Series Three: Blog Sixty-Six

For people who play racquetball, the strategy is to position yourself on the court as to give you the best chance to manage most of the shots. Some people refer to this position as the sweet spot on the court. This space on the court creates the best advantage to reach most of the shots made by an opponent.

I borrow this term to apply to relapse prevention from addiction. Some addicts in recovery tout they have been cured from their addictive urges. Most however have not. To those who battle craving to use or struggle with destructive patterns of living, it is important to increase awareness of high-risk behaviors and situations that build temptation and trigger addictive acting out. Increasing mindfulness to high-risk experiences with strategic plans to manage these challenges creates an awareness of sweet spot. This will empower you to manage high-risk situations and reframe the curse of craving into a blessing of connecting with the legitimate need within that must be met in a healthy way. The awareness sweet spot is a way of living in the power of your adult wise mind.

Dr. Patrick Carnes created a Personal Craziness Index. The index is designed to help you increase awareness of vulnerable areas of life that if left untended expands the possibility of relapse. You identify a certain number of behaviors in your life that you choose to pay attention to regularly. When an area is left untended for a given time frame, you give yourself a point. At the end of a given time frame (a week or month) you total the points and establish a scale that determines the level of risk you are toward relapse. If the total is low, then your vulnerability to relapse is low. The higher the number the more likelihood of relapse. It’s a way of paying attention to the buildup that leads to destructive behaviors.

There are many ways to manage build-up behaviors and relapse triggers in addiction recovery. Most addicts struggle to create or adopt their own strategy, leaving them vulnerable to whims and circumstances that unfold in everyday life that lead to high-risk and to using.

In 12-step work addicts are asked to create a behavioral sobriety contract. In the contract they are asked to identify high-risk zones or behaviors that do not designate acting out but are high-risk, that if neglected lead to relapse. This section of the contract is referred to as “yellow light” or “middle circle” behaviors. The goal of this section of a sobriety contract is to establish a sweet spot of awareness that gives the addict an insider advantage to managing the urges and cravings that are inevitable in relapse prevention.

I suggest five categories that comprise a yellow light or middle circle list.

1. Personal Relationships: Addicts must consider who they connect to. When friendships become a detrimental influence toward relapse, you have to change your friends. Your friends don’t have to be all in a recovery program. They do need to respect your boundaries. Of course, you will have to tell them what they are. Anyone who does not respect your boundaries around addictive behavior is not healthy for your recovery. You will need to hang out less with them. Build relationships that honor and respect your recovery behavior.
2. Places: Take time to assess the places you go that create high-risk. Some of the places need to be eliminated. Many places will need to be managed with accountability and support. Examples can be travel, hotels, parties, events, family gatherings, etc. If it is likely you will act out in any given environment, then obviously you avoid it—simply don’t go! Other scenarios will require planning. Create an itinerary that you will be accountable to your recovery support. It can be written out or etched in your brain to be reviewed with a sponsor before you engage the high risk place and then checked in as the time you spend in high-risk unfolds. This is a time tested management tool that is important to utilize throughout recovery.
3. Mindsets: Addicts must pay attention to the “mind funk” they get into during the dynamic of recovery living. It is important to manage destructive mindsets that fuel self-sabotage. Depression is a common experience for addicts. Medical and emotional management is critical. Victim posture is an everyday dynamic that must be reframed by an addict. Most addicts marinate in mistaken beliefs that spawn the anticipation of rejection and trigger victim posture. Addicts must learn strategies to interrupt these destructive mindsets. Deprivation is a deadly mindset that ultimately fuels entitlement. If you wallow in deprived thinking inevitably you will engage entitlement to act out. Sorting and sifting destructive thoughts and shifting away from destructive mindsets is crucial to establishing long-term sobriety.
4. Emotions: Most addicts were never taught to recognize feelings let alone how to address them. A regular feelings check with others is critical for an addict in relapse recovery. Acting out is triggered when addicts disconnect from feelings. This is the way addicts lose their way and become uprooted from being centered. There is no right or wrong feeling. Emotions simply exist. Get a feelings list and practice identifying what feelings you have during the course of your daily living. Managing feelings will keep you connected and on the solid ground of relapse prevention.
5. Behavioral sabotage: There are a number of behaviors that can wreck an addicts plan to live sober. Passive-aggression, procrastination, resentment, conflict avoidance, “fixing” other people’s problems, approval-seeking and a host of other possible destructive behaviors must be managed. It is important for an addict to uncover behaviors that sabotage recovery. Often, therapy is needed for an addict to recognize and manage unhealthy behavior patterns. For sure, accountability with a support community is necessary.

Vigilance in these five areas will yield the reward of long-term sobriety and balanced living. Addicts in recovery will spend most of their recovery lives managing these 5 areas of living. When addicts are hyper vigilant about high-risk zones, they tend to go off the rails and relapse. Hyper vigilance is usually triggered by trying to please someone or prove to another that you are serious about recovery. It is not sustainable. Balanced recovery is present when an addict is accountable to a support community without hyper vigilance to please another. This is what is identified as the awareness sweet spot.

Series Three: Blog Sixty-Five

John Kennedy Jr. was killed in July of 1999 when he was caught in a deadly graveyard spiral while flying his airplane at night over the Atlantic Ocean. The official report suggested that Kennedy fell victim to spatial disorientation while descending over the water at night.

