How Resolving Trauma and Learning to Breathe Can Finally Help You Overcome your Addictions
There are several programs out there that deal with addiction. The 12 Step program is one of them that has incredible value. It works; it has saved people’s lives. In fact, I’ve worked the program myself.
But, for whatever reason, some people just can’t see themselves doing AA. Or they discontinue going to meetings and lose their support network. Or maybe they worked the steps and they are sober but still can’t surrender to a new way of thinking and living.
The Get Unstuck program is for anyone who struggles with addiction — whether to alcohol, drugs, excessive gambling, or anything used to numb out from the experience of life — and for people who are already sober but feel like something inside them is wrong or missing or unfulfilled.
The program borrows from other well-known approaches to self-help, particularly the 12 Steps. But I think my 30+ years of experience in clinical psychology as well as my shared experience with addiction and recovery leave me with something valuable to add.
How the 12 Step Program Works (& Why Sometimes It Doesn’t)
One of 12 Step programs’ biggest values is that the meetings are free, ongoing, and available to you all over the world. They provide a place to land and get support when you need it, and a place to return that support when you’re ready.
As I used the steps myself, I found that it was helpful for people who have a complex internal world that they’ve created to survive. It takes a lot of work to untangle this web of coping mechanisms and get back to your natural self. That’s what the 12 Steps and this program attempt to do.
The reasons some people don’t resonate with the 12 Step program have largely to do with the spiritual aspect. These people often have negative past experiences with religion, or perhaps they aren’t able to open themselves up to something like that without proof.
Another drawback is for people dealing with more than one addiction. The programs keep everyone focused on one drug or one habit so people in the group identify with one another based on common challenges. If you have several addictions to work through, you have to go to a separate program for each one.
Get Unstuck
The Get Unstuck program addresses the core of addiction in such a way that you don’t have to be in multiple programs to experience the benefit, and that doesn’t depend on belief in a traditional type of higher power, like capital-G God.
The format is different, too. You don’t have to go to meetings before you can get any help from the program. You don’t have to work all of the steps in order, and you don’t have to get a sponsor.
The goal is to help people find some inner peace, be comfortable in their own skin, and find a way to be more open to a new way of life. It doesn’t matter what mechanism you use to do that, whether it’s this one, the 12 Steps, or another.
A Focus on Personal Responsibility
This program emphasizes the self. What can I do differently? What can I do, if I put my energy into something else? What follows is that you’ll stop trying to control everything around you and just focus on the next right thing for you.
Resolution of Past Actions
This is an important part of the 12 Steps that remains in Get Unstuck. We’re going to look at the past and the things you’ve done that you feel regret or shame about, and you may have to consider how you can resolve a past situation.
Trauma Work
We’ll give you the psychological tools to confront impressions and emotional states you picked up from your family and carry with you still. You’ll get clear on how we pick up emotions and energy from family members as a way to try to connect, and carry that with us as a burden.
That makes it difficult to trust. People with addictions avoid trusting others at all costs. They don’t want to feel vulnerable. Doing the work to confront your trauma will help you develop the ability to express and be open and learn to trust.
Breathwork and Meditation
If you practice going quiet instead of running around frantically, you can become settled in the place within you. That’s where, from my perspective, we store the wisdom of our larger consciousness, creation, god, if you will.
Most people struggling with addiction have a particular difficulty quieting their racing mind. That’s so often why people drink or do drugs or engage in numbing activities — to quiet their mind, shut the damn thing off and get a break. But with discipline and practice over time, you can learn to quiet your own mind. It’s that ability to go quiet and be open to be guided, where the richness and where the possibilities are, that are beyond your capability at an intellectual level, beyond your own imagining.
Ongoing Support
There are two kinds of transformative experiences: a sudden, white light experience that happens overnight — or an experiential, or educational awakening. The latter experience is mostly noticed in reflection. Gradually, over time, we realize that we haven’t had a drink in months — how did that happen?
But all educational transformations require ongoing reinforcement and support of like minded people. It’s like learning a language. As part of Get Unstuck we offer support and a community of people who speak your language.
Why This Program is For You (Even If You’re Already Sober)
We will help you address your addiction or whatever the multitudes of ways you have developed to numb out from the world. We acknowledge that none of these coping mechanisms are necessarily bad — but in excess, they become problematic.
By working through your trauma and confronting past behaviors, we’ll address the things that underlie your addictive behaviors. Ultimately, we want you to finally be able to see that there was never anything inherently wrong with you. You were valuable and worthwhile from the beginning. You just didn’t know it.
