Month: May 2013

The Promises Of Recovery

I have yet to meet someone that hasn’t come to a recovery program for the sole purpose of trying to find healing from an addiction. Whether it’s AA, NA, OA, SLAA, CA, Al-Anon, CoDA, or any other program that was formed based upon the 12 Steps, there is a common language used in each of them to guide a person to that healing. And one of the greatest things a person finds in all of these programs as they begin their own path of recovery is something called “The Promises”.

The following is the list of the promises as they are laid out in just about all 12 Step literature:

1. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

2. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

3. We will comprehend the word Serenity.

4. We will know peace.

5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

8. Self-seeking will slip away.

9. Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change.

10. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.

11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

For the longest time, I thought these promises were bogus. I figured they were just some type of mumbo-jumbo that were written tons of years ago and held no purpose anymore. I often heard many people in meetings read and talk about them and how much their lives have actually changed to match what those statements were saying. What I didn’t realize is just how true each of those 12 promises were until I began to really do the work in my own recovery.

Looking back I realize now there was a gateway I had to pass through to begin to see these promises coming to fruition in my own life. I always had the key to this gateway, but I was too afraid to use it. It came down to a decision I continued to make on some level in my life of following self-will versus God’s will.

Living in self-will is what led me to all of my addictions in the first place. It’s what got me in trouble all the time. It’s what caused me fights, anger, and rage. It’s what disrupted my entire life. And for most of it, I tried to maintain at least a certain percentage of it because I was too afraid to allow a Higher Power the ability to run the show.

It took a lot more of me getting broken before I was finally able to say I was done. But when I did, and when I finally admitted my own self-will had gotten me nowhere, I sought out in every way I could in my own life how to live in God’s will. Since then, it’s like I suddenly have understood the language constantly being spoken at all of the recovery meetings I attended. It was almost as if I had a universal translator that helped me to really get why recovery works. And the more that I have stayed with God’s will and done my best to remove my own will, the more I have found these Promises to be coming true.

By living in self-will I remained addicted to so many things and because of that I couldn’t find any new freedom or happiness in life at all. I still regretted the past and wasn’t able to shut the door on a single thing. I was anything but serene and peaceful and continued to go down and down on the depression scale. None of my experiences were helping anyone and instead were causing pain and hardship for those around me. I felt useless and lived in self-pity constantly. I was extremely selfish and self-centered and had no interest in anyone else but myself. I became self-seeking to the max with everyone and everything as I developed a ‘life sucks’ mentality along with a very bleak outlook on just about everything. My fears grew everyday of what people thought of me and eventually I became jobless and directionless. I fell into the same pitfalls again and again and soon I was doing nothing more than trying to play God rather than seek God.

I do my damnedest today to live differently by seeking God’s will instead. And it’s working. Every one of those promises seems to hold some level of truth now in my own life and it’s getting better everyday. Because of this, I can say today that I know 12 Step Recovery really does work and the promises can and will come true. It just takes work. It takes removing self-will. And it takes walking through fear and trusting that God’s will is a whole heck of a lot better than any second I might have ever lived in my own self-will.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A Prescription For Healing…

One of the first major medications to become mainstream in this world was penicillin and while it was officially discovered back in the late 1800’s, it didn’t become mainstream in its pill form until the 1950’s. Since then, it seems as if there has been a shift with many people from one of natural healing to one of pill therapy.

Granted penicillin has saved many lives and helped many people since it came into widespread use. Prior to that, I know many people died from something as simple as a scratch or a cut that became infected. While I’m not knocking medications such as that and their effectiveness to elongate a human life, there is a sad reality that is facing our society today because of drugs and medications. People are becoming more and more dependent on them to exist and function throughout any given day.

