Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition.

The first time I saw the Steps, I thought, ‘Hmm, a bit religious, a bit pious, a bit ambitious’. There was the ‘Christiany’ feel. Look at the third step, ‘turn our will and our lives over to the care of God’ – steady on old boy, that just sounds like a cosy version of ISIS. But now I know that you could be a devout Muslim with a sugar problem, an atheist Jew who watches too much porn, a Hindu who can’t stay faithful, or a humanist who shops more than they can afford to and this program will effortlessly form around your flaws and attributes, placing you on the path you were always intended to walk, making you, quite simply, the best version of yourself it is possible to be. In my case, as you will see, this includes a good many flaws, some odd thoughts and occasional behavioural outbursts.

There are now hundreds of 12 Step movements with new objects of unwitting fetishization: narcotics, gambling, food, gaming, sex, hoarding. There are in fact now sufficient organizations successfully deploying this method for us to assert that there is a common yearning that initiates, then fuels, the addictive cycle.

The reason I worked the 12 Steps was because I was desperate. The reason I continue to is because they have awakened me to the impossibility of happiness based on my previous world view: that I am the centre of the world and that what I want is important.

If you’re like me, you like to ‘half-arse’ things. Me, I’ll buy a book on healthy eating or meditation and that’ll be enough, I will use the social tool of ‘consumerism’ to satiate a need and leave the matter there. A book on healthy eating untouched on the shelf will not improve my Body Mass Index, whatever the hell that is. A book on meditation, flung to one side, will not elevate my consciousness and attune me to the Great Oneness behind my thoughts and feelings. If you’re not going to do the things suggested in the book you may as well spend the money on cake or blow it down the track. It also, and 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.’ It’s bloody difficult. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Actually no, 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.

usually part of us wants to change a negative and punishing behaviour, whereas another part wants to hold on to it.

A 5-point guide to the cycle of addiction 1 Pain 2 Using an addictive agent, like alcohol, food, sex, work, dependent relationships to soothe and distract 3 Temporary anaesthesia or distraction 4 Consequences 5 Shame and guilt, leading to pain or low self-esteem

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.

Where the ‘one day at a time’ homespun, thanks Nan, wisdom kicks in is with the rather Zen and incontrovertible truth that life is experienced in the present, beyond today your projections of life are conceptual.

Step 1 means you can change. It means surveying the landscape of your life, your family relationships, your working life, your sexual behaviour, your eating, your use of your phone, drugs and alcohol, the way you spend money and asking, ‘Am I happy with this?’ ‘Is this how I want to live?’ If there is a behaviour or problem that lurches out garishly, some glaringly obvious looming catastrophe that this surveillance reveals, then it is here that you can take Step 1. I am ‘powerless over this and my life has become unmanageable.’

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.

took Step 1 when I ‘admitted I was powerless over my addiction and that my life had become unmanageable.’ That I didn’t have control, no matter what I said to myself and others, and that it was getting worse. I knew there was no way out, that I had fear and shame that I didn’t want to face, that I hoped I would never have to.

When I was a kid, knelt in front of the TV in the post-school, pre-Mum-home hinterland, I believed I had a solution to the problem of being me with every Penguin biscuit I jammed into my gawping trap. The distraction of the taste, the ritual of unpeeling them like a Buffalo Bill victim, the scraping of the chalk-brown custard guts, enough to occupy me, to fill me up. So the ‘treat’ of a perfectly enjoyable chocolate biscuit sandwich-wrapped in foil became an emotional necessity, a survival tool. Alone at home they toppled like a row of calorific dominoes into the hungry void. I already had a sense of shame and solitude around this behaviour. There was already something other than the simple eating of biscuits at play.

As a side note it’s worth mentioning that this is not a moral argument, for example if you love looking at porn and don’t have a problem with it, then I have no opinion on that or advice to offer. In fact, if you’re happy with your wanking or boozing or drug use, or self-esteem or relationships or eating, you probably don’t need this book. If there’s not a problem, there’s not a problem, as they say in 12 Step organizations. 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.

A common meditation is to envisage the moment before death, to accept that this place of consciousness in which we sit, that which we call ‘I’, is the place from which we will experience death.