For pilots, a graveyard spiral happens when you become disoriented and have no visual reference to the horizon. Most graveyard spirals happen at night when you cannot see. The pilot mistakenly believes his wings are level when they are banked left or right. When the pilot does not increase back pressure on the yoke, the plane starts to descend faster and faster in a banked descent. Pulling back on the yoke, without bringing the wings level, tightens the spiral and in most cases, increases the rate of descent. The harder you pull back, the tighter the spiral, dooming the plane to ground impact.

Physiologically, the pilot can’t see the horizon. Most pilots are unable to feel the turn in the beginning of a graveyard spiral. When the pilot does not trust h/her instrument readings for whatever reason h/she is vulnerable to a graveyard spiral that quickly becomes fatal without course correction. Pulling out of a graveyard spiral requires that a pilot trust h/her instruments.

Addictive relapse is a graveyard spiral.  When an addict fails to trust the instruments of recovery, a crash and burn relapse is inevitable.

Here is a list of instruments to be aware of that can prevent a graveyard spiral in recovery.

1. Accountability: Responsible recovery is built on accountability through cultivating purposed vulnerability. Addicts want to isolate and live life in secret. Accountability intercepts dysfunction because it insists that you develop the commitment to tell on yourself. The strength of a sobriety contract is your willingness to be held accountable to people in your support network for what you put in your inner, middle and outer circles. When this breaks down the graveyard spiral begins.
2. Living in Consultation: The 12-step community is a space to cultivate connection. Addicts deepen sobriety and clarify values by living in consultation with a 12-step group. Addicts lose their way when they distance themselves from connection with others in recovery. Your best isolated thinking puts you into a graveyard spiral that created crash and burn through addictive behavior. Living in consultation is a proven lifestyle that helps you course correct and avoid graveyard spirals. Awareness remains keen to addicts who are open to the considerations and guidance of a sponsor and other 12-step support people. When addicts withdraw, become defensive or compromise consultation, the light of awareness dims. Addicts are not pathetic nor do they lack the capacity to make decisions. However, it is critical to recognize the need to live within limits and seek the guidance of a recovering community. Consistent consultation increases awareness and relapse is avoided. No one cultivates relational intimacy alone. Building a foundation of recovery requires consultation.
3. Commit to telling on yourself. This tool is absolutely necessary to staying the course in recovery. Vagueness fuels the possibility of relapse. Checking the boxes in recovery is a set up for a graveyard spiral. Checking the box is doing recovery without connecting to heart. This happens when you engage the fringes of recovery community. It comes from a subtle shift in attitude. When there is opportunity to be vulnerable and share discord and incongruence you gloss over the invite and remain at a surface level of communication. Recovery healing is only present when addicts tell on themselves. This vulnerability must be cultivated at every level of life. As an addict, when you are vague in your check in, you communicate stability when you are in danger to a graveyard spiral. Relapse doesn’t happen all of a sudden. However, when the conditions are right and mature, backsliding happens in an instant. Crash and burn happens quicker than any addict ever thought possible. It is critical to cultivate a resolve to tell on yourself about every aspect of living. Take time to reflect. Is there any level of life that you are vague or unwilling to discuss with your support community? You will know this by examining the stones in recovery that you have not turned over and surrendered to discussion. Examine all the aspects of your life, your attitudes, your behaviors and your decisions. If you are vague with yourself or others in your support community, you may be in a graveyard spiral and not know it.  Awareness is the second critical tool to add to your tool box of relapse prevention. It is a skill that requires rigorous honesty with self and a commitment to open-hearted sharing of every aspect of your life to your recovery support community. Examine the congruence of your shares. Are you accountable for your hypocrisies? Have you accepted your inconsistencies as casual without answering to your support community? These dynamics fuel a graveyard spiral that leads to relapse. Awareness is everything.

Series Three: Blog Sixty-Four

In baseball a 5-tool player is one who excels in hitting, fielding, speed, hitting for power and average. There are not many major league players who demonstrate these skills during any given season. This season Paul Goldschmidt of the St. Louis Cardinals is such a player. It is even more rare for a player to demonstrate these skills throughout a long career. Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Barry Bonds are all iconic players who demonstrated these five tools throughout their careers.

There are five tools necessary to achieve long-term sobriety in addiction recovery. Today, I will discuss one of the tools and follow up with subsequent blogs to cover the other four.

Failure is a reality in almost all aspects of life. Everyone desires to relate to accomplishment and success. Long-term achievement requires the ability to manage failure. People highlight spectacular victory but longevity teaches how to handle human shortcomings.

It is a common response to lower your expectations when encountered with failure. Sometimes it is helpful like when you attempt to achieve unrealistic expectations. However, in many cases lowering expectations is an attempt to soothe oneself from the sting of failure. Addicts scale down expectations for sobriety after they announce their success in a 12-step meeting and then act out against their bottom line behaviors. It is easier to lower expectations than to learn from the disappointment of failed behavior.

Relapse behavior for an addict is a reconstitution of old destructive patterns in behavior that engage acting out with a drug of choice. Lapse behavior include indications of failure in attitude and action around addiction management. It involves behaviors that are short of addictive acting out but engage high risk patterns of thoughts and behaviors that inevitably lead to actions of relapse.

