What Addicts Know - Christopher Kennedy Lawford

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that happens to me. I no longer pretend to be a victim. So now when I’m in a good relationship and those whispers begin in my mind—“Maybe she’s not really here for you. Maybe she’s just really good at hiding her real intentions”—I recognize those inner voices as my fears resurfacing, as the feelings of insecurity that make me wonder whether or not I’m good enough for her and if she’s going to leave me.

      Once I developed the understanding that I’m just manufacturing those fears, I had a choice and I could do something about it. When the inner voices try to sabotage me, I can call upon recovery skills and resources to counteract them and defuse their emotional impact.

      Taking responsibility for thoughts and actions is a process. At every step you need to ask yourself what is real and what is merely your projection based on fear, habits, and upbringing. Most people don’t believe they have the time to work through this process. They’re running as fast as they can just to survive. Admittedly, it does take some time and energy to develop the capability and desire to do it. You need the willingness to engage yourself. It has to become important to you. That is true for everyone, but for addicts it’s absolutely crucial because for them it’s really a life and death issue.

      LEVELS OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

      During my recovery from drug addiction, I’ve gotten to know dozens of experts in the recovery field. One of them, a well-known addictions-recovery specialist in New York, began an entire branch of research in 1998 to study the various approaches people use to stay in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Many of her close friends are in drug and alcohol recovery, and she has interviewed countless others in recovery, giving her a unique, valuable point of view.

      “I’ve grown as a human being by accepting and acknowledging personal responsibility, and that’s happened as a result of being in contact with people working on themselves,” she told me.

       When I began in recovery research, I interviewed people and heard their recovery stories and saw what they were going through in working the Twelve Steps. That experience taught me an enormous amount of what it means to be a human being. I am a “normie” but have grown enormously from learning these lessons, which can benefit everyone.

       In looking back on their lives, many people insist on blaming others; they have to feel like victims. This blaming tendency goes back to childhood. We don’t usually teach children that all actions have consequences. For some reason in this society, saying I’m sorry or I was wrong feels so horrible that many people would rather not. It’s easier to blame what happens on someone else than to say you were wrong. I know many people whose lives haven’t turned out the way they wanted, and they blame it on circumstances or someone else. In any situation involving someone else, they had a role to play, even if it was just a small role. So it’s always best for us to ask ourselves if there is anything we would and could have done differently, and if so, would that have changed the outcome. Look at your role in every situation. That is what personal responsibility is really about.

      Is it possible to maintain recovery from an addiction without embracing personal responsibility? Many specialists don’t believe so, and I agree. People cannot improve their lives without realizing that they have a part to play in the outcome. One psychologist explained:

       People are often afraid of change and so they stay in less-than-satisfying situations because it’s easier than making a change. But if you are self-aware, you can start acknowledging that there are things you can do that empower you and allow you to put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life. A lot of people say recovery to them is a second chance to become the person they wanted to be before addiction took their life away. They had to shed their moral code in order to survive as an addict. A successful addict has to lie, cover-up, and deceive. To be in active recovery, you have to rediscover the practice of a moral code and that includes the lesson of accepting personal responsibility.

      WHAT EVERYONE CAN LEARN

      You have to know who you are and who you aren’t, and you need to cultivate an idea of who you want to become—all grounded in a foundation of personal responsibility—if you hope to achieve some level of contentment within your life.

      “What people in broader society don’t yet understand about people in recovery,” explained Dan Duncan of the St. Louis-area National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, “is that those in recovery have taken responsibility for their illness. Recovery means you take responsibility for your own wellness. For general society there is a lesson in that because too often, as human beings, we get stuck in life, with depression or anxiety or lack of ambition. And then we say, ‘Oh well, this is the way I am.’ That is a huge cop-out. Those in recovery know the addiction is not who they are or want to be.”

      I think every human being has a desire to attain a higher self, to be a better person in every way possible. Yet society too often rewards people who aren’t searching for the higher self. Take, for example, the abundant cases from Wall Street, Washington, DC, and Hollywood. Those cultures reward people who are looking out for themselves. Cutthroat behaviors and attitudes are effective and become the norm.

      When I first got to Hollywood a friend of mine said, “The ethic here is not that you succeed. It’s that you have to succeed and your best friend has to fail.” The people who dominate Wall Street, Washington, DC, and Hollywood aren’t necessarily sociopaths, but many of them have little concern about their actions and their actions’ impact on others. Such people seem incapable of holding themselves accountable.

      You may be reading this and thinking, What does this have to do with me? I don’t have any of these problems. What I am saying is that we addicts have had to change ourselves and we’ve had to embrace spiritual principles to try to find our higher selves. It’s a matter of survival for us. We’ve had to own what happens to us and take responsibility for our thoughts and actions. It may not be that much of a life and death issue right now for a non-addict but it’s still an important path to greater well-being. And to get there, you’ll have to have the courage to embrace these recovery principles.

      What we learn as addicts in recovery is that if we focus on ourselves and we change ourselves according to spiritual principles, then we get along better with other people and, as a result, our little part of the world is a better place. It’s that simple—yet it means everything.

      PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY INVOLVES FORGIVENESS

      Many people forgive others for transgressions simply so they can move on and aren’t stuck in the past. “Without forgiveness we remain locked in a jail cell of past hurt and pain,” wrote psychotherapist Donald Altman in his book The Joy Compass: Eight Ways to Find Lasting Happiness, Gratitude, and Optimism in the Present Moment, “all the while missing out on one of life’s greatest learning opportunities. Consider that when you sit in that cell, you have labeled yourself as a victim and thrown away the key. Holding on to resentment, anger, and bitterness may provide some sense of vindication, justification, and solace, but it does not offer any hope of joy.”

      Joy and contentment are states of being we all seek in life, yet something we only see more clearly once we strip away materialistic pretensions and unrealistic expectations. The act of offering forgiveness to ourselves and others provides a time-tested way of transcending life’s accumulated sufferings. This isn’t a new idea, of course. Ancient wisdom enshrined the practice of forgiveness as part of a foundation for leading a spiritual life. But its relevance hasn’t in any way diminished over the centuries.

      In the 2,500-year-old Buddhist meditation known as “loving-kindness,” a statement of forgiveness is the first blessing offered. Forgiveness is extended to anyone who may have harmed us, forgiveness is requested from anyone we may have harmed, and then forgiveness is offered back to us for any harm we have done to our own selves. That harm to self usually comes from the incessant sniping of our inner critic.

      Our inner critic is that mental voice (or voices) that whispers or sometimes even screams at us with instructions about how we should feel and behave. We are told we aren’t good enough, we’re not deserving, we should always be right, we should never forget past wrongs, or we shouldn’t trust anyone or anything—especially when it comes to giving or

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