Addiction & Recovery

and the reality is : there is an underlying cause that is driving you to adopt this behavior ... You need to discover what it is inside you that makes you want to escape from that cause..

That being said: I had a problem, not with drink, but with something worse ... and since I am atheist, I found it hard to reconcile joining AA with my own beliefs about deities and higher powers ...

I stumbled upon Rational Recovery,.which is a different approach than AA ... the intervention occurs between you rational self ( the one who wrote this post) and the addicted beast part of you, who turns the car towards the store on the way home, and who grabs the bottles from the shelf ... who pulls out the cash to pay ...

There is a point in that process where you decide to act out the urges of your beast brain ( the part of the brain that is shared with all other mammals. and controls hunger and sex drive, for instance)

The beast brain does not control your muscles, and so it cannot do anything on its own ... but it's hungry for the drugs ... it provides comforting ideal images of you enjoying your drug of choice ... images you think of on the drive and that convince you to turn your car .. enter the store ... grab the bottles . ... etc ...

The idea behind RR is to recognize those images as a voice from your addicted, hungry beast brain , and to then intervene with your rational self .... and to literally tell that beast to shut the f@ck up ...

Your hungry little beast brain wants its drugs, but it cannot get them if your rational self doesn't agree and doesn't go through with the actions to acquire those drugs ....

We laughed about this in RR, but it does boil down to this:

You have to recognize when that voice is talking to you, and you tell it 'no' NO NO NO ....

Sounds so simplistic, I know but it works for me ... no meetings ... no shaming ... no disease ... just an active intervention that occurs within my own mind that denies my addicted animal brain the ability to use by stopping it as soon as I think of it ... I tell that little bastard inside 'no ... I won't go through the motions to satiate my beast brains desire to satisfy its drug cravings ... it's needs my rational self to act on its behalf, and I will not do that anymore ...

I tell it NO, and the thought slithers away ... I rarely have those thoughts anymore ....

That's my take on it