Category: Recovery From Addictions

Just over twenty-four hours ago I awoke at 3am with flu-like symptoms. With a fever that spiked somewhere between 101 and 102 degrees and aches and chills everywhere, I was down for the count yesterday. Thankfully today I am back to par and am glad that I spent yesterday doing nothing but laying in bed and taking care of me.

Being a recovering alcoholic and addict, I’ve come to learn there is a difference between being selfish and taking care of myself. I came from a family where there was always an angle for everything. All actions arose out of some end desire for either of my parents. I too became this way as I grew older and immersed myself in addictions. Day in and day out I sought one of my addictions and nothing was going to get in my way of living in them. If I did anything that might have been deemed kind or nice by someone else, I had an angle behind it. Over the past year as I have transcended into a more God-centered life, I have been able to see these patterns and begin to remove them from my life.

Yesterday, as my fever was spiking, I had to make a choice to not attend a commitment I had made to speak with a few others at a detox facility. For someone else that decision may have seemed like a no-brainer. For me, it was a little more complex. Having lived for much of 22 years completely selfish and self-centered, I have spent much of this past year getting out and doing what I can with no motivation other than to help others heal. One of those things is going to speak at various facilities where the still suffering alcoholics and addicts go for treatment.

I asked myself the question multiple times yesterday if it was being selfish if I cancelled on my commitment and stayed home. Part of me continued to say that there were a lot more people worse off than how I was feeling. Thankfully with the aid of my therapist as well as my spiritual advisor and sponsor, I thought things out further on how it would be if I did show up. Would I really have been effective speaking about my experience, strength, and hope in front of a group of people as I shook uncontrollably? Would I have been able to show convincing testimony of the benefits of God and AA while dozing off with the fatigue I was battling. Would I be able to show the happiness and joy that I normally have in living in recovery and serving God? The answers to each of these questions after much thought was “no”. I decided because of that, it wasn’t selfish for me to take care of myself and stay home last night. The action of going could have put others at risk on both a health perspective as well as a recovery one. And just as important, it could have made me even unhealthier.

Living a life for as long as I did selfishly does add some complications to my normal thought processes about things like what happened yesterday. Much of my prior life, when I was active in addictions, was filled with excuses that I was too tired, too depressed, too anxious, or too “anything” to get out of myself and help another. In most of those cases, all of those things that I made excuses for, were brought on by myself and arose out of my addictions in the first place. In contrast, how I felt in the previous 24 hours was out of my control. When I awoke this morning and felt 100 percent better, I realized that my choice to stay home and take care of myself yesterday was the best thing I could have done.

Thankfully, with having a much stronger recovery from my addictions today, I have the support in my life from a few individuals and from God to show me that sometimes just taking care of myself is the best action to follow.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

One of the hardest things in recovery is the realization that there isn’t some magic pill that can be taken to make all the pain go away. Whatever form of 12 step recovery one might pursue, the journey is going to be filled with both highs and lows until God has become the center point of their everyday living

When I first walked into AA in 1995, my attitude was such that I thought I just needed to attend meetings. I saw all the people with smiles on their faces and I heard messages about how great people’s lives were. For some reason, I tuned out the middle parts of the stories that I heard. I didn’t hear about the long, arduous road of clearing the muck out from within. I didn’t hear about the journey of reducing the ego and removing self-centeredness. I didn’t comprehend that I needed to seek God’s will and remove self-will. My feeling was that if I just showed up I was doing enough.

Boy was I wrong.

I didn’t last long in AA. I decided it was too stressful and tried to find an easier, softer way that wasn’t going to be with the twelve step process. So instead of twelve steps, I went twelve years searching for something else. While there are a lot of things out there that can guide one closer to God, like the twelve steps are geared for, each of them takes constant vigilance. I wasn’t willing to do that with any of them. My ego, selfishness, fear and deeply imbedded pain had me running from one thing to the next, getting some benefit here and there but never scratching the surface of what ultimately was going on inside of me and driving me to believe there was some magic pill out there.

In September of 2007, I had gone through enough pain.  I decided to give in and begin my journey in AA with 12 years sober and no real recovery. I started to attend as many meetings as I could weekly. I got a sponsor. And I began to read a 3rd edition Alcoholics Anonymous book that I still had from my very first attempt with AA in 1995. Weekly I met with my sponsor delving through page after page after page in the AA book. The first year of my work in AA was extremely difficult. I’m not sure if it was because my ego continued to fight the process and act out in other addictions or if there was just so much pain I was having to face as I walked through the steps. Either way, what I discovered was that there really are a lot of highs and lows in recovery until God became my focal point with everything in it.

When I’m acting out in any addiction such as alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex, what I’m seeking is to stay in the highs and avoid the lows. The highs can be great but the lows are awful. I lived in a life where I sought out addictions on some level for over 22 years and my brain has tried to continue to convince me that it’s possible to avoid the lows altogether.

News flash. It’s not.

It’s only possible to numb the lows with more addictions.

Entering a twelve step program made me face this reality head on. Over past five years I’ve gained a better understanding that life has it’s ups and downs but they don’t have to be as extreme as they once were when I was an active addict. I’ve learned that true recovery and healing means walking through the pain as bad as it may seem, facing all inner demons, and emerging into the light on the other side. Recovery is not about avoiding or walking around pain.

The more that I have placed God at the center of my life and my recovery, the more that those highs and lows have balanced themselves out. I compare it a lot to a ride on a roller coaster. On most roller coasters, the first part of the ride are huge hills and huge dips but as the end of the ride nears, the hills become smaller and smaller and eventually become level. This is how my recovery seems to becoming today. I don’t find myself getting extremely elated and then crashing shortly thereafter. I don’t find myself seeking out quick fixes to make myself feel better anymore. When pain arises, as it still does, I seek out healthy support in AA, consult with my spiritual advisor/sponsor, and I try my best to go to God in prayer and meditation to get through it.

To walk in a door of a twelve step recovery meeting and hope that everything painful will magically disappear is an illusion. To continue to live in that illusion will lead a person away from an amazing path to a God centered life. To lead a person away from that amazing path to a God centered life will ultimately guide one back to addiction seeking, more highs and lows, and a whole heck of a lot more pain.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

My previous blog entry discussed my evening at a restaurant with friends that spent their time on a cell phone rather than engaging in communication with the others present at the table. It went on to discuss some of the negative things happening in society that I believe are a direct correlation to how communication is changing with all the advances in technology. This entry focuses more specifically on the use of cell phones during recovery meetings as that too has become a larger problem today.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that every 12th step recovery meeting I’ve attended these days gives a reminder to shut off or place in silent mode any cell phones present before the meeting actually begins. It never fails though, there always seems to be at least one phone, if not more, that goes off in the meeting. But an even more disturbing trend lately is the amount of people that spend their time during meetings texting or surfing the internet.

The first and most important thing I’ve learned today with my own recovery and God centered life is to admit my own guiltiness of this. For many years, I came to recovery meetings for the social aspect. I wasn’t interested in doing the steps. I wasn’t interested is listening to the speakers. And I definitely wasn’t interested in doing God’s will. As the pain got greater in my life, so did my willingness to do what was necessary to focus more on my recovery, on finding God, and on removing my self-centeredness.

For a time there was a great tug-of-war game going on between God and me. I kept trying to do my recovery in my own way. And there were many times that as the cell phones advanced into the smart phone generation, I would spend the meetings surfing the web, texting people, or randomly flipping through my digital photo albums. Meanwhile, in my self-centeredness, I never realized what this might look like or feel like to those who were speaking at the meetings I attended.

Imagine for a moment being at a podium, any podium, in any meeting, recovery related or not. Then imagine speaking in front of a group of people at that podium about something very personal to you. Finally, imagine during those moments of speaking, upon looking out at the audience, that the majority are looking down at their phones busily tapping away on the screens and not listening to you. How does it feel? I can answer it because I’ve been on that side of the coin as well.

It doesn’t feel that great. In fact it feels like what I’m saying doesn’t really matter.

To speak publicly about something so personal to me, such as my journey of recovery and seeking God is hard enough. But to have most people not even pay attention and instead spend the meeting time on their cell phones is even harder. I compare it to the feeling I had as a child when I would bring something important to my parents and they were either too busy watching one of their shows, drinking alcohol, or caught up in one of their own dramas.

Meetings are supposed to be for either speaking about one’s experience, strength, and hope, or listening to someone offer the same. Many years ago, when cell phone technology didn’t exist, people sat through meetings with their cups of coffee and listened much more intently on what was being said. Regardless of whether a speaker is truly charismatic or not, isn’t it important to give them our fullest attention? Wouldn’t each of us want the same if our feet were planted in front of the podium telling our story?

I know the answer for me is yes and I have made the corrections necessary in my life to start showing more respect for all speakers. I think back to the time when Bill and Bob attended meetings and have wondered what they might feel like today if they were to attend a meeting and see the vast majority of people tapping away on cell phones instead of listening to the speaker. The most important thing that has helped me to change my meeting etiquette is to place myself in every speaker’s shoes, to remember my own journey to recovery and salvation, and to know that their testimony is equally important to listen to as to when I’m speaking about mine.

The more that I place God at the center of my life, the more that I find myself steering clear of my self-centered behaviors. The more that I find myself steering clear of my self-centered behaviors, the more I see that using a cell phone during a meeting is self-centered in the first place. The more that I see that using a cell phone during a meeting is self-centered in the first place, the more that I have turned it off or left it in the car before entering any meeting. The more that I have turned my cell phone off or left it in the car before entering meetings, the more that I have gotten out of meetings. The more that I have gotten out of meetings, the more that I have placed God even deeper at the center of my life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson