway: I’m still clean and sober; I still feel loneliness and it still sucks when I do; and I still feel different from others.

Be well.

“Integration”

I’ve been wracking my brain for a couple days now, wanting to blog, but drawing a total block on a topic. Then, as I was cruising social media, I saw some friends who were no longer friends of mine, but were still friends of my friends. Confused? No matter; it isn’t important to the story. This got me to thinking about how the people in our lives change over time. True, deep, long-lasting relationships are few and far between (at least, in my experience). People come into our lives, they go out. Sometimes someone will be in our lives a long time as just a mere association, then will rise in prominence. A casual acquaintance becomes a best friend; a friend becomes a lover.

Thinking about these things lead me to reminisce on opportunities I’ve had here and there to join in certain social circles, to go deeper into a fold, and the times and reasons why I chose not to. I know I’m being a bit vague, but this is a blog not a book. At those times, the reason I didn’t immerse myself more deeply into their group is because I felt different from them. What I’ve been through in life, the things I’ve seen and what my experiences have taught, give me a certain perspective. And sometimes that perspective interferes with my ability to have deeper relationships.

I’m not referring to the common theme of how those of us who suffer from the Disease have been through such trauma in our lives that we have intimacy issues. What I’m talking about here is how it’s hard for me to just ‘hang out’ with a bunch of people who don’t understand some of the deeper, darker, realities of life. I have a hard time relating to folks who haven’t been through or at the very least peered out into the black. I dated a woman once who very quickly came to understand that I was someone who ‘swam in the deep end’ as she called it. I think I made some comment about how the shallow end couldn’t hold my attention after having been in the deep for so long.

There is an important aspect to Recovery, that of rejoining the larger society. Some of us never leave—further proof of the importance of anonymity. Some of us struggle for years. But for those who are successful in walking the spiritual path, we ultimately find a way to rejoin. The ‘moment’ where we do can be different for each of us. For some, it’s getting a dream job (or a decent paying one). For others, it’s a new car. It can be getting married. It can be almost anything.

I’ve had moments along those lines in my life, but I still retain this feeling of separateness. No matter how I might pass as a normie, I still feel that separation. Not that I think I’m better or worse than those who haven’t seen what I’ve seen, just that what I’ve been through in life has changed me. Recovery from the Disease has changed me further. It’s not a change I would ask to be undone, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to go back to sleep, living my days awake as I do now. But still, there is the fact of who I am, and where I’ve been.

No matter how well I might re-integrate into society, the experiences of my life stay with me. That’s not good or bad, it just is.

“But I’m Right!!”

Here’s a great piece of wisdom I heard in the rooms once: ‘Anytime I find myself insisting I’m right, it means I’m probably not.’ It reminds me of that old-standard relationship advice: you can either be right, or you can be married. Ha! Seriously, though, someone who always has to be right, who is not able to admit when they are wrong, is someone who is deeply insecure. How do I know? That used to be me. Some days, it still is.

That self-righteous, sanctimonious attitude is such a turn-off to others. When we’re in that mode, being right isn’t just about being factually correct; there’s a strong moral judgment streak in there. It’s not just that I’m correct, it’s that I’m better than you because I have this opinion, because I know this truth, and you are less than a human being because you think differently—and a moron. What’s wrong with you that you don’t think like I do? Any idiot can see my way is the right way.

It makes us feel good about ourselves to insist we’re right, and to look down our noses at anyone who sees things differently. Our self-esteem gets wrapped up in our beliefs about our opinions. Sometimes our entire worldview gets wrapped up in there as well. I think of the evolution vs. creationism debates, or even the general belief in god vs. atheism arguments. A lot of moral opinions seem to fall into this category—we have a belief, and part of that belief is that our belief is the ‘correct’ one and that all others are wrong. Yep, we can build ourselves one tall house of cards like that by simply insisting we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

I remember all too well being a know-it-all. I remember my sense of self being all wrapped up in being right, knowing more than others, and the egomaniacal pride I took in showing that knowledge off. (For example, I really enjoy using big words). That tendency is still with me, and something I have to take great care at indulging in. There is a fine line to walk between being who I am, taking pride in my good qualities and standing up for myself, and letting my character defects get out of hand. Humility is a crucial part of the program, but false humility is not the way.

Because this is an area I have struggled a lot with, it’s also one in which I have strong reactions to others. I still feel my ire rise when I’m confronted with someone exhibiting this behavior. Maybe someone lies to my face, or perhaps they are on something I consider to be my turf and insist that they are right when they don’t have all the information on a situation. The part of me that wants to respond and say, ‘no, I’m right!” is still there, ready and waiting to go into action at a moment’s notice.

But here’s the thing about needing to be right—it’s isolating. When we’re in conflict with others, it’s entirely possible that we might even actually be right, but insisting on it can still damage our relationships. Standing on our own perspective when we’re wrong is definitely destructive. There’s a cost to our moral indignation, and again that’s what turns others off. It’s not that we’re right and they’re wrong, it’s that (regardless of who’s right) we’re being total dicks about it.

There are times when it’s important to stand up for ourselves, when we are in the right and we need to make a stand. There are times when we’re wrong and we need to admit it. Life is rarely black and white. In the end, we have to take each moment as it comes, and think about what’s more important to us: do we want to be right? And is it really worth the damage being right will cause? Or is it more important to be in communion with others, to be a part of a whole? And if we insist that we’re right, even when we’re wrong, how can we learn? If we chose to isolate ourselves from others, how can we continue to change and to grow and to become more than we are?

Being right and being wrong aren’t the be-all end-all of who we are. It doesn’t have to reflect one way or another on us or on our character. No one is always right. No one is always wrong. But we are, all of us, always human.

