Article by Make The Days Count Contributor Marie Monroe

 

Love

Alcohol

Food

Substances

Shopping

Anger

Gambling

Drama (in Our Lives)

 

Each of these can represent an addiction … addiction to food, alcohol, or even to behaviors.  This definitely isn’t an exhaustive list, either.  There can be many more addictions.  Just with substances alone they can range from hard drugs to nasal spray.  And they are all powerful. 

 

Living with addictions is difficult.  Recovery can be as well.  This isn’t to say that recovery is impossible – far from it!  However, to be free of addiction – whatever addiction it may be - we need to find its roots.  This requires a new vision, a change of mind and a change of heart.

 

“Big task!” you might say.  Yes, recovery is big.  It’s big and requires commitment.  Recovery is arduous because it is riddled with strong emotion.  It will be, in the end, our emotions that will take us home because when it’s all said and done, the root addiction is a “feelings disease” and recovery is an affair of the heart.  

 

It is the human heart – the metaphorical heart – in which full recovery can be found.  This requires a revised vision of our addiction.  Alcohol or food, for example, is a symptom … not the cause!  We need to change our minds about what the problem is in order to target it properly.

 

All the Confusion

An incorrectly identified problem will give us an ineffective solution.  We will miss our target. This is simple wisdom.  Addiction, however, obscures our vision.  It tricks our minds.  It hides from us.  It tells us something else, or someone else, is the problem.  It even tells us, through denial, that it doesn’t exist at all!

 

In all this confusion, we can’t find the actual problem in order to mobilize the correct solution.  We wind up in denial.  We wind up blaming this or that or her or him.  We wind up in pain, searching in the medicine cabinets, the casino or the mall for the right sedative.  This is how addictions continue and how they take their toll.  Snowballing, over time, unchecked addictions bring a greater and greater pain with a greater and greater need for relief.  If we are searching for that relief in the wrong places, for long enough, the snowball will eventually become an avalanche.

 

An Attempt to Live

We all know the catastrophic costs of addiction.  We see a person whose choice of remedies (alcohol, drugs, gambling, shopping) has been ineffective for a very long time.   We wonder how anyone could be this way.  Why doesn’t he stop?  How can she be so self-destructive?  This is where we need to change our vision of what this problem is.  The process of active addiction is not an attempt to self-destruct.  The process of addiction is an attempt to live.

 

This is, at first glance, very counter-intuitive.  It seems that it’s behavior that keeps us stuck in addiction.  It seems it’s escapism or a wish to self-injure that propels us deeper into addiction.  These are the superficial symptoms of addiction and they are, admittedly, powerful.  They are not, however, the problems we must solve if we want to be free of our addictions.  The problems we must solve are our incorrect perceptions and belief.

 

Getting Half-Way Home

Changing our minds about addiction will get us half-way home to freedom.  We need to see the problem for what it actually is.  We need to see that each addictive substance we choose to consume, or every addictive ritual we choose to perform, is an attempt to lead a better life.  

 

In this new vision, our substances and rituals become our ineffective solutions, but they are solutions nonetheless.  It’s a powerful realization.  It is a piece of recovered self-knowledge in which we can find enough hope to carry on toward healing. 

 

Hope and Self-Knowledge

To know that we, even in the depths of our addictions, have been seeking life is a realization that renews us.  It reminds us who we really are.  While hope can be an engine that drives us, self-knowledge can be an arsenal with which we fight the good fight.  

 

The momentum of these two will jettison us to the path of recovery.  Our task then becomes to stay there, to stay on the path.  We do that with mindfulness–breaking life down to its moments, its next right thing to do.  That’s manageable.  That’s the walk to freedom.  Once we find the path, it’s easier to stay on it. 

 

Changing Our Vision

First, we must change our vision.   We must change how we see the problem.  We must change how we see the solution.  In addiction recovery, we must also change how we see ourselves.  Once we stop imposing an anti-life, escapist, self-destructive view of ourselves upon ourselves, we can remember who we truly are.   We can come back to our hearts and there, we can heal.

 

To see ourselves as problem-solvers, people who wish to live and live well, people driven by hope … these are changes in self-perception that will save us.  They will return us to the wonderfully messy business of living where recovery takes place.  There we can shrug off addiction’s illusions – that we hate life and ourselves, which we want to self-destruct.  We can reclaim the humanity we have lost, but so desperately, through every addictive behavior, have sought.  This is how healing takes place and how addictions begin to slip away.  This new vision of ourselves, and of what our addictions have tried to do for us, is the foundation of recovery.

 

Restored to a sense of humanity, we understand that we feel.  We understand that feelings can be painful and that we can allow them to flow through us.  We understand that if we stand out of the way pain will pass.  We remember that feelings are also where joy lives.  Here is the true passion of recovery and of life.  Our feelings are our passion.  Our feelings will lead us to freedom from addictions and restore our health.

 

Responsibilities in Recovery

We have responsibilities in recovery.  These responsibilities are also things of the heart.  We have to look for the true ardor of life.  No one can do it for us.   We have to look for the feelings, begin to acknowledge them, and to accept them.  In a phrase, we have to feel … and allow ourselves to feel.

 

Our feelings will do their transformative work if we don’t interfere.  We need to be willing to stand aside and let this healing process take place.  We need to be willing to experience loneliness, grief, fear and sadness.  We need to be willing to be intimate and joyous.  We need to accept anxiety and anger if they come.

 

The Healing Heart

The world we live in when addicted to any substance or ritual is an illusory world.  Our thoughts and beliefs are distorted.  Our behaviors are ineffective.  We fear things that can’t hurt us and we pin our hope to things that can’t help us.  We are, very simply, mistaken.

 

In recovery, we have to be willing to find and live in the authentic person where feelings will heal us if we allow ourselves to feel them and let them pass.  That’s what happens in the human heart.  It’s in the heart where we will find ourselves when we come back home.

 

“We don’t want to feel helpless, so we use fear, anger, addiction, or unbridled sexuality to block out our helpless feelings.  The fact is that if we cannot openly face our feeling of helplessness, we cannot receive help.  It is important that we accept our helplessness, taking it to God and allowing Him to be strong where we are weak.”

-David F. Allen, Shattering the Gods Within

 

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