Sometimes what we experience is a consequence of a physical condition: When we’re detoxing, for example, things can get pretty intense. Most of us in early recovery find that we lack a “volume knob” for our emotions: Our moods swing wildly, our lives seem very dramatic, and we can be startlingly impulsive. As long as we are not a danger to ourselves or others, many of us find that we can wait this out—things settle down as we get used to our new lives, and as our bodies get used to being clean. Sometimes we look insane, but we just need more time. “Emotional detox” can take a lot longer than physical detox, and there are days when it’s really hard. The time we sit in meetings may be the only time our racing thoughts slow down at all. Having people around us who have been through what we are going through and come out the other side is very reassuring: We may not be convinced this will pass, but our sponsor’s confidence can give us hope.
Other physical changes put us through emotional challenges as well. Some physical illnesses or head injuries have emotional or cognitive components, and those of us who struggle with other physical diseases may find our thinking is sometimes profoundly impacted by them. When we or our loved ones notice a sudden change in our behavior, it is worth considering whether there may be physical forces at work.
But there is not always a physical or organic cause behind our disturbance. We go through intense emotional changes in recovery, and they can be frightening. Too often we mistake spiritual crisis for mental illness. Grief, depression, or panic may come over us in a wave; memories come up from the past and seem to swallow our present; and all of this can be part of the process we go through on our way to freedom. What we really want is a cure for our feelings.
The pain of spiritual growth can feel like depression. A “dark night of the soul” can be frightening and lonely. But what is happening on the inside is often the process that will bring us into the light. Sometimes there’s just bad weather in our heads and we simply need to wait it out. Hanging on, suiting up, showing up, and sharing openly with our sponsor and other members we trust is sometimes all we can do while it passes. We talk about “the process” and are told to trust in it, but we don’t always know what “the process” is. We may be very confused by where it seems to be taking us. If we focus on putting our faith into action, we can come through difficulty with new understanding and awareness.
This kind of crisis can be frightening in its intensity, and sometimes it seems we can only distinguish it from another kind of struggle in retrospect. Intense as it is, it is temporary, and relieved by breakthrough or by an obstinate willfulness to hang on until the crisis passes. “We undergo a vital spiritual experience and are changed,” says the Basic Text. We can be restored to sanity and live happy and productive lives. But it may not be safe or sensible to wait to find out what kind of crisis we’re having before we seek help. We may need new tools to continue to build our house; it doesn’t mean we are abandoning the work we have done or betraying our commitment if we sometimes go looking for them elsewhere.
Some of our more experienced members have shared that moments of deepest insanity occur when our insides don’t match our outsides—when we are doing things that go against our beliefs, when we are in one way or another living a lie, or when we are in denial of what’s really happening around us. The disconnect between what we want, what we believe, and what we are doing is enough to make anyone feel insane—and can be a powerful force for relapse. Coming back to living in integrity begins with sharing honestly with one person. It may be a long road back, but the alternative can be so painful that we may not survive it clean. When we tell our sponsor or trusted friend what’s really going on, we can begin to feel a little hope again.
Aging
Life passages everyone has to deal with are changed for us because of our disease. They may be magnified by our obsession and self-centeredness, or we may simply be more dramatic than our nonaddict friends and neighbors. But we also have physical challenges to deal with that are a consequence of our addiction—the high cost of low living, some have called it. Many of us have other diseases as a result of what we have been through, and we may struggle to get through the shame and guilt we feel before we are willing or able to get treatment. Some of us experienced trauma—violence or abuse that has consequences long after the bruises have healed. “Getting in touch with my body has been a very slow process,” said one member. “Any new information from my body just felt like panic.” We have been in accidents, violent relationships, fights, war, prison—all of these situations had physical and emotional consequences that manifest in different ways over time.
For some of us, there is the simple, strange experience of having lost time: When we get clean we may feel like we are waking up from a long nap. “I look in the mirror and there’s an old woman looking back at me,” said one member, “and every time it’s a shock. It seems to me that the last time I looked I was just starting out. I still feel like a kid, but I look like someone’s grandmother.”
The likelihood that we would die is less alarming for some of us than the possibility we might get old. Staying clean a long time is one thing; allowing ourselves to age is quite another. And some of us, as we see it happening, grieve. We may grieve for a long while over the time and opportunities lost to our addiction. We may experience that sense of loss after we have been clean for many years—when, for example, we become a grandparent and realize how much of our children’s lives we missed. We may not have noticed that time has passed at all, until someone points out to us that our friends or the people we date are a generation younger than we are.
Normal social pressures to look young or stay pretty are magnified for us by our self-centeredness, but also by the sense of lost time, the feeling that our looks are something we trade on, and that old addict fantasy of dying young and glamorously. When we realize we are too old to die young, and that we might just be around to live a long and full life, some of us have mixed feelings. There is gratitude but also a sense of despair: “I hadn’t prepared for this,” we think. Some of us seek to preserve our youth as best we can, working hard to dress and care for ourselves so we look and feel younger. Some of us realize that we have planning to do, and take action to ensure the future for ourselves or our children. Finding the balance between vanity and self-respect, between self-loathing and self-acceptance, is a struggle for many of us. When we finally surrender, we find that aging too is a journey, and we can actually enjoy the adventure. We are not just growing old; we’re growing up!
A member shared, “There really isn’t too much to this aging thing except self-acceptance, and what your body does.” Like so many things in recovery, it sounds so simple from the other side, but getting there can be a long walk. It might be impossible to separate the changes that come with graceful aging from the changes that come from working steps; together, though, the combination is remarkable. As time has passed and our fellowship has aged, we have started noticing some of our oldtimers getting more and more beautiful. There is something about spirituality that radiates through our outer being, a sort of agelessness that appears as elegance and dignity. Although we may fear growing older, many of us find that we can embrace and love what we have become—aches and pains and all. “As I have aged and have more trouble getting out of the chair without leaning on the table,” said another, “I am more secure about who I am. I find myself more attractive than when I was a hot tomato!”
Death, Dying, and Living with Grief
Addicts die. We talk about it in our literature, we remind ourselves at every meeting that the ends of our disease are “jails, institutions, and death,” but when one of us dies we generally respond the way anyone else would: with shock, surprise, and anguish. When we lose a member to the disease, we may go back through the same reservations we experienced in early recovery that the program doesn’t really work. Many of us experience other reservations at this point as well—the feeling that it doesn’t pay to care so much about people, the sense that loving addicts
only results in loss and hurt. For some of us, staying in the fellowship after a painful loss can be very difficult. It’s not unusual to feel that others are grieving wrong, that people aren’t responding appropriately. When we are hurt and angry it is easy to lash out, harder to feel compassion and connection. But experience has taught us that these are the things that make it easier to get through difficult times clean—even grief.
Of course, losing addicts to the disease of addiction isn’t the only way we experience death in recovery. Addicts die clean, too. We lose members of our family, we lose friends; sometimes it seems like the more connected we are, the more opportunities there are to experience loss. And in a sense, it’s true: We love more, we care more, we share more than we ever have, and perhaps more than people who are not members of a fellowship like ours. One of the rewards of recovery is that our lives are so rich and full of people we care about, but we do lose some of them, and it’s hard. Sometimes what we feel is the guilt of having survived: We may never understand why some of us live long, full lives and some of us are gone so early. For many of us, the answers we find in the steps carry us through the very real moments of doubt. But they are very particular, and can be different for each of us. The grief process forces us to make peace with unanswered questions, and in that way it is a gift.
Some of us find that a death we experience in recovery triggers feelings left over from earlier losses that we never really had the chance to grieve. We have learned through working the steps that emotions we don’t feel in the moment often wait and catch up with us later; the experience of walking through a loss in the present can bring back long-forgotten losses from our past. We have been surprised by the force of our emotion at the loss of a friend, or even a pet. We may have thought we could get through the feelings relatively easily and find that we are floored by the experience. Others of us find that there is still some distance between ourselves and the world, or that our reactions are not so immediate. Sometimes our feelings aren’t as deep as we think they should be; we think we are supposed to be having a particular experience, and we are feeling something very different. Giving ourselves permission to have our feelings and not judge them is a powerful gift we can give ourselves. Whatever our response, it is ours, and we can own it without allowing it to swallow us or define us. We have the freedom to fully experience a range of emotions, and to know at the same time that our emotions are not the limit of ourselves or of our world.
Grief is its own experience. Allowing ourselves the time and space to move through it is a commitment to ourselves and to honesty beyond what many of us have experienced before. The feelings move to their own rhythm and on their own time, and it can be very difficult to imagine that we are not “doing it wrong” when we are surprised by a wave of emotion at an inconvenient moment. As with so much of what we experience in recovery, there is no one way, and certainly no right way, to go through it. We take comfort in the knowledge that all things must pass, that our feelings will certainly change, and that others around us who have also grieved deeply find a way to survive their emotions, and to thrive once more. We find in recovery that even the worst things we experience can be transformed into a lesson we learn, and then a tool we can use to help others.
When we seek conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves, we find ways to be of service. Inside or outside NA, being of service helps us find value in our lives when we can’t see our value for ourselves. Giving generously of ourselves, especially when we are in pain, is a path through some of our sorrow and confusion.