I accept there is a problem: my girlfriend needs time to herself. ‘I come to believe that a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity’; it does, the program – which is a power greater than me and my previous way of thinking – tells me in this moment, the only moment I have, to immediately surrender my old idea (in this case the old idea is not ‘I must take heroin to be happy’, it is ‘I am here to write’). The idea is surrendered. The power is the program, the sanity is I recover my role as a good father and boyfriend. And I feel good. I feel good typing on this bed with (quite cool actually) lullabies playing on my phone, my daughter gurgling and cooing contentedly by my side, now that is a miracle, with my girlfriend asleep. Can you see how this could very easily have become a different scenario?

May I tell you that fame, like all the other shimmering sedatives I have sought, is limited in its effectiveness. When the baby starts crying as she just did (I knew I spoke to soon!) or I wake up in the night anxious, or when I am haunted by my fear of death and failure, fame is of little use.

Here is a postcard from the other side: fame, luxury items and glamour are not real and cannot solve you, whether it’s a pair of shoes, a stream of orgies, a movie career or global adulation. They are just passing clouds of imaginary pleasure. When my girlfriend needs me to act like a grown-up, I don’t think, ‘thank God I’m famous’, I refer to my program.

Step 3 means we ask for help. When I notice that I am agitated, fearful or confused, I no longer, as in the past, plough on. I pause. I have learned to better commune with my feelings. Mentally the inner dialogue is like this: ‘Wow. That is a really hurtful email. I hate the person who sent me that. I must be pretty worthless for someone to talk to me that way. I think I’ll send a response so loaded with invective and syntactic daggers this person will never bother me again.’ I read an email that disturbs me … I feel mobilized in my gut … my body responds first … then my thinking alters. This is a trivial example of the ordinary junction that previously would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to me needing to drink, or use or ‘act out’ – the kind of everyday challenge that I needed an addictive supplement to tackle. Now that I have made a decision not to live that life, I have to recommit to it every time I encounter an event that triggers my old way of thinking.

This tiny act of ingenuity disrupts, enormously (!) my previous model of behaviour, which was ‘Feel, Think (maybe!), Act’ – the compulsion is ingrained and barely conscious so I have to be vigilant to spot the opportunity to change direction.

In a sense we re-write our past. We change our narrative. We reprogram ourselves. There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks down the hidden and destructive personal grammar that we have unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.

Isn’t it a good thing to know about yourself? That you are going through life requesting friends on Facebook and asking people on dates driven by an existential fear that you will always be alone? When were you planning to address that? Is your plan to go through your (finite) human life motivated by unexamined dread? Is that your plan? And you wonder why you’re fucking nervous?! At the heart of so much activity and interaction is deep and unaddressed fear. We have to expose it! We have to amend it! We need help! Thank God you read this book you lunatic.

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.

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. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships.

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. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘Wow, I’m on a planet in the Milky Way, in infinite space, bestowed with the gift of consciousness, which I did not give myself, with the gift of language, with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, none of which I gave myself, with no concrete understanding of the Great Mysteries, knowing only that I was born and will die and nothing of what’s on either side of this brief material and individualized glitch in the limitless expanse of eternity and, I feel, I feel love and pain and I have senses, what a glorious gift! I can relate, and create and serve others or I can lose myself in sensuality and pleasure. What a phenomenal mystery!’ Most days I just wake up feeling a bit anxious and plod a solemn, narrow path of survival, coping. ‘I’ll have a coffee’, ‘I’ll try not to reach for my phone as soon as I stir, simpering and begging like a bad dog at a table for some digital tidbit, some morsel of approval, a text, that’ll do.’

Every time I reinvest in the material world as a potential source of happiness I am able to return to them when it fails. When religions talk of idolatry, I feel I know what they are saying; when I make something else, other than my connection to myself, nature and others, my ‘idol’, my symbol of the divine, I get in trouble. If you take away the bombast, the sense that these edicts are being bellowed down from a purple cloud, ‘Don’t get too wrapped up in relationships or money’ sounds like the sort of thing a grandparent might say. I have an inclination to make these things my salvation.

