Series Three: Blog Fifty-Six

“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” –Vincent van Gogh

Addicts stop believing in themselves. In many cases addicts never had anyone who ever believed in them. So they give up and succumb to mistaken beliefs about themselves that are not true.  They live a life of self-sabotage and self-fulfilling prophesy. Unless they learn to believe in themselves they will die an addict without recovery.

I learned to stop believing in myself when I was a little kid. The only thing I had going for me was that I was pretty good in sports, but was never noticed for the goals I achieved. My older brothers expressed a lot of false bravado and lived a false self. When I competed with them they would rig the game so I would not win. If I still was able to figure out how to win, they would destroy the game so it would not happen again. I surrendered to believing I was not good enough and slumped to accepting ordinary results. Later in childhood I stopped trying out for sports. I was average at best in academics at school. I was chided as not being special and buried deep in my soul that I was not good enough to go to college or be successful in life.

Even though I completed college and engaged in success in my professional life it was never enough because I learned to not believe in myself. I had this push within that I had to be more to keep from being less.  In very early childhood I learned to masturbate to numb out the pain from not believing in myself. Looking back, I thank my lucky stars that at least I had something I could resort to which would anesthetize the emptiness and pain of misbelief.

I got lucky when I met and married my wife Eileen. She believed in me. When I was a pastor, I never preached a sermon she didn’t like. As a professional counselor, she always believed in who I was and what I did. As an addict, she never gave up on me. She refused to believe that my acting out was about her.  She believed that I would overcome the mistaken beliefs that drove my addiction. She believed in me. In time, it became infectious. She says I taught her to believe in herself. As a codependent I probably did. In our 46 years of marriage there has been a slow sunrise of awareness that has emerged that I could believe in myself. Of all the addiction interventions I have experienced, none is as profound as learning to believe in me.

Belief is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. I am so glad it does not mean to feel in accordance with. Throughout my life, my feelings have been all over the map. If I only acted on what I felt, I would be an inconsistent mess.

Feelings are paradoxical. In recovery, I learned to recognize and listen to my emotions which helped me to identify important needs and address them in healthy ways. I also learned to not allow my feelings to define who I am or how I would behave. Through conditioning I learned to recognize my feelings and thoughts while controlling my actions to create what I wanted in my life—like early morning runs. Often, it took a mile or so for my feelings and thoughts to settle into acceptance of the action of exercise that I wanted to do. It all hinged on the action word of belief.

Recovery is the same. Addicts must learn to recognize their affect, and resource themselves through healthy self-parenting skills. This takes time and hard work to achieve. They must learn that what they feel does not determine who they are or how they behave. In learning to resource themselves they must recognize that incongruent behavior is an aberration to their belief of who they are. Even though everything within tells them they have failed and will never get it right, they must bring themselves back to their center of self. This will only happen through practicing and strengthening belief in self. In the presence of lapse or relapse an addict must act on what they believe is their true self. They must condition themselves to ignore the mistaken beliefs that scream they do the opposite which always results in more self-sabotage and destructive behavior.

The secret to long term sobriety and the creation of serenity is to believe in who you are. There is no greater gift that a parent gives a child than to believe in who they are. It is taught by the way you role model your own self-belief and not through your words. I am grateful for those in my life who believe in me. However, sobriety and long-term transformation require that I believe in myself. I think of myself as a late bloomer in self-belief.  It is never too late for an addict to believe in who they are in recovery.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-Five

“There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river—one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.” —Joseph Campbell

People who get stuck in black and white thinking struggle with addiction recovery. Wallowing in the mud of addictive behavior, most hope to find a magic formula that will help them crawl out of the muck and mire of destructive behavior. Blueprints for recovery contain no magic bullets. There is no guarantee to maintain long term sobriety.

With any addiction, there are behaviors that some can do who are in recovery while others cannot.  In sex addiction recovery the topic of masturbation is controversial. Masturbation is considered a healthy self-soothing behavior that most everyone has engaged some time throughout the stages of life. However, there are many different religious views about masturbation. Some religious faiths discourage and condemn its practice as morally wrong. When it comes to a matter of faith or non-faith it is left to the individual to sift and sort whether the behavior is healthy, hurtful or even sinful. This evaluation of behavior is solely individual. It is important that if someone decides that masturbation is sinful that they are able to articulate why, based on their religious belief system.

It is common for most sex addicts to abstain from masturbation during early stage recovery. They often put the behavior on their “red light list”, identifying that the behavior signals a breaking of sobriety. This is often encouraged in early recovery because of the common struggle with impulse control. Some addicts never return to masturbation because it is either determined that it is too high-risk which triggers imminent sexual acting out, or it is identified as acting out in and of itself. Those who include masturbation as healthy outer circle behavior have a more complicated course to tread.

Some report masturbating to healthy images with no escalation to more egregious addictive behavior, particularly old acting out ways. Others indicate being triggered to committing obvious addictive behaviors. They identify that masturbation was the component that fueled accelerated sexual acting out, like compulsive use of pornography, affairs, paid sex experiences, etc. The obvious conclusion for these recovering addicts was that masturbation must remain identified as “red light” behavior in order to remain sober.

The question about whether or not masturbation is healthy for a sex addict is dicey and fraught with pitfalls. While considering the pros and cons, be prepared to manage the junkie worm mentality which tends to frenetically get excited about the reintroduction.  Always know that addict rationale is looking for any reason to find a hit. Addictive rationale is cunning and baffling.

Here are some considerations to guide you through this gray zone maze of decision-making.

