We often say in recovery groups that all our stories are unique to us and all our stories are the same. Mine then, too, as explored through this site will be an all too familiar narrative. But, as the writer and professor Leslie Jamison reminds us in her book "The Recovering" it is actually the familiarity, the cliche even, that is the important lesson. Especially for some of us. Like Jamison, I was once in the literary world. I need that reminder because I am so prone to terminal uniqueness, to the writer's or creative's ego. This cuts across many professions.
Jamison says we don’t want our stories to be just like other people’s stories. We fear the ordinary. Another excellent writer Jonathan Franzen described this in his book of essays “Farther Away” where he tells of the role of this fear in writing on the addiction and life and death of his friend and fellow writer David Foster Wallace. But, again, the cause is the cure. The ordinary saves us. We find that immersing in the stories of others and seeing the connection to ours helps us to understand ours. We need the time and space where we are just like others and where that is celebrated. Instead of this story-sharing becoming banal, it has become a blessing. I hope that mine and Grace’s stories will be blessings to others too, as other’s stories have been to me.
The brief overview of my story: One day I am being described as a rock star in the local non-profit community. I am close to finishing a book. I travel to far-off places to share experiences my public life back home, and back home I host people from all over the world who come to see what we are doing. The next day the bleaker, troubling, disgusting secrecy of my life of my addiction is exposed publicly and the one called star is now called monster, behind tangible bars after decades of fashioning my own prison bars of the mind.
I was extremely fortunate that some of this secret struggle had become exposed nine months before the D-Day or Discovery Day to some few in my family and I was able to finally begin getting serious (well, at first, semi-serious) about therapy and to begin the all crucial 12 step process. Between my D-Day and beginning recovery work and then the day of my arrest nine months later (for an online crime of access with intent to view illegal porn some year and a half previously), I started and stopped, started and stopped. It is the ordinary path of trying to become abstinent, to get a day, a week, a month toward a sober life. All the while I was still trying to manage my hectic by choice, overflowing with stress and activity, life--the public work, the family man, and only added on therapy and recovery.
The key word is “manage.” I sought to manage my recovery and therapy too, and was not
rigorously honest in those settings either. I was still not making the hard, go to the depths at any lengths inward turn required to begin my life work toward wholeness and health and real love. I wasn’t prepared to become the “bug goo” needed for any transformation, the kind the caterpillar enters into on the way toward a butterfly life. I was trying to skirt consequences. I was still trying to have it all without understanding what the real “it” was I could have.
As Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park succinctly puts it: Life breaks free…Life finds a
way. (Or it doesn’t. Death of many kinds, both physical and spiritual, also can triumph before we find true life). In my life, it seems to have taken the actual real world prison to help me break free from the mental prison I had been in, had been going deeper into, had been putting myself in solitary and extreme conditions for longer and longer times. (Incarceration also delayed my recovery, and added to my traumas, and could have been exchanged or abbreviated for hard restorative justice and consequences instead of retributive justice, but that is for a much later post. I have learned that key to my recovery has been to focus more on my ethical life than on the legal entanglements of my life; to focus on what I have done and why, instead of what has been done to me.)
Finally in this brief overview, this shortcut, this telescope of what will come in posts to come:
My sobriety of so far near six years can be framed in these few ways that will be elaborated on elsewhere:
The “trinity” of 1. Self-Understanding. 2. Discipline. 3. Becoming a part of an Alternative
Community. I call it trinity because like the classic theological concept there is a unity in the
tripleness, a weaving where one becomes another, requires the other. I adopted this frame
particularly from the work of Gabor Mate, who will pop up often later on this site. Each of these will be explored.
The Work of Processing Emotions. And doing so on a daily basis. That I hadn’t done this, that I had run away from it, never really been taught to do it and rewarded for not doing so, and had approach-avoidance to it, was not really a surprise to me. Red flags abounded but I ignored them and worked to make sure others did too. My denial of the need to process emotions had become so ingrained as a daily reaction to life for so long that what I knew deep down I needed I also deep down made sure I never came close to doing.
While I don’t have the same theology as C.S. Lewis and don’t use “Satan” language while I do use “God” language, still in Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” (which amazingly until in recovery I had willfully avoided reading) he captures this dynamic in my life well. His Devil was that part of me that created a persona that stayed close to emotions but in an approach-avoidant way. Sort of like the crime or political boss whose dictate is to keep one’s enemies close, all so they can be managed and used to ill effect.
Part of my life in journalism and fiction and literature was to learn how to re-direct, deflect, use emotions indirectly, turn them into art, an object, rather than going through them myself to know them and life better; part of my life in community work in impoverished places was to pinpoint community traumas and how emotions like shame worked in those places and in my neighbors, so I would be too busy in my dedication to the outside world to address the same emotions and my own poverty of soul in my inner life and how it was affecting my family.
Feeling and processing feelings In recovery helped save me. I was saved by keeping a daily “emotional scorecard.” I was saved by my emotions becoming so overwhelming and obvious that to live I couldn’t manage them anymore the way I had, even though much of my emotional work had to be done in the most inhospitable place imaginable for doing so, jail and prison. I was saved by reminding myself that unprocessed emotions was a trigger that led to relapse, and relapse would lead to total destruction of what self and relationships I have left. This difficult and demanding and, unnatural for some of us, work will be explored later too.
The Three Circles. My daily life is now structured by the recovery tool of following the Three
Circles. I learned this and practice it thanks to SAA. I believe it is a useful tool for living for all,
and have seen its success in use by all ages. It is a preventive, as are the other overall
frameworks here, for people not to go down the road I and others have been forced to travel. I am sure there are many other ways this has been framed by others. It will come up often in later posts.
Simply put, the three circles are Inner, Middle, and Outer. Inner circle is where we list those behaviors we must abstain from or our life will disintegrate. These will vary in number and degree of extremity depending on one’s recovery and life circumstances. Sometimes a behavior will be in or out of it depending on what we are struggling with the most at any given time. Middle circle is where we list those attitudes and behaviors that prompt us, trigger us, to engage in our inner circle behaviors. If inner circle life is described as “acting out”, not abstaining from destructive behaviors, middle circle is often where we experience “acting in,” engaging in the destructive mental or physical activities that we have found will lead us to acting out. They can destroy our quality of life too. So outer circle is the place where we put our antidotes to the inner and middle circles. This is our list of healthy activities, what we find gives us life and meaning, where we find true peace, perspective, and purpose. I will be sharing how my own circles have changed and are changing over time.
The Three P’s and The Three R’s. My goals and guides for life and recovery. Many blog posts
will examine my struggle to follow them. The Three P’s I just mentioned. How am I doing living in Peace, discovering and growing my Perspective, and serving a Purpose? This will guide how I identify and use my Three Circles throughout the day. They give me a way to track my steps in recovery. The Three R’s provide where I want to go with my life thanks to the Three P’s and all the tools I have, and that is toward deeper personal Recovery, family and friend Reconciliation, and community justice Restoration. Like with self-understanding, discipline, and the alternative community, the Three P’s and the Three R’s are each to an extent a trinity also, one dependent on the other. But they are more outcomes sought than the specific tools of daily living. In many ways the Three R’s in particular are beyond full realization by my efforts and commitments alone. For fullest realization they depend on how others are or aren’t willing to engage with me, and so they may have an inherent failure built-in. Nevertheless it is important to embrace that and embrace them as life aims to live toward. This whole website is one small act done in the spirit of the Three R’s.
This is a brief overview of what will emerge in more detail as I write on what led me into such a deep place of disconnecting my Self from myself, and from truth and integrity and love and my sense of right and justice and what I hoped for in the world for those I love and those in my community. And as I write on how I have emerged, and am still doing so, up from that depth. In gratitude for those who never left me there, and for those who in their own various ways had been there too and shared their own different and similar stories of life with me, and still do.