“Emotional Abuse”

After my homegroup Friday night, some of us went out to dinner for the usual post-meeting fellowship. There’s this great taqueria a few blocks from the meeting and it’s a pretty regular sight to see some number of us there on Friday’s. The staff all knows us, knows what we like to order. Whether it’s just a horchata, or a big wet burrito and a side plate of French fries.

As we sat, chowing down on some of the best cheap Mexican food in town, we talked about a whole range of subjects. It’s like that for us. At one point, we were sharing childhood stories. One member talked about how they were always getting beat on, and how their response to it was to just turn and laugh as sort of a ‘is that the best you got??’ response.

For myself, the childhood experience was almost the exact opposite. I was very prone to crying. In fact, the bullies learned early on that they didn’t need to hit me at all; they could tease and taunt me to tears, and they did so. Frequently. After I shared this, one of our dinner group quickly made the point that my experience was much worse than that of the other member’s. I demurred, saying that no one’s pain is better or worse than another’s.

These days, psychology circles are beginning to recognize emotional abuse as capable of causing far more damage, being even more destructive to a person, than physical abuse. They also recognize one of the common themes of those who suffered emotional abuse is that they tend to minimize their trauma. Emotional abuse can be a tough one to get my head around. I find it easiest to think about as a form of abuse that isn’t so much about the things people did to you, but what they didn’t do. Emotional starvation, lack of validation, making someone (particularly a child) responsible for emotions that aren’t theirs, the lack of an accepting and loving environment, these are the things I think of from my own past.

I sometimes write about how much the 12-step program has done for me—that I’ve tried religion, psychology, pharmacology, and on and on, and nothing worked until I got into Recovery. That’s mostly true. What’s also true is that I have done a HELL of a lot of therapy, and a lot of work on myself on my own. I’ve had to accept and learn to deal with some basic truths about myself, not the least of which is that I have a lot emotional depth—especially for man. This can make life pretty damn tough at times, but I’ve found that by staying in touch with what’s going on inside me, it’s manageable.

This is not to say that it’s easy. I can still have strong emotional reactions to certain types of people and situations. Sometimes things come up that are very hard for me to deal with. Things like when someone lies straight to my face, or is having a bad day and throws their shitty attitude at me; when my integrity is questioned, or if someone is making constant crises out of situations that don’t call for it. To me, these situations can get interpreted almost like… well, actually, sometimes they don’t get interpreted at all. When stuff like this happens, sometimes my brain just shorts out trying to process. If I had to put them all under one umbrella, I’d call it times when my reality is called into question. Hmm. That might not make sense.

Say I know things to be one way and someone insists to me that they’re not, or say someone tries to make me responsible for something that I had nothing to do with, my brain can short out. It’s like I’m left without footing, without a leg to stand on. And there is definitely a part of me inside that regresses to that young child who wants to burst into tears. Even today, I don’t do well with being teased. Someone may be trying to goad me, push my buttons, maybe for no other reason than to fuck with me or see what will happen.

That’s the kind of stuff that I really have a hard time with, and even though I’m much better at dealing with it than I used to be, I’m well-aware that it can be dangerous territory. Sometimes, someone will be pushing me and I reach a point where I have to tell them, straight up, “stop fucking with me!” This bear-ish response, of course, is the defensive cover-up for the child inside who is crying the much truer, “stop hurting me!”

I’ve been accused many times in my life of being overly sensitive and overly emotional. I don’t see myself that way anymore, but not because I’ve stopped being sensitive or emotional. That awareness, those perceptions, and the thoughts and feelings that go with them, have been tempered. Good boundaries have helped. Resolving issues from my past has helped a lot to. Learning to recognize the things I can’t change and let go of them has been an immense relief. But I remain who I am.

I don’t think of myself as sensitive and emotional anymore. These days, I am merely someone who has a lot of emotion and is in touch with it; I am sensitive to the world around me and the people in it, but I don’t have to let it affect me. Like anyone else who has endured trauma in their life, I retain the scars of those experiences. They may have healed, but they are still there. And with that healing, I am able to move on.

“One Helping Another”

Even in Recovery, life still has its ups and downs. It’s that whole ‘living life on life’s terms’ thing we always talk about. The program gives us tools to use, things we can do, so that we can deal with life in different ways instead of our old ways—like getting loaded, getting loaded, and getting loaded.

When I’m going through a rough time, one of the things I find really useful is to go to a meeting I haven’t been to before. I love my homegroup, of course I do, but there’s something about taking myself out of my comfort zone and being around folks who I don’t know, have never met, and yet are like me. It helps me to know that there are so many others out there who struggle with the same issues I struggle with, in the same way I struggle with them.

One time I tried this, I was having a hard time with some toxic people in my life. Hard time? Okay, that’s an understatement. I was going absolutely bonkers trying to deal with them. I was talking to my friends in the program, my sponsor, and I was still stuck. I could even think through the situation, recognize my powerlessness over these other assholes folk and how my life was becoming totally unmanageable. Still, things weren’t getting better. I could tell myself all day long that ‘this too shall pass’ but it wasn’t enough. I could practice patience, but I needed help to get through the pain of going through it all. So I called a friend and asked if they knew a good meeting.

Once there, I listened as I did when I was new—I listened for the similarities, and I heard them loud and clear. At one point the speaker started talking about toxic people and how to deal with them. My ears perked up and once again I was amazed by the power of the rooms, and of the rewards I receive from allowing the big G to work in my life. The speaker kind of grimaced at first. He scrinched his face up and paused for a moment at the subject. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, that’s hard.” And I knew in that moment that I really was going to be okay.

