What is addiction?
Addiction is not a Disease, but rather it is a spiritual malady and force of habit. It is a poor self image and the presence of a broken heart. Our heart can be healed and our habits can be changes. We won’t relapse if we take the time to respect ourselves enough to realize not only did we hurt others but others hurt us deeply. The certainly taught us as children that we were inferior and bad. So we spent the rest of our days trying to prove that it wasn’t true while our own hearts believed that it was.
What can I say? I have been passionate about recovery for years. I made my Recovery Farmhouse websites back at around 6 or 7 years sober. Since then I have written hundreds of articles and engage in numerous Facebook group posts. I have worked in AA for years on end being a member of a home-group and being a sponsor. I have held positions in my homegroup such and chairman, secretary, and the like.
Why in the Hell Was I an Addict?
The most important thing I have learned in recovery is by far the true reason I became an addict to begin with. And what supersedes that realization must be the question, why was I in so much emotional pain and mental anguish? I have answered these questions. Please don’t give me the text book answers like “So our troubles we think are of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholics is an extreme example of self will run riot. Though he usually doesn’t think so. Selfishness self contentedness! That, we think is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self delusion, self seeking and self pity we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. …AGAIN SELF WILL RUN RIOT.
Sorry Bill W. your right of course EXCEPT your missing the core. What Bill is describing here are SYMPTOMS. Symptoms of what? These are symptoms of a man who has low self worth therefore must posture himself all the day long in what we call, DEFENSE MODE. And defense mode is just another symptom.
It’s Important to find our what is at the core our our addiction
What you saying Laura? You may ask. I am saying we need to go MUCH DEEPER if we are to gain access to our emotional and mental inner workings. I say we need to go to our auto-biography.
Why was I so damn insecure that I had to stay in defense mode to convince myself and others that I am NOT A PIECE OF SHIT after all? Why did my own heart believe that I was “bad” for so many years? And if you don’t see this about yourself, you have more false pride to strip away. How do we strip false pride? By working the steps thoroughly. By making ourselves subject to a sponsor. By remember we are students. By starting the day with prayer as students. And by tabling our defense mode survival mechanisms.
RESISTING FEAR BASED REACTION PATTERNS
That may means we no longer get to RUN LIKE HELL from AA or any responsibility when we feel uncomfortable. We need to make “discomfort” our new theme and our comfort zone. Once we accept discomfort as our comfort zone we will become comfortable with it eventually. We step out! We volunteer for home group positions. We go to jails and institutions to carry the message on panels that share their stories. We are now in the mode of learning and doing things we are simply NOT USED TO. This is growth.
We don’t know everything. What helped me is a dream God gave me in my first year of recovery that showed me my individual personalities both survival personalities and my authentic original personalities. See the article here:
Recovered
So if you read that article you will see that I discovered the true patterns and nature of my addict personalities. Furthermore I discovered that the neural pathways of an addict are permanent BUTT, (I must make the point that everything after “but” is NOT bullshit such a comment degrades our own purity and self image, don’t believe everything you learn in AA.) that these paths in the brain can be built upon by new pathways and eventually the new behaviors/pathways are much more akin to our nature than the old sick pathways buried under the new bright and happy bridges and roads of our recovery brain.
This doesn’t happen overnight. But it DOES happen eventually if we keep on keeping on with step 11 and 12. WE MUST meditate daily and give our hurt inner child positive affirmations.
See, what happens is we are born with an open mind and have hopes and dreams. These dreams, hopes and our own self image get CRUSHED by whoever is degrading us as children. These adults usually do the demoralizing without even realizing it. They crush our little hearts and we learn that we ourselves are apparently “bad and wrong.” So we begin to change who we are by putting on a mask. We now commence to becoming the people that OTHERS seem to think we should be. Now our perceptions are twisted and we become actors.
Why. Because we have been taught at a young age that our personalities are all wrong and we believe it.
Now, how that comes about and who did this to you is what you must learn. Meditation will help. Does this mean we are not responsible and that the wrongs we have done to others isn’t one of our core issues? No! WE must still clear the wreckage of our past, however we need to address the wrongs suffered and do the steps on those.
Working the steps on wrongs suffered is just as important and working steps on wrongs done to others.
