Archive for August, 2008
If Life Were Fair, I’d be Dead
If life were fair, I’d be dead…I heard a guy say this in an AA meeting once. He’d been sober forever, and serenity and wisdom oozed from his every pore. He didn’t have to speak for you to know you were in the presence of someone who’d thoroughly thought things through, but when he did, gems like this dropped from his lips. I loved him deeply and madly, but alas, he spurned my advances, steadfastly refusing to sponsor members of the opposite sex. I could only admire him from afar and glean what precious wisdom I could from hearing him speak in non-intimate settings. Ah, well. The memories are fond nevertheless. And in thinking back on this particular statement, it makes as much sense today as it did then.
When he said it, I knew instantly what he meant. Addicts who’ve found a new way to view the world know, perhaps better than any other category of human being, what it means to live pointlessly on the edge, take stupid chances, flirt with petty disaster, and live to tell about it. I’d had many such experiences: driving drunk and under the influence of many drugs; ingesting mystery drugs purchased from complete strangers; allowing said strangers in my car and home (and sometimes even more intimate places); rubbing elbows with greasy dealers and other opportunists who inhabit the seedy world of street drugs; alcohol-induced fits of rage; cocaine-induced seizures; and what was—oddly, it might seem—most frightening at the time, blackouts, which came with more and more frequency as the end of my drinking career neared. In any one of these instances—and they all happened with remarkable regularity—I could easily have met a tragic demise, easily become another statistic for the dreaded War On Drugs. I shudder when I think of all the crazy and foolish risks I took. Was I stupid? Self-destructive? Temporarily insane? All of the above?
Perhaps none of the above. I think I was merely young and naïve, and became accustomed to a way of life which was all I knew, and which I kind of liked, despite its craziness and despite feeling like hell mentally, physically, and emotionally a lot of the time. In the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, “The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.” For a while.
Anyway. The point is, life is not fair—and that is cause for rejoicing and celebration! Kiss the earth and give thanks to whatever or whomever you choose to call God: life’s not fair. Because if it were, I’d have likely died long ago from my bad choices and foolish ideas, and maybe you would have, too.
You don’t have to be an addict to figure this out; addicts just get more opportunities than most to figure it out early on. It’s one of the many perks of answering the calling at the wrong address. You know you done wrong and got lucky. There’s no fooling yourself about it. But once you get that, where do you go from there?
The unfairness of life can be a hard idea to accept because even as we come to terms with it, we (most of us, anyway) struggle with a built-in sense of justice and fair play that seems contradictory. Maybe you’re still thinking that life is supposed to be fair, that there is a committee of your peers somewhere making just decisions on your behalf and you just haven’t found them yet. Or maybe you think justice will occur after death, meted out by some committee or Personage residing in the sky. Maybe you just think it’s not fair that life’s not fair. None of these ideas could be further from the truth, and all of them hamper our ability to understand the world and ourselves in a positive way.
The truth is, we don’t always get what we deserve. Good deeds and people often go unrecognized, while bad deeds and people often go unpunished. The undeserving and untalented get ahead, while the rest of us toil away in obscurity. One person has an idea and gets ridiculed; someone else has the same idea and becomes a billionaire. Luck plays a much larger role in success and failure, sickness and health, than we care to admit. All of this may seem wrong or even evil, but it really isn’t. In fact, it’s the opposite: it’s good and necessary and essential to everything that makes life worth living.
If life were fair, it would be dreadfully boring. Consequences of every act and every situation would be predetermine-able. Incentive as we currently understand it would vanish, replaced by some automatonish process of calculating outcomes; void of passion, soulless, dry. If life were fair, the whole idea of making decisions might become obsolete since consequences would be so completely predictable.
If life were fair, we might well eradicate misery, pain, and even crime, but we would also lose mystery, delight, and ecstasy. Adventure would be nonexistent. Surprise would be a concept existing only in our minds.
If life were fair, everything that makes us human—questioning, challenging, the drive to improve our lot, the capacity to learn from our mistakes, the capacity to appreciate the unexpected, the desire to create order from chaos (for example)—would disappear.
In summary, unfairness is one of the aspects of human life that makes it the most wonderful and precious entity in all the Universe. This is not an exaggeration! I believe that if we were given an opportunity to live in a “fair” world, we would want the old one back faster than we could say “egalitarianism.” The tiniest glimpse into the horrors of utopia would be enough to convince us.
That built-in sense of justice and fair play is important, though. Critically important. The very essence of being human means trying to do the next right thing, and we must never cease honing and perfecting our idea of what that is, and working toward the kind of world where everybody has that option. Call it what you will—the drive toward wholeness, the creative impulse, the instinctive sense of survival—the desire for justice is as much a part of our makeup as indifference is a part of the Universe’s. And the better we understand this, the better we understand the nature of our humanness and the nature of our connection to and place in the Cosmos.
