Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

Amie had naturally been excited about her drama school audition and the prospect of reclaiming a lost opportunity. Drama school became in the parlance of recovery her ‘Higher 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.

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.

But for we who are discontented here, this is the road we must travel. No point bemoaning what everyone else ‘gets away with’. In this world people seem to be getting away with a lot; a lot of consuming, a lot of gratification, a lot of senseless sensuality, a lot of bilious materialism, wilful indifference to suffering, selfishness and dishonesty but for you and me this is not the way. It can never work for us. We will never wrestle bliss from this world. We settle for pleasure and we never discover bliss. ‘This world has nothing else to give you now Russell, it can only take away from you,’ said the bearded swami, all glowing and swathed in ochre. My gut squirmed before my face reframed on hearing these words. ‘I know this.’

Now when I am attracted to a woman and my old code jolts with the sudden snap of a stirring crocodile, my new program is fired up. Not with the slick efficiency of an immaculate Apple app. No, like a whirring and whistling Victorian time machine, juddering into clumsy life, blinking and twitching and setting off bells. To do this I must have an inner connection of some kind, an awareness. If I am falling forward through life, some inert berk zombie-ing along, I’ll cling to any branch I come across. If I am aware, I have a throne within me, I have a personal sovereignty from where I can adjudicate. ‘I could stare at this person,’ I think as the scaly and serpentine missile shatters the wall of my sanctum, ‘But then what? Then I will be flooded with desire. The desire will want me to breach my own ideals, which, if I do, will have consequences, inner and outer, and if I don’t do, will disturb my peace.

On the surface, nothing is happening but the inward coordinates manufacture a world in keeping with past patterns, fraught and fearful.

Do I consciously try to live a life contrary to the defective impulses that previously governed my life?

To put this in the everyday, I often wake up and immediately feel, before even opening my eyes, kind of glum and anxious and deficient. One negative thought can quickly follow another. I have to intervene in this process. I do it through prayer: ‘God, I humbly ask that you direct my thinking today, show me how I can be useful to the addicts who still suffer. Show me how I can be of service, how I can be patient, tolerant and kind.’

Use this new relationship with higher consciousness to acquire the commodity we all need, especially if we are unaware of it: purpose.

not tied to the world by a million invisible strings that can jerk you out of your serenity at any moment.

There is no ‘me’ – when I say ‘I’ what am I referring to? My memories and drives, my mental projections and beliefs? My car? My toenails? All dust and spent energy, an impending funeral and then a decade or two of anecdotes in the occasional chats of other doomed trainee corpses. My separateness, my ‘me-ness’, is not going to provide much comfort then, and a life devoted to the fulfilment of the drives of this odd and temporary conglomeration I’m steering, is no more than the combing of a cadaver’s hair.

When I have faced serious challenges in recovery the program has been at its most powerful. This is when I know to surrender, that I do not try to navigate my way out of personal pain using the maps I have drawn up myself. I use this program.

Consider the Greeks (oh go on): they talked of ‘humours’ and ‘deities’ and ‘furies’ that would possess and direct the heroes of their myths. Joseph Campbell says that when we are enraged or gripped by jealousy or lust, these supernatural energies have us in their grasp. When I transfer my attention from my own life and problems to the life and problems of the person on the other end of the phone, I have to, and this of course must have a biochemical component, wrench my thoughts off one circuit of the psyche and access another. Attention and intention are the Sat-Nav and petrol of consciousness.

This can only be averted by continually working this program, in this case Step 12, ‘to carry the message to the addict who still suffers’. May I say, in my self-centred life, in this self-centred world, this edict is indeed revolutionary. Where else are these values enshrined? Where are they practised? Only on the fringes. When I meet people who work in homeless shelters or refugee camps or hospitals I feel like I’m meeting saints, and in a way I am because they have stepped outside of the values of our culture and committed to another path. I’m sure there are NHS A&E nurses that are selfish arseholes, I just haven’t met any of them. Whether we are discussing the individual or society as a whole, these values can no longer be peripheral, they must become central.

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.

By this definition: ‘Trying to solve an inner problem by outer means, in spite of negative consequences’.

I am secretly frustrated for a second, as I want to use the toilet before we leave and am unsure how to manage – if I take the dog, he’ll probably eat someone’s breakfast or set off a fire alarm, if I leave him with my family he’ll unsettle these walkers – but before I can even properly formulate my anxiety, one of the ladies is joyfully offering to hold the dog and taking the lead so kindly that I am both admonished and reminded that the world is full of love just waiting.

The fella in the shop introduces himself as Brian, says he knows the house we’re staying in because his missus works there cleaning, in fact he’ll give her a call and she’ll drive us home. What is this world so full of kindness? Where is the world from the solemn TV news? Was the world always so gracious when I sat cursing and abusing?

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.