“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.

“Lies”

Honesty. It’s where it all begins.

I think honesty is a tricky thing for everybody, not just us addicts but the normies too. And I’ll sidetrack just a little to soapbox about this culture I live in. It is indeed a bizarre world. As children we’re taught not to lie, yet we see adults do it all the time. We are told to tell the truth, and yet I remember all-too-well that it was the liars and the cheats who got ahead. The real lesson, (or so it seems to me now, having lived a few years) is not so much not to lie, but not to get caught.

That may work for some people, but it doesn’t for me. And it’s not what the program teaches us. The program is pretty damn clear on this point, in fact. A life of lying is where we come from; Recovery is about learning to live differently. There is a part of us that is always looking for the loophole that will allow us to do what we want, live life our way according to our own rules. The idea that we can, that is an illusion, my friends. Living according to our own designs? That’s how we ended up in Recovery to begin with! And yet, the Disease is always there, always in the back of our minds telling us to look for the shortcuts, find the quick and easy path.

The literature talks a lot about Honesty (the spiritual principle behind Step One). I think the best example is still the ‘how it works’ section from out of AA’s big book. It’s a full 7-course meal of truth wrapped up and crammed into just a few short pages. There is no easier, softer way. We do Recover—if we have the capacity to be honest. The results of all our efforts will be zilch until we entirely let go. I remember working the steps out of NA’s workbook and doing a long section on reservations; those can be a problem, too.

We’re so good at hiding things. From other people. From ourselves. Denial is an old leather jacket so familiar we don’t even realize we’re wearing it. But intentional deceit is a trickier thing for us. Our culture tells us little white lies are okay. It tells us too that it’s okay to hide the truth to avoid hurting someone. That, my friends, is some bullshit right there. It’s not okay to lie by omission. We are as sick as our secrets.

It is possible to be rigorously honest. That right there is the key. Not brutally honest, but rigorously honest. We do our best to live our lives in a ways that we don’t have to lie. And when we have a truth that needs told, we look for a way to speak it in love. A therapist of mine would talk, too, about emotional honesty. It’s about being real with people and giving them the full truth. We can’t let fear dictate our actions (or inactions). That is not the way.

Lying, whether by commission or omission, is anathema for people like us. We may think we’re doing the ‘right’ thing by being selectively honesty. We’re not. It feeds our Disease, takes us backwards on the path of Recovery, and leads us back to relapse. Step 6 in the NA workbook has a really good section on this and it spends considerable time talking about how shades of dishonesty is poison to our souls. We need to be fully honest with ourselves and with the other people in our lives. If we aren’t, our spiritual growth suffers.