Read MoreFinding Peace Beyond Life and Death
My stepson Aaron was found behind a restaurant in Salinas a few weeks ago. He was taken to a hospital. He was resuscitated three times. The fourth time he slipped away, the hospital made a call to his family, and they said no more. Let him go.
Aaron’s mother and I were together from the time he was 2 years old until he was about 12, when she and I split up. I spent some time with him after that, but not much — he began using drugs at a young age, and stealing things to fund his habit.
That was almost 30 years ago. Aaron lived his life with paranoid schizophrenia. When he took his medication, he functioned okay — but he was still a drug addict. When he wasn’t on his medication, he was so paranoid that “they” were after him that he had to find a distraction to get relief. The only way he understood to find that was with drinking alcohol or doing heroin.
Aaron had overdosed numerous times throughout his life. He was in the hospital not long ago for heart disease. His body was shot. Despite the best efforts of the people around him, nothing was able to stop the disease of mental illness and drug addictions from finally killing him.
It’s a difficult thing, to care about someone and keep watching them self destruct, keep doing things in a way that, at any moment, could kill them. I’ve known many people like Aaron over the years. There’s a sense of helplessness in it. People with addictions are, by and large, self-medicating to get rid of their anxieties. Help them shut their brain off, find comfort.
With enough alcohol or opiates, the body can almost completely shut down and go to a quiet place of oblivion. I think when people overdose more than once, like my stepson, they’re riding that narrow edge between life and death. There’s nothing you can do except witness energy traveling into a black hole of the void.
Black holes suck in everything. That’s just part of the cosmos. But sometimes, inside black holes, there are universes.
Connecting With the Life Force
We are not our bodies. We are the consciousness that uses our bodies. The consciousness doesn’t die or age. It’s all a part of the cosmos. I ask people, ‘Is there a part of you that doesn’t feel any older, or like it hasn’t aged at all?’ If you feel that — it’s your sense of consciousness, and it’s connected to the infinite consciousness. The energy that includes all of existence.
So, in essence, we can’t die. There is no death.
Most people, when their bodies shut down and they’re pronounced dead but then come back, describe a space of pure peace. It’s a place they can relax and feel safe.
Just like when you first came into your mother, as a spiritual being and an essence came in, there would have been a moment of peace in your existence in the physical life. People entrenched in addictive behaviors find that place of peace through taking themselves close to the brink of death. They’re seeking peace within the life they’re in.
Regression
One of the ways we can get back to the peace that existed before we felt the separation of our life force from the expanded consciousness is through rebirth, or regression. An Australian psychiatrist I met in the ‘80s was using a technique called the primal scream. The premise was that if you regressed enough, you would go back into the womb.
When he watched people go through this therapy, he would see people’s bodies sometimes move exactly like eggs or sperm do as they’re seeking to connect. So, is there a cellular consciousness there? The life force kicks in at the moment they connect — and then separates from the creator of that life force and identifies with the individual cells embodying it. He says that’s our first abandonment experience.
Everything is energy. We pick up on energy from everything around us, the frequencies and the wavelengths going on around us. As people go through rebirth, they take that feeling they had when they were fully connected to the life force and bring it out of their body. It was always a part of them. It’s always a part of you; it just got lost in the experience of genetics, the influences of the responses in the life sustaining it.
Ultimately, in the rebirthing process I have them move forward. They go through the whole process of being reborn, and come out imagining being in an environment where everyone is celebrating them. This brings them out into the world with a sense of inherent connection to the source.
All the years I’ve worked with people who’ve done any kind of deep psychological work, they almost always say things like, “I want to matter.” “I want to be appreciated.” “I don’t feel loved.” The only thing that can get us there is to experience an internal reconnection to the truth of our existence — and that is that you are already valuable. You’re already loved.
Meditation
Regression and rebirth isn’t the only way to connect to this life force — there are many ways, but this and meditation are the ones that I’ve personally validated myself. You can expand into nothingness and everything, or go back into the womb. Either way, you’ll find the life force that came into that cell in the beginning actually came from the source that you just left.
If we leave the body and go into deep meditative states, we start to expand our consciousness. We see that we’re not the body. We’re not the thoughts.
In the now, there is a sense of fullness and richness so expansive, nothing ties you to the past or to the future, to desires or to expectations. There is just this one. And this one. And this one. When you’re in the present, you can be 100% satisfied. If you’re distracted and thinking about other things, you’ll only ever achieve partial satisfaction. I think most people live their lives with only partial experiences, because they want to be numb and disconnect.
