(The question the dying woman throws back)
I interviewed a woman who is terminally ill. So I tried to delicately ask, “What is it like to wake up every morning and know that you are dying?” “Well,” she responded, “what is it like to wake up every morning and pretend that you are not?” ~ Marc Chernoff
a. A desire for self-destruction, often accompanied by feelings of depression, hopelessness, and self-reproach.
(The non-hero’s journey into addiction)
The non-hero’s journey
Stabbed in the back The betrayal is astonishing. The jaw drops. Are you kidding me? I have to take twice as much of this stuff to feel anything close to what I felt when I first took it?
Why? Because of a little liquid pleasure I borrowed from the future? What’s wrong with hitting the future up? Especially when the present is such a confusing mess?
Time to drink and ponder. Maybe I’ll even quit drinking after this. That would be a huge life-changing decision! Not the kind of decision I would ever make without first taking a drink.
That’s sad. Sad on many levels. It is sad that I’m even thinking about this. How do I know what to think anymore? One drink is too many (for me) but a hundred is not enough.
Regretting a typical scene from my life
I feel like I’m under a volcano right now. I need a drink or something. A fix. I need to make something happen, to feel good again. So I talk my friend into going into an early morning bar at the end of a dirt road in Juarez.
(Borrowing from the future — debt and addiction as twins)
Yet it’s still an insight for me: Debt and addiction go hand in hand. They are siblings. Twins. Because in each case I borrow from the future.
He loved this observation that he just got from his talk with Adam: “The greatest addiction is familiarity.” Maurice couldn’t get that phrase out of his mind. He wrote to me, “It does seem that familiarity is a powerful yet subtle addiction. Staying in our comfort zones, not risking … Going numb to our own possibilities. Numb like the numbness the drunk seeks with each successive drink. The numbness that makes you forget.”
And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to users. ~ Ann Marlowe
(Addition vs subtraction — the trap of always adding more)
Addition and addiction The problem in life starts when you think you have to add something to the present moment to make it better. Addition (the act of adding) is seductive. It’s fun! Adding! Like two plus two, woo-hoo. But it’s a slippery slope.
Subtraction! People fear it. What would be left? Just me? Adding muddies the water … what if subtracting made it crystal clear? Some people have what they call food addiction. Or carb addiction. Addiction to bread and sweets. Emotional eating, they call it. But what if I subtracted flour and sugar from my diet?
The pursuit of more I’m thinking that I’m not enough. No wonder I’m always adding something to me … something from the outside world. Byron Katie talks about being addicted to love and approval. Believing we need it. There are clinics for sex addiction and romantic love addiction.
Business author Jim Collins notes that one of the main reasons great companies collapse and fall apart is what he calls “the undisciplined pursuit of more.” What brings down a company will also bring down a human being.
(The treasure was already inside — drugs only remove the barriers)
This was already in there all along
author of the books Naked Lunch and Junkie. He was actually a brilliant man, and never so brilliant as he was in his later years when he was clean and sober and said that there wasn’t anything, any feeling, any high, that you could get on drugs and alcohol that you couldn’t get without drugs and alcohol. And that’s because that treasure of good feelings is already in you. The drug (and I always include alcohol as a drug) just temporarily breaks down the brain barriers. It releases what’s already there. But only for a quick flash. It shows you what you could feel most all of the time if you were truly free and clear.
Through meditative living, devotional work and helping others, and an ongoing spiritual life you can find out faster than I did that you can have an even happier life than you did at your best drunken, drugged-up moment.
But as Burroughs found out, the drug itself doesn’t directly produce the feeling. It just removes the thought-blocks in the brain to the treasure that’s already there. There are other ways to remove those barriers, thank God (and the people who helped me).
One word that reveals everything
In the brain there is now a vicious circle. Because what feels like an unbearable compulsion began as only a thought. If we believe and then dramatize the thought, the path to freedom and serenity is blocked. And that path is everything.
Why demonize your healthiest desire?
