Robert

Good Music to Support Recovery

I have found good music to be very helpful in fulfilling some of my spiritual needs. “Good music” means music that helps me to feel the Spirit instead of music that pounds my spirit numb. I used to use music to numb myself in the same way I can use pornography or substances to numb myself. Good music has become a way to re-sensitize myself and help me to be more sensitive to the Spirit’s gentle promptings.

My addictions harden my heart and prevent me from feeling anything at all, much less the Spirit. So calm, relaxing music has become an important part of me learning how to feel anything again.

Healthy Connections

Before recovery, almost all my connections with women were lustful and dysfunctional. When I got into recovery, I started disconnecting in those lustful ways from women – largely through surrendering lust and through avoiding people and places. A few years later, I started to feel a sadness about being isolated away from half of the people around me because of my fears and triggers. A counselor I was seeing at the time suggested that I try connecting in a healthy way by saying “hi” and getting to know people just as I would a man or someone I wasn’t triggered by. It is important that I point out that I could not do this earlier in my recovery or these attempted connections would have gone back to being lust-based.

Amazingly, when I said “hi,” the lust disappeared and the anxiety left me as well. To those to whom I couldn’t say “hi” or that it wouldn’t be appropriate to say “hi”, I would think about going up to them in my mind and tell them “I just objectified you and I’m sorry for that, I hope you have a good day today” without them saying anything back (in my mind) and that helped me as well. That felt a little strange to do, but it kept me honest and helped me be aware of what I was doing.

Again, I could not do this before a few years into physical sobriety from the addiction, but now I see that through positive healthy simple connections, I can have freedom from the anxiety and temptations that up to that point I just had to wait around for and then let go of when they came along. It takes a lot of time and complete honesty. Again, this progression took years and had to be taken in the right order and at the right time, but with each step, I found more freedom and happiness. Years of addiction had really messed me up and it takes a while for God (with my help) to untangle that mess. I don’t know if I’ll ever run out of things for God to untangle, but that’s OK, because at each stage, from the first moment I stepped into a recovery group, I have had more and more freedom, hope, happiness, and motivation to keep going.

Step 12

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I just had the best piece of cheesecake I’ve ever tasted in my life. I just have to tell those I love most about it because I want them to experience it too. It’s my gift to them to share good things I’ve found in my own life. So it is with the Gospel of Christ. So it is with the results of applying that Gospel to my own life to free me from the hellish compulsive addictive nightmare I used to endure daily. How could I keep that to myself? If I love God, I love others, and I want the best for them. So I share.

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Step 11

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 3 is me letting go of my own will, and step 11 is seeking God’s will. In step 3, I stop drowning myself with my own horrible ideas to where I’m just floating there. Step 11 gives me a positive direction from God so I can start moving in a direction that’s aligned with His amazingly frightening will.

Of course God’s will scares me to death. How could it be any other way? I’ve already tackled all the easy stuff that I’m not afraid of. All that’s left is the stuff that petrifies me with fear. I am bound by that fear, and fear is not from God. So it’s got to go. And the only way to get rid of fear is to face it. When I’m working my program well, I include steps 1, 2, 3 and 11 in my morning prayer. I will add step 12 to that too some day. I’m slow. So I talk to God about the things I’m powerless over, then I express my faith in His ability to help me with these things, and then I give them all to Him to figure out and only then am I ready to follow His will. My will is usually too noisy to hear anything from God. So the steps are in order for a purpose. I have to let go of the wheel and let Him guide me through my day, asking for the courage, power, and clarity to align my rebellious self with His will.

He loves me and wants me to get stronger and freer. And I’m giving Him permission to do that, so I need to stick with it when He starts me down a path toward something I fear. It’s like I’m working out a weak muscle and God’s my spotter and I’ve agreed to be here doing this and then the pain gets to be more than what I expected. Then instead of working through it, I’m tempted to run out of the gym to avoid the pain. But that just puts me back where I was before. If I can build up a little more trust in Him each day, each week, it helps me to put up with the pain and fear, knowing that it will be better afterward. Like going to the dentist. If I thought the dentist was my enemy, I’d run as soon as I saw the needle.

My daughter came to me with a sliver in her finger. She trusted me enough to help her get it out. She knew it was going to hurt worse than what she was enduring right now, but she and I have built up a trust that I love her and will do what will give her peace and happiness in the long term. So she comes to me when she needs relief from the pain – even if it means more pain for a time. Afterward, the pain subsides and her faith and trust in me is increased a little bit more. So it is with me and God. He is my father after all.

Meditation (or pondering) has also helped me seek God’s will and get rid of my own defective parts of my will. There are a few different methods I have used.

One method is to focus on breathing and nothing else. If my mind drifts, I don’t get frustrated, I just bring it back to my breath. That method quiets my mind down and gets rid of the noise.

Another kind is observational meditation where I simply observe my mind’s activity without holding on to any particular thought. That’s a lot more difficult for me because I grab the thoughts and run with them. This helps me become more aware of my thoughts and decreases my self-condemnation, which allows more thoughts to come to the surface. The more awareness I have, the more freedom I get to make choices about my thoughts and feelings instead of them silently running me.

