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.