Addiction has been described as a disease which tells you that you do not have the disease. This means that part of having the disease is believing that you do not have it. This is referred to as denial or in 12 step philosophy as “insanity”. The reference to insanity is not what we do when we intoxicated i.e. your behavior, however, refers to our thinking prior to picking up our drug of choice. It refers to being out of touch with reality. The reality that the recovering addict needs to be grounded in for his/her ongoing recovery and ultimately for survival is the fact that their relationship with mind and mood-altering substances is based on loss of or impaired control, powerlessness (12 step philosophy). The moment a person with the disease of addiction forgets this fact, it leads to their demise. This implies that being restored to sanity means that we are grounded in the reality of the fact that we are powerless over our addiction. Why do people relapse when they have been restored to sanity. Some believe that they were not fully grounded in that reality to start with. Or could it be that one could be grounded in reality and then due to our actions or non-action we insidiously slip back into being detached from our reality about our addiction? This would imply that sanity and insanity sit on a continuum with a midpoint. We also know that to hold onto our reality we need to take certain actions. The slip to insanity happens inch by inch. When we believe that we do not have to do the simplest of actions we start slipping. ” I don’t need to do 4 meetings I can get away with doing two a week”, “I don’t need to call my sponsor so much” inch by inch. when we were doing all these actions we had a belief that we needed to however that belief changed to, I don’t need to anymore. This is the psychological component of our disease manifesting again due to not taking the action which arrests our disease. This slip will continue if we do not self-correct and pick up the recovery actions again. If left unchecked it culminates in the hight of insanity, where we are so detached from our reality that we believe that we can use our drug of choice with control. The picking up of our drug of choice is the end of the process, not the start. How do we stay grounded in reality? The recommended recovery actions are there to continuously remind ourselves that we have the disease of addiction. When we engage with literature we remain grounded. When we go to meetings and introduce ourselves and acknowledge our disease we stay grounded. When we identify with someone else we remain grounded, when we share our experiences we stay grounded, when we help someone else we tell our storied not so much for the other person but to remind ourselves of our addiction.
Lest we forget
SHARING IS CARING