There are very few addicts who do not relapse after engaging recovery, no matter what the program. All addicts and everyone else fail with lapse behavior. It is called being human. Addicts must learn that how you extract meaningful lessons and then throw away the rind of failed experience. This treatment of failed behavior is absolutely critical to anyone who has successfully created long term sobriety.

Here is my version of the first of five tools to a relapse recovery plan.

Engage in the Relapse Litmus Test. Geoff Hewitt wrote a poem about a sailor who was lost at sea and somehow made his way to the shore. Exhausted he fell asleep on the shore only to have the tide come in and sweep him back to sea. This is the story of many addicts in recovery. Managing recovery failure embraces four tests. (a) A beginner’s attitude:  Showing up every day hungry for one thing that will keep you sober and growing is challenging. This becomes more difficult the longer you are sober. The tendency is to lose urgency and back off from cultivating personal growth. On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate your beginner’s attitude toward recovery? Will you take the initiative to examine where you got off track from your recovery program? Are you willing to do what you need to do to get back where you need to be? These are the questions that the humility needed to engage a beginner’s attitude. (b) Honesty-Recovery requires honesty. Deep emotional honesty is difficult to achieve. Few people achieve this level of honesty. Face the questions: Where am I dishonest with myself? Who have I been dishonest with? Am I willing to make amends and restitution for my dishonesty? Who will I be willing to be accountable to for this lapse behavior? These are important litmus test questions to guide you through failure. (c) A willingness to do something different. Albert Einstein’s famous quote “you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it”.  Twelve-step communities like to croon “insanity is doing the same thing over and again, expecting different results”. Ponder what it is that you would be willing to do differently in order to accomplish the level of sobriety you desire? When you don’t know what to do, brainstorm with your 12-step community for solutions that make sense. Are you willing to go to any length? What would you do differently in the next 24 hours/week/month? (d) Do whatever it takes to stop the slide of acting out. When skiing on a steep slope and you fall and uncontrollably cascade down the mountain, you do whatever it takes regardless of how it looks to get stopped! Even if you look like the abominable snowman coming down the mountain, one thing matters and that is to stop the fall. It takes the same urgency and burning desire to stop the slide toward addictive behavior. There must be a burning desire within your heart. Although determination alone will never keep you sober, you cannot recover without it.

Let go of resistance, defensiveness and judgmentalism. Valerie Cox wrote a poem about a guy who in an airport she thought was stealing from her bag of cookies. She never said anything but gathered feelings of despise and resentment toward him. However, she had packed away her cookies and was eating from a bag she thought was hers but was his. It turned out she was the ingrate, the cookie thief. This poem reflects on experiences of recovery from addiction. Addicts easily become ensued with judgment toward others around them. Resistance to suggestions made from sponsors is common place. Defensiveness grows like mold to every addict. These dynamics will drain the joy of surrender in recovery. Controlling these destructive patterns is a challenge to sobriety and serenity.  Take inventory about your own judgmental spirit toward others. Have you been the ingrate focusing on someone else’s cookies thinking you were right and they were wrong? How are you cynical and judgmental toward others? In what ways have you been defensive? How are you passive/aggressive toward others in your life? What are you resistant to do in your recovery life? Where do you not want to eliminate personal judgment and criticism? What steps must you take to clean out resistance, judgmentalism and defensiveness? These are the questions that become a litmus test in your plan for relapse prevention.

Series Three: Blog Sixty-Three

Family scripts and experiences are carved in stone. Recovery requires significant long-term effort to disconnect the emotional wiring that sabotages relational intimacy caused by family dysfunction. Many of us have turned into ourselves, unable to connect to others. It was, at the time, a necessary choice in order to survive the lack of safe, loving and consistent care from our primary caregivers. For many mom and dad were good people who did some lousy parenting. They did the best they could most of the time. It just wasn’t enough. As a result, many of us learned to numb ourselves from the myriad of unhealthy childhood experiences to protect ourselves from disintegration and pain.

Today our relationships become conflictual and difficult. We recreate past disappointments and losses that were experienced from family past. We become compulsive. We are driven from boredom by a compulsive desire for more excitement. We seek ways to not think or feel. We think that if we control situations and people around us, we will not be so likely to get hurt or be alone. So our truth becomes black and white, driven by thoughts we would like to avoid. Many of us deny reality. We want others to do our research for truth. We tell ourselves that the realities that surround us are not actual. It’s all fake news. Addicts have done this their entire lives. It’s an illusion that we embrace to numb the out of control and over control cycles that create more and more chaos. We learn to compartmentalize so that we see these weaknesses in others in order to avoid the impact of our own past experiences in our family of origin.

Here are a few recovery reflections from old family scripts.

