PERSPECTIVE

OUTSIDE THE BOX

If nothing changes nothing changes. How many times have we heard that at meetings? I remember an old-timer telling a newcomer, "The only thing we're going to ask you to do is to change your whole life." Anyone who has been around the recovery process for any appreciable time knows the wisdom of this statement.

This book is all about making substantive life changes at many levels. Most of what will be offered will not seem dramatic or difficult, but I can assure the reader that absorbing and implementing some or all of these insights and recommendations has a high probability of creating very positive changes to the trajectory of one's life.

A key to viewing and implementing what's being offered is the willingness to try things outside our current comfort zone. All of what's offered below are concepts and tools being utilized by numerous people in various recovery communities. Each has shown the potential to assist the individual in achieving a more balanced and serene recovery.

THE NATURE Of ADDICTION

I'd like to clarify something that is largely overlooked or ignored by a substantial segment of the recovery community. Almost all program groups identify themselves as dealing with an addiction to a specific substance or behavior. The meetings are identified as being for an alcoholic, compulsive overeater, love and sex addict, etc. While this is very effective in helping the suffering addict find their way to the program, it tends to overlook a grander reality. The disease of addiction is bigger than any one of its physical or social manifestations. Once the disease is in place, even if the addict shows little tendency to indulge in any other form of addictive or compulsive behavior, the tendency to do so is already in place and will emerge given the opportunity.

Here is a key takeaway. The disease is addiction, not alcoholism or drug addiction or inability to eat rationally. All those addictions and many more are present to a greater or lesser degree in all who have developed addictive disease. Given the right circumstances, any one of them can creep in to replace those that may currently be in remission. True abstinence is not simply removing the compulsion to use our primary substance or behavior. It means having reached a level in the recovery process where we no longer have the need to use any mechanism to escape.

That all in recovery have the tendency to switch addictions is a hard-to-deny reality. How many have found themselves not drinking but now consuming 10 cups of coffee a day, or putting on significant weight by enjoying a pint of ice cream every evening, or ingesting an extra meal at the pancake house with the gang after the meeting? How many compulsive overeaters find it easier to stay on their food plan if they include wine as part of the plan? In my experience, such behaviors are common but not readily identified as problematic or as having switched addictions.

I remember being at an AA meeting in the spring of 1976 when a member of the group made a remarkable statement as to why we hadn't seen him for a while. Hal related that he'd started going to OA as well as AA and replied, "I'm taking my addictions in the order in which they were killing me." At the time I laughed, but over the years I've come to appreciate the deep wisdom of that statement. The many-faceted nature of addictive disease is a tender trap and few in recovery haven't taken the bait.

The purpose of all addictions, be it to a substance or a behavior, is to still unpleasant emotional chatter in the mind. Once the addictive dynamic is firmly in place, unless the addict finds healthy ways to reduce the mental noise, they will either live in a state of emotional discomfort, or will find themselves falling prey to one or more of the other addictive processes in their quest for emotional relief.

It's not necessary to understand the details of how the mind is emotionally wired to understand where the mental noise comes from. Many of us heard in school that the psyche is made up of three main operative elements — the ego that we use to manage day to day experiences, a repressed pure predatory animal element called the id, and an overall modulating element called the super ego or conscience. The ego's primary purpose is survival and over the millennia, it has learned to use pleasure and gain to achieve that goal. The ego has no concept of a Higher Power since it thinks it is totally responsible for its own survival. For the most part, the ego functions very much like a self-centered animal and is rarely content with its circumstances. Like most animals, untamed, it can be not only disruptive, but dangerous.

Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA, was once asked if he could summarize the AA program process in a few words. His answer: "It's all about deflation of the ego at depth." What Bill was suggesting was that in order to achieve reasonable emotional sobriety the recovering addict needs to find ways of stilling the mental noise that is a dominant feature of the active ego. That is the purpose of the 12 steps and the many adjunctive recovery tools that have been added to the recovery process over the decades.

The ego, at its core, is really just an evolved animal. All animal species from bacteria to humans do not have the capacity to generate their own food. Plants can produce their own nutrients through the process of photosynthesis but animals lack that ability. Therefore, in order to survive they must search out a source of food and find ways of staying safe as they forage. Over the millennia, as animal species evolved, they learned more effective search tools and ways to protect themselves during the search. The most evolved animal species, we humans, still at our emotional core manifest those basic instincts, to find what we feel we need to survive and to stay safe in the process. The amazing complexity of the human body and mind center around these two most basic, core, instinctual drives.

Unfortunately, the evolved ego has somehow gotten its priorities distorted. Despite being surrounded by ample sources of nutrients and all the necessary elements for its survival it still thinks like a primitive animal. Over time its insatiable urge to forage has transitioned from searching for physical food to a need to find or create emotional food. The ego has actually evolved sophisticated mechanisms to create the psychic food it intuits it...