Saturday, 06 June 2009 22:43
RECOVERY FALLACIES
For 20 years I've enjoyed attending NA meetings, and hearing the lore and wisdom of recovery. While most of the pithy sayings and clever phrases sounded just right, some of them are somehow missing something. It always seemed to me that they were passing on an incomplete thought, or a slightly fractured truism. As I related the more complete thought to sponsees, some asked me to write them down. So:
1. "An addict alone is in bad company." That all depends. Am I alone with the Basic Text and a sense of God's presence? When I'm centered in the light, I can be very happy, joyous and free in my own company. In fact, lots of times I'm enjoying a peaceful morning of solitude and contemplation; and then later I find myself in the company of others who are angry or vexatious; and I can't help but think, "Gee, their company sure didn't contribute anything to my recovery, except to make me practice patience and tolerance!"
Undoubtedly, the REAL saying should go: "AN ADDICT ALONE WITH HIS DISEASE IS IN BAD COMPANY." If I get caught up in resentful isolation, with sick thoughts and obsessive worries, and can't call or reach out to anyone, then I am at my disease's mercy. That's when almost anyone's company is better than my own. But when I remember that God is always with me and can help me if He is sought, I know I don't have to go through it alone.
2. "I'm powerless over people, places and things." (some go on to say they're powerless over thoughts and feelings too.) This one always bugged me. After all, I'm not a complete jellyfish! In fact, I've been rather influential over all those things. I have influenced people to use in the old days; in clean time I have helped influence people to stay clean. As for places, I may or may not clean up my apartment; and if I really want to alter my space all I need is a day off and a full tank of gas. And things?!! Don't be silly; I was an epicurean user, and even now I pride myself on my ability to make a lovely meal out of food, a nice tune from a piano, or a nice message from a word processor.
Only once or twice, I have heard addicts express this one as a complete thought, i.e.: "I'm powerless over those people, places and things that are DIRECT TRIGGERS TO MY ADDICTION." Think about it: I have no business hanging out with those playmates, playgrounds and playthings that were intimately associated with getting high. (As the old-timers used to say, "If you stick around the barber shop long enough, you WILL get a haircut.") The classic example: Wombat the addict has 30 days clean, and decides to drop by his old pal Dealer Dan's place, to gloat about his newfound freedom. Dan and the boys are passing the bong around, and whenever it gets to Wombat, he self-righteously refuses it -- "None for me, thanks; I'm CLEAN today!" Which doesn't go down so great with the boys, who now make a bigger point of passing it right under Wombat's nose and ridiculing his stoic attitude -- till he finally gets steamed, loses his "serenity," grabs the bong, and says "Give me that! I'LL show you who's chicken!"
As for being powerless over thoughts and feelings: Yeah, I'll give you that I don't always have the power to keep crazy thoughts or uncomfortable feelings from just popping into my head uninvited; but I DO have power over whether I make them welcome and let them stay. I can counter a sick thought with a well one, and I can ask my God to extinguish diseased thinking and grant me some serenity, courage and wisdom. And the more I do that, and practice principles in all my affairs, darned if I don't get fewer and fewer crazy thoughts and uncomfortable feelings that just pop in from nowhere!
3. "It's a selfish program." Oh yeah? Doesn't say that in MY Basic Text. Or in my Steps or Traditions. People who repeat this classic misrepresentation of recovery principles are (in my opinion) parroting trash, confusing newcomers, and denigrating the good name of Narcotics Anonymous. This is quite patently an UNSELFISH program for selfish people. We are taught to give and share, to stop being self-centered and learn to be God-centered. (I suspect that selfish people repeat this tired old lie in hopes that the fellowship will come to cosign their shortcomings. )
I'd like to rephrase the sorry saying: "This is a program of SELF-PRESERVATION. " In ONLY ONE sense can I discern a so-called "selfish suggestion" -- and that is the refusal to be milked dry. At times, my needs must come first. Sometimes my friends, my sponsees, my group and my area all want a little piece of my time and energy. If I give it all away, then I have no time and energy left for me. And if I let myself get so drained that I lose the recovery I have, then I'm of no use to them anyway. So I try to always schedule some time for recreation, serene solitude, or just goofing off. I am entitled to some time and activities that are just to please me. My promise to serve and help is not the same as a vow of sacrifice and poverty. God wants me to prosper; but it can't be just for me.
The best way I've seen this phrased was in Hillel's Riddle: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone, then what am I? And if not now, when?"
4. "Clean time isn't important." If that's so true, why do we never see addicts lining up to give theirs back? (One guy says, "If clean time don't mean nothin', then you won't mind if I take yours, right, sport?") Even though I will grant that the first thirty days is the most important, there is no doubt that seeing lots of members with lots of time, helps give the newcomers hope.
The completed thought ought to read, "What you DO with your clean time is more important than how much you HAVE." (Or perhaps, "Continuous Clean Time isn't everything -- but it's a start.") Without a doubt, a 2-year addict with Steps, love, service, God and recovery in his life is a far better example of the program than the 15-year addict with compulsion, anger, selfishness, nihilism,
and addiction-without- drugs. But even sheer time has a value all its own. They say, "Time heals all wounds." We can only recover over time; even the most eager among us don't get sane overnight. Chances are that an addict who is staying clean but not following suggestions, will still do less damage to himself and others than one who eagerly agrees with the program but just can't stop using.
There's a cool old saying that goes: "There's no-one more miserable than an addict with no recovery and no drugs." So even a member who stays clean but doesn't work on his recovery picks up some of the solution just by "keep coming back." And if he won't work the Steps, sooner or later they'll start working him.
5. "I surrendered to my addiction today." NO!!!! That's what I did every day I used! The whole idea is to STOP surrendering to our addiction, and to START surrendering to our program! (Or to our Higher Power.) This one goes back so far, it even got repeated in the Basic Text. If you really want to reflect a new level of surrender, you might say, "Today I try to surrender my addiction to my Higher Power." Sort of like turning a dangerous criminal in to the cops. That's also a better way of saying that I think God has a better way of capturing and rehabilitating my disease than I do, and I'm going to defer to a Higher Authority.
6. "Fake it till you make it." Sorry, wrong. Those who get good at faking it never make it; we are, after all, the world's best actors. So good at seeming to be cool that we can even fool ourselves. The real script went: "Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you." Sort of suggests, if you behave like a woman or man of God; if you move through life like one upheld by Spirit; if you take risks that would honor someone who was more certain of their spiritual sure-footedness -- then your deeds will awaken the spiritual sleeper within. All great lives started with practice; that has nothing to do with fakery and phoniness.
7. "That means that you can say that you were here, but you can't say that you saw me here." Or even worse, "That means that what you heard here should stay here." WHY do some people feel such a compulsion to interpret the 12th Tradition for us, and to do it so badly? (A- I don't care WHO says they saw me at a meeting; and personal anonymity is an 11th Step issue, not a 12th; and B- If what you heard here stayed here, then you'd leave the message of recovery here along with the identity of who shared it.) When I'm feeling whimsical, I say, "And that means... exactly what it says." When I'm feeling more helpful, I say, "This suggests that the ideas you bring home are more important than the names of the people who introduced them to you, and that if you can use it, whoever said it doesn't make it any more true." The simplest form: "If you heard something good from me, don't hang it around my neck like a ribbon; instead, take it home and make it your own. And if you heard something terrible from me, don't crown me with it like a dunce cap; remember that I'm an addict too, and my years clean don't mean I'm immune to pain or that I couldn't use your love and support."
8. "A drug is a drug is a drug." Sorry, no, you can't get high from aspirin or saccharin or insulin. We have NO RIGHT TO PLAY DOCTOR. Some addicts have died, and some have gone into convulsions and were left with brain damage, because some meddlesome fool with too much self-righteous zeal and too little plain sense, convinced some poor naive fool to stop all their prescribed medications. I have even seen some sponsors with umpteen years who should know better who tried to get sponsees to adhere to the most extreme standard -- no vitamins, no Tylenol, no nothin'. Really, "Anything you're using to get high is a relapse" is what we surely meant to say. Addiction's main trigger is INTOXICATING CHEMICALS, not NutraSweet. Many drugs are harmless; many are life-saving. The ones we are recovering from in NA are the ones we used to get LOADED from. Not all those other things. We have "no opinion on outside issues", and drugs (unlike addiction) are an outside issue.
9. "Once an addict, always an addict is a lie." No it's not. We admit we're still addicts every time we introduce ourselves, so why the contradiction? Because the original idea was, "The tired old lie, 'once a JUNKIE, always a JUNKIE' will no longer be tolerated, either by society or by the addict himself. We do recover." And THAT was true -- because recovering addicts can stop acting and thinking like self-centered sleazy junkies. We are not cured, but we can change -- often to an astounding extent. Maybe we could better say: "The claim that 'Addicts can never change' is a lie." We prove the truth of that every day.
10. "Take what you want and leave the rest." (I first heard this and thought, Oy, people here are quoting "the night they drove ol' Dixie down!") Partly pernicious, because it's partly true. At any meeting, somewhere from 5% to 90% of the sharing will be self-indulgent nonsense. We need to be a little discriminating, and toss out the whining and misconceptions, and glean the gems and the wisdom that will make recovery better. But we CAN'T take what we want and leave the rest of the PROGRAM. When addicts only work Steps 1, 3 and 12 (ignoring the rest), they tend to become BT thumping busybodies who tend to lack the humility, compassion and forgiveness that mark real recovery. Without the whole Step & Tradition matched set, the piecemeal hodgepodge program resembles more a box of memorized quotes and an invitation to fanaticism.
Better let's say, "Whatever you can't use today, put it on the back burner; maybe you can use it tomorrow." Matter of fact, this is even true of the whining and self-indulgent nonsense! If I remember how ridiculous someone looked when they monopolized a meeting with crap, I'm more likely to turn that crap over to God when it comes up in my life, rather than dwell on it, wallow in it, and bore my home group with it.
There are quite a few other "NA Misconceptions" that we successfully mislead ourselves with from time to time. I'll think about some more and get back to you.
Found in a NEWSLETTER 4 yrs ago I forgot which One -
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written by MIKE SHIMNOSKI, June 07, 2009
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written by Ted, June 08, 2009
"This program is so simple any bozo can get it, but the Einsteins will miss it everytime."
"I don't know about you, but I'm a real dope fiend!"
"Defects of character don't ever go away, we just learn better ways to deal with them."
Reading our Basic text and the use of common sense quickly dispels these three dittys, unfortunately newcomers haven't (for the most part) read the text with a sponsor and haven't learned to rely on common sense--so it usually isn't long before a newcomer (wanting to be accepted) repeats these fallacies.
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written by Kelly O, June 12, 2009
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written by 3dreamingfrog, June 17, 2009
P.S. Here is another "piece of wisdom" for you (or should I not suggest 'food for thought' to an addict, LOL). The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, and each day clean is a miracle, but it's not how much clean time you got that matters, rather it's how much clean time you are willing to get. It's not where you have been that's important anymore, it's where you are going that matters. Just sharing that with you, cause it was shared with me.
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