He did have some useful advice for how to deal with people like that, but the thing that was the most helpful was knowing that I wasn’t crazy. What I was going through was as hard as I thought it was; the feelings I was having weren't unreasonable, they were what anyone might feel, going through what I was going through. Dealing with toxic people is hard, and it’s particularly hard for those of us in Recovery because we used to BE the toxic people. (Some of us still are, but that’s the subject for another entry.) Being around folks who are the way we used to be can pull us like a magnet back into our former selves. It’s no different than how being around people who are currently using or drinking can lead us right back to getting loaded.

So much of the power of the rooms, the healing I get from going to meetings, is from that feeling of not being alone. When I hear someone I’ve never met share how I’ve felt, it helps me to not feel alone. I still get chills when it happens. I still fall back into that old way of thinking that I’m unique and that what I think and feel, what I deal with in life, is a problem only I have that no one else could ever understand. It isn’t true. It’s such an amazingly powerful part of the program, one addict/alcoholic helping another. We’re able to let ourselves be helped because we know the person on the other end has gone through what we’ve gone through.

After that meeting was over, I walked up to the speaker and thanked him and we shot the shit for a few minutes. I let him know how much he’d helped me and how glad I was that I’d gone that night. The miracles that happen in Recovery are still amazing. I hope they never stop being so.

“Thinking About Codependence”

A lot of us in Recovery have issues with codependence. Our families tend to suffer from it to an even greater extent, and make no mistake it can be every bit as painful as what those of us dealing with the Disease go through.

I had the fortune (misfortune?) to begin recognizing my own codependent thoughts and behaviors early on in my Recovery journey. In a way, I was working on these issues before I had even started the work of recovery from my addictions. Naturally, I didn’t make much progress until I began addressing the latter.

I’ve heard codependence called ‘addiction to people’. I’m not sure I see it quite like that. I tend to look at it more like the Disease, just without substances. A lot of the behavior patterns, the ways of thinking and relating to others, are so similar to active addiction. And certainly codependence walks hand in hand with the Disease; it’s pretty rare to find a couple where one is an addict or alcoholic and the other isn’t codependent.

The work I’ve done on my own codependence has taken a lot of forms: learning to have and enforce strong boundaries for myself; not offering help in situations where it hasn’t been asked for; allowing others to be responsible for themselves and the situations they’ve gotten themselves into; not making assumptions about what others think and feel; asking for help when I need it. There are many others.

Changing these patterns has been tough for me. Something I still struggle with is the idea that my allowing someone else to have their problems and deal with them themselves does not mean I don’t care about them or what they’re going through. It’s meant learning the difference between having compassion for someone, versus feeling sorry for them. And also that having compassion for someone and what they’re going through does not automatically lead to action on my part. Just because someone is having a hard time in life, that does not mean I have to abandon my own boundaries that I’ve set for myself.

Just because someone is having a bad day (or a bad week, month, or year), that doesn’t give them the right to treat me poorly. Just because I feel compassion for someone else’s situation does not mean I allow others to manipulate me. If anything, when someone else is going through a hard time, I have to be extra vigilant about maintaining my boundaries because I know my tendency is to abandon those boundaries, to cancel out myself and rescue the other person--even if only temporarily from their own feelings.

Codependent manipulation can be downright insidious. Throwing a pity party to try and get others to rescue us? Not healthy behavior. It keeps the pity partier thinking of themselves as helpless, and prevents them from doing what they need to do to take care of themselves. And it’s bad for the helper, too. I know from my own personal experience that being a rescuer leads me to have an inflated opinion of myself. It feeds my ego in unhealthy ways. I start thinking about how great I am that I do all these wonderful things for other people—and without even being asked! That’s not about being someone who cares for others, that’s about me puffing myself up.

It’s taken me some time to learn to recognize the difference between when I’m being a rescuer and when I’m genuinely helping someone. I have to watch my motives, my thoughts and my feelings. I need to keep on asking myself, ‘am I doing this to try to control the other person?’ It applies to my emotional sobriety as well. I still catch myself having imaginary conversations all the time that aren’t about anything else other than me trying to control a situation in which I feel powerless.

I like to tell my sponsees that codependence work is like 12-step graduate study. Work through your steps for your addiction first, I tell them. A lot of the work we do on our addiction helps combat those codependent ways of thinking and behaving. If we get through all our steps and are still having trouble with codependency, there are a ton of books out there on the subject. (Followers of this blog are familiar with my deep love of Melody Beattie, just to name one author.)

In the end, though, this is yet another one of those ‘quality problems’ that we get to work on. Once we’re living the spiritual lifestyle, once we’ve put together a few one-days-at-a-time, life begins to open up for us. Instead of our lives being what our addiction brings on us, they become what we make them.

“Decisions, Decisions”

‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.’ --Step Three.

There’s an old saying about how all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I like this idea a lot. It really highlights the need for being active, for taking action. If you aren’t doing something to stand up against what’s wrong, you’re giving your silent approval to what’s happening.

When I took my college classes on diversity, we discussed the same idea. We talked about racism, sexism, and all the other ‘isms’, as systems of oppression. These systems exist and are inherent to the way things are, and will persist until changed for no other reason than because they are the status quo. Therefore, if you aren’t actively working to fight against these systems, then you’re accepting them and—again, through your inaction—making a tacit admission that they are okay.

