Do you feel restless, irritable, and discontent in life much of the time? These three words often describe quite a number of individuals in recovery from a former addiction usually because of one reason and one reason only. They’re still trying to look for the solution outside of themselves.
Take an addiction to alcohol or drugs for example. Beneath the surface of someone succumbing to the evils of either is really just someone who’s fearful and insecure and trying to hide from themselves. And when they put their booze or pills down, those points don’t change. The 12 Steps are meant to get to the root of why someone is like that in the first place and when they do, they charts a course of spiritual healing for the individual. But unfortunately, it’s frequently not a pleasant process at all, which in turn leads many like my I once did to seek something outside of oneself to fill that empty pit within.
In my case, I chose many sexual affairs, caffeine, shopping, and more to temporarily fill that void but even when I did, I continued to feel those feelings of being restless, irritable, and discontent on a regular basis. I know of plenty of others who have been clean and sober for a while from their former addictions, yet they continue to choose other ones such as over smoking, sleeping around with an abundance of men or women, or buying various things for themselves all for the sake of trying to feel better. And it’s those same people who often have a tendency to say how they still feel those three uncomfortable feelings regularly in life.
I believe the only way they will ever rid themselves of those feelings on a daily basis is to seek the same solution I discovered after many years of searching externally and experiencing nothing but repeated failure. That solution was to go through each of the 12 Steps diligently and draw a whole heck of a lot closer to my Higher Power. In doing so, I found a wounded, hurt little boy within who only ever wanted to be loved and nurtured.
While the 12 Step process was not easy for me to undertake, its long-term benefits have been well worth it. I don’t experience much in the way of being restless, irritable, and discontent anymore these days, but if I occasionally still do, it’s always tied to a recent moment where I re-sought the solution outside of myself. Case in point, on Halloween night, I ate about 30 pieces of chocolate seeking some ease and comfort externally and I paid the price dearly for the next two days with both a physical and an emotional hangover.
The simple truth is that there are tremendous amounts of ways one in recovery can be mislead into believing happiness exists outside of them. Alas, I personally never found any one of those ways were able to produce a cure for being restless, irritable, and discontent. Going through the 12 Steps and procuring a Higher Power though has truly been the only solution that’s ever worked to ridding me of feeling them. But, if I ever hear of someone finding a permanent cure for those three feelings outside of themselves, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’m going to keep on practicing the 12 Steps every day of my life because the last thing I want to feel in life these days is restless, irritable and discontent.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
Just so you know…a bit of a rant coming here…
There is a very dangerous understanding in the “fundamentalist” versions of 12-step communities: that anyone who is feeling restless, irritable, or discontented is somehow failing in their recovery process. The “AA Nazis” will tell you that if I’m feeling these things, I just need to work harder to purify myself so the world will just float on by me and not affect me in these ways.
This is bullshit, in my experience. Life happens, and life is lumpy. Health issues come up; cars break down; work stress pegs the crap-meter; loved ones make silly or even harmful decisions – and all of these can trigger the R-I-D syndrome. And if it doesn’t, it’s probably a good sign that I’ve disconnected myself from my feelings and the world in general.
The twelve steps give me a way to deal with the restless-iritable-discontented syndrome. It is not R-I-Dproofing, it is R-I-D-resistancy. Until I become some kind of Zen master who is never bothered by anything, R-I-D will happen. And it *should* happen. I, at least, believe that we should be irritated by injustice, poverty, and suffering – and then we should DO something about it.
I have one friend in recovery who has gone 99% blind over the last six months. I have another who was on his sofa when the Joplin tornado hit his house – he was sucked through his living room picture window, thrown onto his front yard, and then the tornado dropped his front porch on top of him. (Four broken ribs, pneumonia for 2 months, blood loss….you name it.) The list goes on… there are lots of people worse off than I am. That helps – especially to remember my blessings.
It also helps to know that most of my problems are caused by my blessings. Work stress? The only thing worse than that is trying-to-FIND-work stress. A sponsor once said, “Any time you are having relationship problems, it helps to take the time to write your partner’s obituary. Do it. Think about what it would be like to have to be doing that right now. If it’s not an incredibly painful image, then you need to consider what *you* are doing with this person.”
Robert Fulghum wrote an incredibly powerful chapter in his book “Uh-Oh,” where he talked about learning to make a very important distinction:
One of life’s best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.
(“Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door” (2001), p. 146)
Your rant is welcomed my friend. I agree with you that things happen all the time. I call them the curve balls in life. BUT… my studies in Buddhism have shown me that even when THOSE things happen, we can still walk through them with peace and serenity. It’s all about how we handle each of them. There are things today, when they happen, say people cutting me off on the road pretty bad and almost hitting me, that used to cause me the R-I-D feelings. Today, I just laugh and say a prayer for them 99% of the time. The 1% when it does bother me is usually when I’m trying to be in control of my life and get somewhere fast because I’m not at peace with myself or something else… Hopefully this makes some sense. 🙂