In these groups that people attend on the basis of mutual need, it is as if you could walk up to these anonymous people on the Tube or city street and they would turn to you and lift their eyes and openly recite the contents of their hearts: ‘I feel trapped in my marriage’; ‘I’ve never got over being abused’; ‘I am lonely.’ With these silent and ubiquitous truths spoken the world is not filled with strangers and grey faces because I cannot help but love people who know the pain I feel. Even if the tune is distinct, when I hear people honestly speak I know the notes they hear in their hearts are the same notes I hear in mine. That beyond the difference of language is the oneness of language’s root.

Okay, my turn now. Zoë W has said something about seeing a Coke can whilst in the deepest backwaters of Rangoon and Ian is analysing deftly the clever use of African American stars and models and the odd, jarring proximity to sugarcane and slavery. Real me wants to say some dumb stuff now – silly, glib, naughty stuff about race and consumerism – but he mustn’t. So instead I make some pretty good points about how a hundred years ago seeing a Coke can anywhere would’ve been weird and that we are all tribal people waking from the womb into a world of ersatz ad agencies and used-to-be schools (is that a Madonna song? No that’s ‘Playground’, close enough) and that Osho says, ‘Society is just a clearing in the forest’, and I like that. A clearing in the forest. Nature, both inner and outer awaits a cessation and she will flood us anew with thorny green wonder. And my mind too, just a clearing in the forest, language structures and philosophical structures all heaped up high but built from nothing, like that clear plastic scaffold the Doozers in Fraggle Rock used to build.

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.

I am not living on benefits and drug-addicted. But I am still him, even if his life has changed, the essential self refracts now through a new prism, the new external coordinates, personal and social, remind me. I am famous, he was not. The Shard hadn’t been built then, yet now it tears the sky in jagged certainty, unfinished. I was in there once and it was like a Ridley Scott film: bleak membrane drum-skin tight above the anxious city. I am soon to be a father and I don’t take drugs and I am not penniless, I am penniful, if anything.

I’ve lived all over London so its streets teem with a deep geology of agonized nostalgia.

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.

Foucault would tell you, if he were here and you could get him to cooperate, that the very notion of an inner connection to a divine being is a social and linguistic construct that we need to abandon, and that we invent ourselves rather than discovering ourselves. I disagree with Michel here, mostly on the basis of my personal experience with distinct and seemingly transcendent aspects of ‘my own’ consciousness, and not only while off my nut on drugs. I accept that there are limitations to the capacity of this book but I invite you, implore you even, to consider that your model of reality, if painful, is in need of improvement, and the humility and faith that are components of this ‘way’ will set you free.

I always envisage ‘going out’ from my heart, lovingly, kindly and then witness if the vow can withstand London traffic.

We do not choose between program and no program, we choose between a conscious program and the unconscious program that operates us by default.

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.

My sense is that our inner faculties, our emotional palate, are similarly comparable. Whether you’re a gnarled and boisterous apprentice mechanic or a Cambridge don, solving conundrums from your high-tech wheelchair, there is in most cases a comparable inner world. If not a basic binary, a universal pantheon of inner deities and demons which, in our race to total rationalism, we have unwisely discarded. The Greeks knew these gods dwelt not on Olympus but upon the summits, crags and slopes within.

I am grateful for my life where I get to show off for a living, and as a consequence of this I will occasionally be photographed. Now if I were you, reading this, determined not to change my Weltanschauung (‘world view’ in German), I’d go, ‘That’s easy for you to say, you’re loaded and you’re on a rowboat on the Thames with yer luvverly bird of course you can accept a modicum of inconvenience.’ Well here is my riposte: ‘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.

That doesn’t mean you have to live as a monk, although that is one way out of it, it just means you can never quench your spiritual craving through material means.

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. This in the case of my stepdad meant two things, the first being forgiveness. This is pretty easy when you get into it. Here’s how: he is just a human being like me. He is not perfect, like me. It is 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. Forgiveness is a powerful spiritual tool, without it we are damned as individuals and as a people. Forgiveness means letting go. It means being willing to accept that we are all mortals flawed and suffering, imperfectly made and trying our best. That sometimes there is a collision of instinct. He was trying to live his life, have a relationship with my mother, work nights in a job he didn’t like and support another man’s son. He was doing his best. Am I unwilling to forgive? Am I determined that the world must be as I decree? Do I see a future in that way of thinking, especially when it’s done nothing but bring me pain so far? What am I holding on to? 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.