This way of thinking applies to Recovery, too. Those of us who’ve been in this for more than a few one-days-at-a-time know that we don’t get to stagnate. We don’t get to just tread water. If we aren’t moving forward, we’re moving backwards. That’s just how it is for folks like us. If we aren’t actively fighting, taking action to keep the Disease at bay, then we’re letting the Disease win. It never quits. It’s always there, waiting for us to get lazy, for us to let our guard down, and to drag us back to the hell we’ve worked so hard to escape.

A big part of the third step is recognizing the enormity of what we do in it—and it’s not so much what we decide to do, but the simple fact that we made a decision at all! Sure, it’s huge that we make a decision to turn over our will and our lives, but just as important is the fact that we made a decision in the first place. We begin our transformation from people of inaction into people of action. We begin to become people who are actively in charge of the direction of our lives, instead of just following the path of least resistance and avoidance.

As time has passed for me in my Recovery, I have begun to see being active or being passive, making decisions or not, differently. I’ve become more conscious of how not making a decision is in itself a decision. If I put off making a decision, then I am passively deciding to continue accepting things as they are.

One example of this from my own life is my current job situation. I think a lot of aspects of my work environment are unacceptable. So, I’m applying for other jobs and going out on interviews. If I wasn’t doing these things, or taking some other form of action, then all I’d be doing is complaining. And no matter how loud I might complain, my actions would still show that the situation is, in reality, acceptable to me.

Another example (which, admittedly, is a bit harsh) is someone who’s in an abusive relationship but has not yet made the decision to leave. Until they make that decision, they are—by default—deciding to stay. And by the way, I don’t mean to ignore the enormity of life-changing decisions. I know how tough big decisions are. All I’m saying is that not making a decision to change can, in effect, be the same thing as making a decision to not change.

When it comes to fighting evil, fighting racism and sexism (and all the other ‘isms’ of injustice), it’s really easy to feel that the fight is futile. And maybe it is. Maybe the quest to change these things is an impossible one, a task that will never be completed. But if I don’t at least try, if I don’t work to try to change things, then I’m saying I’m okay with things being the way they are. I’m not.

The same is true for me in my Recovery. If I stop the work of Recovery, if I cease that daily maintenance of my spiritual condition, then I am saying that it’s okay to move backwards and to go back towards being the old me I used to be. It isn’t.

Recovery is a daily decision. Every day, I get to decide whether I’m going to move forward or backward. If I don’t choose to move forward, then by default I will end up choosing to move backwards. And that is not acceptable to me. So I keep choosing to move forward—one day at a time.

“But I'm Not Using”

It's a refrain of mine: the Disease never quits. All that I am, everything I have inside me, all my addict tendencies, thoughts behaviors, and actions, that potential is still with me. I've learned a new way of living, that I don't have to use or act out on my addiction, that it is possible to live a different way. But I've found it important to remember, to reaffirm on a regular basis, that my potential to live that way, and to cause all the chaos and wreckage I used to cause, never goes away.

It's another common comment of mine is that the Disease isn't about substances. The thoughts and behavior, the actions we take when we're in our Disease, that symbolizes the disease more than our use. People didn't hate me because I was fucked up all the time, they hated me because I was an asshole. And even though the program of recovery can help us to stop using, far more powerful for me is how it's helped me to stop being an asshole. (For the most part--I'm still not perfect ;-)

It's about the difference between sobriety and recovery. And this too is a really important point. If I'm not using, then sure that's great; but if I'm still being an asshole, then why would anyone care?

I've known people who went through some seriously rough times in their lives. I mean deaths of parents, children, life-threatening illness, and did it without picking back up. They talk about how hard it was, how they didn't get through it perfectly, but at least they didn't use. It's an affirmation.

I've know people who use that same phrase in a negative way. Maybe they're going rough spots in their own life, but instead of doing what needs to be done to take care of business, they sit in inaction and tell themselves it's okay because they aren't using. Next thing you know, their lives are going all to hell. Maybe they've found other ways to fix without drugs. Maybe they're fixing with food, or with sex; maybe they're obsessing themselves with other people and others' lives. The deep, dark, hole of their lives keep getting deeper and darker. Instead of affirming their sobriety, they use the fact of their abstinence as a crutch, as a blanket of denial or an excuse to take not take action.

Sobriety isn't the same as Recovery. If we stop working the program, if we cease our pursuit of living life by spiritual principles, we aren't living in recovery. We might not be using, but so what?

“Life After Drugs”

I wasn’t one of those people who thought their life would be over if they quit using, but there are plenty who do (or did). Some people don’t ever even try sobriety because they don’t want to become a ‘boring’ normie. Some folks have the misfortune of walking into their first twelve-step room and being faced with dour, depressed faces. News flash: Recovery does not have to be a funeral. If it feels like it is, then you’re doing it wrong.

My fear was always that life never would become anything other than misery. Actually, I can’t even call it a fear. I was convinced that was what life was, or at least what my life was. I thought everyone did it that way, that anybody who claimed to be happy was merely pretending. I was convinced that the agony I spent each day in was how everyone felt and that getting fucked up was how we all dealt with it. And let’s not forget the final piece of that particular insanity of mine—that I was a grade-‘A’ fuck up because I couldn’t keep doing it anymore.

I am still amazed that my life can be so full of joy. I used to think joy and happiness weren’t ever attainable, that at best all I could achieve was to be so deadened from substances that I felt nothing. That was my pitiable attempt at achieving happiness and balance in life—to be so fucked up that I was dead to all feelings, to the people around me, and the world I lived in.

These days, it is so different. Like night and day. No, more like the cold and dark of absolute zero in the middle of space, versus dancing on the surface of the sun in eternal brightness. I get to have a life now. I get to have a balanced life, too. I get to work, to play. I get to have my moments of struggle and the times of reward. I have hobbies, friends. There are sacrifices and payoffs. There is balance.