1. Grieving unmet needs is important to accepting what is. There is a desire for others in our family-of-origin to embrace new found awareness and truth that is discovered in recovery. But, they don’t! In many cases, your insights are ignored and not even acknowledged. For a season, much of your energy is spent trying to help your family of origin to see what you have uncovered. Grieving takes time. You will need to let go and accept that your loved ones will likely never see what you know. Acceptance is not compromise. Rather, it leads to separating yourself from your truth. Without grieving you will fight your family and fight yourself trying to get them to understand. Acceptance leads to embracing whatever relationship you can engage with your family-of-origin. It always means letting go of what does not exist but you it wish did.
2. Learn to internally regulate your feelings. Allow the emotional pain from your family-of-origin to surface.  For me, it was like trying to hold down powerful springs that were essentially painful experiences. There was a pattern of behavioral experience that included religion, fast-paced living, and addiction that served as a cocktail for numbing out what I did not want to face or feel. The reality of painful past experiences were the springs that kept pushing back against my stubborn will, which tried to avoid the experiences I feared to face. Finally, I wore out and all of the springs started popping up all over the place. I was unable to control them. Internally, I fell apart. This was the place I began to learn to regulate my feelings. It required that I surrender to trying to control what was uncontrollable. Internal regulation included facing what was real about my parents and childhood.  Until this happened I relied upon life skills that led to intimacy disability.
3. Reconstruct your beliefs about relational fulfillment. The way in which you do relationships will change as you reconstruct your fundamental beliefs about yourself and the world around you. Detaching from your family-of-origin is often necessary to realize that you are worthwhile. Others see that you are an unrepeatable miracle of God. Give yourself permission to take it in. There was a time in my life that I enjoyed the connection and friendship of others but I craved for the acceptance and connection that I did not have from my family of origin. I desperately wanted their smile of approval. Like wolf pups hovering around the carcass of their dead mother hoping for milk, I hovered seeking the approval and acceptance that would never come from my family of origin. I learned to let go and move on. You must too. Learn to believe that who you are is valued. Rebuild your mistaken beliefs into affirmations that help you realize your destiny of connection, value and relational intimacy. This reality is a result of accepting you being just the way you are.

For many of us it takes a lifetime to unravel the family scripts that were carved in stone. For those who take the journey and stay the course discover the secret of their own brilliance and genuinely rejoice in being an unrepeatable miracle of the universe.

Series Three: Blog Sixty-Two

Recovery is about connecting with yourself and others. Most addicts learn to distract and disconnect from experiences that create discomfort. I remember the church I attended growing up. I was forced to attend twice on Sunday and prayer meeting on Wednesday night. Then there were revival campaigns every night for two weeks twice a year. Sometimes the revivals were conducted in a circus tent in a vacant lot in town.  During the revival what happened inside the tent resembled a circus.  Cottage prayer meetings were organized to get ready for the torture of the two-week revival. The old ladies of the church would bring their best baked pie offering some relief from the torture of having to pray. I learned to distract and disconnect from unpleasant experiences early in my life before addiction ever bloomed.

I brought baseball trading cards and memorized statistics on the back of the cards of favorite ball players. I know it sounds boring but then you probably have never attended a cottage prayer meeting either. There was always sawdust spread out on the ground for the tent meetings that were conducted at night. During the revival meeting June bugs would fly in attraction to the lights. As a kid, I would bury the June bugs under a small pile of sawdust and see how long it would take them to crawl out from the bottom. You just did whatever was necessary to survive boring uncomfortable experience. Church was a primer to addictive behavior teaching me to disconnect and distract from discomfort.

In recovery, addicts learn to manage discomfort and reconnect to relationships by finding meaningfulness in everyday relationships. They learn that everything doesn’t have to be spectacular.  They stop looking for a magic bullet and figure out how to sit with discomfort and make it meaningful. Connecting with others is a very simple art that can get lost with complicated plans for activity.

Here are a few considerations for connecting with others that you care about:

1. Practice sitting still and saying nothing with your loved one. Maybe for an hour or longer. Turn off the TV, shut down the internet and all other devices and sit in silence, doing nothing. Reconnect with yourself and practice managing the discomfort that comes with silence when you are not used to it in the presence of your loved one.
2. Practice listening to the blowback your loved one shares about what they don’t like about their relationship with you. This takes guts and a level of maturity most of us don’t have. You can grit your teeth and tolerate. Opening your heart to what your loved one is saying about their experience of you is a different level of connection. It requires that you be able to sit with and be present with feelings of discomfort. Once I had a friend tell me “when you see me being blind to a weakness in our relationship please tell me.” So I did. He didn’t like it and argued with me that I was wrong and I had misunderstood. Blowback is difficult. You will connect deeper with your loved one when you condition yourself to sit with their blowback.
3. Practice saying it straight when you have blowback to your loved one. For those whose tendency is to advise and opine what others ought to do, this suggestion might be interpreted as a green light to tell others what to do. Be careful. When advice is not requested it will be received as judgment. That said, it is not connecting if you walk on eggshells fearful that your feedback will hurt your loved one’s feelings. If it is your truth, say it straight. You don’t have to be rude and crude. You can be sensitive and still say it straight. Have the courage to connect by saying your truth direct and with care.
4. Don’t take up too much space when you try to connect. Addicts take up too much space in relationships. When you want what you want when you want it, there isn’t any room for anyone else. Obviously, this is problematic toward creating connection with a loved one. So, practice keeping quiet. Let your loved one express their feelings, wants and desires first. After you take in their thoughts and desires, you can then chime in with yours. None of us do this perfectly. Yet, this is a skill set when practiced creates an inviting environment for connection.
5. Creatively discover a language that connects with your loved one. When my kids were young we used to try doing family meetings. They were awful and disastrous. No one liked them. So we quit. The only thing about a family meeting that connected was what was described as “funny time”. Each kid loved trying to entertain the rest of us.  The language that connected was goofiness not the language of a seriously planned meeting. Go with what connects. When addicts go into treatment and recovery, they come home with strange language that doesn’t connect. They use recovery talk and treatment phrases like “I make up” etc. Nothing wrong with the words but it might not connect with your loved one. Just use heart language. At times heart language avoids verbalizing feelings. Parents can find connection with their children through sharing experiences with common interest and passion like music, the outdoors, and a myriad of other life events. The language of connection sometimes is found in just being. There is no need to put a language to it, just go with the flow of being with your loved one. You don’t have to force feeling talk.