In my book Crazy Good I tried to explain my theory that it’s almost impossible to immediately go all the way from bad to good. To ski-jump the polarities. In one foul swoop.
It is far easier to succeed by going from pretty good to a little better. Progress not perfection. But it means you have to start with pretty good. You have to be happy with doing the best you can do. (Most people are not!)
You have to find a way to feel good about your basic innocence… to not berate, condemn or label yourself negatively. Which is why it was so valuable to see an “urge” or “craving” to indulge my habit as a hidden desire to thrive, which was a good desire.
Why make it a sickness? Why not just understand it? Once I understood it I had a chance to direct that desire toward something healthier and more life-sustaining. Like replacing false “spirits” (the old frontier name for alcohol) with true spirit.
So is this all good? So maybe I should have called addiction a “Life Wish.” Because people do take drinks and drugs to feel better … to have a momentarily better life, however brief the good feeling is … however long the pain is on the rebound.
People can be cured from addiction because addiction is created from a person’s misunderstanding about where feelings come from. ~ Dicken Bettinger and Natasha Swerdloff Coming Home
Is this idea ridiculous?
Does that kind of thinking dishonor the tragedy? Does it not respect the seriousness of the drama?
The only way around is through. ~ Robert Frost
(The spiral upward — addiction’s path becomes the path out)
My addiction to distraction
We can keep casting this net wider, too. How about addiction to distraction? How about addiction to love and approval? Addiction to worried thoughts? Whatever addiction you can identify with, the news is good. Because the path out of all of this doesn’t just get you back to where you started. It’s not just a vicious circle. When you really allow it, it’s an unfolding … a spiral upward. The path out of the woods gives you a life you would not have had if you had not been in the woods.
It is not circular. This path. This is the ultimate path with heart. It does not just circle you back to square one. It circles and unfolds upward, a swirling ladder to the stars. (Cue up Stairway to Heaven. Allow the music to play.)
So… we should all just get addicted? No. No. Too dangerous. Addicts die.
(The oceanic baby — individuation as the wound underneath)
Show me the way to go home
As I was growing up from newborn to two years old to four to six to ten, the feeling of personal warmth and security was gradually leaving me! What the hell?!?!?! I was becoming an individual. It felt like it was happening against my will. Some psychologists call this “individuation.”
Some people think I had Peter Pan syndrome, a refusal to grow up. I used drugs and alcohol to stay young and foolish. I never even tried to enjoy life without alcohol. I never even tried to grow up. But my belief today is weird: I think if you can understand how to recover from addiction into what people call “good sobriety” (a very low risk for drinking or drugging again), you can understand how to enjoy all of life, even if you are not an addict.
By spiritual progress I mean spiraling up beyond the illusion of individual ego.
understood Vladimir Nabokov when he exclaimed that “a spiral is a spiritualized circle.” I saw the possibility of liberating this vicious circle that was my ego life of short-term desires, so I could spiral up. Into spirit. (Do I sound like I’m from California yet? I’m not. But I can see the risk.)
Babies don’t do that. There is an oceanic sense one has as a baby. Like feeling that you are a small, jubilant wave in a huge, thriving ocean of life. No name, no separation, no individual ego-hallucination yet.
don’t yet feel the disconnect. It’s awfully warm and secure on this fine, interconnected planet! Like a wave upon a breathtaking ocean. The wave doesn’t know it’s a separate wave, or a good wave for surfing, or a bad wave. It feels like it’s just an expression of the ocean. Which it is! A gesture! A gesticulation! One hand waving free! Silhouetted by the sea! It is only we, we labelers, who call it a wave. And by labeling it, we make it separate.
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. ~ Vladimir Nabokov Speak Memory
(Mine — the moment ego and fear are born)
I have got to HAVE IT!
Just the mere fact of being used to be blissful and more than enough but now having became the thing. All the rage. (In both senses of the word rage.) I saw a toy in a store window and I had to have it. I learned the importance of the word mine. If you want to torment a child (and why would you want to do that, really? Maybe just briefly to understand this idea) … point to something the child is holding, a stuffed animal maybe, and say the word “Mine!” Watch the alarm ripple through the child’s body as he pulls the soft stuffed puppy away and shouts back at you, “Mine!” And so the fear begins. Security is threatened. Nothing is really safe anymore. Who can you trust?