I never thought to myself that I didn’t want to quit because I wouldn’t have a life if I did; I never thought I had a life to begin with. I wasn’t a party user. I was a depressed, lonely soul who hid from the world and desperately tried everything he could to get the world to leave him alone. I tried everything I could to be emotionally dead. I even tried to make being dead a reality—without any success, obviously, and I can tell you that there is really nothing worse for a disastrously low self-esteem than failing at committing suicide!

Yes, there is a life after getting clean and sober. For those like myself, it’s a life like we’ve never known was possible; it’s the first time we’ve ever truly even had a life.

“Transitions”

It’s been over a month since my last entry, so I’m giving myself permission to be long-winded today.

I’ve been doing this Recovery thing for a few one-days-at-a-time now. Last month, I passed my 4-year sobriety birthday. I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of newcomers come in, go back out, and stay. And I’ve seen people with some clean time continue to struggle with how the Disease never quits trying to run their life. I have my struggles, too. Fortunately, they’re what we like to call ‘quality problems’. Things like how I’m no longer out of work and desperate for a job; these days I have a job—a pretty good one at that!--and my problem is the struggle to find a different job, one that’s a better fit for me and that I can be happy doing.

As I’ve been looking for a new job, I’m having to spend a lot of time in a mental place that is really uncomfortable for me. I like certainty. I like knowing What Is. Waiting for a call to interview, or to hear about whether I’ve gotten a position or not, that is all ‘what if’ territory. And no matter how hard I try to let go and let god, I still struggle to do so. And in the meantime, the Disease keeps feeding me all kinds of crap, tempting me to jump on board and ride the Obsession Express train back to crazy town.

I don’t like what-if anymore. Not knowing drives me crazy these days. I can’t do anything with what-if. Good news, bad, or indifferent, that I can deal with. But what-if is all about waiting, having patience, trusting. And the more I want something, the harder it is to sit in that place of uncertainty regarding it. This uncertainty is difficult when it comes to romantic relationships as well. And, just as it is with a job I want, the more interested I am in someone, the harder it is for me—especially when it comes to trying to read the situation and the others involved.

I do have my life experience, what brought me to the program, the work I’ve done in the program and the tools I’ve learned to use. I know that, as uncomfortable as it is for me, the worst thing I could do would be to try and control the situation. To try and do something, reacting from a place of what-if and my discomfort with those feelings, well that is all to the bad. Because if I do that, then I’m trying to run my life and that shit does not work. God takes care of me. Always has. All that’s required of me is to do my part and let him take care of the rest.

The parallels of the two situations keep going, actually. Even if I’m called in to interview for a new job, that only adds to the already heavy stress and unhappiness I have about my current one. The same is true as I struggle to meet someone, or on the rare times when I do—I have all the uncertainty of that new situation, compounded by all the feelings associated with being alone. First dates are obscenely stressful. It's an important point: my fears my insecurities are still there, despite my time in the program. They don’t fully go away. I handle them much better now than I used to (maybe even better than most folks out there), but they don't vanish.

Ironically, the guidance for how to handle each of these two totally different situations is the same. Whether it’s work or romance, all I can do is honestly present myself. The other will be interested, or they won’t. And sure, I may be disappointed if things don't go the way I want them to, but I know (from painful experience) that it does me no good to try and manipulate the situation. That’s what my experience has taught me—when I try to make reality resemble my own designs, that’s when I go crazy, shit gets fucked up, and people get hurt.

But like I said before this very meaningful tangent, what I deal with now are quality problems. And I find myself thinking often about how REALLY lucky I am. I’m in good health. I haven’t developed any cross-addictions. There have been moments where I’ve seen the potential for them and have taken action to ensure they don’t develop (one example: I used to be a good poker player; I don’t play poker anymore). My best guess as to why I’ve been so fortunate in this area is that I have a fierce devotion and determination to work and keep on working the program. Perhaps that is where I am the most fortunate.

I'm not sure if I can say how or why I have so much willingness to work the program, to turn immediately to it when times are rough. Maybe my higher power decided to bless me with this gift. Maybe it’s something I’ve learned from my experience that the program works only if I work it. Maybe it’s an instinct I’ve developed over the past four years. Or maybe it’s because the program is the only thing in all my long years of suffering I've ever found that actually, truly helped.

Hmm… writing that last line leads me to a different thought.

I had coffee with a fellow member recently. I asked them why they continued to work the program, what it was that kept them going. In their response, they talked about how it feels to no longer spend every day wanting to die.

The statement is true for me, too. Before I found Recovery, that was how my life was. I didn’t want to go to bed at night because I’d just have to wake up in the morning and go through it all all over again. Every day was misery, walking around so emotionally raw, in constant pain that was so unbearable, pain I had felt for so long that I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. And it had been like that for so long I couldn’t even tell you when it had started. If you went back and talked to me in my days of self-mutilation (late teens, early 20s), I would have told you the exact same thing—that I’d always felt like this, that I was in constant emotional pain, and even then I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why or when it started.

I wish I could explain this to others—how it feels to live every day of your life wanting to die, and then to not feel that way anymore. And not just no longer wanting to die, but feeling genuinely joyful to be alive, happy to have a life that works. The best parallel I can think of would be to tell folks imagine starving for over thirty years and then eating for the first time. And at first it’s just scraps, then it becomes full meals, then steaks and fresh vegetables, and every bite is a pleasure beyond words.