No one ever told us how to live fully without being afraid that you have to hide all the time or be ready for something else.
Some people achieve a meditative-like experience from something like gardening. When they get absorbed in it, they’re not really attached to the mind. We call these mindless activities, but really they’re just detached enough to halt the internal conflict and give some relief. That happens when the self detaches from the importance of the thoughts and the internal conflict.
With meditation, as we progress we get more and more detached from the conflicts inside ourselves, and all the different pulls for our attention. But it’s not really fully about meditation. It’s about developing the discipline required to establish a habit that you’ve decided will be of value to you.
When you do that, you start to feel a sense of empowerment. A sense that you have a choice of what habits to put your energy into. And then you start to recognize you have more freedom in the world than just reacting to whatever comes into your brain or through your emotions or memories.
Letting Go of Fear
The day after Aaron passed away, I got a call that my father was in the hospital with pneumonia. He wasn’t doing well and for a while we all thought it was the end. While he did recover and is doing better now, it was a tough week. It got me thinking about death and all the feelings of fear and trepidation that go along with it.
We have to let go of the fear of death. That’s not to say that we can’t feel the grieving and the loss and sadness of losing someone you’ve been attached to. But that suffering has to have its own place. Go into it, let it breathe, breathe into it. Whatever it is, breathe into it. It’s the next moment. Then the next moment. As I allow the flow of that experience to continue and stay alive within me, I have to understand that whatever comes, I’ll go through it, whatever it is — and then it will be something else.
But if you’re afraid of death, you’re always running away from the idea of it. Everything comes down to this fear — and it pushes us to seek peace in all kinds of things that are external to us. It’s rooted in not having a structure for knowing, from the beginning, that we are peace. We are love. We are divine.
When we connect to the infinite resource, everything we need is there. Everyone is already waiting for us. We just have to allow ourselves to become quiet enough. To surrender enough. To let go enough and just be in this moment, so that everything can be provided. No more attachments, no more hanging on to this or that, no more thinking, ‘What if I need it later?’
From this perspective, death isn’t even an option. It only exists in the realm in which our bodies exist. In the realm of our egos, of thinking that we’re not important, or that we are important, or that we’re awful or good. Whether positive or negative, those are all stories that the ego tells us.
Choosing Consciousness
My 45-year-old stepson’s body was brought back three times but would not sustain him. My 99-year-old father, on the other hand, came back from the brink of death. It wouldn’t have taken much for everything in him to just quietly shut down. So how do we reconcile these two events?
Every time I go visit my father, his wife talks about how enlivened he gets with the excitement and anticipation of something that matters to him.
To truly be alive, we have to live with a belief that there’s another adventure waiting for us. That we want to be awake, get out, try something new. If we’re stuck running on our unconscious thoughts, we can only run on programs that were given to us by our experiences or our genetics. Those old feelings become so familiar they bring us a kind of relief, in that it reduces anxiety because it’s predictable.
Consciousness, on the other hand, brings abundant possibility. But we have to start down a path that opens doors and gives us a peek into that awareness, so we start to understand that, ‘Wow, I could actually have a life with joy. I could actually feel good about myself.’
When we go beyond thoughts, beyond the body, we find the quiet sense of peace. We access the life force that jolted us into a body of cells in our mother’s womb. Once we find that, we don’t need to run anymore. We don’t crave death as a release from pain. Nor do we fear death.
Because we have a place to go, deep inside, that’s connected to the infinite. Death is just the body — we are the universe.
Read MoreThis Unusual Addiction Treatment Shifts Your Focus Back to the Basics
In a traditional addiction treatment model, the most important part was to abstain from the substance on which you are dependent. Putting the plug in the jug, so to speak.
At AA back in those days, they allowed cigarettes, coffee, sugar, because it beats drinking and doing lines. If you’re not drunk, then you’re good. The smoke would be thicker than you could cut with a knife in some of those meetings.
There was this attitude of, “I’m not drunk today and I’m not destroying my life today, so the rest is viable.”
Things have evolved a bit by now, of course. Holistic health has become part of some programs, bringing in some nutrition education and yoga practices and breathing. But it’s still not 100% central.
Now, here’s the thing that might sound crazy — but hear me out. Health should be the number one area of focus for treating addictions.
I’m sure some of you are thinking, “That’s it? Health?” But here’s the thing. Recovery, at its foundation, means knowing you already have everything you need on the inside. You have inherent value and there’s nothing from the outside that’s going to make you any more valuable.
