Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

The ‘unmanageability’ here meant the negative consequences in my life were stacking up and importantly, once I start with drink and drugs I don’t know when, or if, I will stop. The very act of drinking or using sets me on a course that I am unable to reliably arrest.

when I yield control to that part of myself, when I drink or use or say ‘fuck it’ around any destructive behaviour, I don’t know when I’ll get my life back or what state it will be in when I do.

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’.

‘For me, today, on this planet I thankfully aspire to more than brief interludes of numbness through food, sex and the acquisition of delightful tight trousers with unpronounceable names; particularly as I now know they are all ciphers, poor facsimiles of the thing I’m actually seeking.’

I know, then, that looking at porn won’t make me feel any better. That to look at porn, even though I have this knowledge, would be a pointless re-tread of a well-worn path.

There’s no point you (in this instance in the role of a Victorian flower girl) pleading with Mr Hyde not to ravage you and kick over your begonias, telling him that he will ‘regret it in the morning’ because Mr Hyde doesn’t give a fuck on a stick. Far safer to ask Dr Jekyll to stop messing around with alchemy, when he is clearly dangerously unqualified, before he’s taken that first drink.

but surely the craving will find a new expression, like a magnetic field ordering iron filings. You can replace the filings but the pull stays the same.’

Every time I am prised free of a painful habit, my morphing condition shifts like mercury into a new behaviour.

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.’

There’s not much you can do in these cases except admire the battlements of the fortress of self-imposed unawareness.

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.

Basically we accept that the world is the way it is, but we ourselves can change.

have to chase the fear down to its essence like you’re hunting a tenacious mosquito. For example, I might feel afraid of going for a job interview. Behind this is the superficial fear ‘I might not get the job’, so what? ‘Well, if I don’t get the job, I won’t have enough money.’ Again, what’s behind that fear? ‘If I don’t have enough money, I will be poor, if I am poor I won’t be able to look after myself.’ So, the core fear in this instance is – ‘I cannot look after myself’.

perhaps you are resentful because you asked someone on a date and they knocked you back, or someone rejected your friend request on social media. ‘I am afraid that this person doesn’t find me attractive.’ So what? ‘I am afraid that no one finds me attractive.’ So what? ‘I am afraid that I will never find anyone to be with me.’ So what? ‘I am afraid of being alone’ – core fear, being alone.

example: my former belief that I needed to sleep with a lot of women, when unscrutinized could pose as ‘culturally acceptable’, ‘cool’, ‘fun’, ‘aspirational’, ‘harmless’. Once thoroughly inventoried this behaviour was exposed as ‘desperate’, ‘pitiful’, ‘toxic’, ‘lonely’.

And as we walk along we collect and collate the familiar, the path appears before our feet as we walk and we move further from home until we are too far away to recall that we ever even had a home.

It’s not about allocation of blame (we aren’t in court!) it’s about moving to a different perspective where we can live in peace.

began to see how I already lived by a program. A repeated pattern is a program.

that my fear of being alone meant I bound people to me who were not positive influences in my life.

‘Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. “My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.” Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present.’

Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. ‘My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.’ Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do, and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present.

But if you think about it any version of a personally authored reality is highly suspect because we are seldom taking into account the cosmic vastness in which we live and the microscopic grace that carries us through life.

we all feel worthless then who is the currency of our worth being measured against?

No one wants to be miserable but few people are willing to do the work required to enact change.

all these justifications are obstacles to change.

In justifying our misery we recommit to it.

I am still astonished by my tendency to adorn and adore the bars of my cage. Only through this program have I known freedom.

A modern view of prayer could be ‘an earnest attempt to commune with the aspect of your consciousness that is untainted by learned thought patterns or fluctuations caused by biochemical impulse’.

Humility is the acknowledgement of our relative insignificance – our insignificance when compared to the infinite, or even all the other people currently alive.

Being kind to my girlfriend is like cleaning my teeth or flushing the toilet: it’s good that I do it but if I don’t I will suffer.

I start being kind to people I don’t know, from whom I cannot derive benefit, now that’s advanced.

The prayer is an agreement with the Self that you would like to be.

‘We have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty, trivial desires. Real freedom is freedom from our petty, trivial desires.’

is hard to start anew if your past is littered with damage and your conscience cluttered with guilt and shame.

Why would I want to hold on to an emotion that hurts me, turning my body and spirit into a vessel for ‘justifiable’ pain?

This program helps me to change my perspective when what I would do unabetted is justify my perspective staying the same – ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got’. If you want change, you have to change. You have to make amends.

not my job to adjudicate the world’s people and supply them with a template for how they should be. In fact it’s none of my business. There is only one human being I’m in control of and that is me, and that is where the effort must be concentrated.

What is gained by withholding forgiveness, for ruminating on a concluded event, by holding on to bygone pain and wishing ill upon a man just like me? Nothing.

How can I expect forgiveness if I am unwilling to forgive?

It is of course wrong that I was touched up by a man when I was seven years old and when looking at my part I am not seeking to minimize his responsibility. What I am doing is releasing myself from the pain I have been unconsciously carrying.

essence it’s bad that it happened but it’s worse that I allow myself to be affected by it now.

I cannot control the past but I can control the present through forgiveness.

If I am given an opportunity, in this case, the privilege of free travel to work, I will exploit it like the East India Trade Company plundering their colony.

Step 8 is where we stop justifying our story. We stop clinging to the past. We recognize that if we want to go forward we will need to change. Part of that change is forgiveness and the willingness to look at our lives and the world differently.

settle for pleasure and we never discover bliss.

By not following instruction but instead relying on our own judgement we are reverting to our core problem, self-will.

This means I am detaching from external activity and seeking a different kind of connection.

What I need is to guide my consciousness away from patterns of thought that are deeply ingrained, unproductive and painful.