If someone were to ask me to put a finger on it, that’s the reason I would cite for where my willingness comes from: I used to spend every day wanting to die; today I don’t. And I really don’t want to go back to wanting to die. More than any other reason, I used as a way to escape being miserable. The fact that I'm not miserable anymore is a miracle I once thought impossible.

So even as I walk through the desert of ‘what-if’, I can work the program, listen to the guidance of my higher power and have patience. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, but I can do it. And hey, I fully admit that I am largely writing that right now in order to re-convince and remind myself that I can. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a little good old fashioned acting as-if and remembering that This, Too, Shall Pass.

“Life Isn’t Easy”

Followers of this blog know that I don’t always have the highest opinion of the culture I live in. I think there are things about American culture which set us up for and make us more vulnerable to the Disease. I think our heightened sense of individualism leads to selfishness and a lack of compassion and concern for others. I think the constant barrage of advertisements we endure leads to increased insecurity, making us ripe for falling into the trap of thinking that who we are just as we are isn’t good enough. I’m not lacking in these types of opinions.

Another thing I see as a problem is the way our culture encourages quick solutions. Fast food. TV shows and movies that wrap up problems all nice and tidy. Got static cling? Buy our new and improved fabric softener! Dandruff? Use our new shampoo and conditioner combination! I jest (a little), but my point is that we are encouraged to think an easy, happy life is only one swipe of the credit card away. I’m going to set aside any anti-capitalist ramblings for the time being and focus instead on the first part of that sentence.

A lot of people think they are supposed to be happy all the time. A lot of people think life should be easy. That right there is our first clue that something is amiss—that ‘should’ word and the ‘supposed to’ phrase. We who have worked the program of Recovery are familiar with these. I call them forms of denial, but even if you aren’t comfortable with that harsh characterization, they still represent ways of thinking that are not Recovery-oriented.

I have said it in meetings, to my sponsees, and written it here many times: if we are thinking about what-if, then we aren’t thinking about What Is. Sure, we want life to be easy. I bet a lot of people do, normies included. As addicts, we are always looking for that quick fix, the easy answer, the solution that takes care of whatever the problem is and takes care of it right now. Small problem: life isn’t easy.

One of the most useful things I have learned to do for myself is to recognize that life can be downright goddamned difficult at times, and to affirm it for myself. In my head, it sounds something like this: “This is so HARD!” “Yes, of course it’s hard; it’s supposed to be.” It’s my way of getting out of denial and into acceptance.

If we have the idea in our mind that life should be easy, we are setting ourselves up for a whole world of hurt. Because it isn’t. So when we discover that life isn’t easy, that our quick fix doesn’t work, we play the blame game. We might blame others. Maybe we blame ourselves and ride the downward spiral of self-loathing and failure for not being able to do something we should have.

The fault isn’t ours. It’s not fair to beat ourselves up for not being able to do something that’s impossible. We aren’t failures because we couldn’t bend reality to our own will; reality isn’t ours to bend.

Yes, life is hard. But there is some very good news that goes with that. When we work hard for something, the fruits of our labor taste so much sweeter. Who appreciates a new car more--a sixteen year-old who had a flashy sports car given to them, or someone who worked a second job to save up and buy a reliable Honda to replace their old beater that was always breaking down?

Climbing a mountain is worth it precisely because it’s difficult. Running a marathon is the huge achievement it is specifically because it is so hard. Things that come easy in life don’t have a lot of worth. Those experiences don’t have a lot of depth. Doing the hard work that it takes to overcome, that is where a deeper sense of satisfaction and accomplishment comes from.

In our lives, we can feel like we are climbing mountains or running marathons. Maybe that isn’t literally what is happening, but it can feel that way. The way through is not to insist that what we’re dealing with should be easy. That thinking only makes things more difficult for ourselves—and batters our self-esteem as well. Accepting life’s challenges, facing them, moving through them even though they are hard—that is how we Recover. That is the way of conquering the obstacles we face. We accept, and then we can move forward.

Step One, my friends.

“Outside Issues”

Ah relationships. For folks like us, that’s the last frontier. A daunting landscape full of pitfalls and landmines, a wasteland of previous mistakes and the ashes of What Was. It’s ripe territory for second guessing ourselves. The relationship zone challenges everyone. Want to see your character defects appear? Just get involved in a relationship. They will sprout like weeds on miracle grow. Those weeds can entangle and suffocate us and those we care about. Next thing we know, a brand new trail of wreckage has been blazed, a whole new round of misery and self-loathing has taken over, and our sobriety (if not our very lives) hangs in balance, teetering on the edge.

Am I being melodramatic? I doubt it. I’ve known so many folks in Recovery who have gotten involved in a relationship and endured exactly what I just described. It was like that for me. Ultimately I came up with a set of rules for myself for whenever I meet someone new, because I would really just rather not go through all of that again. The list is extensive. The top level? Is she a normie or someone who suffers from the Disease. If it’s someone who isn’t a normie, there’s a whole other subset: does she have over a year? Has she worked through all her steps? Does she have an active relationship with her sponsor? Last (and perhaps most important of all), is she working a program?? And even if the answers to all those things are ‘yes’, I still proceed with extreme caution.

The next level down, though no less important, is whether she’s involved with anyone else. All integrity and moral issues aside, this is one is there because of some things I have learned about myself. I have made the mistake many times in the past of involving myself with someone who isn’t available. That doesn’t mean so much married or has a boyfriend (though my slate is not clean in that area either!) It means more that I get trapped into trying make something work that doesn’t. What I’m referring to most specifically is whether or not she is emotionally available.