Why the Body is So Important
Let’s look at addiction as an imbalance of health. The human body is an amazing thing, but addictions come about from — and then cause other — imbalances inside it. You have to start with the equipment, and re-balance your body to get yourself feeling good again.
Sleep and Self-Reflection
There is a rehabilitation program in Japan where the first stage of treatment is sleeping. Just sleeping — for a week. Their philosophy is, if you’ve been running hard, you need to sleep just for homeostasis. The second stage was all about devoting time to silence, dreamwork, reflection, meditation, and going inside yourself. It served as a chance to get to know yourself as a psychological being on the planet without all the muck that sometimes comes along with it.
After rest, reflection, and meditation, you have better insight into the problems that still reside inside. Sometimes, rest makes some of the things you’ve been carrying around with you fall away.
The thing that attracted me so much to that program in Japan was the mindset of just taking the time to let the body sit, giving the equipment — our bodies — the respect they deserve and let them do what they do most naturally. You might say your body knows what it’s doing better than you do. We have to get out of its way and let it find a balance.
A Word of Advice
If you need to go somewhere to help yourself get this rest, so you can allow your body to go through homeostasis, seek that out. Find a program with education on how to take care of yourself so you can recognize what your body will go through.
Feelings will start to come up. Feelings will make you afraid you’re going to relapse. Be prepared for this. Some feelings will lift you up and remind you of what it’s like to be high. These high feelings could result in making you feel like you’re going through withdrawals.
If you’re prepared for all of this and know the feelings are a part of your treatment, it will be easier to work through it.
Nutrition and Energy
The body is an amazing piece of equipment. No one on earth has fully figured out exactly how this whole thing all works together — but we do know that we need rest and oxygen… and nutrition.
Get a nutrition assessment, and have other testing and evaluation to determine what kind of damage may have been done or what was genetically ingrained in you. These are all issues that we need to consider in making plans about how to live our lives.
I want to reinforce this point about nutrition. If you’ve been in an addictive mode with drugs, alcohol, food, or any other self-neglect, your whole digestive system has likely adapted to what you’ve been giving it, to get the most nutrition or use out of what it found.
What they found was that, even if you stopped eating Big Macs and fats and sugars and salts, and started putting in all this nutritious food, your body actually won’t have as much energy at first. It adapted to all that fat and sugar because that’s what you could give it.
You have to get your body feeling good. It cannot be overstated how much sleep, breathwork, exercise, and nutrition can affect your emotional health and wellbeing. This is going to help you build your strong foundation. If you know what it feels like to feel good, then you have an anchor to hold on to.
If you don’t take care of your body, then you are telling yourself you don’t matter. But you DO matter. Change the script. Thank your body. Give it the rest it deserves.
Gratitude for the Body
“You matter to me, body! I took you for granted and I expected you to tolerate all this disrespect.”
Go to the place where your body does its most natural balancing: rest. When you do breathing exercises, you again give your body the reassurance that everything is okay. The system in the brain believes that there’s a threat when you’re not breathing properly. That affects your blood and your fight or flight response. It’s a similar concept to nutrition. When you eat nutritious foods, they sustain the body; in that way, you reassure your body that everything is ok.
Be grateful for your body. Your intellect, your thoughts, your emotions. How you take care of yourself matters. It shows how you feel about yourself.
If you talk cruelly to yourself, you’re never going to be satisfied or feel good inside.
Emotional Sobriety is Next Level Recovery
Emotional sobriety is going to be the next level of recovery work. If your wellbeing is based on validation that you seek from others, you’re vulnerable — depending on what you get from the outside to make you feel good on the inside.
“I’m trying to be who I think you need me to be, so that I can get the reaction that I want from you (to support my valuation of myself).”
That’s the dependency we have to stop. We have everything we need — to recover and move forward — within us. Seeking affirmation of our inherent human value in external stimuli is not only unhealthy, it’s unnecessary.
If you want to have an emotionally sober life, it has to be based on the fact that you already are valuable, you already have inherent value, and there’s nothing that you need from the outside that’s going to make you feel better.
In fact, there’s nothing that can make you feel better in any kind of satisfactory way. This has to come from inside.
The Role of Connection
Most people that I run into with addictive backgrounds come from families with very little emotional connection. Either their homes were emotional deserts or worse — outright abusive and cruel. And that has them practicing all kinds of distancing techniques to keep people away.
Having a negative experience of relationships as a child, whether they’re abusive, negligent, or something else, puts us in a challenging place as adults if we haven’t learned from somewhere else how to make positive connections.