Pining or ruminating or sulking over the unfairness of life is a waste of time, and misses the true point, which is that we must live with ourselves, and the only justice that matters is the justice that allows us to do so with dignity. The only real justice we can truly attain is internal: the choices we make determine whether our internal life is heaven or hell—full of serenity, or full of misery. Regardless of what’s dished out to us by the Great Lunch Lady in the Sky, the choice of how to live is ours and ours alone. Paradoxically, nothing could be fairer than that.
Yes, life is not fair. But mostly that works in our favor. That I’m here to tell about it is living proof.
Old Tapes Never Die, They Just Lose Their Power
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. ~Ambrose Redmoon
There is often an expectation when we start working on ourselves that we are going to eventually become brand new people, with none of the problems, pain, and struggles of our old identity. All the things we don’t like about ourselves, all the personality traits that make us feel less-than, unlovable, or hard to be around; we think these will all go away at some future point when we become “cured” and life will open its gates and “really” begin for us.
This is not what growth is about.
Years ago I heard someone say, “The old tapes haven’t stopped playing, I just don’t listen to them anymore.” This was an epiphany moment for me. Although not consciously aware of it, I realized I had been expecting my “old tapes,” all that negative self-talk running amok in my head, to stop playing some miraculous day when I finally “got healthy.” This belief was not only wrong, it was counterproductive to real growth. In trying to eradicate what was a deeply ingrained part of me, I was fighting upstream, pointlessly expending a lot of psychic and emotional energy, all the while missing the real point and the real work.
It’s only natural, I suppose, for a person to think getting rid of their negativity and character defects is the goal of personal growth. After all, those things are the reason we were attracted to the self-improvement world in the first place. We wanted to feel better, we wanted to be free of the demons that plagued us so relentlessly. Of course we want all that ikky stuff to go away. Who wouldn’t?
But a sounder approach is to shift focus from banishing what you don’t like about yourself to learning to be more positive. How do you do this? Well, one way is to immerse yourself in positive thinking. After my epiphany, I realized that if I didn’t want to be bound by my old tapes, I was going to have to create new ones. So I began reading books about how to be positive, how to be productive, how to be successful, how to do creative visualization. (This is different, I discovered, than reading about your issues.) I bought an inspirational desk calendar, and I taped the thoughts that resonated with me in places where I would read them every day: my bathroom mirror and walls, my desk at work, on my refrigerator. I bought cassette tapes (this was before cars had CD players) and listened almost exclusively to motivational, spiritual, and inspirational speakers; I went a long period without listening to music or the radio at all. And speaking of music, I realized that a lot of the music I listened to was angry, so I found new, more peaceful music to listen to. I made a conscious effort not to voice negative thoughts and opinions, to catch negative thoughts before they played themselves out, and to spend less time with the more cynical of my friends. I paid more attention to people I had considered Pollyanna-ish. I worked at being kinder and more tolerant.
This was all incredibly difficult at first. It felt dishonest, artificial, awkward, foreign, and fakey. But as foreign as the idea of optimism was to me, I intuitively knew it was important, and the idea of actively, consciously creating “new tapes” made sense. I kept at it, and slowly but surely, negativity ceased to always be my automatic response to the stimuli in my environment. Sure it was still there, but it was gradually losing its power over my psyche, shrinking down to a more proper size, making room for new ideas and possibilities.
As important as this was—and it was really important!—something else happened through this process that was even more important: radical self-acceptance. In the process of teaching myself to be more positive, I discovered that not only are the old tapes part of who I am, they are a good and necessary part of who I am. They had served me well in my life, saving me in an impossible childhood situation. And when put in a more realistic perspective, they would (and do) continue to serve me well.
The truth is, all the internal obstacles I’ve had to navigate are just as responsible for my being who I am as my positive traits. Probably even more so. Adversity helped me become strong. Pain helped me become sensitive. Feeling different helped me become tolerant. Even my character defects are positives in disguise: resentment saps my energy, but anger is where my power lies when I need it. Feeling inferior erodes my self-confidence, but recognizing things I can work on keeps me open to change. And fear can be one of the most debilitating feelings in the world, but it can also keep me from making potentially dangerous or stupid decisions. Paradoxically, all of my shadow aspects are potential forms of power, strength, and energy.
The idea is that we don’t want to eradicate the things we don’t like about ourselves, we want to integrate them in a more positive form. Eradication doesn’t work anyway; we’re largely stuck with who we are. At some point I realized that I would be carrying around my childhood grief for the rest of my life; that it, and all the “defects” that went along with it, were part of me. Rather than feeling discouraged about this, though, I felt strangely hopeful, like I’d come to terms with a basic truth. Finally, I could quit fighting the upstream current and flow with the Stream of Life.