Learning to sit with discomfort and creating connection with those you love is a deeper road of recovery. It begins with connecting with yourself and includes engaging those you love with authentic intimacy and inclusion of those you love the most.

Series Three: Blog Sixty-One

Life force is ever changing. Every addict enters recovery lost. They hope to find lost integrity, trust and a healthy lifestyle. They want to regain the sanity that has been lost. A cup of coffee, a warm smile and authentic stories of brokenness in a 12-step meeting helps them to feel that they have come home. The Steps and the fellowship become a community of support for an addict to find self, healing and a place to rebuild their life. The community is a safe space to say whatever needs to be said and feel loved. Untold secrets shared remain inside the walls with those who have shared their own skeletons from the closet.

The recovery community is a safe place to cultivate emotional intimacy with others who know what you feel because they have experienced the same dynamics in life. Learning to work the steps by going over them many times with a sponsor solidifies recovery. The 12-step community becomes a safe place to backslide.  Should you relapse, the community is non-judgmental, caring and accepting even though you have failed. It is a good place to learn to separate your behavior from your sense of self. This experience is healing to an addict who mostly comes to the fellowship with shame, disdain and self-condemnation.

Eventually, as addicts recover what was lost, there is the need to launch personal growth. This is where a potpourri of experience begins to unfold. Growth is a dynamic that doesn’t leave you at the same place. Where you were when you entered recovery is not where you will be tomorrow. Many times recovering addicts want to hold on to the security of what was once experienced when they first entered a recovery community. It is difficult to accept that what used to be no longer is. “Yesterday ended last night” is a truthful mantra that is often avoided by recovering addicts. M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled described life as a metaphor of traveling through the desert. Many get to the first oasis, unpack their gear, soothe their weary bones and enjoy the cool waters of the oasis. However, they refuse to leave the oasis to continue their journey through the desert. They choose to live the rest of their lives hovering around the oasis, hoping to hang on to their oasis experience.

This can happen in recovery.  Rehabilitation requires continued growth. It is scary and unsettling to move forward and confront the many faces of change in life. What was once true for you in recovery looks different as you grow and address new challenges.

Some people leave the nest of their recovery community, never to return. Some who leave relapse and tragically return to their old addictive lifestyle. Others learn to do life and remain anchored in their 12-step community as a safe place to sift and sort the many challenges of everyday living that push for positive change.

Recovery embraces a revolution of change. Addicts radically revolt from destructive mistaken beliefs, behaviors and life styles. They change the community from those who act out to those who don’t. This radical revolution never ends throughout the span of life for those who are sincerely committed to recovery growth. This is where Peck’s metaphor of the oasis come into play. The challenge for addicts in 12-step recovery groups is to not hover around the oasis of sobriety but to move beyond into deeper intimacy with self and loved ones at home. This is the journey through the desert that creates serenity.

From one perspective, it is comforting to know that you no longer imbibe your drug of choice, and that you have gained the love and support of others who have also made the same choices. There is mutual admiration and respect for hard won sobriety. However, many 12-step old timers are sages in the recovery room and surly and troublesome in relationships at home. They don’t drink but quietly their family members wish they did because they remain cantankerous and difficult. To Peck’s point of view, they simply have chosen to stop the journey through the desert.

Life force creates evolution. We are always evolving to a different place. If you don’t think so, you should reference your high school year book and note the physical evolution that has transpired from what you looked like then to what you look like now! Recovery is the same. It would be distorted if you were the same today as you were when you entered recovery. Just as much as if you looked the same today as when you were younger. We are all evolving. Even, when you resolve not to grow, everything and others around you are changing. Even the oasis doesn’t remain the same! It’s the nature of life force.

Here are a few considerations about the revolution of recovery and its ultimate evolution.

Recovery requires that you accept change. Bob Dylan crooned “The times they are a changin”. It’s a reality of life. Things were so unstable before you got into recovery and 12-step work. It is so hard to let go and accept the inevitable changes that will occur as your life moves forward. Acceptance creates harmony and helps you let go of people, environment and what used to be. Resistance to change spoils growth. Like a good egg that either hatches or becomes rotten, growth becomes stymied and spoiled without acceptance to inevitable change.

Recovery requires that you leave unhealthy systems. Many of us grew up in dysfunctional families. It took us leaving the system and embracing recovery in order for us to see the toxicity in our family system. Sometimes, nostalgia tempts us to go back, thinking it wasn’t so bad. However, once revisited, only a few experiences remind us that the family system no longer fits. This progression continues throughout life. Many systems that once fueled passion, fulfillment and vision no longer do. Rather than complain or lament about how things have changed, there is a time to move on. Your revolution in recovery has changed you. Undoubtedly, the system has changed too. It is no longer compatible with who you are. It’s time for you to move on and make a change.