Addicts are often terribly lonely, but also tend to be the first to distance themselves from others. A number of self-defeating prophecies are at work here: I’ve got to do it all myself. I should know it all myself. I should be able to figure it all out.
All of that stuff interferes with all of the interpersonal connections, and that’s when things get really sad.
One of the more recent clinical studies observed that all the previous rat studies around cocaine and other drugs were given to rats while in isolation. These researchers decided to experiment: what would happen if they were at, say, a rat playground with fellow lab rats were happy and having fun together.
When the rats were given drugs this time, they didn’t have any interest. They would try it a couple of times and stop. They didn’t get addicted.
So what role does connection play? There’s a whole vibrational frequency that goes with all these different drugs. People identify with that and they actually connect and feel connections with people, without ever saying a word because of this frequency.
If you have that kind of unprocessed trauma or overly stimulated area, then it’ll be almost impossible not to use that as one of the connecting modalities that you use.
Next Steps
Here’s what I suggest anyone suffering from addictive tendencies to do:
- Rest for a while, get good sleep
- Get a good nutritional evaluation
- Consciously address eating tendencies over time, while incorporating yoga and breathing meditation
I just think that’s a better place to start. Then make decisions about whether you need the alcohol or drugs after you’re feeling so much better.
It’ll still be a habit. The brain will say yes, even if you’re feeling good. But it’s a whole lot easier to say no. When you’re already feeling good, you can really clearly see it’s just a dysfunctional habit. It’s not something you really need.
This locks into the idea of consciousness and how, if I’m taking care of my body, I’m treating it as a sacred place. And I’m learning to meditate, learning to do some of the things that give me the break I used to look for in drugs and alcohol.
Our addictions are rooted in deep pain within us, and we’re looking for that break. Maybe it used to come in cigarettes, maybe alcohol, maybe sex or gambling. So I need a break to get relief and relax. But if my body’s feeling healthy, I feel more rested, I feel alert, my energy’s high because I ate some good food, and now I feel like I can address some other issues in my life.
That recognition of what you could be feeling, how good it could be, so that you have an anchor spot to go back to. Then you can become grateful for your body rather than being pissed off about what it’s not. Nothing outside of us can “fix” us.
Your body and everything inside you — that’s where recovery is.
Read MoreWhy You Need a Higher Power
We’ve been having fires here, where I live, for the last week or so. The closest, as I write this, is about 10 miles away.
People have been evacuated, and there may be a storm brewing that will bring more lightning — that could very well start more fires even closer to us. But even from 10 miles, the smoke has been awful, to the point of aggravating my breathing.
On top of that, there are other life stressors like, of course, COVID-19, family issues, working on this project… so this morning, I woke up feeling that anxiety.
I do a breathing and meditation practice every morning, but this morning I decided to go a little deeper, to just sit and get really, really quiet. When I get deep into that silence and quiet inside, it’s like sitting at the bottom of the ocean instead of swimming at the top where the waves are coming in heavy.
Trying to make it on the surface when the storms are kicking in — it’s exhausting. Kind of like living life on your own.
But we don’t have to do it on our own. That got me thinking about why we need a higher power in our lives.
The fact is, the Western world is very machine-oriented. We value productivity. We build machines and create computers to produce faster and faster. Then we compare ourselves to these machines, and we’re surprised or we suffer when we realize we’re not as “good” as a computer.
We need to be reminded to go back to our inner nature and the life force that’s inherent in it. Existing, in itself, is being part of the life force energy. This life force is far more powerful than a machine.
That life force is what brings satisfaction, joy, serenity, and peace — the inner richness you need to counteract the stressors from living day-to-day in a culture that’s focused primarily on value production. When we tap into it, we can ask for help, ask for someone or something to walk through the pain with us.
“Higher Power” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Religion”
When people conflate a higher power with the god of one particular religion or another, the essence of that higher power gets covered in belief systems, bureaucratic structures, and a lot of other junk that doesn’t really have anything to do with it at all.
In that way of thinking, the concept of god is restricted by dualities and dichotomies. Good is heaven, and bad is hell. God is either a loving entity or a punishing one.
In this sense of god, there are conditions for love. And when there are conditions around love, people — those with addictions, especially — can’t depend on that love. They’ve likely experienced people taking love away from them based on their actions. That might even be a childhood trauma that imprinted them at a young age.
That’s why the concept of god and higher power are so emotionally charged, particularly for people who struggle with addiction. For people who go into recovery, the idea of a higher power tends to become a wall because they naturally have trust issues.
That’s not what we want when it comes to having a higher power in our lives. A higher power is not there to judge you or to tell you whether you’re good or bad.
Instead, think about the higher power as a force that created everything as energy. Energetic matter that takes on different forms — energy doesn’t change, but the forms do.
The Energetic Life Force
Energy particles are in constant movement, recreating themselves into new forms. As I inhale, I’m breathing in some parts of other people or the universe. As I exhale, I’m letting go of energy.
This mysterious and incredible transfer of energy is relative to life force — life force is relative to higher power.
There’s something else going on here that is way beyond what we can understand. We’re all in this together! On a cellular/material level, everything in the universe is interconnected and inner-woven. Why wouldn’t I want to tap into the resource (higher power) that will help me be available to this mysterious system that provides unconditional life force energy?
Don’t let your interpretations of the word “god” limit your blessings. You don’t need to ask for a higher power’s forgiveness. You need to simply be, get quiet, turn off the ego’s chatter and believe, even know, there is something else out there beyond yourself that you can tap into for unconditional love and support.
How Connection to a Higher Power Can Bring Peace
It’s worth acknowledging that there’s a legitimate reason for addiction. It’s, in some ways, a very effective method for numbing the pain and trauma of our lives — at least at first. The first drink can make us feel peace and comfort that numbs the pain. Our self-consciousness shuts down, and we can even turn into another person if we wish.
People choose this “magic” elixir and often stick with it. But what if there was another way?
Instead of choosing something that allows only fleeting comfort, try going inside. Go to that place that many people look for. Tap into a resource that is bigger than us. Find a way to start to get quiet!
Finding the Higher Power Within
I have gone to a higher power through prayer. I wanted to know if something was there, so I screamed out to the universe. This is a call outward for connection with a higher power.
Many of us grew up with the Santa Claus prayer: “Please give me a new bicycle,” “Please make Molly better,” or whatever. That taps into an energy of its own, it has a place, but for me?
For me, prayer isn’t just outward or inward; that kind of dichotomy doesn’t work here. It’s about getting to a place where I can accept what is.
Thank you, God, for everything. For the fires. For COVID-19. For the stress. Thanking God for the chaos is a completely different trip.
That’s when I go quiet, go into peace, go into just allowing things to drift away — the things in the layers of belief systems and attitudes, in responsibilities and burdens. I sink and everything lifts.
When you tap into the source, focus just on being what is.
Confronting Painful Feelings
The hesitance to surrender to a higher power can be terrifying. And, just like addiction serves to numb the pain and thereby, perhaps, saves our lives, fear too has its purpose as a buffer between us and everything that causes us pain.
So we avoid confronting our pain. We get angry and blame others to cover the pain.
But feeling the pain — walking through the pain — is necessary for healing the trauma. In my many years of clinical experience, I’ve never known anyone to die of a feeling. People die because they’re running away from a feeling.
Until you heal the trauma that’s imprinted itself inside you, it will be very, very difficult for you to give up all the things that numb the pain of it.
The Collective Energy of Community
The Get Unstuck program isn’t AA — but there are some powerful ideas in AA that Get Unstuck roots itself in. So what makes AA so powerful?
AA is the largest group of people who don’t like groups. Addicts want to do things for themselves. They don’t want to trust others, and they don’t want to ask for help. Ironically, the solution is to be a part of a group! To tell the truth, share who you truly are, reveal your vulnerabilities — that’s when then the magic happens.
When I started going to AA, my heart told me that I belonged there. I just knew it. These meetings were essentially a bunch of people sitting in a room talking and bitching about life, but there was collective energy beyond that.
At that point in my life, I was so full of shame I couldn’t look people in the eye. When you’re simply surviving and suffering, it’s not natural to put yourself in such a vulnerable place. But I kept going.
Could it have been a higher power that helped me to stick with it? There’s certainly nothing human about it — no gregarious leader, no big downtown buildings. There is nourishment that comes from the human connection and support I found within AA, and after a while, the ‘cup’ inside of me was starting to overflow. I was tapped into a fountain.
The most important part of treatment is tapping into what allows you to go beyond what you think you are. If you want to hear about miracles, go to church. If you want to witness miracles come to AA meetings. So many people have been dead and brought back numerous times… and they end up living functional, amazing lives without poison.
Ditching your Ego
This morning, I allowed myself to let go of the things that were burdening me. Not just mental but also physical. As I dropped into nothingness, where I go to meditate and connect with my higher power, I was able to let go of everything that doesn’t really matter.
That’s where I tap into a source of loving energy to replenish me and help calm my mind.