(The grown-ups all told you he was real. From now on, you will trust no one.) You’ve been made a fool. You need to learn to protect yourself from all this deceit delivered by other people. (They are not on your side, you now see.) Given this rude turn of events, can you blame a boy for wanting to get drunk? To find a way back home? But maybe that boy will learn that this insecurity is all happening in his head. It’s all a recurring bad dream happening each day in his imaginary world. And recovery is his chance to finally wake up.
(Resistance to recovery — the drowning man criticizes the rope)
Time to call your sponsor
Because I was a problem. I resisted almost everything about recovery. I objected! It was like I was a deranged defense attorney in a court of law.
The part that was afraid of completely letting go. It was afraid I could never drink again. Or ever take a pacifying drug. “No, it’s just for today,” my sponsor said. “You only have to stay clear today.” Why was I resisting so much? I was like a drowning man. You throw him a rope to grab so you can save his life, and he starts criticizing the kind of rope you have thrown him.
The God part
(The monkey on the back — shame makes it worse, not better)
Frightened by the clowns
I knew I needed to quit drinking. That’s why I was at these meetings and talking to LC late into the night. I needed to get the monkey off my back. It was complicating my life and making it miserable. Drinking really was like having a live, chattering, spitting monkey on my back—all that day-in, day-out craving for the next drink. Most people couldn’t see me and my monkey, but we went everywhere together. But people could see what the monkey was doing to me. The messed up way I looked. The curiously large number of problems I had. The debts piling up. The lies and embarrassing behavior.
I’m listening to a young man talk about how he used the program to clear the resentments from his mind and give himself a chance at a whole new life. Even though he has no desire to drink or use drugs today, he comes to meetings, like I do, to learn how to live. “The monkey’s off my back,” he said, “but the circus is still in town.”
The clowns (other people) weren’t sent here to scare me or make me angry. They are here for my amusement (and my affection).
Not just cope. It’s not just that demoralizing goal of going into therapy to “learn coping skills.”
He said that by thinking of addiction as a disease, I might drop all the moral condemnation and self-shaming that gets in the way of getting sober. It simply refers to the fact that you don’t really feel any control over your addiction. It feels as out of “control” as the flu. And that morning you chose to drink may, technically, have been a choice, but once you’re addicted it doesn’t feel like it. Non-alcoholics don’t ever understand this, because they can choose to drink or take a drug (or not) quite easily. Not so easy for us.
I told LC that I used to think if I got ashamed enough I’d finally quit. But that never happened. In fact, sometimes when drinking and drugs had caused really bad behavior on my part I’d actually UP THE ANTE and drink more and get crazier.
It had not worked at all. In fact, the worse I felt about myself the more I wanted to drink, just to drown out those self-judgments. And the more I drank the worse I felt about myself.
What I learned in meetings was that good feelings and laughter were inside me, always waiting to come out. All I had to do was relax and enjoy. I didn’t need to score a drug or drink a bottle of Southern Comfort to find them. They weren’t outside of me after all.
(Learning to live — children as models of joy and play)
But how do I live?
Okay, now that I was getting clean and sober, how was I going to live? Well … how about I just complicate my life in as big a way as I can and then deal with the complication? That way, I don’t have to chart a course for myself, I’ll just solve all the problems I’ve created for myself and fight the dragons I’ve produced through my own thinking and doing. Like creating your own scary video game to play.
Children give us clues
I often wondered why I so enjoyed being with my children while raising them. Maybe they had the key to something. What was it? (I would later know. At the time I didn’t know, I just knew I had done something right by having them and watching them grow.) They made up games and songs. Every day. Unprompted. They made up little plays and costumes and put them on for me when I came home from work. They were showing me something I didn’t quite understand at the time. They were modeling the way I could have lived but wasn’t.
I mean, really, there was no comic joy in my workdays as I struggled to be a journalist, an advertising agency guy … career after career, whatever I could find, and always the daily grind was an ongoing struggle to put food up there on the table and pay the rent. Or so I always thought. I had not discovered the link between joy and productivity. I had not learned that serenity led to simplicity, power and productivity. Those lessons took me nearly a lifetime to learn. (They didn’t have to. You can learn them rather quickly if you’re lucky enough to find the right path and mentors.)
(Life is fun — seriousness is what blocks true nature)
The energy we call heaven
So what could I have learned from my children that I did not learn back then? This is it: Life is fun. All of it. And there is a humor behind things. But we don’t see it because we take our thinking so seriously.
Big bang is a very childish and clumsy way of describing a laugh. I’m sitting here watching a child try to put a baseball cap on a dog and what happens inside of me? A big bang! A big bang inside of me! Ha! And then, Ha Ha Ha! I used to view the comic adventures of our home life as a welcome diversion from serious reality. I didn’t see at the time that it was better than that … it was a deeper experience of our true nature as living beings! It was not an isolated frivolous experience that occurs during time out from reality.
Flying too close to the ground
Because we weigh ourselves down with such deep, serious thoughts and beliefs. Soon life looks unfair. We are victims. Poor me! Poor me, poor me, pour me another.
“Well,” he said. “You don’t have much of a chance solving this thing from the mood you’re in right now. This may be an important decision in the context of your business, but you yourself don’t have to feel so serious about it.”
That we do better when we are lighthearted and happy. That we perform at a higher level of effectiveness. When we’re smiling. What if we didn’t have to take anything seriously? Would we still be grown-ups? It feels funny that I had taught the creative value of humor to seminar students and coaching clients. For years. You are more creative when you’re happy than when you are feeling like a victim. A lot of research backs that up. But teaching it is so different than the actual experience of it.
(Love and approval — the most popular addiction of all)
The most widespread addiction of all
Although my personal path was through alcohol, I want to acknowledge all the addictions, both life-threatening and not, to sugar, shopping, gambling, gaming, porn, the internet, and the most popular addiction of all: love and approval from others. What I do to win your approval! It can be so heavy and embarrassing. Then I have to do it all over again because approval doesn’t last. It can’t really be trusted to hold. And there’s a clue in that.
What’s the solution to this lifelong seeking? This lifelong craving, to be impressive … to be liked and admired? The solution is to already feel good. To come out of the gate that way. Without negative thinking clouding the day, it feels good to be alive. It feels alive to be alive.
To be lifted by the force
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.”
No part of the day was immune to it. No rhyme nor reason for it. It was a wild side of me that had gone out of control, like a rabid tiger let loose in the gift shop of the zoo. I didn’t know I could stop my ruinous miscellaneous activity. I didn’t know what Emerson was talking about.
(Brokenness and the fresh start sobriety makes possible)
Here comes the sun king
When this sad man was a boy, reading adventure books and watching his heroes in movies, did he dream of dying this way? Are his relatives at his funeral going to say that “he died as he lived…”?
Really? They do merit study. And compassion. Because I think it’s all about distraction. We keep choosing distraction from life… especially when we think (erroneously it will turn out) that this life is missing something. We don’t see that these are just fleeting thoughts. Just passing through. We don’t realize that. Until we do.
Everybody is born with the capacity to enjoy, but not with the art. People think just because they are alive and they breathe and they exist, they know how to enjoy. That is sheer stupidity. Enjoyment is a great art, it is a great discipline. It is as subtle a discipline as music or poetry or painting. It is the greatest creativity. ~ Osho
Brokenness: a major, inevitable consequence of alcohol and drug addiction. Broken homes. Broken hearts. Broken windows. Broken bones. Broken vows. Broken dishes. Broken cars. Broken promises. Broken lives. Please put him back together again. Bring him home. He was never like this before. Will you reach out to him?