1. Live in consultation with your partner and your support network before re-engaging masturbation.  A good sign that the junkie worm is in command of your thinking is when you keep secretive about your plans to restart masturbation, and you isolate the thought from those in your support because you don’t want to tolerate the predicted blow back you might get. Put it out there. Let your support weigh the pros and cons. Masturbation is not demonic. The real question is; are you mature enough to make a responsible decision whether to restart or not. Bring your support network in and turn over every stone of thought for consideration.
2. Be willing to explore the source of your anxiety.  Know how to work through your emotions without having to rely on masturbation. Using masturbation as a tool of self-nurture and relaxation can be healthy. However, it is less likely to be healthy when it is your sole mechanism for relief. Practice deep breathing, meditation and many other strategies of healthy self-soothe. Share your stress and struggle with your partner. Let h/her learn how masturbation gives you relief. Practice sharing and notice how feeling heard and understood curbs the intensity of wanting to be secretive about desiring masturbation.  When masturbation becomes an organizing principle for self-soothe, it narrows your perspective and increases the possibility of it being unhealthy. Learn to sit with discomfort. This process is not magical but it is a necessary experience toward establishing a healing perspective about masturbation. You must learn to rock with the waves that exist in your life.
3. Be honest with your support including your partner about your fantasy life. If you choose to explore healthy masturbation, what spoils the journey is withholding the truth about your experience from your support and from your partner. At this point, the issue is more about your deceit and dishonesty which will unravel the integrity of your pursuit. Don’t forget that the greater issue in your days of acting out was not just your betrayal behavior but the lies you told about your behavior. For an addict, managing fantasy is critical. Rehearsing fantasy about past acting out behaviors with old sex partners is high risk. As an addict, you will need to extinguish old fantasies that fueled you crossing boundaries and acting out. It is important to work with changing your language about how you reference acting out. You will need help from your support to notice the intensity of energy that flows to the old acting out ways. Often, you will be blind to the exciting energy that captures your expressions. Old fantasies have to die. You have to ask the question “When I rehearse my old examples of acting out, does that move me toward acting out with porn or physical contact? Have tough honest conversations with yourself and other support people discussing the raw truth. Also, does the fantasy connect me closer to self and your love partner? Let this honesty be your guide with support.
4. Be accountable with support.  Take note if you begin to edge your way into pornographic thought and/or illicit sexual fantasies about people you or your partner know. Are you closer to wanting to re-enact the fantasy in real life situations? Remember, some people have fantasized about others but have never crossed the line and acted out with another. You have. You have broken your commitment to values in this way. Walk carefully, here. Know you fantasy boundaries and inform you love partner about them and how you are managing on a regular basis.
5. Know your limits.  The only times that recovering addicts get into trouble is when they ignore boundaries. There is a great temptation to ignore your limits. You might get tired of having to say no to thoughts and situations that others don’t seem to struggle with. Some addicts in their narcissism seethe with discomfort and think it unfair that they cannot do what others do. Just remember that if you will go deep within rather than try to bash the outer barriers and limits you will find deeper satisfaction and serenity. Keep this in mind as you ponder returning to masturbation.
6. Be willing to not be like everyone else.  Addict thinking argues with rationale that competes and compares with others. Why do I not perform as well as others? Others in recovery seem to not struggle with sobriety as I do? It is important to recognize that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

There is great power anchoring yourself from deep within. Focus your eye of attention on the power that is within you. When this happens you stop comparing and there is no longer a need to look at others.

Sexual expression is wide and varied. It is a beautiful expression of uniqueness and fulfillment. Just as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings movie had to discipline his focus to balance his perspective about the “precious ring” so too will you as an addict need to protect your perspective as you consider introducing a sexual behavior that in the past has been utilized with destructive compulsivity.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-Four

When people are bullied and physically dominated, sometimes I feel their pain in my bones. I remember watching my older brother Dave get into fights. I absorbed the pain and humiliation of guys that he would dominate in a fight in front of their girlfriends. There are times when listening to stories of people under extreme emotional and physical control that I feel their sense of claustrophobia physically. Clinical research suggests that there is a strong possibility that people carry the traumatic feelings of shame and fear, etc from past generations in their body. Literally, you can feel it in your bones.

Like many, I grew up in a family where boundaries were either non-existent or skewed and abused. When I was young and impressionable I learned to please others. Pleasing others was a way to fit in. I once played tackle football without a helmet. I did this to prove to my older brother who was the coach that I was tough. That’s how I fit in. I learned to keep my mouth shut about the sexual abuse that was perpetrated by a pastor toward me and others. I pleased the pastor who told me I was more mature than other kids because I kept quiet. Learning to go to any lengths to fit in became a strategy in my young adult life. I worked between 80 and 100 hours with no pay for three years primarily to get the approval of a senior pastor. When I confronted the pastor who promoted an attendance figure that was inflated by 1000 that it was deceitful, he scorned me and I learned to keep my mouth shut to maintain his approval. I buried my fear, anxiety and shame with a hurricane of activity all around the ministry of the church. Those observing thought of me as a dedicated follower of God. I was and I desperately wanted to fit in.

I learned to doubt my own perceptions. I learned to question my own worth and self-esteem. I prided myself in that I could accept any challenge in ministry and figure it out. There were times I was asked to give a sermon in a moment’s notice and I did. Once I was asked by the senior pastor to close out a concert with meaningful words. I didn’t even have a sport jacket and was wearing work jeans during an era that it was not cool. He handed me his sport jacket and I went out and closed the concert. I thought I was practicing resilience when really I was demonstrating no boundaries.

Addicts in recovery quickly learn about external boundaries. They are challenged to get rid of all access to their drug of choice. They learn to make painful choices about their environment that will keep them sober. They learn to change the crowd of people they interact with. Some even change jobs.  It’s remarkable when considering the external boundaries that an addict installs in order to maintain sobriety. These are all necessary but not sufficient for long-term serenity.

