Tim Casteel's Reviews > Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

Recovery is a vulgar, brutally honest, modern day Ecclesiastes; with Brand, a self-described "half-wit King Solomon".
Drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, fortune- Brand tried it all and found it wanting.

I found the book brilliantly insightful into the human condition and very helpful in how to escape the bondage of desire.

Brand is offering the 12 Steps as salvation. But many of the 12 Steps, rooted in Christian belief, are quite Biblical.
Brand submits to the 12 steps, uses them as a map for every area of his life:
"I apply them to every thought or feeling I have, knowing they are a means of negotiating my experience of the external world and my place within it.”

Yes, Brand mixes in weird eastern mysticism and transcendentalism.
And yes, he might use the F word A LOT.
He’s not a Christian.
But Brand is dead-on in his description of the slavery to desire and the freedom that comes from submitting to God.

Here’s how he describes overcoming addiction:
"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."

And we are all addicts - whether to our phones, lust, food, or all sorts of pleasure.
"The reason you must tackle your addiction… is it will, in the end, fail you.
That’s why you’re lucky if you’re addicted to crack or smack, they are fast hemorrhaging, fast failing systems. Our pattern is easier to observe and therefore, with commitment and help, easier to resolve.”
Most of us have hidden, more manageable addictions that are not so obvious, but they are just as enslaving.

Our self-centered approach to life is not working and we need a power outside ourselves:
"Oddly, counterintuitively, in our culture of individualism and self-centred valour, it is by surrendering that we can begin to succeed. It is by ‘admitting that we have no power’ that we can begin the process of accessing all the power we will ever need.
Where I have found this program most rewarding and yet most challenging is in the way that it has unravelled my unquestioned faith that I was the centre of the universe and that the purpose of my life was to fulfil my drives…
Can I now accept there is a power greater than me at work in this cosmos? I don’t have to ally with it yet, all I have to do is accept that my thoughts and I are not the apex of human experience."