“A Disease of the Mind, Body, and Spirit”

I had coffee with one of my sponsees last night. He’s coming up on a sobriety/cleandate birthday and has been having a rough time of it. We talked about how all us in Recovery tend to get squirrelly around our birthdays. Mine’s coming up in August and I fully expect to have a few crazy-in-the-brain days. He’s also had some difficult news on the personal health front, the short of which is that he really needs to start taking care himself. As in, or else he could die. 

Now there’s a familiar phrase: get off the drugs, stop the drinking; if you don’t, you will die. 

The Disease never stops trying to kill us. Some in Recovery understand this better than others, like those for whom their moment of clarity is the moment they fully realized this fact. I’ve heard many a speaker talk about all the times they were told they needed to quit, but refused to listen. I’ve seen many people come into the rooms, who keep coming back, but who develop other bad habits. They struggle with cross-addictions to sex, food, gambling, etc. And that’s to say nothing of the alcoholics and addicts out there who think it’s okay to still smoke marijuana. Just a little to take the edge off, right folks? Wrong. But I digress. 

My sponsee’s cross-addiction is now threating his life. During our talk, I tried to really impress upon him the pervasiveness of the Disease. It really doesn’t ever quit. The worst of it is that we can never win against it. The topic of ‘surrender’ came up for discussion recently, and I talked for a good while about how we need to keep on surrendering. I need to keep on surrendering. The moment I think that I’ve got this thing licked, that’s the moment it starts to take back over my life. If I think—even for a second—that I’ve beaten the Disease, that’s all the opening it needs to grab hold of my life’s steering wheel and drive it into a tree. Or another car. Or off a cliff. 

I got some advice early on about how important it is for me to keep on fighting the Disease in all areas of my life. One bit of advice that really helped me was to hear about how addiction/alcoholism is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. We treat the spirit by working the program--going to meetings, working the steps with a sponsor, being of service, and helping others. How we treat our disease in the other two areas, the mind and the body, is up to us. 

The way I handle the body aspect is through my diet and exercise. I do my best to eat healthy, and to not eat too much. My day job is for a nutrition program, so I’m pretty lucky there because I’m plugged in to a lot of current research on food, eating habits, etc. For exercise, I’ve developed a healthy running habit for myself. Currently, I’m running a mile just about every day. These are not changes that happened overnight, they are things I planned and worked hard to achieve. I've done my best to remember, too, that as an addict my tendency is to obsess and take something to the extreme. I built things up slowly. These days, regardless of the other benefits I gain from taking care of my body, I also get a whole lot of pleasure from saying ‘fuck you’ to the Disease. 

The same work needs to be done for our minds. One of the members in my homegroup is retired. He takes classes at the local community college. Not to get a degree, not to work towards starting a second career, but just because they are subjects he’s interested in and because he knows he has to fight against the Disease in all aspects of his life.  

We can never win the war against addiction; we are addicts. We will always be addicts. But we can achieve a truce with the Disease which allows us to live our lives in ways beyond our wildest dreams. If we put Recovery first, if we work the program, we give ourselves a solid foundation. On that foundation, we can then build after miracle. Getting clean is only the first of many.