Often it takes a lifetime to understand and implement internal boundaries that weed out the dysfunctional patterns of destructive childhood experience.

I listen to addicts in recovery apologize for things that are not about them. Stories that indicate tolerating the impossible. Stories that highlight the ongoing practice of denial of feelings. All of which promote a lack of boundaries.

It is common for addicts in recovery to continue avoiding the pain of past abuse. Of course, many carry the pain and shame of generational abuse and don’t recognize it.  What is helpful is to recognize that we are all a work in progress, particularly therapists, since I am one! I think I will be growing myself up the rest of my life. At least, I hope so! The journey in healing and creating healthy boundaries is long and engages a circuitous path. There is seldom a distinct “before” and “after” result. No real sense of “now I have arrived”. Though I have stopped a lifestyle of acting out many years ago, there are many flaws and shortcomings that require consultation and accountability in order to improve my development of healthy boundaries in my life.

Boundaries engage an evolving awareness. Like binoculars, boundaries increase spiritual vision and awareness. Surrounding myself with people who have and do validate my feelings has increased the sensitivity of my own personal limits and empowered my capacity toward assertive living. End result is that I experience myself saying “no” more often.

Learning to say no has helped me to recognize commitments that are hurtful. It has helped me to understand people who in their own destructive neediness require a boundary that created healthy distance between me and them. This has been a challenge since historically my sense of self-identification was pinned to caring for and pleasing others.

Boundaries required that I not be invisible. It has been necessary for me to insist and assert my expectations, needs and wants in business and personal relationships.

Boundaries have helped me to fill the hole that exists in my soul from the inside rather than creating a cocktail of external experience that never satisfied.

Addressing historical trauma has helped to release the grip of generational traumatic experience in my life. It has positioned me to offer a new legacy to my children and theirs. I have been able to observe how a lack of boundaries have taught others to disrespect me. I allow others to be abusive to me when I do not employ healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries require consequences when they are not recognized. In some cases, it has ended relationships. 

I am learning that letting go of pleasing and caretaking others is helpful in clarifying boundaries, of knowing where I stop and others begin. The process of surrender in Step 3 promotes and strengthens solid relational boundaries. Valuing myself in the presence of those who don’t has increased my own visible awareness of how to care for myself. Boundaries help me to shrink back from trying to do for others what they can only do for themselves.

These personal declarations come from my own personal recovery journey. There are days when I look around me and I feel overwhelmed by shortcomings. I sometimes feel defeated and hypocritical regarding broken boundaries and times where I have given my power away to someone else in order to please them. Yet, as I view the past and present terrain, I have unmistakably forged forward with great gains that have transformed my respect for personal boundaries. Establishing boundaries has become the binoculars that have increased my vision of being an unrepeatable miracle of God. Boundaries give me a life force toward the fulfillment of my destiny.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-Three

Most addicts roll with life being emotionally intolerant. Nostalgia is not warm. It’s haunting. Yesterday brings back moments of painful loneliness and bitter emptiness. There is a quixotic interest to revisit past family experience and make it something it never was. Some shut down all feelings that trigger past memories of childhood. There is an unspoken vendetta to crush all possibility of connecting to a hurtful past. Yet, the longer we live, past experience trends upward and outward. Feelings of discomfort regurgitate in our memories like heartburn from drinking too much coffee. Old torments appear in unexpected moments. Unwanted destructive behaviors crop up like weeds in a bean field. Getting rid of them is like one continual game of Whack-A-Mole.

We grew up in families who had no boundaries. Everybody knew and was into each other’s business. A concern for boundary violation was quashed by the dysfunctional behavior that dominated family living. Anything outside the family norm was driven out. If you liked hard rock and the preferred music was country, you kept it to yourself. If you wanted to wear a Pukka shell necklace you were ridiculed for being a hippie. In my family, the peace sign pointed to the antichrist. If you wore it or drew it on anything you were unwittingly promoting the devil. Lava lights and black lights represented a counter cultural movement that ultimately led to drugs, sex and rock n roll.  Back in the day, fathers divorced their sons for wearing long hair. Kids grew up hating their now deceased dads about the long locks of hair that were once a battleground but now a bald distant memory.

Past experience of verbal knockdown drag out fights over styles, physical weight, religion, drugs, rock n roll, and circular rhetoric about ‘do as I say not as I do’ sit in a cauldron of past memories. The tsunami of pent up emotion erupts like a volcano when past memories are triggered by current experiences in life.

The response for an addict is to numb out through a cocktail of escape experiences.

Addicts attach to a substance and/or process because it delivers what it promises and is a very predictable lover. It is the only way an addict knows how to self-regulate. The crazy-making experiences in life that don’t make sense don’t matter anymore once the lover is engaged. The whole of life becomes surrounded by addictive behavior. Frequently, it is muttered “this person had so much going for them. How could they destroy themselves with addictive behavior?” But, when you excavate the root causation, intense emotional pain is uncovered as the driver of the insane behavior. In order to take away the addictive behavior, you must understand the role it plays in the person’s life and then replace it with something that does work. Emotional self-regulation doesn’t come from others because others have been the source of the pain in the first place. Addicts don’t have the ability to utilize others in a safe manner.