Ego brings forward fear and stress and chaos. It’s terrified of losing control. When I can quiet down, I can tune into the unconditional loving energy of the higher power. Then I can see or hear or feel what I want and need more clearly.
By getting my ego out of the way I am making my head quiet. I’m going to that place of silence within. I won’t question why, why, why? Why me? That’s the ego show.
This program is about getting rid of ego, bringing you out the other side with an understanding that your ego’s impression of you was built upon a faulty premise. At your essence, you are deserving of love — and have been since the moment you were conceived. So if you aren’t actually all these things you take on, your successes or your traumas, then who am you?
The truth is that the ego and my self-will and my independence make me come up with things. When that list of options has been exhausted, THEN I try to reach out to a higher power.
So often we exhaust a list of options set out by our ego and our self-will and our independence before we reach out to a higher power. I urge you to turn this on its head. Ask for that help FIRST. Doing so has taken me beyond faith, to trust. Faith is when you don’t have proof; I have proof that it worked every single time.
Call it whatever you want to call it. If I’m asking and I’m open and I’m getting something back beyond my wildest dreams, then… I’M IN!
Letting Go
Surrendering, letting go and handing control over to a higher power will take you through hell — but it will reward you in ways you never thought possible.
There are so many people who have tried this, and the results have been incredible. If I ask and I’m open to receiving what comes to me, rather than trying to control a situation to get what I want, it comes back better than I imagined.
At one point in time, you would have had to force me to do something I didn’t want to do. To go from there to seeing surrender is one of the most powerful, rewarding experiences on a long road travelled!
Breathing Exercise
Start by letting your nerves calm down, letting yourself be quiet. This allows your body to rejuvenate itself and find balance. Our system is so complex, even science doesn’t fully understand it.
Go quiet, and allow wisdom to come to you, or through you. Allow yourself to be with this expanded consciousness. Let your body rejuvenate. Now breathe:
- Breathe in and out through your nostrils only.
- As slow as you can, count to six while you breathe in.
- Count to six while you breathe out.
- Repeat for 5–10 minutes.
The counting helps your mind stay on track. Your mind will always be looking for something to do, so when you notice it starting to wander, just bring it back to the count.
The discipline to do this is part of what we’re trying to build. It starts with a commitment to yourself — that you’re going to take action. That you’re going to do things you wouldn’t normally do… to enhance the quality of your life.
Finding Your Awakening
I am a spiritual being having a human experience.
When you learn this and believe it, it gets everything out of the way. You get rid of all the false impressions the ego holds onto. Then we get back to our true, divine nature, cells brought about by the life force connection.
After my meditation this morning I felt like a different person. All I had to do to shed the anxiety and fear I was feeling was to get quiet, breathe, and let go.
The reality is, most of the things causing that stress, I don’t have control over. But quiet is where I get relief from the stress — and that’s where the suffering is.
Surrender. Find a solution that doesn’t seem to fit into the psychological realm.
A place where you just know.
Read MoreYou Should Be Grateful for Your Addiction
We’re taught to look at addiction like a negative thing that happens to us.
But that’s not really what it is at all, and to think of it that way is to misunderstand an addiction’s true function.
Addiction, at its most fundamental, is a primitive reaction to trauma — or, essentially, a coping mechanism for your life. Your addiction is a human predicament that is programmed within you as a child. It has nothing to do with who you are.
We have to reframe the narrative around addiction. Instead of perceiving addictions as monsters that are out to get us and ruin our lives, try to see them for what they are: your very human strategies for surviving trauma.
You didn’t choose that trauma, and you didn’t choose your addiction. But you can choose to see your addiction as a challenge that makes you a victim or empowers you to live a fuller, richer life.
What is Addiction, Really?
Let’s back up for a moment and address the fundamental question here: What is addiction, really? When I say addiction, most people think of drugs or alcohol. But in reality, this issue is much larger than any one group or addiction that develops in reaction to trauma.
You can be addicted to anything — belief systems, thought patterns, emotions, depression… The object of your addiction isn’t itself necessarily bad. It’s your relationship to that thing that can become problematic. The key to overcoming your addiction is to heal the pieces inside of you that are driving your addictive behavior.
Often, trauma comes from the belief that we’ve done something wrong and need a way to deal with it — it usually starts in childhood. As children, we blame ourselves for the things that cause us distress. As children we are supposed to be self-centered.
All too often, the trauma of this shame imprints us and creates certain negative beliefs within us that are deeply painful. So, we find dependencies to help us cope.
Our brains instinctively come up with this survival strategy. It starts out at the most primitive level — it’s not a thought process, but a primitive, ingrained response. The good news is that, as long as you’re still here, that strategy has worked!