Connecting with places and people change while the principles remain the same. Personally, I likely will remain connected to a 12-step community the rest of my days. However, I know a number of people who have moved on to other life experience. Some for the good and some with disappointment. I have learned that building a shrine out of life experience is counterproductive to growth and acceptance of the passage of time in the span of life. That said, the principles for growth remain the same. Hunger for personal growth and humility with the capacity to bring yourself back to center are concepts of truth that ground your recovery revolution and track with you throughout your evolution of life experience. Exercise the courage to leave environments that no longer foster recovery growth. Practice radical revolution in recovery growth that promise to bring you to the fulfillment of your destiny. Leave the oasis and finish the journey through the desert by maintaining the principles that you built your foundation for recovery.

Series Three: Blog Sixty

Betrayal does a number on those who have been deceived in a romantic relationship. Most of the time a betrayed partner stumbles into the reality that their partner has been lying and cheating with someone else. When therapeutic disclosure happens their mind cannot wrap around the certainty of what they have heard. Surely, there must be some mistake! Everything seems so surreal. Numbness takes over their whole body. They don’t want to know what they have committed to sit down and hear. When will s/he ever stop? Everything feels like a sham. Some feel nauseous about what has been said. Some actually throw up. Some want to run out of the room and run away forever. Some do. Most feel stupid and some feel guilty as if it was their fault. All are puzzled and confused, wondering who is this person that I committed to?

Forgiveness of betrayal is not first on the list of issues that must be addressed when there is betrayal. It comes down the road. Honest disclosure is priority in order to establish a ground zero for healing in the presence of infidelity. Validation of pain and devastation is essential. It is critical that disclosure not be piecemealed or slowly bled out. Shedding light about the build up of thoughts and actions that led to the hurtful and disgusting behaviors is important for healing. These steps of healing require purposeful interventions with which both partners must participate in order for the relationship to heal. Of course, some betrayed partners need to leave the relationship in order to heal from the infidelity. 

At some point, forgiveness must be experienced in order for the relationship to heal. Many couples do not do essential preparation for forgiveness to be thorough and complete. Consequently, the memory of betrayed experience continues to haunt and undermine connection.  Even though still committed to the relationship, the shadow of betrayal disables closeness.

A letter of clarification is a key preparatory component to the forgiveness process around offending behaviors. It is a letter written by the offending partner. Betrayed partners commonly feel responsible for the behaviors of their addicted partner in some way. Even though it is not true, partners of addicts often wonder “what is it about me that deserved this awful treatment?” Addicts must grasp that their addictive actions victimize others. In a greater sense, there is an offender in every one which expresses itself through a mentality that “wants what I want when I want it”.  It is the core of offending behavior. This part of offending must be exposed for what it is — the epitome of narcissism.

What must be cultivated in the heart of the offending person is the capacity to tell on yourself to the offended partner.

It is important for a victim to recognize by h/her own insight that you as an offender have victimized h/her. It is a more powerful healing experience when a perpetrator demonstrates awareness of ways in which h/she has victimized their partner.

A letter of clarification addresses the experience of gaslighting. The goal is to “unbrainwash” the offended partner so that h/she understand that you “get it” that they were not responsible for your abusive behavior. It is a crucial link to the process of forgiveness. It can pave the way to relational and individual compassion and forgiveness.

Clarification is not asking for forgiveness. That comes later. It is saying it straight. “Now that I told you all the destructive things that I have done and where that behavior has come from within me, here is the way in which I took advantage of the relationship and completed the behaviors that I did. Clarification goes a long way to deconstructing the lies and undermining behaviors that created the crazy-making gaslight experience that leaves offended partners bewildered and handicapped in their own healing process.

Listed are components to consider for your letter.

• List the ways that you have offended. Not just the infidelities but all of the related hurtful behaviors should be included. For example, the lies, the blame, pouting, distance, passive aggressive behavior, etc. List the many ways that you have been hurtful to the relationship.
• Recall the special memories of promise and commitment that you made that are now sullied with deceit. Recognizing that those special moments are spoiled because of your betrayal helps to validate the crazy-making pain your partner experiences.
• List the overt (obvious) and covert ways that your partner objected to any hint of your hurtful behavior such as statements of disapproval of flirtation or any other behavior against the values of commitment.
• Describe things you thought and did to groom yourself to act out in the behaviors you did.
• Describe what you did to groom your partner to pull off your hurtful or addictive scheme. (Lies etc)
• Share the excuses and addictive rationales you made to justify your behavior.
• Identify your “smoke-screens” you utilized to gaslight your partner. (Moodiness, depression, anger, busyness, etc)
• Describe your attitudes, fantasies and sexual behaviors that pre-dated the betrayal behavior that your partner suffers. This will assist your partner to recognize that your betrayal is not about h/her.
• Specifically describe how you gaslighted your partner and created the confusion they suffer about whether you ever loved them. Give examples about how you demonstrated love to them and then turned around to use that example to pull off your addictive scheme. Share examples of the mixed messages you gave that gaslighted h/her.
• Reassure h/her that there are people in their life who do not do what you have done. (friends, family etc)
• Identify areas of your life that it would be unsafe for your partner to trust you without accountability.
• Identify people you attempted hide your behavior who are close to your partner and who would have offered them support had they known what was going on. Also, what you did to hide it.
• Underscore weaknesses and vulnerabilities your partner has and ways you took advantage of them to act out in the way you did.
• Identify hardships that your partner/family have endured because of your hurtful behavior.
• Thank them for listening/reading your letter and encourage them to share it with whoever they think can support them. End your letter without terms of endearment, like “Love Joe”. These behaviors are not what you want them to love.