Here are some considerations for healing:

1. Create a secure base. Easier said than done. You will need a safe container by way of a community to achieve a safe base. In parenting a child, the parent gives 100% effort to helping the child identify how they feel about what goes on around and inside them. They concentrate on helping the child understand their relationship to others and how the world operates. When there is an absence of parenting, it is like being thrown out of the airplane without a parachute. A child lives with internal chaos and anxiety. This is the condition that must be addressed in every addict. It is mostly likely to be successfully addressed in the context of a healthy community like a 12-step group. There an addict can explore what h/she feels about self and others. They can practice relational engagement. It is a place to sift and sort feelings about relationship dynamics in and outside the group context.
2. Begin the process of integrating your fragmented self. Addicts learn to utilize denial and dissociation as a way of coping with discomfort in life. They struggle to trust others and wrestle with a host of self-sabotaging behaviors. In order to address the hole in their soul an addict must learn to unite their fragmented self. For example, an addict may say they hate themselves because they are ugly. They are not ugly but they feel ugly. There exists two conflicting thoughts that fragment and alienate. It is important that an addict form an internal relationship with these two fragmented parts. Addicts must learn to have dialogue including both thoughts and perspectives. An addict creates a secure base when both opposite perspectives and feelings are recognized and neither are ignored and a relationship is formed with the two parts.
3. Cultivate self-parenting skills. An addict will often denigrate themselves with negative self-talk. Addicts struggle with an unstable sense of self. There is a sense in which an addict knows that whatever they say is true and that the opposite is true as well. An addict understands the rational part of craving. They know it makes no sense to engage the addiction. However, there is another part that is stuck in a 12-14 year old emotional self. What is needed on the scene is a wise mind observer rather than enabling the 14-year-old to highjack the scene.

It’s like the whip on the stage coach of a team of horses racing out of control across the prairie headed for a narrow passage way with a 100-foot drop. The whip takes the reins and gives them to a 14-yr-old kid hanging on to the side rail and says “kid you are on your own!” This would be disaster! Comparatively, the whip takes the reins from the child’s hands, pulls the child close and whispers that he knows how to get the team of horses to slow to a stop and does. He carefully navigates the narrow passage way and all is good and everyone is safe.

This is what must be practiced in terms of self-parenting in the life of an addict. Two opposing perspectives must be recognized with a wise observing mind making the mature decision. This is the practice of healthy self-parenting.

Series Three: Blog Fifty-two

Addicts are vulnerable. They don’t know how to recognize or manage feelings, particularly the strong and powerful ones. What they do know is to split off from their feelings and pretend they are just fine. Once I was sitting at a wedding reception and a clergy colleague who sat next to me began talking.   He had a close friend who was also clergy and was allegedly run out of his church because of a trouble-making family who accused him of sexual abuse. What he didn’t know is that the accusatory family was mine, and I was one of the family members that was abused. I wanted to kill him on the spot. But, I didn’t. What I did was smile and become quiet. I think I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

Addicts are pretty good with these splits. When they are hurt, numbed with shame, seething with resentment or dominated with anger or hate, they know how to compartmentalize their feelings and pretend they are not there. They use this ability to manage and control their environment that is unsafe. The problem is that inwardly they lose themselves by failing to recognize their affect. They drown in the feelings that were triggered or go to great lengths through maladaptive behavior to avoid their emotions. Addicts learn to avoid the obvious and embrace the improbable. They live in a constant state of vulnerability not knowing how to recognize or manage the feelings that have been buried. They are unable to draw from their own internal resources because there aren’t any. They remain in constant need of self-regulation resources. They think the resources are external.  It’s a fantasy that is never realized. Since painful, rejecting, and shaming relationships are the cause of their deficits in self, they cannot turn to others to get what they need or have never received. With few other options addicts turn to their drug of choice. Why, because the dopamine rush delivers what it promises. To get away from the hell of the pain that slaps them around, any reason is a good reason to use.

Drugs of choice migrate.  Addicts might find a way to shut down Heroine, Booze, Crystal, Molly or Blow. They just migrate to the next fix. It can be anything including workaholism, exercise, food disorder, rage or caretaking another. It is common for recovering addicts to create a new cocktail for their choice of drug. It will always be that way until they get at the root cause of needing a fix. Here are a few things to consider.

1. Understand your pain. Slow your life to a pace that you go inward and embrace what hurts. Dare to embrace average. Go inside to the common places of your life and face what you feel. None of us got through our childhood unscathed. There you will find the wounds that need to be scrubbed. It hurts but you are already in pain. Why not make your hurt a healing hurt rather than wallowing in pain that never stops looking for a fix that is never enough?  You must resolve the pain and stop pretending.
2. Learn to regulate your emotions. Practice recognizing what you feel, particularly the powerful feelings of shame, resentment, anger and hate. Learn to sit with them and experience embracing unwanted emotions and notice that you can get through them without having to numb out. You will need help. Step outside yourself and ask for that help even though it feels awkward.
3. Utilize others for support. Finding your tribe for support is important. This is a long-term problem for addicts in recovery. When in crisis, addicts surrender to a 12-step fellowship. Often, they don’t go deep in a consistent manner to live in consultation with accountability about their feelings. You will need help holding your feet to the fire about relationship issues. Addicts often focus on the fundamentals of 12-step work around in order to address their drug of choice. But many miss out by not using that same support to regulate their feelings in other aspects of living. It is important to utilize your community of support around the feelings that come up in your everyday relationship life.
4. Become an observer about how you think about your own thinking and learn how to reflect on the mind of another.  Learning to manage your emotions is necessary to understanding your thoughts about yourself and the world around you. People tend to be insular. Life becomes a maze or a hamster wheel and we just do what we do. Pause and observe what you feel. Utilize contemplation. Think about your thoughts. Learn to identify and give voice to the different parts of your mind that are contradictory to other parts. Learn to sift and sort by listening and recognizing the truth that is in each thought. Then practice integrating your thought discrepancies with your own wise mindedness. It is necessary toward transforming behavior. Emotional maturity and secure attachment is the ability to reflect on your own internal emotional experience and to make sense of it. It includes being able to observe and reflect on the mind of another and connect with them. The way you read others is important. It begins with learning to manage and make sense of your own affect and thoughts. 

