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Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status,
become prioritized to the point of destructiveness.
self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition.
1 We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable. 2 We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3 We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 4 We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5 We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6 We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7 We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8 We made a list of all persons we
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1 Are you a bit fucked? 2 Could you not be fucked? 3 Are you, on your own, going to ‘unfuck’ yourself? 4 Write down all the things that are fucking you up or have ever fucked you up and don’t lie, or leave anything out. 5 Honestly tell someone trustworthy about how fucked you are. 6 Well that’s revealed a lot of fucked up patterns. Do you want to stop it? Seriously? 7 Are you willing to live in a new way that’s not all about you and your previous, fucked up stuff? You have to. 8 Prepare to apologize to everyone for everything affected by your being so fucked up. 9 Now apologize. Unless that
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I don’t really want to tell you this, isn’t easy. This isn’t ‘How to change your life in ten minutes while sat on your arse writing messages to the universe and popping them under your pillow.’
the hardest thing I’ve ever done is toil under the misapprehension that I could wring pleasure out of the material world, be it through fame, money, drugs or sex, always arriving back at the same glum stoop of weary dissatisfaction.
I was introduced to the 12 Steps by a seriously committed atheist
My way of coping with the quiet anxiety of uncertainty was to find distractions and pleasures. I was never still. I was seldom reflective. I sustained myself with distraction.
As long as I can remember, I didn’t feel good enough. Now I’m a little older I think, ‘What does that mean, good enough?’,
I just felt inadequate, incomplete. Not good enough.
I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t reproach themselves momentarily after an orgasm achieved in solitude.
Step 1 invites us to admit that we are using some external thing, a relationship, a drug or a behaviour as the ‘power’ that makes our life liveable. It asks if this technique is making our life difficult. By admitting we are ‘powerless’ over whatever it is, we are saying we need a new power, that this current source of power is more trouble than it’s worth.
When I first heard about the program and the idea of abstinence was explained I thought both ‘fuck that’ and a kind of low resonant thud of acceptance that abstinence would be my path. One of the many paradoxes of the spiritual life I encountered here lies in the trite maxim ‘one day at a time’, as in ‘just try not to drink today’, ‘try not to eat unhealthily today’ and ‘try not to act out sexually today’. I knew they meant ‘you can’t ever drink again’, ‘no more chocolate. Ever’ and ‘you are now celibate’. ‘Your ballroom days are over baby.’ And they do mean that.
If you have food issues you will always need structure around eating. We have to accept it.
the rather Zen and incontrovertible truth that life is experienced in the present, beyond today your projections of life are conceptual. You don’t have to not drink for twenty years today. You don’t have to give up white bread for all eternity, right now. And if you do make it through today, and ...
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I don’t act out. Then the next day, or even an hour later I think, ‘Imagine I had done that? It would be over now anyway and I’d’ve detonated my family’.
I think it is a part of being human, to carry a wound, a flaw and again, paradoxically, it is only by accepting it that we can progress.
Pain is a signal, it’s some aspect of us that’s beyond our somewhat narrow conception of ‘self,’ communicating. A pain in the leg means ‘don’t put pressure on this leg’; a pain in the mind means ‘change the way you live’.
Mantra (put this into your own words) ‘Divine Power, Supreme Truth, love within and without, guide me to a new way of being. Help me to put aside all previous thoughts and prejudices that I may be open to a “New Way”. I ask the creative power deep within me to guide me towards the person I was always meant to be, to seek out relationships and experiences that will move me closer to this Truth.’
The step, stripped of reference to divine power, becomes ‘You don’t know what you’re doing – you’d better make a decision to accept help.’
No one said, let go of all this, look within, there is no real power in the world of things, only distraction and pleasure.
In fact half of humanity live in conditions of galling poverty so any of us that have swerved that nightmare would do well to not spend our leisure time bemoaning the fact that we are not laid out on a yacht with a Kardashian slurping away at our privates because, the sages are right, the material world is an illusion and its treasures all too temporal.
But actually, is there anything for which I can legitimately take credit? I didn’t give myself the ability to speak or write. I didn’t invent the English language, or the printing press or the camera, or any of these things upon which any success I’ve enjoyed has been built. This is why I need to be grateful for success, never proud of it, because in short, I have done nothing. It was all just there. When instead of grateful I feel proud, when instead of blessed I feel anointed, it is a sure sign that I am soon to be in mental peril.