But if addictions are survival strategies, why are they bad?
First of all, we need to move away from these rigid ideas of good and bad, black or white, all or nothing. Addictions are survival strategies, yes, but there are better ways to cope with your pain — ones that can guide you back to your joyful, happy, and free inner nature.
This is why things that don’t seem objectively bad can still be harmful addictions. Think of someone who is a compulsive reader. You may think, “What’s wrong with that? They aren’t hurting anyone by spending time inside reading books.”
They may not be hurting other people, but they’re using fantasy as a way to cope with pain. Disappearing into books and spending all your time absorbed in fantasy worlds is a very limited way to live your life.
Survival strategies take up a lot of space in your life. You depend so much on the thing that keeps you going that you have less and less room for anything else. If I smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, I’m dependent on a system. Because that system is working, it keeps me stuck, because it brings me comfort — and I think that’s the best I can expect.
We have to realize that none of those things that imprinted us as children were ever our fault, or anyone else’s. Children can only do the best they can with what they have to survive. We have to forgive ourselves. We have to do the work to reprogram the blame and the way it has made us feel about ourselves.
Addiction doesn’t give us what we need for courage or confidence. It doesn’t allow us to have experiences that require self-reliance, courage, or a sense of responsibility
Open your life to something bigger. Addicts tend to be very black-or-white with no in between. Everything is either intense or boring. All or nothing. There’s a resistance to the middle way. But, if you look at a rainbow, every color exists between black and white. There’s richness in the middle — you just have to be open to the wonder.
How Reframing the Narrative of Addiction Can Transform Your Life
Our addictions got us this far, and for that we should be thankful. Try saying thank you: “Today, I’m here because of you, and I appreciate you. But today, I’m ready to make room for other things.”
Yes, you should be concerned about bad habits detrimental to your health and wellbeing. But this survival mechanism comes down to two things: either you’re going to die or stay alive.
Instead of thinking what we are traditionally led to think, reframe it this way: if you have an addiction, no matter the damage it’s done, the addiction did what it was intended to do – keep you alive! You survived. You are a survivor. You are surviving.
Get Unstuck
The neural pathways you developed in response to trauma as a child can be reprogrammed. But you have to be willing to walk through the muck of those old traumas and hurts. You don’t have to look at your addiction as the enemy.
Doing that work is not easy. It will, however, reveal the richness that exists between the existing black-and-white ideas about addiction and healing. It can take you from simply surviving to living a rich, full life beyond your imagination.
Confronting Your Trauma
There is a way to move from survival mode to living a rich, full life beyond your imagination. But you have to do the work. All the scary, painful things in your life… you have to confront them.
Think about going through a breakup. Maybe you used alcohol or food or gambling to numb the pain before. What about this time? The goal is to mindfully and deliberately move through the pain as if walking through a fire. No excuses. No search for sympathy.
You’re going to move through the pain so you can get to the other side. You have to matter enough to yourself to walk through the most painful experiences so you can access the full richness of life.
You are the only one who can do the internal work that is necessary for me to move forward and create change.
Building Trust and Connection
You have to do the work yourself, but you don’t have to — and shouldn’t — do it without support.
Generally speaking, people who get into addictive habits have learned not to trust others along the way. Most of us grew up without proper connections with the people we relied on most. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or how much money you had — even some of the richest people in the world grew up without emotional connections to their families.
But it’s those connections — or lack thereof — that define our ability to love ourselves, feel worthy, and develop healthy habits. We develop neural pathways that give off vibrations that make us drawn to what we grew up around. Whether they’re good for us or not, their energy is familiar, and that prompts a sense of belonging.
We have to break this pattern by bringing people together. When you develop a recovery system of bringing trustworthy people together, you create a collective network of people who have a common goal and develop real, supportive relationships.
Building trust with people helps us to create new neural pathways that allows us to go out into the expanded population and open ourselves to all the languages of life that we’ve previously kept silent.
Is it Time for You to Get Unstuck?
If you want to step outside the patterns of your addiction, you have to do the internal work. But to even start that work, we had to recognize a problem. Our addictions are big red flags that help us recognize the deepest challenges within us — and every challenge in life is an opportunity to move through it.
To your addiction, you can say, “Yes, thank you for helping me survive. No, thank you, to this as a way of life.”
The Get Unstuck program can teach you powerful, practical techniques to heal your inner trauma, and you’ll be able to implement what you learned within a community of support that will help you rebuild your trust in human connection — and in yourself.
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