Changing Course: (partial)

Addiction is your lack of ability to change a thought, a belief, a behavior, or the use of a substance. You are addicted when you will defend the use of that thought, belief, behavior or substance to the detriment of your, or others' health. Most people are familiar with substances addiction, which may include just about everything that can be ingested, like: salt, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium, cocaine, and meth, fat, soda, marijuana, sugar substitutes ...anything. You also can become addicted to attitudes and emotions. You can be addicted to a life role.
Everyone is addicted to something, but most of us are addicted to living the same day over and over again. The day or events you keep repeating happened last week, last month or last year. You repeat the same relationship again. You project your past relationship residue on the new or current relationships, not realizing that practically in every situation you will repeat the same relationship patterns time and time again, regardless of the other person. Why do you do this? Because wherever you go and whatever you do, something remains the same. There is a common denominator, and that would be you. You repeat the past for better or worse because you are attached to it.
Most of us are like the lead character in the movie Ground Hog Day4, Phil Conner, the main character, is a weather forecaster who spends the night in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where he is to do a news broadcast about the annual ritual of the groundhog “Punxsutawney Phil” emerging from his den to see his shadow. This will determine whether spring will come early or not. Phil covers the news story and after unsuccessfully leaving Punxsutawney due to an unexpected snow storm, continues to relive the same day again and again. Every day he awakes at 6:00 a.m. and the same music is on the radio, the same events are taking place outside the bed and breakfast he is staying at: people walking, the same cast of characters talking and interacting with Phil. He covers the same Punxsutawney Phil story every day. Initially he is filled with denial and a small degree of mystery regarding this turn of events in his life, but it quickly turns to contempt. He does everything he knows or can think of to change what quickly becomes a recurring nightmare for Phil, but to no avail. No matter what he does he wakes up each day to the same cold and dark winter day. Phil is trapped in a time loop of addiction. He is reliving the same day with the same beliefs and attitudes; with the same old paradigm of how Phil believes the world works. He is addicted to role of who he believes he is supposed to be, a series of images, past beliefs and interpretations about himself and the world. Phil is addicted and plagued by the entitlement of how he should be treated. He is addicted to the struggle of trying to change the people around him to fit into his distorted view of the world. Phil is truly a victim of his beliefs, as all victims are: That "if everyone else would just change, then I would be okay.” If everyone saw the world the way he did, everything would be "as it should be."
Phil grows increasingly depressed about being stuck in the same day, believing he is powerless to change his reality and the victim of some anomaly of nature. Phil befriends a couple of locals in a bowling alley one night and they all get inebriated. One of the guys points to a beer glass and sums up the way Phil is responding to his situation: "You know, some guys would look at this glass and they would say, you know, 'that glass is half empty.' Other guys would say that glass is half full. I bet you are a ‘the glass is half empty' kind of guy. Am I right?" When Phil tells his friends at the bar of his plight, that he is living the same day over and over again, one of them nods and says, “That pretty much sums up my life.” They too, are living the same day over and over even though they perceive each day as new. The only difference between you and Phil is that the date on the calendar for you is supposedly changing (but is it?)
Phil’s journey is fairly typical of human awareness and transformation, especially the grief and loss process over not having control over the world around him. First, there is denial that "this" could really be happening. Phil does his best to deny and avoid the obvious, which is that he is stuck in a quantum loop of living one of his least favorite’s days, framed by his distorted CORE beliefs. He then gets angry and obstinate with little regard for others, feeling victimized by all the people that cross his path. Phil tries to find a solution from the outside. He tries to manipulate and bargain with the world outside himself to make his inner world change but nothing he does works. He becomes aware that the world is not going to change to suit his personal needs so he lies, cheats, and steals in an attempt to remedy the uncomfortable feelings he is having. These behaviors do not work for long. Phil’s Victim voice was loud and clear. Phil had difficulty accepting his situation. He felt victimized by it. He was unaware and unwilling to take responsibility for creating it. Finally, Phil falls deep into sadness and depression where he repeatedly takes his life, only to wake up the next day in his bed, the same song on the radio, the same cold and cloudy day outside.
If you have the same relationships time after time, and they end poorly time and time again, you may blame the other person. Why do things end up the same way every time? If you believe the same things today that you did yesterday and expect things to be different, then the problems lies within your beliefs, it originates within you, not another person. If you carry with you the stress, trauma and events from your past, you may be unconsciously addicted to the story of your past and all the emotional baggage connected to it. This addiction means that you continually hold to your past mythology recreating the past in the present moment. You choose to live the same story repeatedly.

The Illusion of Control: (partial)

