Weekly Blog
Tips, Tricks, Skills, Spirituality and Wisdom
Combat spiritual blindness with accountability
My husband is colorblind; so is my son. The difference between the two is that, while my son recognizes this deficiency, my husband refused to admit his limitation for quite awhile. My husband wanted to believe that a particular favorite shirt is navy blue. It is not. It is black. No amount of his understanding it to be blue will make it blue. The shirt is black. Sometimes he happens to wear something that looks fine with the black shirt - other times he looks like he got dressed in a dark room with his eyes closed. My son, on the other hand, allows his wife to pick out his clothes. And he looks fine, all the time.
We all suffer with a side-order of blindness. It causes us to believe things that are not true and not believe a bunch of stuff that is absolutely true. When we are in this position, life spirals out of control in confusing ways. These false beliefs and denials that we hold as truth cause us to take actions that do not produce the results we want.
The ONLY way I know to change this dynamic is by making a decision that requires our own certainty to stand down AND choose to trust God.
Stop telling yourself things that aren't true
It turns out that some people habitually tell themselves things that are not true. They develop a patterned way of thinking about themselves - and the brain rewards them with a shot of dopamine for their lack of effort to wrestle with the truth.
I know a gal who is always telling me how stupid she is - and she is not stupid at all. I have a girlfriend who is always complaining about how fat she is - and of course, she is not fat at all. Moan and groan. Complain, complain.
Healthy people learn how to stop doing this nonsense and require their brains to get up off the porch and get to work. They do NOT blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in their life or rely on the distorted belief that they are ineffective and unable to do hard things. Healthy people learn how to suffer and live through hardships. They learn that life is hard without having to further confuse the lesson by pretending it should be easy.
People who struggle to cope often contribute to the problem by confusing their suffering with their worth. Do NOT confuse your suffering with your worth. Job is a really strange book in the bible; I am fascinated by all the patterns and myths it busts in the telling of the Job story. He is a good man who suffers for no clear reason. Job is a guy who can teach us that good things happen to good and bad people and bad things happen to good and bad people. Our circumstances, outcomes, and actions are no measure of our worth.
We are so used to taking the cheap hit of dopamine rather than examining our thoughts. Try to do more examining and less automatic assuming, OK?
We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ.
~ 2 Corinthians 10:6, The Message
Habits can fool us
“Addicts must learn to handle cravings, attend 12-Step meetings regularly, and otherwise revamp their thinking, behavior, and lifestyle...Addiction is not an ‘acute’ (short-term) illness with a short-term solution. Like diabetes, asthma, and other chronic diseases, addiction can be controlled but never eliminated.”[1]
“I kept looking back at the other option and there was no other option.”
By the Book [2]
Maybe you think you are off the hook because you are not dependent on alcohol or drugs. Are you dependent on anyone or anything else that has its hooks in you? Habitual compulsions can have the same effect on us. They can trick us into thinking they are the solution even as they keep causing us lots of problems.
Spending more money than we have may be fun when we are buying a cute pair of shoes, but does it cause conflict in your home? Do you have debt-collectors knocking on your door? This is not a way to live!
Caring more about your sport’s team than your friends who root for other teams isn’t cool.
Distracting ourselves with binge watching, binge eating, binge exercising, binge anything may numb us temporarily from our cares and worries, but all those anxieties are just sitting on the foot of our bed waiting for us to wake up.
Eventually, we need to figure out how to not only deal with our problems, but live well in spite of them. The solutions that work for Substance Abuse often hold the key to our own peace of mind!
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Harold C. Urshel, III MD, (Healing the Addicted Brain, Sourcebooks Inc., 2009), pp. 23-25.
A few truths for early recovery
Living in a city with a large university dedicated (in part) to researching Substance Use Disorder (SUD), provides me wonderful opportunities to learn from the experts. In a recent talk, I heard a guy who researches the “brain on drugs” speak in depth about the nature of SUD and the broken reward center. Now, who is to say whether this particular bit of the brain was broken because we abused our brain with compulsive over-use of a particular substance OR whether our brain was broken before we used and because it was malfunctioning, we ended up with a compulsion we could not control? Researchers study these things and I am grateful for their hard work. Hopefully we will learn more soon.
What we do know this - most people who experiment with substances of various kinds even when they do so with gusto and in excess, do NOT end up with a Substance Use Disorder. This is a puzzler. Did the 90% of “others” not try hard enough? I do not know. Are the 10% or so who do end up with an addiction unlucky? And what about the genetic component? We know these things run in families, what is that all about? Research continues. Many questions in the field remain open for debate. But while we wait, many of us in long term recovery have learned a few things about getting sober.
These are practical truths that I am sure will one day fit into the models of recovery that research supports. Please do not miss my point. Research is awesome. But we also have a world of experience built up over decades from folks who fought the disease and survived. Here are a few practical truths that we can apply TODAY (while we wait for the research to figure other stuff out).
* We have a lot of thoughts that need to be examined for accuracy; many will need to be rejected and replaced with thoughts that are closer to reality. (SUD has a thought-disordered component that responds well to treatment if people stick with the program.)
* Our emotions are all over the place in early recovery. We were SHOCKED to discover that our feelings are real but may not reflect our current situation accurately. (We need support as we navigate recovery because it is hard and we are freaked out.)
* Our impulsivity gets us in trouble. Regardless of what our brain is doing, we all need to figure out a way to slow our roll and reduce impulsivity. (In recovery, we need adult supervision. It is not a good idea to spend time alone with our thoughts and feelings without regular reality checks with supportive mentors.)
I love research AND I love learning from folks who have clean time. Who can you go to today for support in your own journey of transformation?
Change? We fear change.
We resist change. I think it is, in large part, because we believe it is harder than we can manage. Change is hard, but we make it feel insurmountable when we expect more of ourselves than the process of recovery actually asks of us. In point of fact, believing the lie that change is too hard is pro-addiction thinking. It is the disease system trying to trick us into believing we cannot do it, so why try?
I suppose this is why I believe that spirituality is such a key ingredient for desperate folks looking for their freedom. In a spiritual program like the 12-Steps, we are NOT asked to do the heavy lifting, we are promised that God will do the hard stuff - and he is eager to do so!
So what is our part? Here is what is being asked of you:
* Believe that God has more power than you do.
* Accept that you do not have enough power or capacity to reason to solve your problems without a higher power.
* Trust that restoration is possible for you.
I’m not going to kid you, this is the first part of the solution. But boy wowser gee whiz - it is a pretty freaking big part with a lot of implications.
Answer the following:
If I believe that God has more power than I have, what changes for me in terms of my relationship with him and my actions on a daily basis?
If I accept that I do not have either the power or the capacity to solve my problems, what changes in the way I deal with my problems?
If I trust that restoration is possible for me, what’s my next right step?