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. So I don’t have to say, like some awful eighties judge, that I was a terrible little flirt and brought it on myself, that would of course be nuts. What I can do is accept that this event happened, that it was not my fault, that it is over and it is not happening now and not to allow it to continue to block my path to mental and spiritual clarity. By forgiving the perpetrator, I release myself. I can revise the event. I can see it as something that gives me more compassion and understanding. I can let go of it. There is no benefit to establishing an imaginary judicial system in my own mind where I carry out punishments to people who have wronged me. By letting go of this long-held inner drama I become a little more liberated and useful. In essence it’s bad that it happened but it’s worse that I allow myself to be affected by it now. I

In the prayer of Saint Francis he says, ‘it is by forgiving that we are forgiven’, and this means I suppose that there is a direct connection between the clemency we express and the world that we experience. That old school staple, the Lord’s Prayer, says, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. Freedom has a clause: it is forgiveness. Or as Gandhi would have it, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’. If we want forgiveness, we must forgive.

Once I had forgiven my stepdad, I was able to look more clearly at my own actions. I was rude, dismissive and disruptive. I stole, I lied and I manipulated. These are harms. So when I make a list of people I have harmed, he must be on it. I must say I felt a kind of liberation having made this adjustment, a sense of freedom that came just from throwing off the yoke of my own tyrannizing perspective. It felt as if I’d advanced from the image I’d had of myself, life and circumstances as a boy to a liberating maturation, manhood. By maintaining a personal museum of resentments, we imprison ourselves within it.

Step 8 is where we stop justifying our story.

In Step 9, I felt the palpable presence of the sacred each time I made a ‘face-to-face’ amends. The structure of the language that the protocol suggests acts as a secular spell, summoning ethereal witness. As if a gently burning circle or an impromptu chapel appears on uttering these apparently quite unremarkable words: ‘As you know, I am an addict. Part of the process of my recovery from addiction is that I must make amends to those I have wronged. I have wronged you and I owe you an amends.’ This simple sentence is the entry point to your face-to-face amends and somehow its words form an arch through which you walk into a quieter space, a space that is not just occupied by you and the other person. It is as if somehow something has been evoked, some hidden principle. Each time I have done it I have felt a subtle awe and unbidden tearfulness. I have felt humbled, I have felt the grace that occurs when you decide to put aside your own way of doing things and surrender to another way.

The fact that it is challenging for the recipient as well as the person making the amends is, I believe, a testament to its authenticity.

An indication that, on some level, I knew I had done wrong was that I felt a churning in my guts on seeing him. It was my own neglected code that I was not abiding by, not a learned dogma. My body viscerally let me know that I needed to make amends, not a blank and learned moral code.

My whole life I’ve been locking myself in toilets to summon up a transcendent experience of one kind or another: as a kid gorging on chocolate and then puking it up, then frenetically spellbound by porn, then drugs, then finally prayer. In every instance the need was the same, to get out of my head, to feel a connection, to feel something beyond being me in a body, on a planet, in infinite space. I contest that we all have this yearning for connection, even if from a humanist perspective. What is the numinous jolt we feel when witnessing the heroic sacrifice of another? Or the tearful pull when people come together in a common cause? What string is being plucked when we encounter heroism? Could it be that we are reminded by the hero’s sacrifice that the appearance of individualism is temporal? That when the hero sees beyond this artificial world of selfish wants and needs, and falls in faith, into the arms of the Ulterior Oneness, we are reminded and relieved? What is the value of fraternity? What is solidarity’s power? What manner of virtue is kindness if it is not the acknowledgement that in truth and in fact we are all one, together here, and what we do to each other we do to ourselves? Heroism’s power is in redolence. It reminds us what we’ve always known but forgotten: we are all connected.

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. A higher, preferable way. I don’t believe these are taught social codes, or petit bourgeois ideals. I believe this to be a marrow-deep, helix-hard presence that wants to realize itself in the same way that a tree is moving to self-realization from the moment the seed splits. Perhaps before, perhaps it is an unbroken spiral of root and branch reaching through what we call ‘time’ back to the creation of life itself.