In 12-step recovery programs, the first step deals with an important agreement for transformation. The first step states: “We are powerless over drugs and alcohol, and our lives have become unmanageable.”12 You can replace the words “drugs and alcohol” with any word representing your addiction to admit that you are powerless over it. Being powerless does not mean that you are without personal power. It means you no longer seek personal power from things over which you have no control.
The illusion of the addictive mind is that you believe you have control over these things. The way to determine whether you have control over something or someone is to put it to this simple test: Ask yourself; “When I’m gone from this earth – when I transition from this body, will the thing, place, or person that I believe I have control over, stop being what they are?” If this person, place, or thing stops being who or what they are after you have left this dimension, then you have control over them. If they continue after you are gone, then you don’t. You do not have control over anything but your choices.
You do not have control of things that are outside of your choices. You either choose to do something or you choose not too. You either choose to be in recovery or you choose to be in active addiction. You choose to live from the voice of the Victim and Critic or you choose to live from your Artistic Self. You have control over your agreements and over what you put in your CORE belief system today. You can choose to continue with old agreements or you can choose to transform these agreements and live through new ones.
If you are using substances or self-harming behavior to change the way you feel, then you must believe that you do not have control over your feelings. You are using something outside yourself to change your feelings. Self-medication with substances, chemicals and behaviors to temporarily change the way you feel is a misguided venture, even though it seems effective in the moment. It is a survival mechanism; a way to veil feelings of shame, fear and loss. Substance use becomes an easy way to temporarily quiet the constant onslaught of your distorted CORE. Your CORE knows that this method of self-medication is only an illusion and soon enough you will start to berate yourself for believing the stupid lie. The voice of the Victim will join in to convince you that you do not deserve anything more out of life than the temporary numbing of a wounded and deserted soul. The Victim will create excuse after excuse to justify and rationalize the sedation of your feelings; your life.
This illusion of control drives your CORE agreements. When you believe you need to control a situation, you are stating that, “I am right.” When you believe that you are right, you imply that someone or something else is wrong. Frequently you will fight to the death to maintain the illusion of control because, for you, like many of us, control equals safety. It is your need to be right and your desire for control that holds your distorted mythology intact and keeps you from living life on life’s terms. Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, said, “Your opinion is nothing but your point of view. It is not necessarily true.”
Consider one person, trying in vain to persuade another person to think or feel the same way he or she does about a particular issue or problem. What you see in another person is based on what you have learned from your own experiences and what agreements you have stored in your own CORE. The truth is that you will see what you allow yourself to see, according to your personal filter system. What you see is your own “personal dream.” It is not necessarily true for someone else. This can cause tremendous suffering if you are unable to accept that others do not agree with your point of view.
What is undeniably true is that what you see in others is merely a reflection of the issues, problems, and concerns that may be alive in you as well and make up your personal mythology. Your experience of another person is a mirror — mercilessly reflecting the conditions in your own being. It is that simple. What you see in others is a reflection of a similar mythology or agreement existing within yourself. This is one of the most uncomfortable aspects of truth: what you complain about, what you criticize and judge in others is routinely a reflection of the exact nature of your subconscious.
When you enter into recovery and begin to deal with the root source of your addictive agreements, you begin to address the beliefs you have written into your CORE. You have the opportunity to begin to discover the source of your issues of abandonment, attachment, fear and shame. These are the issues that established your CORE belief system and these are the issues that keep your addictive mind medicating itself. Your CORE resembles a detailed photo album of who you think you are and how you are supposed to behave. It is these tangled and obscure beliefs that your addictive mind uses to turn you inward against yourself – the Artistic Self.

Owning Our Humanness: (partial)

The idea of transcending my addictive mind has always captivated me. It took years of personal work and continued quests into the womb of the desert to fully comprehend and discern the process of transcending addiction. When I began my life of sobriety I believed I had a disease that I would carry with me for the rest of my life. I was going to be an addict or an alcoholic no matter what I did or where I went. The labels traveled with me. I shared the shame of Hester Prynne, the young woman from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, "The Scarlet Letter,"31 who wore a red "A" by her breast. Hester’s “A” stood for adultery, mine for addiction. Wherever I went, addiction was in the forefront, there for everyone to see. Most importantly, it was there to make sure I would never forget the chaos and turmoil that my behaviors and compulsions to self medicate had caused. I never again would be able to use alcohol or drugs without immediately relapsing into darkness and shadow; a nightmare-like, hellish existence, driven by obsession and compulsion, feeding a hunger that was forever insatiable.
This is generally what I learned in my early days of recovery from drug and alcohol addiction in the smoke filled rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Within the fellowship of those meetings, the alcohol and cocaine were gone, but the caffeine flowed and the nicotine coated every surface, including my skin and hair. I remember sitting there in 12-Step meeting, listening to someone's story, one I had heard before. The speaker was an old-timer, someone with a decade or more of sobriety. This means they were free from illicit drugs and alcohol but not necessarily caffeine and nicotine (the latter being the most deadly and the most costly when it comes to medical problems). Two things happened to me that day in that meeting. First, I smoked my last cigarette to date, and second, I realized that when you tell a "drunk-a-log" story, you are continually reliving the past; reliving the mythology, firing all the neuro-networks that keep the story of your Addict in place. The use, the bingeing, and the fear of ever having to use again were all stopped for the moment, yet the story was forever being kept alive. I had told my story repeatedly hundreds, if not thousands of times. It helped initially to bring my awareness to the things that did not work in my life, my thinking and my behaviors. I learned through the 12-Step model to practice responsibility in my affairs and relationships. What I learned was that I could never change the fact that I would forever be an addict. I would carry this disease with me the rest of my life. There was something amiss here. Where was transcendence -- where was the healing? The label had become a crutch, at times liberating and at others, divisive.
The label of "addict" no longer held a pure truth for me. I know what my fellow 12-steppers would say: “You're in denial ... you are trying to take control back ... don’t forget, you are powerless!” I heard all the AA-speak flowing forth; I had used it a thousands times on myself and others.
That day, as the smoke began to clear, I realized that the old mantras were no longer true for me. The repercussions of stating this here within the hallowed walls of an AA meeting are not among my most pleasant memories. I held my tongue, even though my natural urge at the moment was to have my voice resonate out, shouting to whoever would listen: “Addiction can be transcended!” I repeated it over and over in my head. The idea became real; it began to flow through my blood that day. I took ownership. In that moment, I had the clarity, the understanding and the vision to venture into a new arena of recovery -- to witness my own awakening. I was now going to listen to my inner calling, my intrinsic spirit, my Artistic Self. That morning, as I walked out of the church where the meeting was held, I slowly and tenderly began to remove the stitching of the scarlet letter I had been wearing all those years.