Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

You and your children and everyone you love is hurtling toward the boneyard, I know you know. We all know but because it yields so few ‘likes’ on Facebook, we purr on in blinkered compliance, filling our days with temporary fixes. A coffee here, an eBay purchase there, a half-hearted wank or a flirt. Some glinting twitch of pleasure, like a silvery stitch on a cadaver, to tide you over. And you’re probably too clever to ‘repose in God’, or to pick up some dusty book where the poetry creaks with loathing for women, or gays or someone.

the dissatisfaction of living,

uncomfortable confrontations with who you truly are.

When are you planning to become the person you were born to be? To ‘recover’ your connection to an intended path?

The condition in extreme is identifiable but the less obvious version of

addiction is still painful, and arguably worse, because we simply adapt to living in pain and never countenance the beautiful truth: there is a solution.

This is an invitation to change. This is complicated only in that most of us are quite divided, usually part of us wants to change a negative and punishing behaviour, whereas another part wants to hold on to it. For me Recovery is a journey from a lack of awareness to awareness.

I always felt I was rather too clever for something like a ‘program for living’, certainly one that had any religious overtones.

Small-town dumb.

I was privately desperate. I was broken.

My way of coping with the quiet anxiety of uncertainty was to find distractions and pleasures. I was never still. I was seldom reflective. I sustained myself with distraction.

innocuous toxin, sugar.

As Eckhart Tolle says, ‘addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.’ Here we can see that dissected. As the cycle of addiction goes round it gathers momentum, like an out-of-control carousel, like the spinning of my nauseous head when drunk.

I was a kid, then I was an addict and by the time the idea of working a program had reached me, which with substances means abstinence and with behaviour and food means structure, I was twenty-seven, a heroin addict and in serious trouble.

‘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.’

The attraction to connect is culturally translated by pornography into a numb and lonely staring strum at broken digital ghosts. The most physically creative thing we have, reduced to a dumb shuffle that’d embarrass a monkey.

Because I had no code for life, no awareness that what I was doing was problematic.

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. But, as with heroin, chocolate bars or relationships with inappropriate partners, knowing it won’t work has not stopped me indulging. 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?

Once I go, I’ve gone. There have been many instances in my life where in the midst of some self-generated chaos I’ve been granted the benefit of hindsight whilst the event is still unfolding.

It often takes the form of a mental bird’s-eye view, I seem to float up out of me, a yard or two above the carnage I’ve created and look down at other me thinking, ‘Oh look, there I am, I’m actually persevering with this mayhem. It’s almost certainly a terrible idea. Oh well too late now, I might as well jump back in with him and finish this shit off.’ 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 quantu...

The pace of deterioration too was, in retrospect, worrying. Most days were tarnished with a volatile emotional episode, physical injury, conflict, arrest, humiliation or violence.

The constant witness.

After I admitted I had a problem I felt weak and pathetic. I felt cracked.

‘You’ve faced obstacles, inner and outer, that have prevented you from becoming the person you were “meant to be” and that is what we are going to recover.’

We can just start by being a little kinder to ourselves and open to the possibility that life doesn’t have to be bloody awful.

On our own we didn’t have enough power to change so we need access to a power that exceeds that.