Because of what I have been through in my life, what’s familiar to me is women who are emotionally unavailable. It’s what I’m drawn to, the way my brain has been programmed as the result of how my life has been. I fall into the trap of trying to open someone up. It’s not good, to be blunt. It feeds my ego, thinking I will be the one to help her become the person she could be—totally unacceptable because it means that not only am I trying to make someone be who they’re not, I’m also not accepting them for who they are.

I’ve done a lot of therapy when it comes to the way I am in a romantic relationship. It’s taken a lot of work to figure out what my patterns are, what my triggers are, and what I really do need and want versus what I only think I need or want. I still don’t entirely trust my instincts when it comes to this area, but there has been a sea of change in terms of my insecurities and hanging on too long. I don’t stick around in bad relationships anymore. And I’m able to conduct myself with integrity and let go of something—even if it’s good—when I know that it’s not going to work in the long run. That last one can really hurt like hell, but my life is better for it. I respect myself more for it, and even though it may result in pain for others, I know (or least hope!) that it saves causing more pain in the long run.

The 12-steps are an awesome, life-changing program, but most of us aren’t doctors or therapists. If we’re having difficulty in any particular area of our lives, it’s important to get the help we need. The program isn’t made to be a cure-all for everything that ails us. Instead it teaches us something very important: the importance of asking for help. For me, that meant getting outside help for my relationship difficulties. But it can mean other things, too, like seeing a psychiatrist for medication. The what isn’t important, it’s the asking for help that is. And let's face it: a lot of us need extra help in the relationship department.

The program can’t solve everything, but it can teach us the willingness to ask for help.

"Self-Concern vs. Selfishness"

Selfishness, self-centeredness, self-will-run-riot, these are all things we deal with a lot in the program. We come from lives where it was ‘all about us’ and we learn how to live differently. We learn how to live for others, how to serve others, instead of our own selfish ends. But do we really? If it makes me feel good to selflessly help others, then am I really being selfless? If the only way we can keep what we have is by giving it away, then are we truly giving?

This is a great little knot that I like to tie in my brain about the program. The larger idea gets talked about in psychology circles, too—is there really such a thing as ‘altruism’ at all? If people do good because it makes them feel good about themselves, then is it really altruistic behavior at all? In the psych classes I took, we would go around and around discussing this idea.

Over the course of my Recovery, I’ve had a number of discussions about this with others in the program. What I finally came to rest on is this idea: what the program teaches us, is a healthy kind of selfishness.

Yes, all my work with sponsees serves a very specific purpose—it helps me to stay clean and sober. But I don’t do my work with sponsees with that purpose in mind. If I go into it with that idea, then it’s all about me--I’m being selfish and not acting from the best part of myself; I won’t be able to offer the best I have to those who need help. What happens instead is I go into it thinking of others, being willing to help them, and in return I get helped in my Recovery journey. It’s a question of motives. If I’m acting out of my own selfish wants, feeding my ego, then I'm acting out of the Disease. If I act out of a desire to help others, then I get relief from the Disease.

When I first started working the program, I considered a lot of the work we do in the 12-steps as ‘selfish’. It’s selfish to want a better life (I didn’t think I deserved one); it’s selfish to want to improve ourselves (I can’t ever change); etc. I was talking to another member just last week. She had come down off her pink cloud and was starting to face all the repressed issues of her life; all her feelings were bubbling to the surface. She was saying how she needs to remember that it’s not about her and to just ignore all that stuff and get over herself.

I told her she was confusing self-concern with selfishness.

It’s important to check in with ourselves, see how we’re doing inside, and deal with the issues that arise within us. Can anyone say, “Step Ten”? There is such a thing as healthy self-concern. We have to watch ourselves, pay attention, make sure that we don’t go overboard with it and obsess. But the program is all about having a healthy sense of self-concern.

There’s another basic idea at play here, too—our selves are worth improving. We do deserve a better life than the one we lived as active addicts. Is it selfish for us to want to grow and change and become more than we were? Sure, but it’s a healthy selfishness, a selfishness based out of humility and the genuine desire for something better in life.

And the program is all about that.

“What, You’re Not Perfect Yet??”

I confess, I’m still a perfectionist. It shows up more than any other place when I’m working on my music. I’ll be there in my studio, working on the latest track and I’ll become absolutely consumed with trying to get this one sound to be just right. Or I’ll be recording a short solo and do take after take after take. And god help me when I’m mixing. Hours of tiny adjustments, little bitty changes when I’m the only who could ever possibly hear the difference.

I allow myself that degree of fine-tuning in my music because it’s my hobby, my art. But there are definitely times where I realize I’m fussing with something just to fuss with it. In those moments, I realize that I am obsessing, and that is when I know that it’s time to step back and take a break. Maybe go walk a mile. Maybe trash the whole song I’m working on because I’m trying to make something work that ain’t never gonna.

My perfectionism streak used to be a whole lot wider. I used to be one of those people who held himself to an impossibly high standard. Then, when I didn’t measure up to where I thought I should be, I would beat up on myself for the failure. Never mind that my expectations were grossly unreasonable. Never mind that what I thought ‘should’ do, the way I thought I ‘should’ be, is impossible. I look back on those old patterns and can see how what I was really doing was setting myself up for failure so that I would continue to have a reason to come down on and be hard on myself.

These days, I have a big rule about not blaming myself for not being able to do something that’s impossible. I am only human, after all. And that’s something I learned through working the program—that we are all only human. We’re going to make mistakes. None of us are perfect. In fact, that is what it means to be human—to be imperfect.

Trying to live our lives perfectly is self-defeating. What used to happen to me was failing at being perfect, and then trying again. I thought, “this time, it’ll work; this time will be different.” We are familiar with this pattern; it’s our basic insanity litmus test: doing the same things over and over while expecting different results.

Making mistakes is how we learn. Now, it is perfectly possible to not learn from our mistakes. That’s not so good. It’s important for us to learn from our mistakes. It’s how we change, how we grow. One of my favorite things to say to my friends when they fuck up (and I’ve said it to myself many times) is that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning. In the program, we take this idea to heart and even have a little slogan of our own to follow it up: make different mistakes.

We can’t use the program to become ‘perfect’. There is no such thing. There is only one perfect I’m aware of, and that is my higher power. For me to attempt perfection or think I am achieving it, that is hubris. And the program teaches us that that is not the way. The program is about living with humility. Thinking that we’re perfect, or that we could become so? Not humble. It’s downright egotistical, and that is something we need to avoid if we want to be successful in working the program.

“A-Mending the Past”

The wisest slogan I ever heard in the rooms for when it comes to making amends is this: “we have broken something; we must ‘a-mend’ it.”

There are plenty more good turns of phrase out there, and the literature is full of suggestions on making amends. It is a huge part of the program. It’s the piece about cleaning up the wreckage of our past. The damage we have done, the harm we have caused, all keeps us from moving forward with our new lives. Failing to make our amends? That, my friends, is a recipe for relapse.

The weight of our past misdeeds weighs us down. Making amends is how we handle that burden, how we learn to lay it down and be free of our old lives. We don’t make amends to purge ourselves of guilt. We do it because it’s important for us to admit we have been wrong, and to do what we can to try to make things right. That’s the way to walk to the spiritual path.

Not all amends go well. I’ve had people cut me off barely after I’ve begun to tell me I was already forgiven long ago; I’ve had those who listened politely and told me, ‘well, uh, thanks for saying that but go fuck yourself.’

We don’t know what’s going to come out of our making amends, and we can’t control others. We need to have some good solid Recovery under our belt before we even attempt making amends to those we’ve harmed. There is a real danger in trying to make amends too soon. We could be setting ourselves up for more pain and hurt. It takes time to learn how to live the clean and sober life. It takes a while for others to see the change in us, and still longer for them to believe that it’s actually permanent.

The greater danger is not making amends at all. The damage we’ve done is like an anchor keeping us tied to our past. We can’t be free until we address it. It’s definitely a process of humility, but it doesn’t need to be humiliating. Often times, just stepping outside ourselves, putting ourselves in the shoes of others and looking through their eyes at what we’ve done, is enough to create the necessary willingness to make amends. Admitting we were wrong is part of becoming ‘right-sized’. We’re not perfect. That may be humiliating at first, but as time passes and we think of ourselves less (note: not less of ourselves), we discover that the process is freeing. We aren’t perfect. And we’re not failures for not being perfect. We are, above all, merely human. Just. Like. Everyone. Else.

That’s the real point of humility—recognizing that we are only one of many. Some of us don’t want to be just like everyone else. Some of us refuse to admit we’ve been wrong. And you know what happens to those folks? They walk back out the doors and their misery is refunded.

In full.

“Terminally Unique”

I’ll admit it: I’ve 13th-stepped a newcomer. It’s a much longer story that I won’t share in this entry, but I mention it for a reason. While it’s true that I was given the ‘no new relationships for a year’ advice, it was a suggestion I chose not to follow. I dated several people during that first year of my Recovery, and each time I did the results were disastrous. I’m not overstating things, here. I created a whole new trail of wreckage (which I later had to clean up), caused a whole lot of hurt to those I supposedly cared about. And I especially caused myself some very intense pain and anguish that I really could have done without. I’m thinking of one relationship in particular, because my memory from it and why I thought it was okay for me to pursue is especially clear: I thought I was special.

I thought I was special, unique, that the so-called rules didn’t apply to me or to her or to us. What we had was so intense, so powerful, by god it was love, don’t you understand?! What I didn’t understand, what it took me a long time to accept, was that I am not unique (and that it wasn’t love at all, but again, that’s for another entry). The rules really do apply to me. Why? Because I am addict just like every other addict out there.

From the stockbroker who hides his drinking from his wife, kids, coworkers and boss, to the homeless heroin junkie strung out in the gutter, we are all the same. No one of us is really so different from the other when we have the Disease. We like to think we are, we like to think we’re unique, or that we’re not like ‘those people’, but we are. For those of us who suffer, we are all far more alike than we are different.

It’s a huge danger, this thinking that we’re unique. We think no one could possibly understand how it feels to be us—that is, until we start hearing other people in meetings describe the exact same feelings we’ve had. We think no one has been through what we have in life, done the things we’ve done—that is, until we start working steps and hear our sponsor’s stories about doing the exact same things, or about how the exact same things have happened to them.

We have a phrase in the rooms: ‘terminally unique’. The healing power of Recovery comes from becoming part of a community, from realizing that we aren’t alone. Those of us who aren’t able to accept that we aren’t special, those of us who continue to insist that we are different, it is those of us who continue to suffer. Sometimes, until we die. Ask anyone who has been close to suicide (such as myself) and we can tell you what a deep, dark, lonely hole that place is. As long as we insist on being alone, on being different, we will stay that way.

Coming to understand that we aren’t unique is one of the joys of Recovery. It’s one of the challenges, too. We need to learn to get over ourselves. It’s ego-bruising, but that itself is the whole problem—our egos. We come from a way of living where we were the center of the universe. Through living the spiritual life, we come to realize that everything isn’t all about us. We walk into the rooms thinking we’re solo singers, and many of us like it that way! What we learn is that each of us is merely one voice in a vast chorus.

The beauty of the sound we make together is staggering to behold.