Clarification is difficult but necessary to augment the terms necessary for a deeper forgiveness.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-Eight

“Everybody is somebody—but on any given day there is somebody who feels like nobody. At the end of the day, the question is “does anybody care enough to walk alongside the one who feels like nobody long enough to help them feel that they are somebody again”—KW

You can’t change the way you grew up. Mary Main, professor at UCal-Berkeley suggests that people learn to engage a cohesive coherent narrative of their life. What I think this suggests is that if you are an addict it is important to not just look back and identify all the acting out you have ever done. But dig in and look at the relationships to people in your life that connect to why you do what you do and who you are. It’s sort of like making sense of the chaos and learning to connect with yourself in this endeavor.

Chaos makes this hard to do. People who grew up with crazy chaos often carry a little crazy with them their entire lives. Chaos puts you to sleep to the awareness of living life through healthy alternatives. The way you survived is what you replicate later in life. Your habits for survival are tattooed on your bones.

Therapy teaches you to talk about your chaos. You can learn a lot intellectually about what happened—the abandonment, the disorganized attachment and all the systemic dynamics about your dysfunctional past. But most of us who grew up in craziness will die with some of it still inside. Sometimes I wonder if this is why I will die an addict.

I, like many addicts, grew up in an environment that was so dysfunctionally complicated that it is exhausting just to talk about it, and I have been talking about it for years. Every abuse headline is connected to subheadings that guaranteed crazy living for mere survival.  It’s been said that addicts learn to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. Is there any other way for an addict to survive a complicated abusive past? The web of instability is so complex that to endure required that you fall asleep to healthy behavioral options and live in a trance-like state to what is real.

For example, I grew up in a large family. The ubiquitous presence of sexual abuse impacted our family in every dimension. There was sexual abuse perpetrated by pastors and leaders at our church. There was sexual abuse that was pervasive in our family. The church I grew up in was a cult. There was patriarchal domination of men toward women in our home and church. In a cult, church life and home life environment become one. You must develop the capacity to fall asleep to the reality of what surrounds you just to survive. When I shared my sexual abuse of me by the pastor of our church to responsible leaders, they concluded that my parents who had attended the church for 40 years were troublemakers and shunned them for 3 months.  You would have thought that victims treated in this way would sever relationships and find another church to attend. My parents didn’t. They went to sleep about the reality of what happened to their children and to themselves. Once, many years later I asked my mom about the church shunning her and my dad regarding the sexual abuse and she responded that it never happened. Of course, it never happened when you fall asleep to reality.

My parents fell asleep to the injustices that intruded their lives because they were overwhelmed with the history of abuses that took place in their own family of origin. If you don’t face and address injustice, the only way to survive is to fall asleep to the realities of abuse and domination that penetrate you and the people you love.

My parents ignored what was going on in their family by singing gospel songs like “When We All Get to Heaven” or “Victory In Jesus” in order to ignore the hell on earth that had pervaded every aspect of their lives. How is this so different than the way our society ignores the lies and deceit proffered by politicians, religious leaders and cultural icons about what is real? Rather than sifting, sorting and researching truth, most of us choose a media service to do our thinking and fall asleep to the incongruence of our own hypocrisy and those who lead us.

For those who choose to no longer ignore the emperor who wears no clothes, waking up takes commitment to truth and honesty. It also takes time. The effort to wake up requires that you stop doing what keeps you asleep. It’s no wonder you are sleepy if you keep taking sleeping pills.

You will need to stop your own crazy thinking like trying to do more to keep from being less. Slowing this locomotive down is no small task.

You will have to address your mistaken beliefs that exist and have created blocks to intimacy with yourself and others.  Mistaken beliefs have been tattooed in your heart as a way of surviving the craziness of your childhood. When you do more and have more it is difficult to accept less and think you are more. Material gain is like booze. There’s nothing wrong with either one as long as you respect that both can make you drunk. Driving your life drunk is scary whether you are intoxicated with booze or the disease of more.

The only way to stop the chaos is to wake up from the big sleep. Nothing changes until it is real. When craziness is complex, waking up means to slow life to examine the inconsistencies, face your hypocrisy and address your incongruence.

People talk about making America great again. Yet, if everybody, who knew somebody who felt like a nobody, was willing to walk alongside to wake them up from the chaos and craziness, maybe that would hold promise to a great future for the first time. Together, we can be somebody once again.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-Seven

Sponsorship in the 12-step community involves a number of tasks. It is a privileged role that can inspire and disappoint. The one qualification that every sponsor brings to the table is that s/he is an addict who experiences the same challenges that a sponsee knows. The primary task is to help the sponsee successfully work through the 12 steps. In the process, a sponsor becomes a surrogate parent, coach and friend to the sponsee. Some sponsors insist on a boundary with their own recovery shares with the sponsee. The focus of the relationship is to help the sponsee with recovery challenge and not to identify their own recovery work. Every sponsor must make their own decision regarding self-disclosure about current challenges. In my opinion the best sponsor/sponsee relationship happens when both sponsor and sponsee are emotionally vulnerable to each other. It eliminates the “guru mentality” of sponsee to sponsor. Truth is that when a sponsee struggles with maintaining sobriety, they are more likely to be open to a sponsor who they know has experienced recovery failure. Sponsors do not rely upon sponsees for guidance. However, guiding and sharing with emotional openness, strength and hope in recovery is a sacred role. It fulfills the 12th step emphasis of carrying the message to others in a deep and meaningful way.