We often hear members share that “every day I am in recovery is a bonus,” that “I have been given a reprieve.” We have a deadly disease and are lucky to be alive—and even luckier to be glad we are alive. Many of us experienced in addiction a kind of living death, in which each day was a burden to be survived somehow. Many of us have suicide attempts behind us; whether or not we actively tried to take our own lives, we certainly held them cheap.
It can surprise us, then, how shocked we are when we receive bad news from a doctor. Our perfectly human reaction can seem to us like we are ungrateful or unrealistic. Again, giving ourselves permission to feel whatever we feel is as important as it is difficult. Only by admitting our feelings can we begin to deal with them, after all. Once we start talking about our feelings, their power over us is reduced. One member who had been through a series of medical crises said, “I don’t know if I have a day or a decade left, but I would rather not spend it in fear.” As we use the tools that are available to us, we find solace. The same tools that guide us to live lives we can be happy with can help us to walk the end of our journey with dignity and serenity.
Of course, not all of us know it’s coming when our lives end, and some of us have many false alarms or close calls. Sometimes these brushes with death can be a wake-up call, allowing us to consider on a practical and spiritual level what it might mean to get our affairs in order.
In moments of great pain, a deep stillness comes over us; in those moments, we can see the depths of the darkness within us but also the enormity of the power to which we are connected. The terrible grief we feel can bring us a conscious contact that nothing else ever could. The impulse to withdraw, to pull away from noise and crowds and even from the people who support us the most, is often a form of self-protection: We can be so afraid of shaking loose the feelings again that we barely want to move. But letting the people we trust come and support us reminds us that we are not alone, even in our coldest moments. And allowing people to help us can be a form of service to them as well: When we let someone love us at a vulnerable time, they—and we—are rewarded. The caring and sharing we talk about is a two-way street, and those of us who are practiced at giving often have a hard time letting others love us back.
It is a loving act to let others love us. When we find ourselves in a position of need, it can be too easy for us to experience it as humiliating or burdensome. But we are given the opportunity to let those who love us express that in very concrete ways. The vulnerability we experience allows us a different experience of love. It is an act of generosity to let people be close to us, and we try to understand that they, too, are going through feelings about what’s happening. Our training in letting go of self-obsession helps us now: As we help our loved ones through their fear and sadness, we may find the words we need to hear to get through our own grief and pain.
Certainly, as we recognize that we are loved and cared for, we realize that our lives really are different from what they had been: We matter in the world; we have made a contribution to the people around us and to people we can’t see. The love we’ve shared, the families we’ve been part of, the meetings we’ve started and served and shared in—all of these have been a form of amends, a way of making peace with ourselves and our world. We are grateful for what we have and what we have had, and we know better than most people that death is not the worst alternative. We have seen others suffer worse fates, and perhaps we have ourselves. For some of us, in the surrender that comes after very bad news, we find that we are finally able to let go and be present in the moment. Letting go of the fear, the anger, and, gradually, the things that bind us into our lives, we are set free.
Courage
The serenity to accept the things we cannot change often comes after having had the courage to change the things we could. It takes courage and humility to open new doors and to close old ones. For many of us, courage was not something we came into the rooms with, but we find it here. We might still be afraid, but that no longer stops us from showing up and meeting challenges head-on. When we walk through our fear, our fear turns into faith.
Ultimately, this chapter is all about courage: the courage to accept the things we cannot change and to change the things we can, to look at ourselves as we are and accept ourselves anyway, to talk about things that make us uncomfortable, and to take on some of the issues that challenge us most deeply.
Working a program in relation to the physical part
of our recovery does not necessarily mean working a physical program, though for some of us it does. We don’t all take on exercise or proper eating or conscious physical healing as part of our daily program, though some of us make this a central part of our recovery. The principles are what we share, even when our practices are very different. We all find that it is necessary, sooner or later, to face the truth about our bodies, whatever that might be; to address the harm that’s been done; to treat what we can, and surrender the rest; and to be honest. What we gain is acceptance of our physical reality, the ability to live as fully as we are able, and the willingness to do so—on life’s terms.
Relationships
Recovery doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We need one another, and we need to be involved with the world around us in order to recover. Living clean is all about relationships—with ourselves, with our loved ones, with our fellow members, with society, and ultimately with our Higher Power. The people in our lives are the means by which we experience grace. We see the miracle of change in others, and they reflect our own changes back to us. They are windows through which we see the world, and vehicles by which we achieve spiritual progress.
The truth is that most of us have not been very good at relationships. Some would say that an inability to form or maintain long-term relationships is one of the symptoms of addiction. The Basic Text tells us that the disease makes us “devious, frightened loners,” that we develop strange habits and lose our social graces. When we came into recovery, we didn’t always recognize what was wrong with the ways we related to people. Our experiences as using addicts shaped our habits and our expectations.
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