By realize that we were victims we can process resentments toward our abusers or those who neglected us emotionally and eventually let go of the deepest and most emotionally debilitating issues of our hearts.
These issues paralyze us and perpetrate our soul with an unbearable pain by which we feel we MUST medicate. Do you see where I am going with this?
Some people are unable to meditate because they have so many emotional issues dancing around in their gut that they have buried. Fear and shame being at the forefront of every addicts innards.
Step Eleven and Expulsion of Oppressive Habits
I remember when I first started my meditation. I felt a twisting turning live entity squirming inside my guts. Call it a demon. Maybe it was. I am pretty sure several demon where forced to leave my body during the first few years of meditation. Being still made them crazy inside me. Still I forced myself to stay still on my bed and focus on a mantra. I would say the Lords prayer over and over visualizing every sentence. Some of the spirits that left me were the spirit of sloth which I expelled by forcing myself to do physical exercise in the sun and shocked my body over and over using cold water from the hose. The sloth demon hated it! That feeling of extreme heaviness that I had suffered with for so long finally was expelled by sunlight, water, and exercise. I used to make rainbows with the hose. That may have also helped magically.
Expelling the spirit of lust and perversity
Then there was the spirit of lust. Oh yes we all have a great list of sexual perversity on our fourth step. There is nothing new under the sun. I felt the demon of lust leave me by staying celibate for over a year and not engaging in perversity. I remember being in my car and I swear to you it would squirm and move inside me craving sex and other peversities. It actually made my body squirm around like a girl shown in the movie Black Snake Moan. If you have seen it you know what I am talking about. If you want to get clean your behaviors MUST change so these habits, trends, spirits, or whatever you want to label them can leave.
These expulsion processes WILL happen naturally. Or we can go to a tent revival or Pentecostal church and get prayer by several believers at one time with the laying on of hands. Spirits tend to leave this way as well. Thing is often people feel the freedom of the deliverance but don’t change their behaviors and take back the spirits of oppression once again. I have done this myself.
Our walls must come down the Truth Will Set us Free
Let the other idiots save their false pride and use us as battering rams for their inferiority. When we share fear and shame in meetings we release it from our heart. People will use our weakness against us and mock us for being truthful. Let them. If will be they who mocked us who ends up relapsing because they chose to save face rather than saving their own ass. Plus exposing ourselves to others in truth also expels the spirit of false pride that would otherwise kill us. False pride fades when it is exposed to the light of truth. This is why people can get up on the podium and share their stories over and over saying things that you would be ashamed to ever admit. They are now free from the shame that oppresses. Secrets of shame are one of the things that are common to addicts. Shame must be exposed to the light of truth for us to be set free from addiction.
Addiction is based in childhood self worth issues and the presence of a broken heart. Most addicts are so deep in survival mode they have blocked out their true feelings of a broken heart and especially vulnerabilities. We must become vulnerable to someone if we are to recover. By “vulnerable” I mean exposing our true self to someone…people. Sharing TRUTH in meeting. Looking for empathic people to share our fears and shame with. There are always going to be bastards in meetings that will label you “bad” when you expose your true fears and shame. However, we must save our ass not our face. If we keep the walls up around us recovery CANNOT get in. But it there, it’s common among addicts. But also addiction is a spiritual malady. This is why people do get sober by spiritual deliverance in churches when prayed over. But without AA your not going to get all the 11 and 12 step work we so desperately need to help us change those neural-pathways of the brain. Addiction IS spiritual and physiological.
Cunning and baffling? Not when you have gone through the processes I am describing in recovery.
God said “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” What I am offering you here is the knowledge that has taken me 12 years and a boatload of fight to learn. When I say fight, I mean going against our feelings. 90% of recovery is the act of going against that which our feelings are telling us to do. And then…what we have gone against, now becomes a way of life, habit, and becomes our very nature. WE CAN CHANGE OUR NATURE. Amazing huh?
If you don’t get yourself a Higher Power by reaching out to God with your heart chances are you won’t get the kind of deliverance and recovery I am explaining. The kind of recovery that means “RECOVERED” instead of spending the rest of your life on the precipice of relapse. Screw that. You can get to the point of not needing meetings but it takes YEARS and we must always do the maintenance work of steps 10, 11, and 12 to stay spiritually fit.