Another kind of meditation is when I visualize a flame in front of me with a huge empty space around the flame. I focus on the flame and my breathing. As I breathe in through my nose, I imagine the air soaking into parts of myself physically (like into pain in my back or tension in my shoulders or neck) or emotionally (into lust, anger, stress, etc.). I hold it in for a second and then let it out through my mouth and imagine the pain, tension, lust, anger, stress, etc. going into the flame and burning up. I repeat for a few minutes. I’m visual so this one works well for me and gives my mind something to imagine while I’m doing it. And it really helps a lot. I have no idea why it helps, but I don’t really care. I found this technique in the Wheel of Time book series, but I believe the author Robert Jordan might have gotten it from somewhere else. I do it as described above, which is slightly different than what is described in the book. The lust and anger and stress tend to get visualized coming from my heart or entire body depending on how intense it is. And with each breath the emotion seems to get less and less until there isn’t anything left to feed the flame. It’s strange, but it has worked really well for me. More on this here. Sometimes I can feed images into the flame (like I do with Christ in Step 3) and those might be coming from my brain. So breathe in through the nose and visualize the breath going up into my brain and soaking up the images, then breathing out of my mouth those images from my brain into the flame. And I do this with my eyes closed. It can even be just a couple of breaths at my desk.

Step 10

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

For me, step 10 is just working steps 4 through 9 in my daily life. When I worked steps 4 through 9, I was just catching up to the present – taking inventory, sharing it, figuring out my defects, apologizing and making things right. I’ve done it for the past, and all that had built up was dragging me down. So now, I’ll keep my wreckage from building up over time by taking care of it in the moment instead of 30 years later.

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Step 9

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

This is definitely one of the most rewarding steps. It’s scary, but the more fear and shame I face, it seems the larger the treasure I find behind that fear. This was also the first step that I saw God’s hand physically and objectively reaching down from Heaven and touching my world in ways that I can’t deny.

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Step 8

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

The first time I worked step 8, I did it alone. Maybe because of my pride, fear, or shame. It didn’t go well, because I bring all of my character defects with me into that list and I need another set of eyes on the list – my sponsor’s eyes – so that I can see clearly enough to make a good list. This step is extremely important. It can show me many levels of my dysfunction and help me make my relationships more healthy going forward, in addition to fixing relationships from the past.

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Step 7

Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Character defects and shortcomings are the same things. I read that Bill W. was told in a writing class not to use the same phrases twice, so he came up with synonyms rather than using the same words across steps. Someone should have told him it’s ok to use the same terms when talking about the same things when giving instructions to avoid confusion. 🙂

For me, this is the simplest step. It’s a prayer. That’s it. So I take the list I created in Step 6 of all my character defects and what each one gives me, I’m ready to let them go, so now I just need to give God permission to help me rid myself of them. I go over the list with God just like I did with my sponsor, and then I ask Him to remove them from me. Or rather work with me to have them removed. I found that the removal of them isn’t usually miraculous and instantaneous during my prayer. I get to work on them in step 10. But at least I’m now prepared to work through them and have given God permission to work through them with me, having done steps 6 and 7.

Step 6

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

I like to think of step 6 as a way for me to gather up a bunch of my underlying addictions (character defects) and figure out what each one of them is giving me that makes me want to keep holding onto it. I can’t really become ready to have them removed if I’m holding onto them for some reason.

So, I went through my 4th step and gathered up all of my own character defects from the experiences I had documented into one big list. Impatience, anger, grumpiness, hatred, pride, denial, yelling at my kids, shame, codependency, selfishness, etc. Then I wrote next to each one what it gives me. For example, denial gives me a false sense of righteousness and safety from consequences. Yelling at my kids gives me a sense of them being obedient and me being a good parent.

It seems that a lot of these have to do with impatience. I don’t want to wait to do things the hard way, the right way, the way that actually lasts. So I go for a quick and easy way that doesn’t work in the long run.

As I inventory all of these defects and realize that they give me stuff that’s temporary and just makes things worse, in the long run, it helps me to surrender them, let them go, and become willing to have God work with me to get rid of them. A lot of that work to get rid of them happens in step 10, but I have to want to let them go before we can work on getting rid of them.

I share the list of defects and what they give me with my sponsor and let him know whether I feel like I’m ready to let them all go or if I need more surrender first. Once I surrender them, I’m ready to move to step 7.

Facilitating

In LDS Addiction Recovery Groups, there’s usually a facilitator at each meeting who shares first. (In other recovery groups, they’re called co-chairs.) They’re just like any other member of the group. They are recovering from addiction and have worked all 12 steps and have sponsored others so that they can share their experience instead of their opinion. They also should have a decent length of sobriety. They make sure the sharing portion of the meeting goes smoothly and that each person gets a chance to share if they want to. Sometimes in bigger meetings, that can mean running a timer to help people remember to finish up their share in time so that all have time to share.

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