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ОглавлениеA huge percentage of the recovering drug addicts I know seem to have a few things in common, other than their disease: intelligence, creativity, individualism, humor, and, yes, they all seem to have or have once had enormous amounts of ambition.
—KRISTEN JOHNSTON
in Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster
I’ve dealt with a wide variety of individuals afflicted with the disease of addiction, and in my estimation they are the most interesting, fascinating, and gifted people I’ve come across. They are also the most challenging; addicts are deviously manipulative and self-absorbed. Their illness causes suffering and pain for themselves, their loved ones, and the rest of society. Yet from their struggle comes an opportunity for all.
Recovery is about exposing and healing the darker sides of being human. And honing the skills necessary for sustained recovery from addiction reveals a life-enhancing recipe that can benefit everyone. From the darkness come exquisite, profound gifts.
People who get punched in the face by the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of addiction for decades and who live to tell about it are remarkable human beings on many levels. They are not just survivors, they are teachers. And it’s time we all paid closer attention to what they have to teach us about human well-being.
“What does the word ‘recovery’ mean? What do you get back when you recover? It is yourself,” Dr. Gabor Maté told me. Maté is the Canadian physician who authored In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. “There is always a loss of self before addiction starts, either from trauma or childhood emotional loss,” said Maté.
We lose that sense of self in childhood. A child cannot soothe her own pain and an infant cannot soothe his own distress. That movement outside of our self for answers is a very natural human movement. We always think something from the outside is the answer. So we use more substances, try to acquire more things, try to achieve more and more. A lot of people who aren’t considered to be addicts have the pattern of addicts. Who in our society isn’t cut off from themselves? Who doesn’t use behaviors to give temporary relief from stress and then can’t give up those behaviors? Addiction, or the capacity to become addicted, is very close to the core of the human experience. An addict’s recovery of self is a model for everybody in our culture.
That is what this book is ultimately about. Whether or not you are or have ever been an addict, whether or not you know addicts—in fact, even if you consider yourself hopelessly normal and not prone to any kind of addiction or seriously bad habits—you are still at risk and will benefit from the advice in these pages. Before you snicker with skepticism or indignation, let me tell you why I think this is true.
As a culture we’ve become addicted not only to gambling, drugs, alcohol, and the other usual suspects, but also to technology, the acquisition of material possessions, and every conceivable promise of instant gratification. More is better has become society’s mantra. We eat more, spend more, take more risks, and abuse more substances . . . only to feel more depressed, unsatisfied, discontent, and unhappy. You may know these symptoms firsthand, or recognize them in the lives of the people you care about.
What we are usually left with is the throbbing emptiness that sets in when the fixation on more brings us nothing but more of the same old feelings of want. Consequently, most of us will do or try just about anything to escape the recurrent stress, frustration, discomfort, and boredom. Those are the warning signs on the road leading to the cliff of addiction and social dysfunction.
We’ve entered an unprecedented period in human history, a period where technology dominates our waking thoughts and actions, and even our dreams. Smart phones, tablets, and computers; social media and the Internet—all have given rise to an entire new category of dependency and addiction. “There’s just something about the medium that’s addictive,” said Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude in a 2012 Newsweek interview. “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive behavior—or substance abuse of any kind—become addicted via the Internet and these other technologies.”
Brain scans support the observation that if you are a technology addict, you feel functionally unable to quit. You may not want to believe it, but the brains of technology addicts resemble those of drug and alcohol addicts—their prefrontal cortexes have been fundamentally altered, and abnormal changes are evident in brain areas that govern decision-making, attention, and self-control.1
IS ADDICTION THE NEW NORMAL?
Once you realize that the brains of technology and other addicts are different from those of non-addicts, you can’t rationally continue believing addicts engage in self-destructive behaviors simply because they are weak-willed or morally flawed. Despite the “Just Say No” antidrug sentiments voiced by former First Lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s, it’s not that simple for addicts. They can’t just say no, at least not without help. It’s clear that as a species we are rewiring our brains, making ourselves vulnerable to addictive behaviors at an ever-faster pace and in an ever-widening range of ways. The repercussions extend to everyone on the planet.
Though we don’t have a fix yet on the number of people who meet the criteria for technology addiction, we get a hint of how extensive the problem could be by looking at how many of us already actively wrestle with other toxic compulsions that negatively affect our health and lives. As I pointed out in my previous book Recover to Live, the following well-documented statistics for the United States are stark and revealing:
• 17 million alcoholics
• 19.9 million drug abusers
• 4 million with eating disorders
• 10 million problem gamblers
• 12 million with sexual compulsions
• 43 million cigarette smokers
To complete the picture, we must add in those who also admit to being in recovery from an addiction. At least 10 percent of US adults aged eighteen and older are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse, according to the results of an October 2012 survey by The Partnership at Drugfree.org. Add in those folks recovering from sexual compulsions, gambling addiction, smoking, and food-related issues, and we’re probably talking about one in five of all adults, maybe even one in four.
Has addiction become the new normal? I don’t know, but we do seem to have become a world of addicts. The toxic compulsions affecting so many people in the United States can be found spreading like a metastatic cancer to practically every culture on earth. To repeat, it’s not a crisis of moral weakness and lax discipline. It’s a brain disease. Medical science has now conclusively proven that.
Having this disease doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your quality of life. As the history of drug and alcohol treatment and recovery demonstrates, people can and do recover—and do so magnificently—emerging from the ordeal far stronger and better prepared for life’s many and varied challenges. The ways they do this offer a recovery plan for humanity itself, a plan outlined in the ten lessons in these pages.
TAKE ME TO YOUR ADDICT
While conducting interviews for Recover to Live, several treatment experts emphasized how our culture still tries to overlook addicts’ contributions to society and the common good. Stigmatized and marginalized, people in recovery from toxic compulsions are too often defined by their problems and not by their accomplishments, such as mastery of the life skills necessary to remain in recovery—a feat made even more remarkable because it occurs within that more is better cultural conditioning and overreliance on brain-altering technologies.
What can any one of us, regardless of culture or upbringing, learn from people in recovery from addiction? This book reveals the often inspiring and amazing gifts that addicts must summon and master to maintain the recovery life. But these gifts are usually overlooked by society because of the stigma still attached to the addiction itself.
If you are a non-addict, or “normie,” you may be asking, Where does addiction lead except to jail, a rehab center or hospital, the gutter, or an early grave, right? Not so fast. Consider what it takes to be a successful addict. You’ve got to function halfway decently to keep feeding your addiction. You need to summon the inner resources to survive one of the most punishing and treatment-resistant brain diseases known to man, and you must manage to survive long enough to get into recovery and become a productive citizen again.
Addiction is a full-time job that requires a lot of overtime. You’re an addict all day, every day, evenings, weekends, and holidays. If your addiction is to illegal drugs, your job is even harder because you need to stay out of jail so you can continue to feed your addiction. To constantly hunt down the drugs and get the money necessary to purchase the drugs, and to do this without losing your freedom, takes a lot of focus and skill. Believe it or not, these skills can become genuine assets when applied to pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
Even if your addiction is to something legal, such as alcohol or the human need for food or sex, feeding that compulsion requires the skill to prevent the rest of the world from knowing about the world you inhabit. So you hide and cover up, make constant excuses, and manipulate other people. To be a successful addict you have to work at it like your life depends on it. And often it does.
People recovering from toxic compulsions confront and surmount enormous traumas and challenges in their lives, much like cancer survivors or disaster survivors. And they have more than just their war stories to give us. They’ve mastered coping and wellness skills we all can strive to develop for healthier and happier lives of our own.
Moreover, many personality traits of addicts are the very qualities we admire and need in our leaders. This isn’t just a random theory or an addict’s wishful thinking, nor is it based on simply reviewing the long list of addicts throughout history who have had extraordinary lives and monumental achievements. In fact, a growing body of neuroscience research into the dopamine-using circuitry of the brain supports the contention that there is something special about the addict’s mental makeup.
“What we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex, or drugs,” observed Dr. David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, writing in 2011 for the New York Times. “How can this be? We typically see addicts as weak-willed losers, while chief executives and entrepreneurs are the people with discipline and fortitude. To understand this apparent contradiction we need to look under the hood of the brain . . . the risk-taking, novelty-seeking, and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.”
This idea of beneficial traits lurking in what otherwise looks like unbridled misery is gaining a research foothold in other fields of mental disorders. An October 2012 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that creativity is “closely entwined with mental illness.”2
It’s never been a secret in the creative professions that, as a group, they are more likely to suffer from the full range of psychiatric disorders, including addiction, compared to people in other less creative professions. Creatives have felt or seen the flameouts firsthand. But what is new is a growing professional psychiatric acceptance that these disorders “should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable,” noted Dr. Simon Kyaga, in an interview with the BBC. He and five Swedish colleagues at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm surveyed more than 1.1 million people, evaluating their psychiatric diagnoses and occupational data over a forty-year period, and found definite evidence of that link between creativity and mental disorders. “If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment,” said Dr. Kyaga. This would be a big step forward from the traditional black-and-white view of these diseases, meaning we can therefore “endeavor to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”
While we shouldn’t romanticize people with mental disorders any more than we should people burdened with toxic compulsions, it’s now possible to see the potential benefits of these afflictions without, of course, discounting the obvious liabilities and negative repercussions.
How can we separate the toxic side effects of these disorders and compulsions from the “silver linings”—the artistry, talents, and accomplishments? These are all questions worth asking because the answers, as I hope to show in this book, may ultimately benefit society and humanity as a whole.
WHAT WE ALL HAVE TO GAIN
Who among us hasn’t yielded to a temptation or craving that we later regretted? Is there any “normal” person who hasn’t experienced a temporary loss of control or recurrent obsessive thoughts, even if it’s just a musical jingle you can’t get out of your head? How can we release more creativity in ourselves without becoming too much of a risk-taker? What are the most important lessons to be learned from the collective recovery experience, and what role can those in recovery play in moving human consciousness forward?
At surface level the problem facing addicts is usually easy to identify: They can’t stop engaging in self-destructive behaviors. For self-described non-addicts who also want to improve their lives, the underlying problem or challenge usually isn’t so obvious. Yet in digging deeper, we find important parallels to what the addict faces. It can be the feeling of “stuckness,” a refusal to change, denial, dishonesty with self and others, a fear of the unknown, unrealistic expectations, feelings of entitlement, and selfishness. It can be a “quick-fix” tendency to self-medicate with toxic substances or to engage in risky behaviors to relieve boredom or stress. Such feelings and tendencies are, if nothing else, human.
Whether in the throes of a full-blown addiction or not, many of us regularly fail to make a connection between our current behaviors and the future consequences of those behaviors, a classic trait in addiction. As individuals no less than as a culture or even a species, we discount the future at our peril. We live beyond our means. We don’t save for tomorrow. We postpone getting into recovery from toxic compulsions. We think that Mother Earth will somehow, someday, clean up the environmental messes we make, just like some among us think that time alone will heal all of the emotional messes they’ve stirred up in their families and their lives.
“We ‘normies’ have a lot to learn from the lessons demonstrated every day by the recovery community,” explained Brenda Schell, program director at the Missouri Recovery Network, a group that works tirelessly to support people in recovery and educate the public about addiction and recovery issues. She continued:
People in recovery from addictions have overcome things that, before I took this job, I never imagined people could overcome. I’ve worked with people who were dirt poor, homeless, or came out of a prison or a ditch, and then someone, usually someone in recovery, believed in them and they got the help they needed to build a productive life. I am constantly wowed by that. I just don’t see that special bond and connectedness within broader society that I see every day among those in the recovery community.
Those in recovery cultivate an attitude of gratitude. We can all benefit from having an attitude of grace about what we have been given. Addicts in recovery have a willingness to pay it forward. They support each other in the recovery community. Society would certainly benefit from that model of behavior. The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t just pertain to alcoholics . . . How we [feel] powerless over a lot of what happens in our lives. How to take an inventory of ourselves. How to admit the exact nature of our wrongs. Being honest with ourselves and others. Being of service to others. Being a messenger of hope . . . pertains to all of us. These are messages and lessons that need to be carried beyond the recovery community to become a part of our whole culture.
Brenda Schell’s remarks underscore why I had to write this book. The skills and techniques that facilitate recovery from an addiction can also provide self-improvement opportunities for anyone, addicted or not. That’s what these pages are about.
SHEDDING LIGHT ON OUR DARKER NATURE
Those of us in recovery count our blessings and are grateful. We learn how to want what we have and this helps anchor us in the present time, which is crucial because, as research shows us, a wandering, restless mind is an unhappy mind.
Because you are reading this book, you either sense or have identified a need, an area of improvement you want to focus on. But remember, there is no quick fix, either in this book or in life. I’ve looked for all of the quick fixes and none of them worked as advertised. So, sorry, the quick fix is a myth.
This book isn’t a fad diet, either; it’s not some kind of self-help fantasy. But the lessons you will learn here can make life more tolerable. The principles in this book can help you have the fullest possible human experience.
A word of caution: Don’t set yourself up for failure by attempting to do all ten lessons simultaneously and incorporate them into your life all at once. Try working on them one at a time. Try to picture the ten lessons as life skills found on a circle. They can be arranged randomly on the circle or in the order I present them. They naturally overlap; life is too messy to ever be compartmentalized. Together, the ten lessons are a process you enter anywhere on the circle, based on mere chance, your own nature and preferences, or your current circumstances. As you get into the process, the order of the lessons that works best for you will become clear.
Think of them as a new lifestyle; changes you will slowly implement for the rest of your time on this planet. This thought can be scary, but just keep reminding yourself, There are no quick fixes; quick fixes don’t exist.
Consider this book an opportunity to investigate how your life is going. Ask yourself the following questions:
Am I generally content with the way things are?
Are my emotions mostly on an even keel?
Are my personal relationships strong and supportive?
Is there enough joy in my life?
Your answers may lead to the realization that what you need is recovery—a recovery that is unique, personal, and crucial for you. Recovery is about finding something we’ve lost, and what we have lost is our true self. Alienation from self is a byproduct of this culture of ours and its fixations, and we are all trying to find ourselves—whether we realize it or not. Addicts in recovery have discovered a process for achieving just that.
These pages give you the practical tools mastered and lived every day by those countless people who have successfully stayed in recovery. It may take some time to get off the Ferris wheel of repeating your mistakes over and over, but if you’re going to be compulsive about something, you can’t do much better than relentlessly pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
So consider this book a gift from the recovery community to all of humanity. Most of society continues to accept us addicts only reluctantly, not yet knowing what we have to give back. But what you now hold in your hands could, hopefully, change all that.
