Answer Addiction

Tag: self-love

  • 5 Unexpected Things That Happened When I Surrendered

    5 Unexpected Things That Happened When I Surrendered

    Spiritual surrender is like letting out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. My next relapse no longer feels like it’s coming for me. I made it out. I’m alive!

    You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.
    -Pema Chodron

    New Year’s Day, West Hollywood. I had three days sober off a brief marijuana relapse and was headed to an AA marathon. After parking, I realized I was out of juul pods so I went on a search, rectangling around the block on my way to the meeting hall, hoping to find a store.

    When the first meeting ended, I panicked. Where did I park? I ran out, saw my car, took a picture, and ran back in. 

    Several hours later I discovered that the photo wasn’t of my car. I have a gray Prius in L.A., which is every third car. I scoured the neighborhood. A well-meaning valet tried to help and I yelled at him. Hours passed. It grew dark and cold, my phone now at 11%. I stopped to breathe. Big fear.

    Voices and the tinkling of glass tumbled onto the street from a bar. The thought of drinking or using hadn’t occurred to me. And why would it? A glass of wine or a joint wouldn’t help me find my car.

    Just at that moment, the heavens opened up and God reached down a golden hand through pearly gates and spoke.

    That didn’t happen. But what did was pretty fucking rad.

    I saw that every problem in life is exactly the same as losing your car.

    I walked past the valet again and apologized. I knew that I had parked headfirst rather than parallel, near Robertson Boulevard.

    He pointed. “You’ve got one more block like this.” I stood at an actual turning point.

    I had been looking for my car on the wrong side of the street.

    I found it 30 seconds later. That was the moment the course of my life changed forever.

    These are some things that happened for me, and may happen for you when you cross the street of spiritual surrender. 

    1. I’ve stopped trying to get over on my addiction.

    Am I allowed to drink kratom? Vape CBD? Take pills? A doctor will happily prescribe whatever I think I need. And aren’t magic mushrooms a spiritual experience? I spent years in fauxbriety. I spent an entire summer posted up in a Kava Kava bar while we all nodded out on kratom tea and talked about our favorite AA meetings. Note: I am not talking about anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, other psychiatric medication, non-narcotics in general, and supervised pain management after injury.

    For the problems I have encountered in my own life thus far, holistic alternatives work better than anything big pharma wants to sell me. I never win. Addiction always wins. I was constantly sending myself the message that I wasn’t enough or okay just the way I was; I needed a drug that I considered not really a drug to fix it. Actually? I don’t. 

    2. I feel relieved. Like amazingly fucking relieved.

    Spiritual surrender is like letting out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. The shoulders go down the back, the face softens, and the respiratory system begins the great energetic exhale. It sounds like the ocean. My next relapse no longer feels like it’s coming for me. I made it out. I’m alive! There is hope. I don’t live in fear of what I may do to myself anymore.

    3. I can let go of people and summon new ones.

    I lived in a perpetual state of war. I believed that you were my problem and I saw boundaries as a personal attack. I clung to people who had limited love and empathy to give. I would give you more of my time, money, and energy than I could afford and blame you for it. I would let things build and build and build until I got blackout drunk and told you OFF.

    I have been working on myself pretty hard since 2012, and haven’t done most of the things most of the time since 2016. But until I surrendered, I didn’t believe I could let go of people before the relationship blew up. I didn’t even know what I wanted; I would just sense what you wanted, then decide whether or not I would give it to you. We live in a sick society full of broken toddlers. Emotionally, I’m in elementary school now. I no longer need to punish myself with reflections of a past me. Every time I let someone go I make space for someone new. I can see that many people are simply lost in their own pain, and can’t see past themselves. I can have compassion, and empathy. From a distance. 

    4. I can be in a world of pain without bleeding on everyone.

    As I grow older, traumas and patterns emerge, deeply embedded toxins and conditioning that wants to be felt and released. This week has been intense and painful. I felt attacked by the universe. In the past, when things like this happened, I panicked and made desperation phone calls to anyone who would listen. “I have to call in the troops,” I would say.

    Today I am able to allow emotions to flow through me even if it feels wrong at first. I can put down the looping stories and let myself feel. I can make the connections from current triggers to past traumas, advocate for myself when necessary, get on stage and be funny even when my life feels like it’s been dropped on the floor. Before surrender, the only time I was accused of being professional was on Seeking Arrangements. And there are lessons in pain. There are always lessons for those who are brave enough to look.

    5. I believe in myself enough to do the things I believe in.

    I am practicing Ashtanga yoga again, something I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve given up meat and most dairy. I believe that pigs enjoy warm baths just like I do, maybe more because they aren’t thinking about how many people downloaded their podcast. Also please download my podcast: Comics Book Club’s: Drunk & High on Petfinder.com with Amber Tozer. I pray, I meditate, I have cut down caffeine and have a plan to get off nicotine. I completed my first pilot script, waking up at five a.m. to write and rewrite so I’d be finished in time for a fellowship deadline.

    I used to hate myself so much I could rarely let myself enjoy anything, most of all my very favorite things. Now I am ready to do what I came here to do, with enough wild stories to last the rest of this life and a different sort of story to write into the fabric of my future.