But how can mere sobriety repair all that was broken? How can it erase the wreckage of the past? Maybe it can’t. But maybe it can do something better than that. It can create a fresh start. It can give a person hope. A new beginning. A bright future. Unlimited possibilities for creating a good life!
That’s what new sobriety is like. And then it gets better. If you stay with it.
(All addiction is addiction to distorting what was already fine)
Why can’t she smoke marijuana?
“Can she smoke marijuana?” Ellen’s anxious sister asked me. “I don’t recommend it,” I said. “Not if she wants to fully recover from her alcohol problem.”
My theory is that all addiction is an addiction to the distortion of reality. Marijuana has its own way of distorting. So does alcohol. So does meth. I’ve experienced them all. Nothing but distortion. A disfiguring of what was already just fine. Self-administered distortion puts you in a house of mirrors. Curved and twisted mirrors. The carnival calls it a fun house. But I can’t see Jerry’s final days as being all that much fun.
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ~ Rumi
To me, slowing down was counter-intuitive, especially when I was lost. When I was lost on the road (before GPS) in some strange town I would always drive faster and faster. When I was little, when I was lost in the Michigan woods I’d run faster down the wrong path further away from home. I never realized that the best thing to do is to slow down. And then to sit quietly in a clearing. (That clearing is heaven.)
Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that. You cannot hold onto the old all the while declaring that you want something new. The old will defy the new; the old will deny the new; the old will decry the new. There is only one way to bring in the new. You must make room for it. ~ Neale Donald Walsch
(The blank slate — each day empty and new, if clear-minded enough to see it)
A blank slate called the human
If individual human personality was real, you wouldn’t have so many people trying to “find out who they are.” That’s what my sponsor LC used to say to me. I said, “I guess, now that I am learning to live a clean and sober life, I am kind of a blank slate.” We were talking one night when we went to coffee after a meeting. “Welcome to the human race,” he said. “We are all blank slates. We start each day empty and new. We’re just not always clear-minded enough to see it.”
That former individual used to feel separate and isolated from the dancing world of being. I was a piece of driftwood. You could have called me Steve Driftwood. A singer’s name. One who carried a sad sack of blues. No rhythm. Just blues. But this new feeling, this was different. This was connection. This was dancing by the light of the moon. This was the light itself … like a long lost lamp that finally got plugged in.
(Bad feelings pass on their own — freedom in not taking thoughts seriously)
There is no figuring this out
I want to debunk and ridicule with humor all the psychological “causes” non-addicts and addicts alike identify as the “reason” someone drinks or takes drugs.
But paradoxically, the addict’s path to glory must include taking total responsibility for not continuing the addiction. It’s something you really have to do. Which soon becomes good. Like reacquainting yourself with free will. Long lost friends. Reunited.
mean, the word isn’t completely wrong. It describes the base of it, the underlying clear mind. The refreshing purification of the human system that happens with sobriety and spiritual progress. But winning my freedom from addiction was better than just getting sober. Yes, it included sobriety. But that word is chilly and cold, like the Jordan River. Like the old spiritual says about that river, “It chills the body but not the soul.” But not the soul! The soul is not a freezable thing. It is a warm, evolutionary unfolding. It is the real sense and feeling of recovery. In recovery, one’s whole life becomes soulful … as it was always meant to be.
Is that the clue to gambling addiction? Risking losing it all for a possibility of financial bliss? Defying cause and effect? Defying the whole idea of earning my way with one bold roll of the dice? What is addiction? Doing what I know I should not be doing because I feel compelled? When I’m not addicted, my free will wins. The free will rules. And so my will easily has me not buy lottery tickets, and not buy a giant bag of candy bars today.
In front of me is deep glorious work, but I turn on the TV instead. I watch the playoffs, then start watching ESPN’s updates … it’s on for twenty-four hours … I can’t stop checking it anymore. What’s the latest news on Johnny Football? Addiction to distraction. Is that a real thing? Is it why artists and writers are no longer proud of their work?
Remember that ex-junkie William Burroughs said you can get anything you got on drugs without using drugs. You dive within and find it because it’s there. That’s all drugs do anyway. They go inside to release things.