Managing your feelings and thoughts creates self-agency. It is necessary in developing a true sense of self when we don’t we foster a false sense of self which blinds awareness of your own feelings and thoughts. It further darkens your understanding about ways in which your behavior hurts self and others.

Oh! by the way, I did circle back with the insensitive clergy colleague and insist that he listen to the gory details of sexual molest by his clergy friend toward me and my family. Though he was stunned with silence, he heard the other side of the story. I have since wondered if that did not change the way he shared the narrative with others.

Series Three: Blog Forty-Nine

Carl Jung is famous for formulating the concept of the shadow, the portion of our personality which through the course of our life is relegated to the darkness of the unconscious. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters like facing our demons or dealing with our dark night of the soul. Addicts talk about the shadow side as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a reference to the Robert Louis Stevenson novel about an attorney investigating a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde. It is revealed at the end of the short novel that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, with Jekyll transforming into Hyde via an unnamed chemical concoction to live out his darker urges.

Even though addicts feel awful about their behavior, it is common to utilize acting out as a way to avoid facing the carnage of pain and shame surrounding the dark side of their actions. One of my brothers died from alcohol and cocaine abuse. I remember him telling me that he would lay awake many nights smoking cigarettes and tossing and turning trying to avoid the shame of his addictive behavior which only triggered more of the same conduct.

Regardless of it being perceived as minor or major, everyone has a dark side that has offended someone. It is expressed through the mentality of “I want what I want when I want it”.  The process of clarification is a necessary exercise toward cultivating empathy toward yourself and those who you have harmed. Clarification is a way to expose the narcissistic offending part of your life. It is developing the capacity to tell on yourself about ways that you have hurt yourself and others. There is a certain “unbrainwashing” undertaking that occurs with the clarification process that is healing.

Addicts in recovery learn to separate their addictive behavior from their sense of self. They learn that they are not their behavior. Addicts achieve this separation of behavior from self by learning to identify their feelings (shame, loneliness, fear etc).

Clarification is a way of observing the way you think of thoughts about your feelings.  In order for this observation to be helpful you must develop an awareness of a “wise mind” with the capacity to recognize divergent thoughts and separate behavior from the essence of self. It is easy for addicts to lose themselves in conflicting thoughts.

You are not your feelings. As an adult, feelings are meant to help increase awareness and to inform you about needs that must be met in a healthy way through caring actions.  Until you cultivate and practice this distinction, shame will convince you that what you do is who you are and most likely as an addict you will succumb to more addictive behavior.

Learning to think about your own thinking is a mentalization process that fosters clarification. Establishing a strong sense of self-esteem is necessary to create clarification. Transforming mistaken beliefs with powerful affirmations is predicated on addressing past traumatic experience that molded mistaken beliefs during critical childhood development. This process is necessary to developing clarification.

Rather than avoiding the powerful feeling of shame, practice recognizing its voice and presence.  Begin separating truth from fiction in the voice of shame.  With your wise mind, clarify the ounce of truth in the pound of criticism.

As you clarify and separate your behavior from your sense of self, you are empowered to direct the shame away from your essential being and on to the hurtful behavior. Clarification helps to “unbrainwash” your perspective from thinking of yourself as a piece of shit into recognizing that you have engaged in shitty behavior which is an aberration to who you are as a person. You are not your shame. Practicing clarification helps you return to your center of reality and vision of personal destiny. To do this you must practice ignoring the voices of shame. Just as Nash in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, stated that he could now receive an award and be present because he has learned to ignore the voice of demons, so too, must the addict learn to ignore the critical voice of shame. Bathing yourself in affirmation and taking action as if you are the destiny you hope to fulfill is a clarification practice that requires training and conditioning. You must recognize that no matter what you do you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. This practice conditions the mind to transform shame about addictive behavior into acceptance and empathy for self.  You begin to feel comfortable in your own skin for the first time.

Series Three: Blog Forty-Eight

“Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique”. -Martin Buber

There is an old Blackfoot buffalo legend that speaks to the sacred nature of living things. The tribe could not get the buffalo herd to stampede over a cliff in order to provide meat. The buffalo would approach the cliff and then turn aside. It looked as though the Blackfoot would not have meat for the winter

As the story goes Minnehala, the daughter of one of the chiefs, got up early one morning to draw water for the family. She looked up and just above where she was standing near the cliff were the buffalo. She said “Oh, if you would only come over I would marry one of you!”

To her surprise they all began to walk over to her. One of the old buffalos, the shaman of the herd said “Alright, I’ll take you up and off we go!” Minnehala cried out “Oh, no!” But, the shaman buffalo replied “Oh, yes! You made your promise. We’ve kept our side of the bargain and off we go!”

Later in the morning the family got up and wondered what happened to Minnehala? The father looks around and determined by tracking the footsteps that she had run off with a buffalo. So he decided to get her back. He put on his walking moccasins and with his bow and arrow went looking for Minnehala. He walked a great distance and came to a buffalo wallow. The wallow was a place that buffalo would roll around in the mud to get the lice off their backs.

While he wondered what direction to go next a magpie flew up to him. The magpie had magical powers. The father spoke “Oh beautiful bird, my daughter ran off with a herd of buffalo, have you seen her?” The magpie replied, “there is a beautiful girl sitting with buffalo not too far away from where we are right now!” To that the father asked the magpie to go tell her that her father was at the wallow. So the magpie flew and told Minnehala that her father was at the wallow while the buffalo were asleep. Minnehala responded “Oh no, this is very dangerous. The buffalo will kill us all! Tell my father to wait and I will try to work things out”. Soon, her buffalo husband woke up, took off a horn and told Minnehala “Go to the wallow and get me some water”. So Minnehala went to the wallow where her father was to get the water. Her father urged her to escape. But, Minnehala knew that the buffalo would track them down and kill them. So she returned to the herd in an attempt to figure something out. When she returned her buffalo husband determined that he could smell the presence of her father nearby. He summoned all the buffalo and alerted them to the danger. The buffalo gathered and did a buffalo dance. They then went to the wallow and trampled Minnehala’s father to death until his mangled body almost entirely disappeared. Minnehala cried. Her buffalo husband said “why are you crying?” She said “This was my father!”  The buffalo said “But what about us? We have children and family. You cry for your father, but you don’t cry for us!” However, the buffalo husband had some compassion and sympathy and told Minnehala that if she could bring her father back to life again, he would let her go!”

So, Minnehala turned to the magpie and told him to find a piece of her father’s remains. The magpie could only find a small piece of backbone. Minnehala took the piece of bone laid it on the ground and placed a blanket over it. She began to sing a magical song with great power. As she sung, her father was resurrected underneath the blanket. The buffalo were amazed and asked Minnehala, “Why don’t you do this for us? We will teach you our buffalo dance and when you have killed our families, do this dance and sing this song, and we will all be brought back to life again”.

This Blackfoot legend points to the evolution of sacred life among animals and human beings. The story emphasizes the sacredness of relationship between all living things. The cycle of life requests a sacred ritual that highlights the value of life given so that other life can live. It points to the sacred death, burial and resurrection of all living things.

Martin Buber in his classic work “I and Thou” underscores the sacredness of life. Buber explains the sacred nature when a human being recognizes the mutual uniqueness and value of other life. It involves a process of cultivated sacred respect for the other, both human, animal and plant. When the relationship between people and all living things is valued, there is a certain “I-thou” significance that gives reverence to the cycle of life. Buber also defines the “I-It” relationship as one of objectification. Others are treated as an object completely outside of ourselves. There is an emphasis on others viewed as objects to be used.  Treating life as an “it” destroys the sacred quality of life force.

Addiction is symptomatic to the development of “I-it” relationships. Craving reduces everything and everyone to a simple means to an end which is to get high.  The only thing that matters is to get what you want when you want it. The entire worldview for an addict can be defined as an “I-it” relationship.

Historically, the Blackfoot Native American lost its sacred relationship to the buffalo when white men stormed the prairies with an “I-it” mentality and mercilessly slaughtered thousands of buffalo for their hides. They left their meat to rot in the sun. The Blackfoot lost their food supply and their central object for ritual life.

Extreme consumerism, war and political infighting all come from an “I-it” mentality. Few credible scientists doubt the reality of global warming and most agree that our “I-it” way of objectifying the planet is doing irreparable harm with the result of a bleak future for the generations that follow us.

The ego that sees a “thou” in life force is not the same ego that sees an it. Your whole psychology changes when you address existence as an “it”. When countries go to war they must make the enemy an “it”. Death count of the enemy is a statistical “it”. Treating people, plants and animals as “I-thou” is impossible in the presence of rotting, infected egos that promote “I-it”. People are objects to be controlled and enemies to conquer. Suffering and loss of life is only referred to as casualties.

Addiction recovery requires that we create an “I-thou” relationship to ourselves and others in the world we live. In our world, may we remember the legend of the Blackfoot and return to the sacred treatment of all living things.

Series Three: Blog Forty-nine

For addicts in recovery, sobriety is necessary but not sufficient for the long term journey. During acting out, the whole of life is surrounded by addictive behavior. The chemical or behavior became a lover without which there was no reason to go on.

It is important to understand the role that addiction plays in an addict’s life in order to replace it with something that works as an alternative.

Addicts struggle to regulate their emotions because they are poor at identifying and expressing what they feel. Impulse control is lacking because they don’t know what is going on inside of them.

Strong affect like anger, hate, resentment, loneliness and shame create discomfort and trigger ongoing use of addiction to escape the pain. So affect recognition is critical to long term healing from addiction.

Shame is an affect that must be managed in order to maintain sobriety and deepen empathy. Properly guided, shame can actually be transformed into empathy. Offending addictive behaviors trigger historic and current shame. Addicts must learn to address historic shame by identifying the message of mistaken belief that is triggered by destructive behavior. Recognizing mistaken belief underneath destructive behavior requires the discipline of slowing down thinking process. This is achieved by stopping and quieting the mind. Meditation and other interventions are utilized to help addicts slow mind processing.  It requires practice and conditioning.

Addressing historic shame requires identifying the voice of the mistaken belief housed within the powerful feeling of shame. Whose voice is it that is telling me that I don’t matter in this moment? Usually, it comes from the way you were treated or what was said from a caregiver during the impressionable years of childhood. Once recognized, it is important to give back the mistaken belief to the caregiver.

Ideally, you receive assistance from a trained therapist who understands the significant influence of unresolved early attachment issues. Also a therapist who can help with sleuthing out contaminated beliefs housed in unrecognized feelings through significant affect recognition work. It is helpful to have a therapist who through EMDR or other experiential interventions who can help work through the stuck points of trauma. Internal Family Systems work can help identify different parts within and assist a listening process of the sub personalities that will help to integrate the truths that each part represents. Being able to observe and learning to “think about your own thinking” is very helpful toward addressing historic shame.

However, what if you are a part of most of America who cannot afford these cutting edge interventions and modalities. Most people cannot afford the price tag of sufficient therapy to help manage current and historic shame.

So, you do empty chair work focusing on primary caregivers. You verbally give back the shame that was purposefully or unintentionally given to you. You put the caregiver in the empty chair and you tell them exactly what you felt and experienced when you got the message of mistaken belief. You unapologetically say it straight. You allow whatever feeling comes up to be present. It is helpful to have a support person present to witness, give a fair hearing but not to advise or pile on when you pour out your feelings and truth

You practice recognizing the shame of mistaken belief and its source and quietly dismiss the voice, telling the voice of your caregiver that they are not welcome to be a part of the conversation. Taking a few seconds to dismiss the voice of your caregiver in the present moment is helpful in releasing the shame. This is skill set takes practice. In time, you will improve your ability to redirect shame to its original historic source.  You will be less likely to allow the acid of shame to penetrate your sense of self.

Then, there is current shame. Addicts know that their destructive behavior is shameful. It is important for addicts to train themselves to place shame from current acting out on the behavior and not on their sense of self. Shaming oneself only scars and mars. There is no healthy result. I like to say “no one ever beats themselves up to a better place”. It is crucial for addicts to understand that who they are is different than what they do. They are not their behavior. You will feel guilty and remorseful for hurtful behavior. However, once guilt has helped you identify your wrong it is no longer helpful to maintain and wallow in it about what you wrong doing.

When you act out in addiction it is difficult in the presence of shame to believe that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. The word belief is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. In the presence of mistaken beliefs screaming in colorful language that you are despicable, it is necessary to practice acting as if you are the person your destiny calls for you to be.  You must create a clear vision of what that person is. Then bathe yourself with positive affirmations in order to renew your vision of who you really are. I call this stalking the shame that binds you.

When you are able to focus the shame on your addictive behavior and not on your sense of self, you can better cultivate empathy for those who have been hurt by your addictive self. You can cultivate compassion for yourself by recognizing how addiction behavior is traumatizing to you. In addition, when you consider the impact of your addictive behavior toward another person that you care for, you begin to transform the shame into empathy and compassion for those you have hurt. There is no greater intervention to offending behavior than transforming shame to compassion.

Series Three: Blog Forty-Eight

When I was a little kid Christmas morning was mixed with high anticipation, disappointment, dread and a ton of anxiety. I could not wait for my mom to declare from the bottom of the stairway that Santa Claus had come. I had been anxiously waiting for this clarion call for what seemed like an eternity. Quickly, I would race down the stairs in my pajamas to see the bright, glittering packages stacked around the Christmas tree with sparkling lights all around. We had 9 kids, so the entire living room would be full of wrapped presents. I remember the smile on my mom’s face. It is one of my favorite childhood memories.

Every family has their own ritual about how to open presents. In our home, it was total chaos. All the presents were handed out at once by my mom. You could not open one present until everyone had receive all of their gifts. Then it was mass bedlam with bows and paper flying everywhere as everyone opened their presents all at once. There was so much upheaval that the underwear and socks that grandma gave usually settled at the bottom of the pile of boxes and paper and would be at risk being unnoticed and thrown out with the Christmas wrapping paper. This was my fond memory of anticipation about Christmas as a kid.

On the other side, there was the hell and anxiety. The older kids in our family were less enthusiastic about all the chaos that the younger kids made about the gifts. My older brother Dave didn’t want to get out of bed. He would likely be hung over from drinking with his friends the night before. My dad would make him get up and come downstairs to sit around the tree. That always triggered unwanted conflict. My other older brother, Jim was our family scrooge. He seemed to always be in a foul mood complaining about all the noise, that his gifts were not nice enough and just all around being very unpleasant. Dave would make fun and pick at Jim for being such a Debbie Downer. This exchange quickly triggered a fierce physical fist fight between the two. My dad would jump in the middle of this intense quarrel with his heavy artillery approach that included a lot of harsh language, tears and some cussing on my brother’s part. This always threw cold water on all the excitement. My mom would begin to cry and say “Why can’t we have a happy Christmas like all the other families on our block?” I am not sure how she knew how the other Christmas mornings were going for others in the block but I knew that the excitement for ours had come to a screeching halt. After a season of silence, I would wander to the kitchen table where my dad cracked walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts with a brick. We quietly sorted the meat from the crushed shells and ate them in silence. This memory was an annual ritual on Christmas morning at my house.

As an addict, I never learned how to identify my feelings, how to self regulate or establish boundaries around the feeling of others. I just absorbed everyone else’s feelings in our family. As the Christmas morning began, I was not just excited for me but for everybody. Then when things soured I absorbed my mom’s sadness and tears. I was confused about Dave’s lack of excitement and wanted to fix him by helping him open his present. I hated that Jim was such a Scrooge. I tried to cheer him. Then I was so frightened and would go under the radar when my dad came in to quash the skirmish between my older brothers. So much violence in a space where a moment ago there was so much excitement! Twenty minutes later when I quietly sat next to my dad cracking nuts in the kitchen, there were all kinds of feelings racing inside that I did not know how to identify or regulate. Upon reflection, thank God as a little kid I learned to masturbate to quell the unidentified feelings racing inside. I would go insane trying to figure out how to cope with the crazy dysfunction of my family system throughout my childhood. Dysregulated emotional expression became the root of sexual addiction that later flourished in my adult life. 

The 12-step community became a safe container and secure base to explore my feelings. Therapy helped me to understand my fragmented self and to incorporate healthy reparenting skills. My support community allowed me to practice expressing my feelings toward self-empowerment. The combination of therapy and support helped me to learn to regulate my impulses and gain clarity about what was going on inside.

My multiple addictions became an organizing principle in my life that gave me a reason to face each day.  Over time I was able to replace my addiction with a meaningful secure base of support through the 12-step community. It helped to reduce my anxiety and I learned to create calm in my life with the help of therapy and other support.

I learned that in my childhood there were a lot of bad viruses verbally, sexually, through violence, religious and intellectual abuse that was put into my hard drive of experience and thinking. I had to relearn how to think about my own thinking. As an adult I am learning to become an observer of my thoughts.  Training and practice taught me to assert the wisdom from my empowered adult when stuck in my young adolescent emotional self. I have learned to take the reins from the immature child and empower my mature wise mind. This is a process that excludes perfection and will be ongoing throughout my life.

