Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritized to the point of destructiveness.

I have no power at all over people, places and things, and if I ever for a moment mistakenly believe that I do – and act as if I do – pain is on its way.

This is not diminished responsibility; I am responsible for all the things I’ve done. It’s just I wasn’t this me while I was doing them. My life is about preserving the conditions where it is less likely that I will quantum leap into the other guy.

Step 3 is a chance for us to review how our beliefs are working for us. Whether the beliefs are ‘pulling their weight’. In Step 2 we ‘came to believe’ that things could be better, now we are confronted with how that is likely to be achieved, and here’s the knockout punch, it isn’t likely to be by repeating what we were already doing.

this process is not about justification or correct allocation of blame. It is an inventory of feelings, feelings that are muddled and misunderstood and form a matrix of discontent that in the addict personality lead to destructive and unconscious behaviours. This step is about bringing unconscious behaviour to light. In the third column we write what it is in us that is affected.

The problem of denial is hopefully easier to confront. If you’re chugging through life in a job you kind of dislike, a relationship that you are detached from, eating to cope, staring at Facebook, smoking and fruitlessly fantasizing, you can sit glumly on that conveyor belt of unconscious discontent until it deposits you in your grave.

No one wants to be miserable but few people are willing to do the work required to enact change. My belief is that we accept our suffering and only attempt to tackle it through outward means.

I can’t take the hard edges of this world, this world I still can’t fully commit to, after forty-one years and with a baby on the way. Luckily there is a wind chime tinkling away in a tangled melody, just behind me, I think in some sort of gestural vegetable garden. And I know and you know that dancing sound and dancing light, in myth at least, are signs of the presence of a higher thing. And if there are no signs? If there are no higher things? Then why should we continue with our meetings and our traffic jams and our parasites? If these things signify nothing and are just fully automated emblems of only themselves what is the point of theatre and poems or schools and advertising agencies? There is no point. But I know and you know (don’t you?) that there is beneath the shash of thought and the wrought ascent and bilious plunge of feeling, some code of which the Sufis sung. Christ was, even if not the Son of God, surely not a blithering idiot, coming up with notions while picking at his nails. Whether you believe that Mohammed, peace be upon him, was the last prophet or not, there are evident truths in the prophecy that can scarcely be dismissed as babble.

An addict friend of mine said the day before, ‘A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical world and doesn’t commit suicide’. I like this quote. To see that it is all bullshit and not to clock off, that requires faith. Only faith will do. Only faith. Even if you’re double certain that there is nothing but space and dumb molecules out there, clattering about into symphonic and faraway futures, if you believe that’s all there is and don’t check out, you are hardcore. You must really love football or fucking or money or something and be okay with those things being only what they explicitly are, without implicit power, with no unravelling flag blowing behind them in limitless wind, back to before some unknowable moment of creation when this universe’s heart first began to beat.

I accept this all seems quite evangelical. If you bridle at this it’s likely that on some level you think, ‘I want to change, but not that much’, or, ‘I’d like to be a bit better but I like some of my negative attributes and materialistic, individualistic conditioning, it helps me to be a good consumer’. This is a popular perspective. Again, those of us who find this world a little hard to bear must query what our discomfort is telling us. Sometimes the road is long but eventually, once called, we must walk it. Remember, vitally, we work this program one day at a time. It is this manageable time frame that makes many of the absolutes that preclude egocentric conditioning conceivable. I am still astonished by my tendency to adorn and adore the bars of my cage. Only through this program have I known freedom.

None of us can adequately control the meteorology of other people: they’re nice, they’re nasty, they come, they go. We have no choice but to address, alter and amend the inner coordinate if we want to have a different model of reality, if we want to have more choices.

‘If you determine your life by external data, there will always be something to complain about. There will always be some facet of reality that is not going as you would like it to. There is always more to be consumed, people more rich and famous than you. To be clear, unless I’m much mistaken you’re not reading this in a ditch in the slums of Kibera with the barrel of a gun in your mouth while a rabid warlord bums you for his amusement are you?’ And yet that horrific scenario (other than having to read this book while it happens) is reality for some people. 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.

‘guilt is about what you’ve done’ and ‘shame is about who you are’? Guilt and shame tether us to old ways of seeing and being. They are very difficult codes to rewrite. Steps 8 and 9 are integral to the process of shifting our perception of who we are.

By maintaining a personal museum of resentments, we imprison ourselves within it.

The altruistic aspect of the step – ‘carry the message’ – in my personal experience often unfolds thusly: a person reaches out to me for help, I think ‘I’m not doing that, what’s in it for me?’ then I realize that I no longer approach life from that perspective and agree to be of assistance where possible. Then I find myself, for example, in a prison talking about drug addiction and I think, and sometimes say, ‘The person that I used to be would not have done this, he was too selfish. I on the other hand am doing it, therefore I am not that person.’ Usually I don’t mention that ‘used to be’ could refer to a time as recent as that morning. In my working of Step 12 is the understanding that I will always default to self-centredness; if I don’t work on my mental and spiritual state I automatically become selfish and indifferent to the suffering of others. A friend of mine says, ‘The spiritual life is like rowing a canoe away from a waterfall, if you stop rowing you are pulled backward.’

In chemistry, when two substances are introduced, if either component reacts at all, then both are changed forever. This program helps us to recognize early when we are transitioning from our ‘right mind’, a balanced and connected perspective, and into the warped perception of our disease.

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.

Perhaps this destructive drive in essence, which we call addiction, or a suicidal tendency, knows that ‘I’ is not ‘self’; that in fact the self has to go, self has to be destroyed for the Higher Self to be realized and if there is no spiritual protocol through which to achieve it, then we have to find another method, behavioural or chemical, to ameliorate the self to give us connection, to give us liberation.