Addiction recovery is about growing up emotionally. The sponsorship role is critical to this journey. There are many parental tasks in raising children that parallel the sponsorship tasks in the emotional developmental needs of an addict.

Consider the following:

1. Role model credibility. If you want your sponsee to be consistent with program work, you must be. When you agree to do something be sure to follow through with your commitment. Meeting times, calls, plans to work on the steps require that you prioritize the agenda. It is easy to get lost in conversation and not get to the essential work. Worry less about whether or not the sponsee is ready to plunge into the steps. Go for it. Be less concerned about pacing and more focused on getting through the steps. The idea is to make step-work an everyday lifestyle for the rest of their lives.
2. Be coherent and clear. If you intend to have a sponsee call you every day make sure it is clear and circle back when they don’t follow through. Be clear about the conditions you will sponsor. If a sponsee is wishy-washy with follow through, a gentle reminder will be helpful. Be clear with your sponsee that if they continue to be irresponsible by lacking follow-through that you will terminate your role.
3. Commit to patience. Learning to fail forward is a skillset that is critical to long term sobriety in addict recovery. A sponsor must practice being patient with a struggling sponsee. In recovery rooms, you experience the impatience of the “dry drunk” syndrome demonstrated by addicts who have stopped acting out but who are just plain irritable, caustic and judgmental. They are not fun to be around. If you are this way with a sponsee you will be received as judgmental and shaming. Take a deep breath and practice patience with your sponsee.
4. Teach Co-parenting skills. That’s right! Sponsorship is a lot like parenting. If you try to provide all the answers to recovery you will stunt the recovery growth of your sponsee. Truth is you don’t know the answers for your sponsee. You only know what works for you. It is crucial to your spondee’s recovery growth that you allow them to figure out life. You walk alongside and simply notice, validate and share what works for you. If you don’t let them figure it out, they won’t survive the addictive craving that dominates in addiction relapse. You must teach that they become their own guru or sponsor.
5. Cherish differences. Your spondee’s recovery won’t look like yours. Allow for variation. It is true for an addict that their best thoughts got them stuck in the devastation of destructive living. In the beginning of recovery, addicts do need to learn to listen and take instruction about a different way to live. However, the translation of what they hear will look different through their eyes than yours. Cherish their differences. Not everybody believes in God. The words Higher Power might be offensive to some. There is a clear difference in struggling with the concept of God and stubborn willfulness and resistance.  Let your sponsee figure out God or no God. Resourcing the unknown is vast and mysterious. Walk alongside with gentle support for your sponsee to figure out how to best resource themselves. They don’t need to see it just the way you do. Learn to fight through diverse understandings. Tolerate divergent approaches to understanding spirituality and commit to accept and cherish differences.
6. Teach spondees to chronicle their recovery.  We are insistent that sponsees learn and tell their addict story through the first step. It is also crucial that they learn to chronicle their recovery growth. Addicts can live in either a crisis mode or with an “out of sight/out of mind” mentality. When things are going good and recovery growth is achieved, it is important that each addict mark what happened to make it so. This is the information that addicts learn to rely upon to build long-term peace and sobriety. Chip ceremonies are important not to just mark the day count but review and relish the steps taken and the principles employed to get from point A (acting out) to point B, no longer acting out. Each day, month, quarter and year chronicled will uncover a wealth of solid recovery wisdom.
7. Teach resilience and accept consequences. Addicts relapse. As a sponsor, your role is to model resilience. Yesterday ended last night. Today is the day that matters. Learn what you can from your past failure and then fail forward, taking with you valued lessons and wisdom from yesterday’s experience. This is resilience, bringing yourselves back to center. It is essential that addicts learn this skill well. They must also learn to accept consequences. Every act out creates consequences which is different from punishment. Addicts do not gain sobriety through punishment which may be invoked in life circumstances. When you break the speed limit you will be fined if caught. There is punishment that can include incarceration when you commit serious crime. While punishment through imprisonment does not produce rehabilitation, it is a consequence that must be faced. In 12-step recovery, relapse will engage consequences. However, punishment is not helpful. A sponsee may relapse while working on Step 4. Some suggest that the sponsee must go back to Step 1 and start the Steps all over again.  It is almost experienced as a way of punishment. I suggest that the sponsee look at the relapse behavior that led to powerlessness and unmanageability and address it. Then, move forward with Step 4 work. It is not necessary to punish yourself by going back to the beginning and starting over again. Essentially, we can never go back to where we started anyway. We move forward from where we are.
8. Teach sponsees to borrow from their strengths and what they are good at. Learning to do recovery often means to borrow from what you are good at in other aspects of your life. Skillsets for recovery such as discipline, acceptance, perseverance, etc have been incorporated in other aspects of living. It is important to show sponsees how they can transfer these skill sets utilized in other aspects of living to their recovery life. This is one of the most underrated resources in doing recovery.

Sponsoring addicts in recovery is very rewarding. I believe it is necessary in recovery. The role requires that each sponsor consciously practice the Twelve Steps. Sharing common brokenness is a vulnerable experience that enhances emotional maturity both for the sponsee and the sponsor.