iMindShift with Steve Chandler

BEWARE of the MAKE-WRONG MACHINES

My path to recovery was definitely 12-Step. And I know that will anger a lot of people (because it already has) who think such a path is wrong and antiquated.

Books I enjoy and respect about addiction, like Amy Johnson's The Little Book of Big Change, advocate for Jack Trimpey's Rational Recovery which is a marvelous and effective approach except for one thing. It feels it has to make 12-Step wrong for RR itself to be credible and right.

Joseph Bailey's The Serenity Principle does the same thing. It creates a ridiculous caricature of AA and 12-Step in order to make itself seem more sensible and enlightened.

This attempt to create superior competing systems is not as helpful to the still-suffering alcoholic or addict as the authors may think. Trimpey's books are dripping with scorn and sarcasm about 12-Step programs that have saved my life and the lives of so many of my dearest friends and family members.

Religions do this too. Mormons say they have the only truth about spirituality. If I am happy and feeling spiritual and loving God in my Catholic way, well, I am just wrong and deluded and pathetic. I am to be pitied. My happiness is inauthentic. I'm not really happy. I couldn't be.  

Catholics say the same about Mormons. LDS is just flat out wrong and we, ourselves, are the only true lineage from the disciples to you! Trying to trademark God. Patent pending.

I've written about this dark alley in my previous books. The need to make others wrong in order to bolster my own feelings about being right. Soon I become a vicious, snarling, snarky make-wrong machine. I ridicule those who don't agree with me. I become more and more distant from them. Now I am an island. A human speck of disconnect.

But right! Oh, I am so right. So right I can barely stand it.

There is lucidity and hope and magic in the books by Trimpey and Bailey, which is why I am listing them in the back of this book as recommended reading.

But I also offer this important heads-up: what they say about AA and other voluntary, non-profit 12-Step programs (that cost you nothing to attend) bears no resemblance whatsoever to my 30-some years of experience attending those meetings. All the things they imply that AA "makes you" do and believe about God and yourself are just a total misreading of what really happens.

I am for anything that gets you clean and sober and gives you a second chance at life. Anything. There is no right or wrong where that is concerned.  

Like the song in West Side Story says, "When love comes so strong. . .there is no right or wrong. . .your love is your love."

Are you ready to make a BIG CHANGE?

Psychologist/Life coach Dr. Amy Johnson has written a very insightful little book about how we can find relief and, finally, total freedom from the habits that imprison us. Including the more desperate habits of drugs and alcohol.

In her book, The Little Book of Big Change, she correctly identifies urges, cravings and compulsions as mere thoughts. They are thoughts that we dramatize. When we call a passing thought a "craving" because of the sense of urgency it makes us feel, we think we need to do something fast about that uncomfortable feeling. So we act on the thought, the feeling  is relieved, and a neuronal pathway is formed. So the next time that thought reaches consciousness, and the uncomfortable feeling arises from it, we habitually act. We reach for a pill, or a smoke, or a wine bottle, or a doughnut. Or two.

In the brain there is now a vicious circle.

But what feels like an unbearable compulsion began as only a thought. If we believe and then dramatize the thought, the path to freedom and serenity is blocked.  And that path is everything.

"Compulsions obstruct the path by monopolizing consciousness," says Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor in Living with the Devil. "The hypnotic fascination they exert prevents us from attending to anything else. We behave like a rabbit dazzled by the headlights of a car."

Like rabbits, we are run over. Our death wish (compulsion for release) morphs us into road kill.  

We long to die to this discomfort. To not feel it.

What can we do about these thoughts that get internally dramatized in this way?

Stephen Batchelor says "To escape their grip does not entail suppressing them but creating a space in which we are freed to let them go and they are freed to disappear."

His recommended form of creating that space is meditation. But what if it were easier than that? What if we already knew about that space. . .that it was pre-existing inside of us? What if we were (already) that space? The space that the thought had shown up in? And if we just relaxed a bit, and grew still, the thought would continue on out of its own volition?  What if?

"As soon as I know the mind is distorted," says Shantideva, "I should remain as steady as a log."