Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

Because the instinct that drives the compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation and tepid despair, because the problem is ultimately ‘being human’ in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. We are all on the addiction scale.

What happens when you don’t follow the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need to eat and purge? The only way to find out is to not do it, and that is a novel act of faith.

I have no power at all over people, places and things, and if I ever for a moment mistakenly believe that I do – and act as if I do – pain is on its way.

You too, you may think, ‘yes, I am an addict, I will change the way I drink or eat or think or relate to sexual partners’, 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. It is only by finding a more powerful magnetic pull that you can change the patterns completely.

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.

At this point in the exercise we are reminded that 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.

‘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.’

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.

In justifying our misery we recommit to it.

‘A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical world and doesn’t commit suicide’.

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

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. Gratitude for where you are and what you have is one important coordinate for retuning our consciousness. Similarly acceptance. We are where we are supposed to be. From this position we can grow, with inner resistance comes tumult.

It’s not easy to float about like a Sufi if you’ve got three kids and a mortgage or you’re trying to get promoted to pay extortionate urban rent.

Have you had someone apologize to you, a fellow driver or a life partner who has said, ‘I’m sorry you feel I was rude to you?’ When I get those apologies I want to shove the apologizer into a ravine. That is because this program merely formalizes what we all spiritually intuit, that there is a way to make an apology, and that apologizing for ‘making a person feel’ something, instead of for what you did is not a mea culpa, it’s a you-a-culpa.

Under guidance I still concluded that a good many people would best be addressed by letter, that the last thing they’d want was me, looming back into their lives with combed hair and good intentions.

don’t remember what I said to prompt my Auntie Janet’s analysis but I know that people have always thought that I think too much or too quickly or too deeply and I can see why.

Without drinking or drugs I hum with spikey awareness.

I can be very anxious about people. Sometimes I look at the appointments I have, social and otherwise, and wish I could cancel the lot. Sometimes I do, and then on my prized couch, TV on, the place I was aiming for, I sit with the same anxiety lightly bubbling. Why is this? What does the feeling want?

Step 10 is the acknowledgement that our previous nature, our previous tendencies, our previous plan will, when we are inert, reassert itself. If we do nothing we will drift back to the old plan.

In Step 11 a large part of my life becomes prayer and meditation. This means I am detaching from external activity and seeking a different kind of connection. 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.’

The reason you must tackle your addiction no matter how moderate it may seem or whether it be socially sanctioned is it will, in the end, fail you. Because the drive, the fuel, the impetus behind it is legitimate and its goals are legitimate: connection. In the end it will not settle for a simulacrum. It will be found out. That’s why you’re lucky if you’re addicted to crack or smack, they are fast haemorrhaging, fast failing systems. They provide anaesthetic and distraction but are so bloody medically unsound that they are quickly exposed as dupes. Sex and food can sustain a longer masquerade. Now admittedly you see fewer people hunched over in doorways on ice cream than you do on meth but anyone who knows someone who suffers from an eating disorder will tell you that the sufferer is similarly derelict. And because what we are dealing with is a spiritual condition – a post-religious spiritual calling – the inner condition is what we must address.

I have always lived in my mind. We all live in our minds and we have allowed them to become poorly tended. Meditation is a way of cultivating the environment in which I spend all my time. When I am on a run with my dog I often totally ignore the beautiful views and the charming antics of my dog in favour of an inner drama of my own contrivance: ‘What if this happens?’ ‘Why did that happen?’ I could be anywhere because I am not present. The state of mind we nurture in meditation begins to inform our whole lives, indeed that is the point. There’s little value in Om-ing away at a candle for ten minutes then getting up and bawling out a wayward bin man. Meditation is the cultivation of an ignored and latent aspect of yourself that will cradle you as you re-enter the world of material affairs.

Become what you are supposed to be, unbounded, hack through the erroneous codes of your malignant program. We defy them through our kindness, we defy them by reaching out a hand in love, we defy them by loving them, by knowing there is no them. There is nothing to get, there is nowhere to go, that only love is real and we prove this with our lives.

I’ve never been one to impose abstinence where drink and drugs are clearly needed. It’s not for me to judge what a street-sleeper does to cope with their inexcusable suffering. I think that compassion and understanding even in this dubious form provide more comfort, hope and are even more likely to inspire change than impotent piety and unresearched judgement. Or as Bill Hicks says, ‘Damn right this money is for drugs. Drugs are pretty important to a drug addict.’