True unmanageability Often an addict new to the recovery environment is asked about why they want to get clean. Often the answer is formulated something along the lines of “well, I have put my family through so much…” It is here that many addicts are stopped and given the mantra “That won’t work. You have to want to do this for yourself!” We hear this repeated so often that we take for granted this “therapeutic” response as a long-held truth. It is absolutely true that an addict must desire recovery for themselves. It is also true that the things that motivate that desire are often more than a singular desire to improve one’s life and face their addiction. Guilt, shame, remorse…these feelings are a part of the addicts “bottom”. They are a part of what drives the addict to want to stop using and seek help. Those that offer that help need to offer it from a place of honesty and understanding. We cannot simply regurgitate what we have heard and have assumed to be true. We must truly understand and embrace the experience of the addict empathetically. Children grow up (hopefully) in the loving presence of their parents or caregivers. They thrive on making their parents happy and making them proud. I have two kids that I lavish these rewards on daily. For an addict to grow up and become something that causes their parents grief, anguish, anger, mistrust…we must admit this is a difficult thing for a human being to endure. It is difficult for a human being of any stripe to go from a place of receiving love and affection to being the cause of pain. Understand that I am of course speaking of an ideal growing up, not everyone had an experience like this. I use this as one possible illustration. As parents we want to make sure our children are safe, happy, and well-taken care of. We want our children to be able to trust and depend on us. When my children were born I experienced a sense of wonder and love that knew no bounds. Suddenly I realized that my life now needed to take a backseat to this precious life entrusted to my care. Again, this is the ideal illustration. Not every parent has this experience. I could paint a number of similar illustrations, but the point is made. We have an ideal for who we wish to be and how we wish to impact others. When we fail to reach those ideals to our own satisfaction we feel negative emotions. These negative emotions may manifest in our behavior as an attempt to change ourselves to more closely meet our ideals, thereby increasing self-satisfaction and self-esteem. It should therefore go without saying that causing pain to those that we love causes us pain as well. If you read my last post on powerlessness and the concept of powerlessness causing us not only to use against our will but also to act against our will you will begin to understand the nature of the addict and their pain. You can then begin to imagine how it feels for an addict new to recovery to be shut down by a well-intentioned person telling them that this pain is insufficient motivation to pursue a life in recovery. During the course of active addiction we are degraded and demoralized by our addiction. Our ever attempt to control our addiction has failed. Each time we fail we lose hope. As our hope is agonizingly stripped from us time and time again we are left in a state of hopelessness. Hopelessness is incompatible with a desire to continue living. It is small wonder that so many addict take their own lives. Unmanageability is a concept that sometimes gets passed over with little deep thought. Clinicians and peer supports often point to the outward manifestations of our disease: uncontrollable using, the loss of jobs, the loss of family, the loss of freedom and incarceration, etc. These are easy to see and hard to deny. But if our understanding of unmanageability stops there, at the surface, we do the addict a disservice. It is not only losing the family that makes us suffer, it is how we feel about being the person that lost his or her family that makes us suffer. It is not going to jail that necessarily makes us suffer, rather it is how we actually feel about being the person that got sent to jail and how we relate to it inside ourselves on a deep level. Having been there I can tell you that there are indeed people in jail that seem to thrive there, and have no apparent problem at all with being there. As I have pointed out to many of you, if an addict believes that their unmanageability is simply about being unemployed, incarcerated, or driving away their family, then having these things back equals recovery. This is a dangerous underestimation of what unmanageability really is. Unmanageability is inside ourselves. The outward stuff is readily correctible. The inward stuff…not so much. It is the inward “stuff” that we must focus on. We must provide real answers or addicts die or at least go on to live a pointless life of suffering and carnage. For more information on this and other vital topics please refer to the recovery workbook: “From Darkness to Light: A Primer for Recovery” available only from Recovery Resources Inc. at recoveryresourcesinc or on Amazon under the complete title. Apparently there are a huge number of books by the name “From Darkness to Light” so be sure to search for it under the full title on Amazon. Richard Anderson – Recovering from the disease of addiction a day at a time for over 28 years.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:49:57 +0000
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