Gaining Understanding

I realize I've been over some of this before, but I'm going over it again and again until I understand my own epxerience better.

I've resumed the treatment activities that I started before I moved to Lakeside and the whole job fiasco unfolded. I'm attending intensive outpatient treatment at the local chemical dependency center and so far it's been a wonderful experience. The counselor I have is not attached to the 12 steps as a recovery model and there are many people attending who have no interest in using AA. In our first session she asked me if I had been attending AA and I told her yes, intermittently, but that I didn't feel it helped and actually seemed to exacerbate my anxiety, which has been a major stumbling block in my ability to stay sober. She said, "Well then for god's sake, don't go!" The sense of relief I felt at being heard and understood was huge. The sense of relief I felt at moving forward with my recovery without AA and having the support of my addictions counselor left me sitting there in tears.

I suppose some would wonder why that's such a big deal and I'm going to explain why. I know I'm not alone. When I went through inpatient treatment in 1988, the entire professional staff, who seemed to have a good understanding of addiction as a disease and who skillfully transmitted that information to the patients also offered the 12 steps as the one and only cure for the problem. I desperately wanted to be free from my addictions and I bought into their cure fully, with my whole being. I started the steps, got a sponsor and quit using. For the first two years, I was on medication for depression and anxiety that helped tremendously and I was also in professional counseling. I did pretty well for those years. But when that ended, I was left with AA for support. And this strange thing happened to me: the more I worked the steps, the worse I felt about myself. As my sobriety continued you would have thought I would be feeling more self-esteem, more pride in my accomplishments and more connection to the world as a whole, but that's not what happened to me. I began to feel worse. AA encouraged me to get off the medication that was helping me; it encouraged me to focus entirely on my "character defects" and on correcting all the damage I had caused with my self-centered, egotistical, resentful behavior. It taught me that I was inherently flawed (sound familiar?) and that nothing on earth could save me from myself but a higher power. Because I fully believed in a higher power I began to wonder why I wasn't having the same experience most people seemed to have. And I felt worse, and worse.

Finally I drank. And then what did I have? Nothing. Because I didn't believe that I had kept my own self sober all those years, had no feelings of self-esteem or pride and believed that I was fully lost without the higher power on whom I had been depending, I drank a lot. After all, what was I? A tornado moving through the lives of those I loved most, a selfish woman-child with a head full of resentments and a heart full of guilt. I wasn't worth sobriety and I didn't believe I could do it because for six years I had been told that I couldn't do it.

It's bothersome to me that I had to have someone give me permission to not continue attending AA, that I wasn't able to use my own intuition and common sense to make that decision. But I also realize that's part of my problem, part of my addiction - a lack of trust in myself. And I also realize that I was only trying to use what was available to get well.

Martin Nicolaus, founder of Lifering Secular Recovery, has a new book out called, "Empowering Your Sober Self." Here is an excerpt with which I can fully agree:

"One of the most paralyzing notions that stands in the way of recovery is the belief that you become addicted because of defects in your character. If you believe this, you will have a hard time getting free of addictive substances because character, by definition, is unchangeable; it is who you are.

For many decades now, laboratory animals have been teaching experimenters that this belief is mistaken."


And . .


"People who use addictive substances are notoriously hard on themselves. The reason is partly that the world is hard on people whose substance use has become too obvious, and we internalize those value judgments. There are elements in the traditional recovery protocol that reinforce these negative judgments."

Eclipsing Personal Myths or Advanced Truth Seeking

There is a partial solar eclipse tonight at 10:44 EST. In the language of astrology, eclipses are opportunities to either make or break patterns, or if you will, personal myths, we've set up in our lives.

All of us have personal myths that we live with and by whether we're aware of them or not. We come by these myths in a number of ways and from a number of different sources: parents, friends, teachers, our culture, and yes, we even come up with some of them all by ourselves. I've noticed that alcoholism treatment websites like to report myths about alcoholism. The most interesting thing is that there are very few real facts about alcoholism so the "myths" these sites report usually coincide with whatever treatment option they are trying to sell. On one site you'll find that they consider the "disease concept" a myth and on another you'll find that the myth is that alcoholism is a behavioral disorder.

When I went through treatment in 1988 I was told that I had a medical disease (alcoholism) that was incurable, progressive and eventually fatal. I had no reason at the time not to believe these well-meaning professionals and I accepted the diagnosis, followed the protocol (12-Steps) and stayed sober for six years. Obviously, that concept worked for me for quite awhile. At the time, I never questioned whether I actually believed any of it for myself.

But later in my life, when those concepts were no longer working so well, I was literally forced to question the validity of what I had learned . . . against my own experience. And here's what I'm finding - the more gray area the subject has, the more people become attached to their myths around it. It only makes sense that in the absence of few hard facts, myths will tend to abound. Alcoholism, eating disorders, gambling addiction, sexual addiction - all fertile ground for Facts and Myths. And here's what I'm coming to believe - your facts about your problem may be different from mine. My myths may be your facts. Your myth may be solid fact to me. It doesn't mean that I am right and you are wrong or vice versa.

In my study of archetypes, I've seen these personal myths come to life in the form of archetypal patterns of behavior. Addict. Victim. Goddess. Pioneer. Storyteller. Hedonist. When I view my behavior archetypally (which is exactly what astrology does by the way), I'm able to detach from the simmering emotions that surround the issue. Not only that, when I'm aware of other archetypal patterns I can substitute for the one causing me trouble, I'm offered a solution that doesn't require me to blame myself for anything, blame anyone else for anything, or even declare myself right and someone else wrong.

I'm beginning to form a theory about this called Advanced Truth Seeking. An Advanced Truth Seeker seeks out as much hard truth is available about any given situation (which is usually not a lot) and then decides what myth to make her truth. I think this is what most of us try to do in our lives, but we're usually not very conscious of it. That's where the Advanced part comes in. When we become conscious of it, we can decide with eyes wide open that we're going to make a particular myth our truth. I think this is the power of intention, the power of story, and the power of co-creation. I figure we're all just a myth in the eyes of the Goddess anyway.

I'm deciding on a few very empowering personal myths at this eclipse, how about you?