Your Addiction Is Doing Pushups Outside Your Door
Why Sobriety Eludes
Why is kicking addiction so damn hard?
Dude, these are the most *sticky* human behaviors. It’s got nothing to do with what you hear a lot in 12 step rooms: “The world may’ve been created in 6 days, but not your addiction.” Yeah. Thanks for the creation story wisdom.
At the bottom of every addiction are two things, each varying in composition and exerting ownweight of influence in an addict’s life: pain and trauma. But that is not the full story. Those two artifacts are common among addicts. The plainer truth is that our addiction eats us alive while being fed a steady diet of blame, shame, and guilt.
We’re not done.
Each of those three factors — blame, shame, and guilt are connected to and rooted in the craters, holes, and gaps that form a life of lived memories, negative talk, ritualistic behavior, and self sabotage. Regardless of how this was modeled: reared among addicts, victims of unspeakable moral crimes, mental illness, etc., we all wound up in this shared arena.
Keep going…
In our addiction, we are constantly being yanked around by the 2 “E’s”…ego and emotions — each accelerating the other, as we gradually serve out the slow death sentence that blame, shame, and guilt levies on a life.
To find a way out, we attend 12 step meetings. Meanwhile, our addiction is in the parking lot doing push ups. We got to work, and our addiction is in the corridor outside of our office, or it curls up innocently at feet in our cubicle. We drive, and it’s doing bicep curls in the back seat; it can’t wait to be your worst back seat driver. At home, your addiction is doing laps around the block. In your apartment, your addiction is on the sidewalk below; it can’t wait to stage a break-in.
While we sleep — when/if sleep comes in a black-out drunk, a disembodied high…our addiction is mocking us. It won. Again. You feel like crap. It tells you that you’re crap. You believe it. Again. And so, the cycle plays out. Again, again, again, again, again…
Our addiction draws its life force from us. Because it’s us. We eventually beat the gym rat that is our addiction by calling it out; labeling it. Then we actively get after it; we say goodbye to passivity. Alcohol, substance addiction, sex, eating, shopping, porn, gambling, hoarding. Here, the DSM-IV is nobody’s friend. Worse yet, the DSM-IV has never saved an addict.
Being saved from dying from addiction comes down to brute force, implacable will, faithful friends, rigorous program, and shared knowledge. If you think that drugs, porn, food, dice, sex, or alcohol are the enemy, then the actual opponent succeeded in remaining unnamed. The main thing you are pushing against is…not your brand of addictive poison. It’s the symptom, not the cause. The real cause is your ego and your spiritual maladies. In other words, without a credible program that you use every hour, you’re hosed.
Secret: your ego is the part of you that’s sick. It’s the chronically broken part of you. It’s the reason why every attempt you’ve made to hide, flee, travel, abandon, consume…it all ended up with you in a full-blown, face down, relapse chocolate mess. Do you glimpse the futility?
Every time you ran, it was there as close as your back pocket. As you fatigued out, you became yet more vulnerable to acting out: drinking, getting high, eating to excess, hours of porn binging, days spent in casinos…
In a few lucid moments, you had the courage to look up and ask, “is this all there is?”
You addiction is the hyper conditioned, super buff, stunt-trained version of you. Your addiction is every kind of athlete you ever fantasized yourself to be. The result: you are out muscled, out smarted, under conditioned and continuously out played. In other words, you don’t stand a chance. Unless…
…you call out the thing that allows this BS to exist in your life: your ego. It’s the creature that’s always lying, deceiving, stealing, hustling, cheating, evading, obfuscating, breaking, exploiting, harming, poisoning, hurting, striking, yelling, pushing, insulting, diminishing, defeating, insinuating, gaslighting every one, and every thing within your arm’s reach, driving distance of a tank of gas, or the reach of cell phone.
To quote a famous 1980s comedy show character: “listen to me or hear me later.” The path to sobriety and wellness is not by abstaining, it’s by shrinking your ego then reclaiming your life. Then, we can get to a life of zero alcohol consumption, zero heroin use, zero porn viewing, zero over-eating, zero gambling, etc.
Those outcomes ensue because your ego is not driving the bus that is your life. Instead, you are sitting in the back of the bus with the rest of your 12 Step Bozo pals. Never again will your ego successfully convince you that every person in your life you’ve defecated on is unqualified to tell you what a jerk, what an addict you are.
If you think you need your little head patted, told you are someone precious, or that you had an awful upbringing (you are not alone), or your boss is a loser (maybe), or that your significant other is to blame for who you are (you showed up as the addict)…if any of that is what you need to be respected, validated, and dignified…
…then your addiction is doing push ups outside your front door. Good luck with that. Final thought: it does not have to be this way. You always had and continue to have the power to choose.
I’m Mig. I write on sobriety, treatment, programs, and recovery. There’s a maxim in 12 Step, “to keep it, you give it away.”
Comments, questions? Write me at: the.recovered.life@gmail.com