The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic music. The music of strings resonating through11-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku
Because here’s the road to recovery: Thriving. And thriving is good. And there are better ways to thrive than drugs. And that was it for me! The road to recovery began when I saw that there were better ways to thrive. Better ways to flourish. Better links to a good feeling about being alive. Why else give up one’s only way of feeling all right? Because it begins to be that way … one’s habit, one’s drug of choice soon becomes like oxygen. Want becomes need. I used to want it… now I need it.
Sitting in the meetings (some of them bright and early in a sunlit Tucson morning) I notice something weird and hopeful. I notice that a bad feeling (of shame or anger or fear) doesn’t need to be actively gotten rid of by me. This was a huge breakthrough, a major epiphany. Because I’d always actively dealt with any bad feeling. I’d often medicate against it. Nervous? Take a drink or a drug! Scared? Bottoms up! Depressed? Go to a bar! Maybe even a biker bar where it’s macho to drink early in the day! Change the feeling. Always change the feeling. You have to deal with it now! But I noticed in meetings and at home between meetings when I was not drinking that a bad feeling would often just mysteriously disappear. (Hey, where did it go? I haven’t dealt with it yet!) I forgot to take it seriously. So maybe the feeling itself pouted for a while and then stormed out of the building. Took its ball and went home. Who knows? Where is it now?
All your life… you were only waiting for this moment to be free. ~ John Lennon and Paul McCartney Blackbird
Back to the fundamentals One of the heaviest wet blankets in my personal belief system is the recurring thought that I constantly need to win friends and influence people. Don’t people tell you that? To be really successful and happy I need love and approval. From people outside of me. When I was still drinking I started to become convinced that I couldn’t talk to people without drinking or taking a pill, or that I could not be interesting or entertaining without
She taught me that the idea that something is true just because I’m thinking it is the ultimate in self-deceiving narcissism. Negative thoughts are impersonal and unoriginal and can’t claim ownership of any kind.
Look at “my” thoughts here: 1) He’s out to get me! 2) She doesn’t appreciate me. 3) I don’t know how to succeed. 4) I need a drink. When I realized that these thoughts were just coming out of nowhere and needed not to be given such actionable attention, I found something new. I found a path back to the freedom I was born with. Many spiritual teachers call this coming home.
The best ideas come out of the blue Sometimes, as years went on, I caught myself referring to this higher power (this life force) as “the blue.” Things came out of the blue. All my best ideas came out of the blue. The best song lyrics. The most inspired thoughts. All the epiphanies and realizations. Out of the blue!
Now I could see that all creative power comes out of the blue into my heart and soul. Worries about outer life mean nothing. They are projections of my imagination.
“I drank to stop the madness!” Okay. But what if the madness is divine? What if all this frightening change in my world was an expression of life itself, and not a threat to me? Nothing worth getting drunk over. Certainly not the trauma I thought change was.
Therefore you can develop an addiction to a false sense of security. But, on the flip side, if you ever recover from that addiction and see that security is a mere concept, there is nothing better than loving the fact that everything changes, always, and our lives are best lived dancing with the change rather than fearing and resisting it. If the world is run on cosmic music, why aren’t we just dancing? Instead of trying to nail down security. Instead of trying to freeze the motion called change.
As Helen Keller famously said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
The phrase is, “No se puede vivir sin amar,” which the critics said meant “You cannot live without love.” It actually means, “You cannot live without loving.” Quite a difference. That difference is everything.
My shame and painful uniqueness start to dissolve and dissipate. This profound personal dysfunction starts to appear as a part of a human pattern that people can get swept into. It starts to feel less like a deeply individualized failing and more like a common human thing. If you’re human, there’s a chance you’ll get addicted. In the history of humans, it happens often. You can make a big personal deal out of it or you can just get help.
You are a lamp. If you disconnect yourself from the circuit of electricity, you do not glow. You can’t get bright. In fact you have no light at all. Not if you stay disconnected. Light comes from connecting. All light does. Including yours and mine.