While penicillin indeed was a major breakthrough in medicine as it’s purpose was to help heal infections, many of the drugs that followed have done no healing at all, and instead, simply have band-aided deeper issues. There are quite a number now of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and anti-pain based medications. None of them heal anything other than to help a person cope with their life and what has been handed to them. And many people get on them today to help with what they are going through but never do the work necessary to aid their body in its healing process and instead choose to stay dependent upon them for the rest of their lives.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my own case with battling chronic pain, depression, and anxiety, I never healed from those conditions when I took any of the vast numbers of prescriptions that doctors prescribed me. In each of those types of medications I took, what I was going through was only suppressed or covered-up. When I’d take them, I might feel slightly better on the level of depression, anxiety or pain I was feeling, but I’d also have to deal with a whole new slew of side effects that my body would have to endure while I was on them. I’m sure most people have seen at least one of those commercials for these types of medications. They show a person hurting on some level and isolating from life before taking some wonder drug. Then it shows the effects of that person after taking the drug with them doing a lot more activities and living life seemingly a whole lot better. As the commercial comes to a close, in a rapid fast forward fashion, a long list of side effects are read off. What’s sad is how many people are becoming dependent on all of these types of medications today and having new health issues be created because of them. Each of them are changing the chemical pathways and productions in the body, but as soon as one ceases to use them, for many, like myself, the symptoms would return.

After a long battle over the years of me going on and off of them again and again like the hills and valleys of a roller coaster, I finally decided it was worth investing time to delve into why they were happening in the first place. Why was I getting depressed and having anxiety attacks all the time. Why did I develop chronic pains all around my body? Doctors would say it was genetic and heredity and that I wasn’t going to be able to function without taking one of those types of drugs. I beg to differ.

Most of the reasons, if not all of them, on why I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain in my life comes from the circumstances of the life I came into and put myself in day after day after day. I was often mentally and emotionally abused as a child. I was sexually molested as well. I did vast amounts of recreational drinking and drugs. I ate terribly for a long time. I put myself in unhealthy friendships with people who continued to use and abuse me. I was often promiscuous. I relied on legal stimulants such as caffeine to exist and a whole lot worse. All of those things made me who I was and dealt me the hand I had to hold.

I think most people don’t really want to face any type of pain whether it’s mental, emotional, or physical. I know I didn’t. I loved medications at first. It was just another way of me running from the deep-seated issues I had within. Until I decided to change myself, until I started to open up pandora’s box from my past, until I started eating better, until I started hanging around healthier people, and until I started living my life with God at its center, I couldn’t function without medications and pills and I continued to fall back into some level of addiction based behaviors.

It’s been over a year now that I haven’t taken any prescription or been acting out in any addiction. I’m trying to cleanse my life of all the poisons I placed within it. I eat as best as I can. I don’t spend time around people who are actively living in darkness through addictions or other clouded paths. I do a lot of writing and work on myself to heal from all the past traumas I’ve gone through. And I start and end my day asking God for guidance, strength, and healing so that I can keep moving forward on my healing path.

So far it’s working. I’m still alive. I’m still free from medications. I’m still functioning on some level. Is it the level I desire to be at? No. But I want to heal completely from what has caused me to get in these pains in the first place. I want to heal from what got me unbalanced to start with. I know it didn’t take me overnight to get here and please don’t take me the wrong way. I’m not against medications especially those that might help a person survive or get back to a reasonable state of functioning. But I’ve learned well enough now that much of the conditions many of us deal with today go back to how we have been living our lives in the first place.

I think it’s important to remember that any medications, drugs, or substances we may have taken to feel better, any abuse we may have endured, any addictions we may have gotten ourselves involved with, any unhealthiness we may have consumed regularly with food or drinks, any toxic people we may have hung around with consistently, or any other behavior we may have done that wasn’t filled with God’s love and light, each could have contributed to us getting sick in our own way.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but I know I don’t want to be sick anymore. I’m doing my best now to heal naturally. I walk through a lot of fear regularly because of it. It’s tough. It really is. But I have a lot more faith in God now that I will make it to the other side of this, free of medications, free of drugs, free of addictions, and free of anything that ever took me off of the path of love and light in the first place.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Love Thy Neighbor (…and Landlord Too!)

Sometimes I find it’s best to write about a situation that is providing me angst. I guess you can say I might find it healing. Lately, I have been in somewhat of a quandary where I often have no outlet to talk about something that is becoming quite difficult to deal with.

I’ve been renting all of my living spaces now since September of 2007 when I had moved out of the bed and breakfast I owned at the time. I landed in Massachusetts and lived temporarily with my sister while I searched for the next place to call home. The first location was in Brockton where I moved into a friend’s brother’s home who was renting out a room within it. That lasted only nine months. I then found myself moving again, but this time several towns away in Weymouth and into a much larger space of another person’s home whom I had met in one of my recovery meetings. And just over a year ago, I was forced to move again when that owner decided it was time to stop renting out part of their home. Since then, I have been living in a much larger house just a few miles down the road in the same town from where I had last lived. There, I have had to face unique challenges just as much as I did in my previous living situations but overall, I’ve discovered, I am finding it difficult to live with anyone.

