There is Another Way

Shame is such a strong and powerful emotion. It’s the emotion that can drive addiction and at the same time, the one that can stop you from getting help. That was certainly the case for me. The world has come a long way in its attitude towards addiction. The line “hello, my name is X and I am an alcoholic” has almost become a cultural cliche. Whether thats helpful or not is something I will explore another time - but it shows how some addictions have become more socially acceptable to talk about. Yet others remain shrouded in silence. Take sex addiction for example. Sex is a part of every human story, literally none of us would be here without it. It’s often described as one of the most beautiful expressions of love between two people. But still… we don't talk about it. Many of us would happily discuss our relationship with the toilet before we’d ever admit to struggles around sex. When you stop and think about it, that’s absurd. As long as there are topics we can’t talk about, the...

This is a concept that I have struggled with, and I know that many other people in recovery do as well, especially in the beginning. I remember feeling that my early sobriety was so fragile, so unsteady that I needed to build a fortress around it to protect it. In practice that meant being quite self centred. Recovery was my number one priority for a time. Ahead of everything else. I felt that I needed to prioritise meetings, phone calls and reading over time with my family.  I do not regret that early behaviour, I knew that if I wanted to be the kind of person who could be the father my children deserved and if I wanted to be the husband that my wife deserved then I need to work on myself. I needed to make improvements. I needed to get sober. And that took some self centredness in the beginning. But quite soon after amassing some stable sobriety I soon realised that I had been given a gift. I really felt like I had been shown the secret code to life. I really felt that I had a res...

This is what addiction is! Addiction does not kill you with a fireball, it does not allow you to go through the pearly gates backwards at 100 miles per hour. Instead it is slow, painful and self inflicted. There are many who say that there is insanity in the illness called addiction. I can definitely see that there was insanity in my addiction. But it was not just that. There was also desperation, loneliness and pain. The insanity, in my case, came in the shape of repetitive self inflicted damage. I knew that the addictive behaviours that I was engaging in were hurting me. I knew they were hurting my family. I knew that they were putting everything I had lived for at risk. I knew that my addictive behaviours had a power equal to that of an atomic bomb in its ability to destroy my life. But did that knowledge stop me from engaging in them? NOPE! For me that is the complete, selfish definition of insanity. Each time I acted out, I added another metaphorical paper cut to what I later foun...

In today's post I wanted to get a bit ‘sciency’. It is all well and good me sharing my opinions and stories about recovery, but I know some people will need more than ‘it worked for me’ stories. The fact of the matter is that there is a lot that happens through a recovery journey that stands outside of scientific proof. It just happens because it does. If you track recovery back nearly 100 years to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, they would likely tell you that it all just happens because it does. But in these last 100 years Science has caught up with many of the ideas that were initially peddled as ‘beliefs’ and where that happens clearly I find it helpful to highlight the science and I try my best to understand it. One of the things that I have loved about my recovery journey is that it has rekindled my love for reading. Now I find myself reading any book that is even loosely connected to recovery and self improvement. Where once upon a time I would just read, now I study:...

For clarity - this is my first post where I attempt to describe my Higher Power, where I try to outline what it is, what it isnt, what it means to me and why it has become such an important pillar of my recovery journey. I hope, in reading it, you come to realise that there may be some validity in a higher power, that where we do not agree with the Higher Power models described by ‘mainstream’ religion, we have the freedom to create our own.  ‘ Theres something in the way she moves’ is the first line from a song, with the same title, that I grew up listening to. While I was growing up I never gave the song much thought. Sure I liked the melody, I would be mesmerized by the guitar playing, and I would sing along. But I never gave much thought as to the meaning behind the song. Truth be told, I thought it was ‘just another’ love song. A man talking about his love for a woman. And maybe that is exactly what the writer of this song (James Taylor) intended it to mean. But one of the man...