Sometimes I play chess against my phone. It always beats me. I can ask it for hints and win the game that way sometimes. If I play on my own for too long though and then ask for hints, it’s just too late and I’ve lost too many pieces to be able to have even the best hints in the world overcome the natural consequences of the choices I made on my own early in the game.
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Codependency
Codependency is a universal underlying addiction that I found out about around a year after giving up the addiction (as do many others I have talked to). Just as removing the primary surface addiction reveals resentments and fears, removing some of those things then reveals codependent behaviors. I’ve found codependent behaviors in marriage, parenting, facilitating, sponsoring, or any human relationship I’ve been involved with.
The Wigs
I had a dream about a friend of mine. She was wearing a wig. After a while, she got an ashamed look on her face and took off the wig. There was another wig underneath it. The same process then happened over and over, each time she removed another wig, each time she got slower and more ashamed as she kept taking the wigs off. Eventually, she got to the point where she got to the last wig. It took her a while to get the courage to take that wig off. When she did, she had the most horrible look on her face as she took that wig off and revealed a badly scarred scalp with patches of ugly hair on it. She was so ashamed of it. I woke up but then received the last part of the dream in my mind. She didn’t know it, but that scarred layer was just another wig and if she had removed it, she would have seen her amazing hair underneath it.
The Bandage
A certain man got wounded and he didn’t know how to take care of the wound. He did not clean it out, apply ointment, or put a bandage over the wound to protect it. After a while, the wound got infected. It was painful and wasn’t very pleasant to look at and so he put a bandage over it. That kept things from bumping into it and kept it from being so unpleasant to look at. This worked for a brief time. After a while, the bandage started to leak and the pain got worse so the man put another bandage on the one that was already there. It worked last time, so it might just work again. After all, it would be too painful to pull off the bandages and clean it out. This continued until the pain and mess became unmanageable. The only option was to pull off each bandage and then clean out the wound, apply ointment, and then put a bandage over the now cleaned wound so that it could heal properly.
Relapses and Triggers
A relapse is when I act out the addiction. A trigger is something that starts me down the path toward a relapse. Before I got into recovery, relapses and triggers were opportunities for me to beat myself up and hate myself. When I have a recovery program in place, relapses and triggers become learning opportunities. The main things ask of myself or others after a relapse or a big trigger are:
Continue reading “Relapses and Triggers”12-Step Meetings
I have been involved with two different 12-step addiction recovery programs for the past 19 years, Sexaholics Anonymous and the Addiction Recovery Program from the LDS church. Both work for me just fine and are based on the same core principles. Pick one, find a meeting near you, and attend a meeting this week. There’s nothing to be afraid of! You’re going to find people there who are just like you in your same situation.
The inherent safety and anonymity of these meetings permits a level of honesty, humility, and faith in Christ sufficient to allow the repentance process to start working within me. The meetings are safe because everyone there suffers from the same addictions that I do. Therefore, I can have confidence that they will not gossip, backbite, judge, or condemn in the same way people might in other settings.
Boundaries
Boundaries are like fences at the top of the cliff or like a cast around a broken arm. They keep me away from dangerous situations so I can heal by working the steps and recovery in a safe place. Boundaries and walls are used to protect something that’s precious. Sometimes I had trouble setting boundaries for myself because I didn’t think I had value.
The Three Lists
I was talking to someone in my recovery group the other day, and they had been recently consumed with worry about a lot of things in their life and the following idea popped into my head to help with that. It had to do with emptying my head of all worries by writing them down and separating them into three lists. This idea comes from the three kinds of things mentioned in the serenity prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
The 12 Steps – An Overview
I realized that the core of 12-Step programs aligned with something familiar to me from my religious upbringing—a higher power helping me become a better person. This higher power encompassed faith, self-reflection, personal growth, and support from others. Although I had encountered similar ideas in my spiritual journey, I questioned the importance of revisiting them within the context of 12-Step programs. Previous knowledge alone hadn’t freed me from addiction, so why would exploring these principles again in the context of the 12 steps make any difference? However, I’ve found an answer, and I want to share it with you.
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