    I’ve got my head just enough out of my own butt to see the world beyond myself. There is so much out there! Awakening is very exciting, and it feels. Oh, does it feel.

    I wish the same for you: May you be happy, may you be free, may you be at peace, may you be loved. May you believe in yourself. May you find a way to be ready to do what you came here to do. We are all worthy of that.

    Please feel free to share your stories of self-love, surrender, spiritual awakening, personal redemption, and your trolling (if you need to) in the comments. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How To Love Yourself the Way You Love Your Addicted Child

    How To Love Yourself the Way You Love Your Addicted Child

    Our mission in life became to fix our son, get his life on track, keep him safe, and stop the madness. We became addicted to fixing our addict. In the meantime, my life was circling the proverbial drain and it was all my son’s fault… or was it?

    Stories are the cornerstone of living and loving—from oral traditions to New York Times best sellers, tales written by others and those we make up inside our minds. They help us make sense of our existence like nothing else can. Good stories tether us to life and help us transcend into new ways of being.

    There is a story rattling around in my head—a story for myself and perhaps for you. It whispers to me with prompts and questions like: What would I say to you? But then I wonder who you even are. Are you my beloved or a friend I’ve yet to meet? Someone I embrace or a ghost from whom I run? Would we pass each other on the street without a second glance or might we sit and chat over coffee for hours on end? What would I tell you if we were one and the same? No separation, no delineation. Not the stranger or the ally. Not the sober one or the drunk, but rather you, me, we. What would I tell us?

    We’re All Addicted to Something

    Those of us who’ve lived with people who have addictions—oh wait … who am I kidding? We’re all addicted to something. No one is immune. We each have the places we run when we’re feeling vulnerable, scared, or confused. We create our lives so we have our fix of choice within reach at all times. When life feels excessive or news in the broader world is crazed, we grasp at something to ease our rage, sooth our aloneness, and calm the overwhelm. We eat, we shop, we drink, we gamble or easier yet, we try to fix someone else.

    We point a finger away from ourselves and toward them. They are the one with the problem. If only he or she would stop drinking, agree with “the right” viewpoint, pay more attention to me then surely I’d feel better.

    I can’t begin to tell you the number of hours and ways I’ve spent over the last 30 years trying to improve my husband. Lucky guy, the pressure eased for him when our 13-year-old son turned to drugs and alcohol. Together, our mission in life became to fix our son, get his life on track, keep him safe, and stop the madness. We became addicted to fixing our addict.

    We tried inpatient and outpatient treatment, therapeutic boarding school, and a wilderness program. We were all in except, of course, our son, who did his best to skirt the therapy sessions, game the system, and do the bare minimum to figure out how he could get out of our fix and carry on with his agenda. In the meantime, my life was circling the proverbial drain and it was all my son’s fault… or was it?

    Hitting Rock Bottom as a Parent

    They say that true addicts must hit rock bottom before they’ll change, but what’s the rule of thumb for concerned family members? Do we have to hit rock bottom too? It doesn’t really seem fair.

    I recently met a woman who was ensnared in her 40-something-year-old daughter’s cycle. (My son is almost 30 now.) I watched this woman wring her hands and spend precious time trying to figure out how to wire money to her daughter on the other side of the world. I wondered about the difference I felt between us until I realized that that mother hasn’t hit her bottom. Some people never do. They value their child’s life more than their own. That’s what society has told us we should do. Sacrifice for others. Family first. Give to the death.

    When I hit my bottom, I began to wonder if there was another way. What if sacrificing for my son wasn’t the solution? Please don’t get me wrong, I adore my son. In fact, he has been my greatest teacher and I am deeply indebted to his role in my personal journey. I would indeed give my life for him, but I was giving him my living. I was disintegrating into my own form of insanity and it was helping no one. Not him, not my husband, not me. We were each in our own way following addiction into the darkness.

    What if love others as you love yourself looked different than I’d been taught? What if that’s exactly what I was doing? Loving him as I loved myself which turned out to be not very well at the time.

    How to Love Yourself

    I don’t recall if it was the third or fifth or nth incident with the police or treatment when I realized I had a choice. I could go into that dark hole of despair and stay there, or I could find a way to bring myself back into the light. If I could continue to love my son without joining him in the madness, then maybe I could shine a beacon for him when or if he chose to return to a healthier way of living. So in service of myself and family, I chose to light my own candle while continuing to literally light candles and offer prayers of love for all of us.

    I began to develop a journaling practice. I poured my thoughts, fears, worries, and internal and external stories onto the page every day. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I exhausted the dialogue, covered all of the what ifs, and landed at a moment of rest. Then I got up and did it again and again and again. As my practice deepened, so did my sense of peace and ability to be present to others and the world around me. I started to heal. I learned how to draw appropriate boundaries and managed to send love and light to my son even when we were estranged for months at a time. I developed empathy and compassion, regardless of whether I understood or condoned my son’s choices. And somewhere along the way, the chaos quieted. Our legacy gave way to the promise of a brighter ending.

    I remembered that authentic stories untangle us from lies, tether us to truth, and help us transcend into new ways of being.

    May it be so for you and yours.

    View the original article at thefix.com