Don’t get me wrong, some living situations are easier for me than others. My last three have been the most difficult though as each of them had me renting out and living in the same space as its owners. Prior to this, I had shared living spaces with many other people over the years, but in each of those cases I was an equal owner or renter and not just a tenant. What that meant was that I also had an equal say on all the decisions that related back to the home. Unfortunately, in my current living situation and the previous two as well, I haven’t had much of a say at all on anything. I will admit that I’m not the easiest person to live with. I could be labeled a neat freak. I like everything to be kept in order. And I don’t like messes or clutter. But with each of those traits also comes a strong set of good values. I always clean up after myself. I try to help out where I can with household chores. And I consistently pay my rent on time.

Sadly, I have found that these good values don’t translate into much of anything when it comes to wanting to feel empowered in these past three homes that I have been living in. What I have discovered is that when an individual owns a home and lives within it, they usually have their own ways of doing things around it. I know I’m definitely that way when I’ve owned one. In these past three rentals, I’ve always felt welcomed initially with the “my home is your home” sentiments. But at some inevitable point, those feelings have always disappeared and I’ve found myself migrating to spending most of my time in my bedroom as that is the only place that really is my own domain. And even then, I have seen it really isn’t.

Over the past year I have had several run-ins with the owner of my current home. I’ve had to face a lot of my own control issues as well where I continuously come face to face with the fact that I’m just a tenant renting a room. While some of my ideas and concerns have been taken into account and used by my home’s owner, many have not. The space I’m given in the driveway is under a tree that birds like to have a field day pooping on, in large glorious amounts. I have asked in many different ways for a resolution and the end result is me being told to go buy a car cover. The house also has a large yard around it which I often spent many hours enjoying throughout last spring, summer, and fall. Unfortunately, I have not been able to lately as for about four weeks now, it has became a hazmat zone with over a ton of dirt dropped on it, a garden that has yet to be built, and piping, tubes, and wiring that lay all around it for a well-based watering system that is supposed to be put in.

Then there is the inside of the house and how I’ve been told more than once that the way I’m doing things isn’t right such as how I dispense water from the fridge, what dishes I put in the dishwasher, how I place the garbage bags around the can, what recyclables I should be or not be putting in its bin, and what kind of treats and tricks I can and can’t offer to their dog. Even more distressing has been a backup key that I loaned the owner several trips ago to get my mail from my PO Box when I was away. It has since been misplaced and no attempt has been made to set time aside to look for it. If it’s not found, it could cost me a sum of money that I will have to pay back to the post office. The response I’ve received from my roommate to that revelation was that I should have made that known to him when it was being loaned.

Ultimately, my landlord/owner/roommate does have the final say in everything here at the home I am living in. It’s their house and their rules. I just know I would be handling things very differently if I was in their shoes. A lot of that has to do with the changes I’ve made in my life in the past year with God being more at the center of my life, then me being more at the center of it. I don’t operate much at all anymore by self-will and self-centeredness and I’m working on letting go of control that I once maintained with such strictness in every area of my life. It has allowed me to accept the many differences that exist between my landlord and I. While he procrastinates and openly will admit he does, I don’t. He also is somewhat of a hoarder of things where I traditionally have let go of excess clutter. In addition, he enjoys a few drinks here and there and has yet to settle down with one person whereas I’m in recovery and a monogamous relationship.

Eventually I will be moving on from here and hopefully living with my partner in his home. Ironically, he and I share a lot more in common with our daily living values with some rare exceptions. But in the long run though, I believe it’s a good thing that I’m still living here as a tenant because it’s helping me to face some of my own control issues that still remain within me. God has also helped me to practice a lot more patience, love, acceptance, and tolerance towards my landlord especially when he makes decisions that affect me negatively.

While we may be quite different on behaviors, ideals and how we generally might handle things, the one thing we do have in common is that we both share a piece of God. We both have a soul that is connected to the same Source. And we both deserve unconditional love. Because of this, I will continue to do my best to treat my landlord with all the love, respect and kindness that God would want me to offer, even in the face of frustration that I have been feeling lately when I’m not offered the same.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson