Philosophy of Recovery - All These Little Things

All these little things used to be what brought me back out, now however it is all these little things which keep me in. I am a comfortable recovering addict, it doesn't bother me to be sober and after only two and a half years away from the pipe, pills, and bottle I crave only in extremely rare situations. Generally I find myself in what would be the epitome of triggering situations: last call in a nightclub, a sloppy drunken house party, holiday time surrounded by people responsibly indulging themselves, wedding after-parties; and even in such nightmarish instances I do not crave, I simply feel uncomfortable. I assure you that there was a time when my main trigger was discomfort, in fact I would go so far as to say that discomfort is the primary pressuring-force behind my savage addiction. I have now evolved my style-of-response to the euphoria of discomfort. Instead of using I have learned to just leave situations and go somewhere where I am comfortable, such a simple solution it is hard to understand why it took so long to figure out. This reaction occurs on an unconscious level now, I feel uncomfortable and I just leave, there is no thought of using.

Having come so far from the demands of early recovery I have begun to focus my attention elsewhere. I have counters counting my drug and alcohol clean time, although I don't really pay attention to them anymore. I pay more attention now to my other counters, they count my clean time from things like coffee, pornography, and soda pop. There are periods of life during which I reset these particular three counters on a daily basis. There are also periods where I go as much as ninety days without either of the three. Relapse has become about these stimuli now, I will be ten days clean from coffee and walking towards the coffee shop talking to myself like "don't do it man, you're doing so good right now you don't want to fuck this up!" and then my addict-self retorts "who cares? Fuck it. You know you like the feeling of that pick-me-up. We can quit again tomorrow". Then I buy and drink the coffee, feel sick to my stomach and anxious for the rest of the day, try to fix it with more, and eventually decide I need to stop again.

This provides me with such an incredible barrier to my true drug of choice. I see weekly the spiraling effects of relapse on substances as pitiful as coffee, Pepsi, and hardcore porn- to extrapolate the spiral effect to accommodate as powerful a substance as methamphetamine is unfathomable! Another layer of this barrier is that I am constantly failing at abstinence from these meager substances, but I keep trying to quit them: this is like power-cross-fit for the willpower within. I am training my willpower in a very immediate way every few days, and taking my state of mind from a 'fuck it' to a 'fuck this' attitude regarding substances. The third layer of this barrier I discovered tonight and was absolutely astounded at how I came across it. I recall being still in struggling recovery many many years ago and going a week without dope, but then on the eighth day I would be going about my life and suddenly was like "I'm so fucking high right now, what the fuck?". I had actually went out and gotten high, but my rational thought had tuned out, and so I often knew I had gotten high, but couldn't recall where, who with, or on what, it was as if my body said "you might not like it, but I need to get high, so if you have a problem with that then don't watch". So frequently was I walking the right path only to blink and come out on some strange path in the woods slightly disoriented with no clue how I got there. Well tonight I was at a house party which contained many very drunk people, and there was alcohol everywhere, and I was not craving. I felt a little uncomfortable considering there was nothing going on except active inebriation, but I was content to chill for a while. I mingled and shook hands and found a juice box in the fridge to drink, and then I strolled back to the living room and laughed with the group as I slowly sipped my Pepsi. Wait a minute, why am I drinking Pepsi? I'm nineteen days clean from pop.. Well nothing I can do now, may as well finish it. Finishing the criminal soda and walking back to the kitchen I noticed a Pepsi box on the counter, so I looked inside; there were two cans of Pepsi and a juice box in the case. It seems that after I grabbed the juice from the fridge I reached unconsciously into the box, dropping the juice and snagging a Pepsi.

You know what? I'm okay with that. Pepsi: fuck it. Imagine I didn't have all these little things in my life, what then would I have grabbed as my body slipped my mind for those few minutes?

A recovering addict is one of the most resilient types of people known to our dismal contemporary society, and that is something to be immensely proud of; a pride which needn't stop at drugs and alcohol. If you can quit doing dope, then you can quit eating unhealthy, you can quit vegetating on Facebook, you can quit any little thing that bothers you about life; all you need to do is employ that savage willpower you possess and be mindful of your activities, triggers, and reactions.

I don't even want to quit coffee or pop, I really enjoy them. But it intrigues me to discover how durable my will truly is, how long can I go without things that I don't want to go without? I do these little things to entertain and train my mind and my body, and they have paid off over, and over, and over again; and it seems as though there are rewards I may not even be aware of. I will keep these little things until the day I die, and if I master them, if I find I am six, seven, twelve, fifteen months without coffee, pop, and pornography, then I will seek out some new little things which will again put my spirit to the test.

~CCH2015

Philosophy of Recovery - Overwrite to Rewrite

In my addiction I was tormented by the short-comings of my present. In my recovery I became haunted by the memories of my past. Sometimes I am haunted by nostalgic longings for what I once possessed and the extremes I was able to endure. More often however my memories are of my past shame and failures as an addict, as a human being. These shameful recollections are difficult to bear and it is their constant pestering presence which holds the times I am closest to going back out. I have always felt a great deal of shame in regards to situations, most out of my control; perhaps that is simply another of the curses of addiction. I used to feel the shame and the hurt and would numb these feelings, crush them with chemical bliss and bury them deep within my psyche. When it came to be that I chose recovery as my path through the rest of my life I began having to deal directly with these things I had been pushing down for so long. As I pulled one set of nerve endings out from deep within my skin, another set would come to rise: a set which had been successfully dis-acknowledged so that I wasn't even sure if the things I was feeling so terribly about had ever come to pass or if it was just my mind playing jest. With a great deal of meditation on the subject I came to conclude that these 'unknown events' had all truly been and I had simply forgotten them. They had been overwritten by fresher pains and more present troubles to fret.

When I passaged from treatment back into common society I assumed that I had come far enough along, in dealing with these past traumas, that I need not be troubled by them further, unless it was so that I chose. My assumptions proved far from reality. Although need not I fret by day, it was by night these terrors would come to pass. Anytime my mind had a moment to itself it was powerless against the riptide of recollection. Every night my mind valiantly fought sleep from my bed and left me weak and meager in the morning to go to work. I often worked a week on little more than ten hours sleep. It was this corrosion of my faculties which brought me closest to relapse. I knew not how to cope with my demons then. A year went by in my struggle before I came to accept that this is how it would have to be; and I was okay with that, as even physically and mentally enervated: life was better on the ins of sobriety. During the year following my come-to-terms I would discover a cruelly efficient tactic for dealing with my goblins of mind.

The tactic is simple, I began to identify what it was that I was so ashamed of in my past and I would replace it with something I was not ashamed of in my present. Certain songs I would hear brought back memories of terrible times and so I forced myself to listen to these songs as I was with the friends of my recovery. It surely was difficult. I could barely focus on the present for haunt of goblin's screams within confines of cerebrum. But as I did this more and more the scales slowly tipped. Now these songs, being played in my presence, only cause a slight and distant squeal of ages gone past. There were girls I had in my life whom I treated not as I wish I would have; there is nothing that can be done to rectify this past mistake, but it can easily be overwritten by treating present girls how I wish to have valued the others. All things in life are available to be redone better than before, having learned the lessons of the past, and all things may be redone as many times as needed. No limit caps my life, no limit caps my recovery. So long as I draw breath I shall continue to replace instances of that which does not please me with instances of that which does, and it is through this tactic that I shall exercise perfection within my life. For perfection is not to be flawless, yet to be constantly eliminating flaws.

~CCH2015

Philosophy of Recovery - The Ties That Bind Us

Many times in recovery I find myself triggered, not to use, but to go back to the lifestyle of crime I once lived. To get back with my old crew and "do it right this time". After meditating on the matter I came to realize that the lifestyle itself I could take or leave, it was the people within that lifestyle whom are the true source of my desires. These are great people I am talking about, unhealthy as a McDonalds diet but great in their niche of life and when I too inhabited that niche they were truly wonderful people whom I learned much from and owe a lot of who I am today to. But now I have moved out of that niche and they have not. I am out fulfilling my dreams with new associates and new comrades and these new people are the type of people whom allow me to continue growing and continue to achieve. Why then do I feel such an indescribable pull back towards that and they whom I know to be unhealthy for me? They whom walk different roads than I now.

I have deliberated upon this puzzle for well over two years now and have come up entirely stumped and absolutely empty handed, until last week that is. You see there is one other group of people whom come, although not quite to par, rather close to it. This group of people is my fraternity of sobriety: Shunda Alumni. If you don't know who or what this group is that is fine, I can make my point regardless. You see Shunda Creek is one of the treatment centers I attended, the last center before my now long term sobriety. At Shunda Creek clients are engaged in wilderness adventure therapy. That means that clients are taken out into the wilderness and pitted against the forces of nature (with a therapeutic undertone of course). This is significant because while out in that wilderness with my brothers we were forced to take on very extreme challenges with very real danger associated with the cost of failing. We had each other though and so we would come together and overcome all that was thrown our way. This struggle through adversity and difficulty forged unbreakable bonds between the lot of us.

Last week I was out in the bush with some of the boys and we were doing a particularly gruesome trek up the side of a mountain. Sleep deprived, physically exhausted and still behind the halfway point of our journey, it dawned on me. In the mountains, as in sobriety itself: the We-All experience general serenity laced with periods of extreme challenge. The nature of active-addiction however, causes the We-All to experience general difficulty laced with periods of colossal adversity. Therefore in active-addiction every moment is rife with interpersonal bond forging, whereas in sobriety the forging of bonds happens intermittently. 

A useful metaphor is to imagine two men: Man 1 works in an accounting office and goes to the gym for an extremely intense workout two to three times a week. Man 2 works as a labourer on a concrete crew, working quite hard for eight hours a day every day and sometimes goes to the gym when he is feeling bored. These men start both on the same day, two years from now which man will be stronger? As you likely guessed Man 1 is sobriety and Man 2 is active-addiction. After two years Man 2 will be vastly superior in strength to Man 1; as are the interpersonal bonds of active addiction, vastly superior to the bonds of sobriety.

Man 2 will always be stronger than Man 1, unless something changes. Perhaps Man 2 starts getting less days at work and now only works two to three days a week (and does not go to the gym any more frequently). Man 1 will soon close the difference and then rapidly overtake Man 2 because he is working harder for the same amount of time now.

In the sense of interpersonal peer bonding however, it is hard to predict when this overtaking of potency may occur. Especially considering the chaotic nature of the concept in general, as well as the lack of drugs which (in active-addiction) can be a strong motivating force in choosing to maintain an unstable relationship, which if re-stabilized reinforces existing bonds many times over.

Therefore it is critical that we, in recovery, choose to maintain absolute consistency in new habits we are forming, and the new relationships we are developing. These new habits, this new identity, will overthrow the old identity and habits. But not for a significant amount of time. The old ties we hold are so strong, that they will take years to weaken; and if our consistency in avoiding the old and sowing into the new are not impeccable, then those years could turn into decades.

But as they say in the Anonymous community: "As long as the ties that bind us together are stronger than those that would tear us apart, all will be well".

~CCH2015