There is Another Way

In early recovery it is so hard to think of anything beyond the next 5 minutes. Staying sober becomes all consuming and it requires a huge amount of effort. But once the early days have been conquered your brain will start to look forward. And in doing so it will realise that there are so many possibilities available now that you are living your life differently. Now that your life isn't consumed with thoughts of where the next fix may come from. It really is not unusual for people to start dreaming once the urges begin to subside. But the dreams will be many and varied. In this post I want to let you know about my dream. Because I need to hold a space where I can start to look forward. So much of my life right now is still consumed with the devastation of my addiction that it is very easy for me to fall into the trap of self pity. Easy for me to beat myself up with the hurt that I have created. I have never once tried to skirt responsibility for that. I know that even though my ad...

This is a concept that I have struggled with, and I know that many other people in recovery do as well, especially in the beginning. I remember feeling that my early sobriety was so fragile, so unsteady that I needed to build a fortress around it to protect it. In practice that meant being quite self centred. Recovery was my number one priority for a time. Ahead of everything else. I felt that I needed to prioritise meetings, phone calls and reading over time with my family.  I do not regret that early behaviour, I knew that if I wanted to be the kind of person who could be the father my children deserved and if I wanted to be the husband that my wife deserved then I need to work on myself. I needed to make improvements. I needed to get sober. And that took some self centredness in the beginning. But quite soon after amassing some stable sobriety I soon realised that I had been given a gift. I really felt like I had been shown the secret code to life. I really felt that I had a res...

This is what addiction is! Addiction does not kill you with a fireball, it does not allow you to go through the pearly gates backwards at 100 miles per hour. Instead it is slow, painful and self inflicted. There are many who say that there is insanity in the illness called addiction. I can definitely see that there was insanity in my addiction. But it was not just that. There was also desperation, loneliness and pain. The insanity, in my case, came in the shape of repetitive self inflicted damage. I knew that the addictive behaviours that I was engaging in were hurting me. I knew they were hurting my family. I knew that they were putting everything I had lived for at risk. I knew that my addictive behaviours had a power equal to that of an atomic bomb in its ability to destroy my life. But did that knowledge stop me from engaging in them? NOPE! For me that is the complete, selfish definition of insanity. Each time I acted out, I added another metaphorical paper cut to what I later foun...

I first came across the title of this blog as a quote attributed to Albert Einstein and since undertaking my own recovery journey it has taken on a deeper, more rounded meaning. When attributed to Einstein it is often given as his ‘definition’ of insanity! And I think it describes the insanity of my addiction brilliantly. I can not help but think back to when I was in active addiction. I was looking outwards, blaming everything else for not being able to stop. I would often say to myself that I will stop, I will change, when I get that promotion, when a certain event in my life happens, when another person changes all will be right with the world. All the time blaming the rest of the world for my troubles and woes. Thinking the solution would come from outside myself. This thinking locked me in active addiction. It rendered me powerless. It kept me doing the same old things and expecting a different result. That mixed with the progressive nature of the illness that is addiction, meant ...

In today's post I wanted to get a bit ‘sciency’. It is all well and good me sharing my opinions and stories about recovery, but I know some people will need more than ‘it worked for me’ stories. The fact of the matter is that there is a lot that happens through a recovery journey that stands outside of scientific proof. It just happens because it does. If you track recovery back nearly 100 years to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, they would likely tell you that it all just happens because it does. But in these last 100 years Science has caught up with many of the ideas that were initially peddled as ‘beliefs’ and where that happens clearly I find it helpful to highlight the science and I try my best to understand it. One of the things that I have loved about my recovery journey is that it has rekindled my love for reading. Now I find myself reading any book that is even loosely connected to recovery and self improvement. Where once upon a time I would just read, now I study:...

Never before have I come across a phase that so beautifully sums up how I think about my own brain! And this, for me, does it perfectly. Life as an adult with undiagnosed ADHD is hard. I am not sure how life with diagnosed ADHD would be any better, maybe I will feel a shift from the negative connotations and labels that my behaviour has received over time. But for the purpose of this blog post I need to forget all of the outside input and feedback my ADHD gets and focus more on what it is like for me. This saying, ‘A Squirrel on a Treadmill’, paints such a vivid picture in my mind. I envisage a human sized treadmill with an actual sized squirrel. And I see the squirrel moving frantically to keep up pace with the every rolling road underneath his feet. But rather than just running in a straight line the squirrel darts from side to side. Bouncing off of the invisible bumpers that are the limits of the treadmill track.  Every so often the squirrel might let itself stop, in a hope of c...