Category: Recovery From Addictions

Being addicted to anything is a disease of many proportions. And it’s one that comes at a person from all angles that includes the mental, the emotional, the physical, and the spiritual.

For a person who is becoming or has already become addicted to anything such as alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, or anything else, it means the person’s life is being taken over by that addiction and they’ve lost the power of choice to stop the behavior. Having suffered from multiple addictions throughout my life, I have learned just how much of a disease each of them can become.

On a mental level, anyone suffering from any addiction loses their ability to think clearly, to think rationally, and to think level headed. Often there is no thinking that’s done at all. It’s like Pavlov’s Theorem of Classical Conditioning where he learned if you kept feeding a dog treats and then ringing a bell afterwards, that eventually the dog would salivate upon hearing the bell all by itself without seeing any treats. That bell is no different then what happens when one puts a frosty beer, or a line of coke, or a huge piece of cake, or a set of casino chips, or a pornographic image, in front of an alcoholic, an addict, or an overeater respectively.

On an emotional level, anyone suffering from any addiction loses their ability to feel their feelings without experience extremes in them. During the “good moments” when one is indulging in their addiction, joy becomes elation and laughter becomes guffaws. But when one is coming down or withdrawing from their addiction, frustration easily turns into rage and sadness turns into torrents of tears, self-pity, and regret.

On a physical level, anyone suffering from any addiction loses their ability to maintain a healthy body. People often stop showering, shaving, eating, and even sleeping when in the throngs of an addiction. Because of this, their bodies suffer twice. Once if they are over abusing their bodies with any substance that can affect their internal organs and other parts from functioning on a healthy level. And twice, if they are ignoring the basic human needs for taking care of themselves as eating healthy, getting decent rest, and keeping oneself clean are critical to maintaing a healthy physical body.

But the most important level that the disease of addiction affects it the spiritual. Not only does it place a blackness around the heart and prevents a person from truly feeling love for themselves or anyone else for that matter, it also cuts off the physical body’s cord to connecting to the love of God. Eventually, the soul suffers as essentially it’s being cut off from the sunlight of the spirit. And when that happens enough, the physical body dies, and the soul departs from it.

If you happen to be a person in this world who is suffering from any addiction, please, take a moment, breathe deeply, and ask yourself this…Is suffering from the disease of any addiction worth all of this??? I hope your answer is that it isn’t. Seek a Higher Existence and know in doing so, you can end this addiction’s reign on your body, mind, and soul. You don’t have to suffer anymore on any level. Not the mental, not the emotional, not the physical, and definitely not the spiritual…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

All too often I hear people share in meetings about how one of their loved ones is actively suffering from the throngs of some type of addiction. Many of them talk about how they have tried everything to help those addicts and that it’s tearing their lives apart. Yet none of them realize that the best thing they can do to help those addicts is to stop enabling them and instead to begin the path of detaching with love…

So what does detaching with love look like? It means:

• Holding back from the need to rescue, save or fix the addict from being sick, dysfunctional or irrational
• Disengaging from an over-enmeshed or dependent relationship with the addict
• Accepting that one cannot change or control the addict
• Developing and maintaining a safe, emotional distance from the addict whom one has previously given a lot of power to affect their emotional outlook on life
• Establishing emotional boundaries with the addict that one has become overly enmeshed or dependent with in order to develop one’s own sense of autonomy and independence
• Not allowing oneself to be led into guilt or feeling responsible for the addict’s failures or falterings
• Letting the addict that one loves and cares for accept personal responsibility for their own actions and to practice tough love by not bailing them out from their troubles

As soon as a person begins the path of detaching with love, an addict often attempts to dominate, manipulate, and control them a lot more to prevent them from doing so. My mother was the first example of an addict in my life that I experienced this first hand. There were many others I brought into my life after her that repeated these same lessons. What I had to learn how to do was emotionally detach from all of them but to do so meant changing many of my own behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. For the longest time, I thought what this meant was to change the way I was acting so that I didn’t “trigger” them into doing more of their addict based behaviors. That is NOT what detachment means at all. Trying to change certain behaviors so as not to “trigger” an addict is actually enabling them further into their disease.

My path of successfully detaching with love from all those unhealthy and toxic addicts throughout my whole life began with me learning a set of principles that came from therapy, reading self-help books, and Al-Anon. They are:

• I couldn’t fix, save, or rescue the addict
• I was giving my power away every time I tried to fix, save, or rescue the addict
• I was not responsible for the addict’s happiness, failures, shortcomings, or bad behaviors
• Every time I had hope that things would change with the addict, I was living in an illusion and setting myself up for more pain
• I was the one who was allowing the addict to convince me I was helpless, powerless, and incompetent
• I could survive and thrive without the relationship with the addict, that life would go on, and that I wasn’t a bad person for doing so
• There was no shame in walking away from a relationship that was destructive and toxic

The most important thing though, that I learned was critical if I wanted to detach with love, was the fact that I had to learn how to love myself a lot more so that I could see I deserved better. Once that began to happen, I began detaching with love from all of those toxic relationships with addicts by walking out of all of their lives.

If you are feeling at your wits end with someone you love who is suffering from any type of addiction, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize you will never be able to make that person become healthy regardless of how many acts of love you offer them. No matter what you ever do, you will never be able to save, fix, or rescue them. Detaching with love means loving yourself a lot more and reminding yourself that you deserve better. Pray to God to help you with this and know that if you end up walking out of that addict’s life, you don’t need to feel guilty. Not only is it going to be healthier for you, it will be just as healthy for them because it often become’s a great catalyst to driving them into recovery.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A few days ago a woman had raised her hand at the beginning of a big book AA meeting I was attending. For about ten minutes she shared a painful experience that dealt with her 30 year old son who was on a serious implosion with alcohol. She indicated that it was affecting her own ability to stay sane as well as clean and sober. Unfortunately, what came next that lasted for the duration of that meeting was quite a bit of cross-talking and not much in the way of loving support for this woman.

In general, cross-talking typically refers to when people speak out of turn, interrupt someone while they are speaking, or give direct advice to someone in a meeting. It’s supposed to be a cardinal rule that people don’t do this sort of thing during 12 Step recovery meetings. Sadly, that’s not always the case as it was the other day for this woman when several people gave her their own advice throughout the meeting in very direct and somewhat angry tones. Speaking about one’s own experiences that relate to what someone else has shared is quite acceptable during any meeting. But looking directly at someone and letting them know that you feel they should be handling things differently can be detrimental to that person’s recovery. In the situation with this woman, she had relapsed recently and had only a week sober so this was definitely the case. And I could tell as she left the meeting that she was worse off than when she came in.

I was extremely grateful though later in the evening when I ran into her in the plaza across the street from where the meeting was held. She was indeed quite upset from what had transpired and had felt the negative tone from many of the comments that were directed at her. I took the opportunity to tell her I was proud of her for what she shared and that I would pray for her situation. I also let her know that meetings are not supposed to be that way and provided her my phone number in case she wanted to reach out for help.

The bottom line is that cross-talking is harmful to the health of any meeting. The point of any 12 Step meeting is not to provide advice to others, to interrupt when someone else is speaking, or to speak out of turn. Doing any of this can harm the person who is sharing an intimate part of their recovery like it did for this woman. Thankfully, God put her in my path after the meeting was over which gave me the chance to help diffuse what happened.

Hopefully, she will come back and find a healthier meeting to attend…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson