I recently listened to a woman tell her story of getting sober in Iran. Being a woman in Iran is hard enough, but being an alcoholic woman is an impossibility in a country that treats alcohol like it’s the devil itself.
There are no AA meetings in Iran because that would imply that alcohol was being drunk. There are many support meetings for people who are addicted to narcotics, because somehow in the minds of the Iranian lawmakers, drugs are different than alcohol.
At one point she threw out the word ‘rape’ in the context of “just what happens when you try to get alcohol in a country where it is illegal and not sold anywhere.”
The reason I’m sharing this with you is because it hit me right between the eyes. It made me take a good hard look at how addiction took over my life and the many scary things that happened to me and around me. I now see it all as part of the wide, destructive net that addiction throws over our lives.
Denial Drives our Thinking
Denial is a common defense mechanism for addicts. It drives all of our ‘stinking thinking.’ By this, I mean the way we continue to ‘deceive’ ourselves of the seriousness of our addiction. It helps us turn a blind eye to the horror of our lives. It starts with the thought, “It’s not that bad.”
From there, it’s how we recoil from the thought that we are “powerless” over our addiction. More than anything, most addicts want to believe that they still have a choice.
That we are absolutely in control of every aspect of our lives.
And in other areas of life, we did demonstrate control and good judgement. But when we took an honest look at how we behaved under the influence, we have to admit that even we were shocked and baffled. Our thinking that we have everything under control and nothing is wrong, leads us to pursue our drug of choice and justify it to ourselves, no matter how hurtful it is to others.
I am not proud to admit that I left my daughter home alone to go to the bar for “one or two”. This is an appalling lack of judgement – and one that is all too common for too many of us. How did I think that was ok? What did I tell myself? That I’d never do it again. That it was a simple mistake.
Rinse and repeat.
Why didn’t we stop when things got bad?
Why do we insist, “I’m fine, thank you very much?”
Why are we determined to go it alone, even when we join a group? Many of us are, quite simply, help-rejecting complainers.
We don’t like our lives, often have no clue how to solve our problems, but rather than accept help, we’d rather just complain. That can happen even after we put down our drug of choice.
Underlying Causes and Conditions
Recognizing how our thinking is negative and not connected to reality, allows us to work deeper on ourselves, once we get sober. Some addicts believe that they were born this way. We look back on our early lives and we see that our thinking was always askew. We never remember thinking positively about ourselves or the world in general.
For others it wasn’t that way. For them, it was more of a slow evolution of worsening conditions. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr(s). Hyde – someone respectable by day, turning into someone sinister by night.
I lived that double life for many years, praying these two realities would never overlap.
The Way Out
In my experience, years of using denial, rationalization, and minimization to avoid the truth about our addiction takes time, patience, and diligence to change. The key is Honesty – our recovery from cognitive distortions starts with awareness of our thoughts with an honest desire to create a more positive and caring mindset.
Try this challenge:
- Watch your thoughts for a day and notice each time you distort an event because you don’t want to see it the way it is.
- Note when you have an immediate negative opinion about something that you have not fully investigated yet. It’s called “contempt prior to the investigation”.
As you do this, think about what your Higher Self would think. What would Love do? What would Love think? Note it down.
Practice making these little changes in your daily life and notice how it impacts your feelings. I guarantee you – the shift will be undeniable.
In service of your highest self,
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