Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

Here is a more opaque example of self-centredness. If your partner is a bit wayward, you know selfish or difficult and you cast yourself as the downtrodden carer, pacing behind them going, ‘I don’t know what they’d do without me’, that is another form of self-centredness. You are making yourself and your feelings about the situation the ontological (steady!) centre of the world. Is there a different way that you could be you?

The unmanageability at its heart means that there is a beast in me. It is in me still. I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to be respected. There is a wound. I believe that this is more than a characteristic of addiction. 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.

a pain in the mind means ‘change the way you live’.

As if I have a negative faith in a self-destructive doctrine that life cannot be better than it is now, that I don’t deserve better, that I am worthless and dirty so who cares what I do to cope?

Until I made a decision to turn my life and will over to something other than me, what I sometimes call the ‘Ulterior Realm’, the unified truth between constant mutations or ‘the care of God’ as I ‘understand God’.

That God was an abstract authority icon used to placate the many so that the few could act with impunity. Or that God was a necessary placeholder for the mysteries of being while we waited for science to explain everything. Or that it was just an irrelevant attempt to get me to be moral, like Blue Peter or an AIDS awareness leaflet.

I thought, ‘I’ve worked hard on some of these beliefs.’ What is a belief really? A thought, in your mind, that you like having. If you like having it, it must be of benefit, it either improves your life or helps you to rationalize how bad your life is. I can’t think of another reason to have a belief.

Plus how much time have I given over to watching TV or staring out of windows or pursuing pointless relationships or looking at my Twitter mentions? Those hours

all add up and are sadly deducted from the overall life total. They are not a break from life, these ‘harmless’ distractions, they are life. They are life and they are death.

we have to let go of our opinion of how other people, places and things ought to be. My mum, my girlfriend Laura and the government of North Korea are not obliged to moderate their reality in accordance with my whims. If I make my happiness contingent on them behaving in a certain way, I am fucked. I have to petition the universe, my innermost self, God, or whatever it is that I believe might be more powerful than me, to adjust my view – the view that my feelings have a meaningful bearing on the external world.

it is for myself that this process is taken. To move me into alignment with a higher vision of myself. The tension, guilt and sadness I feel when living in addiction is to me an indication of an awareness that there is another way of being.

Power’, the thing that was going to make life alright. For an addict this is a big no-no. You cannot ever elect an ersatz totem, a false idol. Of course we want to, I do it every ten seconds. It could be a part in a film, a passing stranger or a can of Diet Coke – ‘If I get that, I’ll be alright’, I think, not those words, it’s quicker and more insidious than words. It’s just a shift of attention and intention from the understanding that I am here to be useful to the idea that I am an objective-pursuing robot.

Anyone who suffers from food issues knows how total and dreadful it is. Family members feel the same stranded impotence that a drug addict’s family feels. Gamblers that have crossed over know the helplessness, shame and despair that this condition brings. These are the outliers, in whom the universal condition is acute and therefore observable. Our natural yearnings are running amok and they are being stirred and nourished by a society that uses our desire as its fuel. Consumerism and materialism are creating a culture of addiction. We are all on the scale somewhere because we are kept there by the age we live in.

Step 11 is the plain compensation for giving up drugs. By which I mean, part of me just loves getting ‘out of my head’. What was that impulse?

I light four candles, one for my connection to consciousness beyond fear, memory, body and senses. One for my connection to my family. One for my connection to my work. One for my connection to other people. I ask that these connections be conducted through love.

E.g. I know I cannot be happy pursuing instinct and will. I devote myself to channelling love, to serving beauty.

So, ‘having had a spiritual awakening’ – that means you’ve woken up to the reality that you and your thoughts are not the centre of the universe, they’re not even true and if they’re not making you happy – it’s time to let them go to make room for ‘new thoughts’. ‘We tried to carry the message to the addict who still suffers’ – we are kind to people now and try to help them, rather than looking at them as lumbering flesh vending machines that might be able to dispatch a little parcel of pleasure if we put the right penny in the slot. ‘And to practise these principles in all our affairs’ – in our family relationships, our marriages, our jobs, our cars – we now try to be

thoughtful, compassionate and kind. Very simple to type, not so easy to live by. Impossible to live by perfectly but we at least have something to aim for now and to try for the rest of our lives. This need not be done in Jerusalem, this is better done where you are now. Within. Or maybe in Slough.

if you are lost in your life and afraid

to articulate even to yourself how unhappy you are, how fearful of the future, of death, of other people, of being poor, of not being good enough, sexy enough, thin enough, tough enough, famous enough, if you feel that you are not enough and that if you could only ‘X, Y, Z, then everything would be fine’, I believe you are on the spectrum of addiction. By this definition: ‘Trying to solve an inner problem by outer means, in spite of negative consequences’.

its name by stinking of sheer, unadulterated gorgeousness, this goat is highly prized by the perfume trade (the bastards) as a few drizzling squirts of this musk it has in its glands, once extracted, blows the bloody lid off a titchy bottle of Paco Rabanne or whatever. The musk goat (or deer, I can’t remember) spends its whole life sedulously trip-trapping around treacherous mountain paths and getting its fur snagged in thistles (and possibly getting cross-bowed in the shank by Calvin Klein) in its determined and lovelorn pursuit of the source of this most bewitching fragrance, when in reality all it has to do is stick its snout up its own bum. Or wherever the musk gland is. So, you know, the source of this long-sought contentment is within.’