Just as courage is not the absence of fear, growth is not the absence of negativity. Sometimes those old tapes may go away entirely, but if we wait around for that to happen, there’s a good chance we’ll miss out on living our lives.
The Heart of Addiction: A New Way to Look at Addiction
I’ve just finished reading The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors
Dodes has developed a very specific definition of addiction. He says “Virtually every addictive act is preceded by a feeling of helplessness or powerlessness. Addictive behavior functions to repair this underlying feeling of helplessness. It is able to do this because taking the addictive action (or even deciding to take this action) creates a sense of being empowered, of regaining control—over one’s emotional experience and one’s life” (p. 4). Dodes goes on to say that “It is this rage at helplessness that is the nearly irresistible force that drives addiction” (p. 5), and “Every addiction results from a redirection of energy to a substitute or displaced action, usually because another, more direct action is not considered permissible” (p. 6). In other words, we become addicts because we feel helpless and rageful, and in the addiction we find some sense of control.
But, says Dodes, it isn’t all feelings of helplessness that trigger addictive behavior; that is too facile a definition. Rather, addiction is a response to a specific trigger, unique for each individual, and treatment involves discovering what our own personal triggers are so we can make better choices to deal with them. He gives many case histories of people struggling with different addictions—alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, sex, Internet chat rooms—who, once they identified their specific triggers, were able to find non-addictive ways to deal with their feelings. More importantly, they were able to address the helplessness and rage directly, and in doing so, remove the addictive urges.
Such identification is not a simple task. Dodes’ approach is psychotherapeutic, meaning that it involves extensive talk therapy work with a knowledgeable psychologist or psychiatrist. Merely understanding that you had a troubled childhood is not enough. You must dig until you figure out the exact triggers that provoke addictive behavior. The benefits of such an approach are many, including increased self-awareness, increased sense of autonomy and control, and of course, the eradication of addictive behavior.
One of the most interesting aspects of this view is that the addictive impulse is not self-destructive. Rather, it is an attempt at self-care. Certainly, most addictions do have self-destructive results, but the displacement itself is a healthy attempt at self-care gone awry.
The Heart of Addiction is the first literature I’ve seen claiming that addiction is rooted in self-care and not in self-destructiveness. I think this is important because it allows us to see addiction in a different light, a light that is both self-accepting and self-empowering. Traditionally (for the last fifty or so years), 12 Step groups, medical professionals, and the vast majority of treatment programs have considered addiction a physical disease, like diabetes, that you have no control over. Although there is no scientific evidence that addiction is a disease, this “disease concept” has helped millions of addicts get past the shame of their antisocial or immoral behavior and seek help for their problem. Dodes’ view also gets past the shame and remorse of addictive behavior, but does so by focusing on the root psychological causes of addiction. This seems to me a much more intellectually honest approach, and one that the addiction treatment world ought to take seriously.
I got sober in AA and I am grateful that I found the program and that it worked for me. But I have always been fascinated in the root causes and conditions of why I am the way I am, and AA was not the place to address them. In fact, I was told in no uncertain terms that doing so was dangerous to my sobriety, that I was “too much in my own head” and “not working the steps.” It was not in my nature to give up on this, though, so I kept quiet in meetings, but pursued these questions in another setting: therapy. I found this mix to be hugely beneficial. In AA, I found support and a concrete methodology for working on my issues of—for lack of a better term—daily living. In therapy, I found deeper understanding of who I was and why, and deeper understanding of human nature in general. I intuitively believed that both avenues were essential to my growth.
The Heart of Addiction validates this for me, but in a way I never expected. In all my years of therapy, I never directly addressed the triggers that set off my addictive urges. In thinking about them since reading the book, I’ve realized that I’ve still largely not dealt with them! And if I, someone hungry for psychological knowledge, haven’t dealt with my core triggers, then think of how very few sober members of AA have done so. Perhaps none. This would explain why, after years of sobriety, people who stop going to meetings can return to drinking and end up in the same dismal situations they got sober to escape.
Sure, the disease model explains it, too, but it doesn’t explain why going to meetings where you talk about your problems seemingly holds the cure for a physical illness. Dodes’ explanation does.
The upshot is obvious to me. AA is another displacement, although a vastly healthier one than active addiction. I do not say this as a criticism, but I do believe it’s important to recognize the limitations of our beliefs, because such limitations are ultimately limiting to our growth. I think we need to be open-minded about the limitations of all disease model approaches to addiction, which have dismally low long term “cure” rates. (The numbers I’ve found vary so much that I’m not going to link to any of them. However, from my personal experience, I guesstimate the rate to be around 10 percent.)
When evidence is lacking or controversial, as it is for the disease model of addiction, I believe any view that puts personal choice ahead of personal powerlessness is the more intellectually sound one, and also the more moral one. If you read The Heart of Addiction, you may come to a similar conclusion.