A Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery – Part 1

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I often get emails from readers who are looking for advice on how to overcome their addiction problems. These tend to be people who are struggling to escape from alcohol or drugs using the more popular recovery options like the 12 Steps or therapy. A high proportion of the individuals who contact me want to go it alone – they are looking to hear about my experiences with self-directed recovery (aka going solo in recovery).

I always try to offer the best advice that I can, but the problem is that up until recently, I haven’t thought too much about why my path works – I just know that it does. This means that in the past, the answers I gave could be a bit vague. A few months ago, I decided to write down my approach to recovery in more detail, and this has all led to this series where I will outline a self-directed approach to addiction recovery. I’m not suggesting that this is some type of miracle cure, but it may work for some people. So far, I only know that this path works for me.

How to Build Your Recovery Life Raft

In order for this program to work you are going to need to build a life-raft. You will then use this to launch yourself into this new sober way of living. Once you get further along in your journey, you will be able to build a more impressive type of craft, but for the moment you just want something a bit basic. If you tried to create a craft that was too fancy right away, it might be difficult for you to manage so lets keeps things simple.

This life raft is going to have to see you through the early adjustment period of your new life, There may be some rough waves ahead, and you certainly do not want to take to the high seas unless that you feel certain that this craft is going to take you where you want to go. You need to have 100% confidence in your raft because if you go out in a vessel that is not ready it will be likely to sink, and this will damage your confidence. On the day that you are ready to launch, you want to feel as confident as possible that your raft will be up to the task.

OK, let’s dump the life-raft analogy for now and get directly to the point. The first thing that you need to do to break free of addiction is to create the right mental attitude. You will also need to develop some strategies to help you cope with the challenges that are going to lie ahead. To achieve all of this, you are going to need to do some writing.

Write Your Way Out of Addiction

I have talked on here before about how you can write your way out of addiction. This self-directed approach to recovery basically requires that you create your own recovery book- it does not matter if you do this on paper or if you do this on the computer. My guess is that you might have some reservations about writing this stuff down. Here are some things to consider:

- This is going to be your recovery manual and nobody else will ever need to see it.

- Your spelling and grammar does not matter one bit so long as you can read what has been written.

- It does not matter how messy your handwriting is – the only important thing is that you can read what is written.

- There is no busy-work involved in any of this – there is no need to write things down just for the sake of writing them down. You are completely in charge here and you write down what you want to write down.

- Don’t be concerned if your initial attempts at writing are a complete mess – that’s perfectly normal. Over time you will keep on refining what you have written, and your writing will become clearer as your thinking becomes clearer.

- You do not need to have any talent as a writer. In fact, you don’t have to even like writing – think of this as a type of medicine.

I would not suggest that you do this work unless I believed that it was important. I’ve no interest in wasting your time, and I’m not trying to help you become a better writer. I’m convinced that writing things down is crucial for a number of reasons including:

- The shit that is most damaging to us is the stuff that is rolling around inside our heads unchecked. By writing things down, you get this shit out of your head and into the light where you can deal with it.

- When we try to plan things inside our own heads, it will tend to be all muddled and vague – this is no good for the business we have set for ourselves. In order to break free of our addiction we must have clarity of purpose.

- One of the most important reasons for why this written work is important is that it gives us access to our best thinking on those days when our thinking is all fucked up. The problem is that when we need clear thinking the most, it tends not to be there. This is why we can start off our quit with the best of intentions, but we still fail because our best thinking goes AWOL when we need it most. By writing this stuff down, your best thinking will be there when you need it.

How to Build a Life Raft

OK, lets get back to the life raft analogy. In order to build this craft that is going to help you break into this new life you will need four things::

- You need a sail so that you can use the wind to propel your boat forward. This is your motive for quitting.

- You need planks of wood on which will be the part of the life raft that will keep you afloat. This is going to be the principles of your recovery.

- You are also going to need some type of rudder device so that you can steer your raft. This will be your strategy for dealing with early recovery.

- You will also need a destination. If you don’t have at least some type of basic idea about where you want to go, you could end up just going nowhere.

Ok, as you have probably guessed already, I know nothing about building lift-rafts, so please allow your imagination to stretch in order to accommodate my feeble account.

In the next article in the series, I will be start looking at each aspect of your recovery raft in much more detail.

I also talked about this approach in a recent video/podcast

I would be grateful for any comments you might have so don’t be shy.