The 12-step community has been a safe place to address my addiction to chaos, emotional pain, abandonment and rejection. It has helped me to work through my distorted sense of responsibility and my tendency to take things personally. It has provided a laboratory to sort through mistrust of others from alienation. I have been able to unravel self-defeating behaviors and learn to be assertive and not aggressive with my anger.

Utilizing 12-step recovery with therapeutic guidance I have learned to develop a real self. Like a geode, the 12-step community and therapy has helped me to remove the outside and see what is inside and what coalesces in order to understand what blocks my ability to deepen intimacy. I have learned how codependency and traumatic experience are siblings that have undermined my ability to create closeness with others. I learned to “fake it to make it” as a way of building a bridge to my true self. The 12-step process combined with therapeutic intervention has taught me to make sense of my internal experience while reflecting on the mind of another. It has fostered individuation. I am able to have my own thoughts without giving into the urge to have the same thoughts and feelings of another who I would like acceptance from.

Therapy and the 12-step community has helped me to do the necessary work around symptomatic addiction and to get the runaway train going down the track stopped. Both have helped me to unearth rooted causation from my family of origin and address the wounds that bound me. Both have supported the development of my spirituality which helps to make meaningfulness from a crazy dysfunctional past and utilize my personal brilliance to navigate the present dysfunction of our current culture.

Series Three: Blog Forty-Seven

“A friend said to me, “Hey you need to grow a pair. Grow a pair, Bro.” It’s when someone calls you weak, but they associate it with a lack of testicles. Which is weird, because testicles are the most sensitive things in the world. If you suddenly just grew a pair, you’d be a lot more vulnerable. If you want to be tough, you should lose a pair. If you want to be real tough, you should grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”

― Sheng Wang

It is strange the way we talk about being strong. Hollywood has had such an influence at every age-level of life development about what it means to be strong.  Whether it is the special powers of Elsa and Anna in the child’s imagination of Frozen or the legacy of the Iceman in the latest presentation of Top Gun. Strong is always a presentation of outward strength and superiority within the context of pursuit and conquer. Through Hollywood characters you can prevail and dominate that which threatens you and the universe. Any display of weakness fosters disapproval. Failure is always perceived as weak. Demonstration of fear is ridiculed.

In our culture, people cryptically connect strength and weakness to our sexuality. The strength and power of a man is portrayed by how he can please a woman in bed and continue to last throughout the night. The strength of a woman is portrayed as being competent in bed and powerfully in charge because of advanced sexual knowledge and ability to please her man. Every sexual orientation has a presentation of domination that is presented as strength.

When people show weakness, particularly men, sexual anatomy is referenced. “Grow a pair” is the vernacular used by many that suggests an individual doesn’t have the courage to address an issue or take action. When someone appears vulnerable to fear, they are often called a “pussy” referencing the soft and sensitive female sexual organ. Both testicles and vagina are sensitive organs of the body. For men, testicles suggest strength but the vagina is referenced as weakness in terms of describing someone’s fear to act. “Don’t be a pussy” someone might scold another.

Politicians do everything possible to avoid vulnerability. The fear of disapproval in the polls dominates decisions. Most opt to please the polls and not stand for espoused principles.

All said, paradoxically, weakness is the beginning of strength. Ignoring this reality will mire you into the depths and despair of the fearful experience in life you hope to avoid. Virginia Satir once said “life is not the way it is supposed to be. It is the way it is”. The way you cope with it will determine whether you are able to transform weakness into strength.

Sadness and sorrow suck. People do everything possible to avoid this reality. There is no escape from this common thread in life. They are both painful and penetrate to the bone. Actor Keanu Reeves says that “grief changes shape but it never ends”. Coming to terms with the different types of loss in our life is a part of adult living. Some say they can endure almost any loss if they could just know when the pain will stop. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote that “In reality you will grieve forever. You will not get over the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but never the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to”.

It requires great courage (not testicles or vagina) to embrace your own darkest moments so that you can be present for others in their dark moments. In those moments for others, it’s not words that are needed just presence.

Strength and courage come to those who willingly free fall into the depths of human emotions unabashedly when facing the pain of loss. Sadness, grief and loneliness all require this free fall.  Unconditional confidence doesn’t come because you are tough or you have such deep faith that God will make it all right. It comes to those who take action on the belief that the only way through a difficult experience is to embrace it. It comes to those who act on the belief that with the help of Higher Power and others in their community that no matter how far down they go, they will rise again. Like poet Maya Angelou wrote “You may shoot me with your words—You may cut me with your eyes, —You may kill me with your hatefulness, —- But still, like air, I’ll rise!” You don’t embrace and go down into raw and difficult emotional experiences because you love the feeling of free fall, you go down because you know it is the only way to rise again. This action is true courage and genuine strength.

Some people as John Prine described in the lyrics of his song “Other Side of Town” are like the clown who puts his make-up on upside down, so he wears a smile even when he wears a frown. They practice performing for others rather than being vulnerable and real with who they really are. They think that strength and courage come with a stoic stance. The idea is to carry the world on your shoulders and don’t let anyone know the pain you have within. Men are told to show machismo. Women are told to quietly endure and stay in their place.

People go deep when they courageously allow sorrow to do its deepest work. Often, we don’t because we fear we will fall apart and not survive the pain that sorrow brings. Yet, whenever someone chooses to embrace their own darkness, shed the mask of machismo or the veil that hides true feelings, and go deep with common shared sorrow, they create the depth of genuine confidence that stands the test of time regardless of the results. In this way, we truly come full circle with sorrow and sadness and learn as Dr. Seuss declared, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” This describes an authentic experience of strength and courage in the presence of human frailty.