September is National Recovery Month.
My blogs will focus throughout September on addiction and its life-destroying tendencies. The writings derive from my experiences of battling addiction and living a life of recovery.
These specific writings are focused on the ACT acronym.
ACT leads to sobriety…
A – Acknowledge you have a problem, are powerless over it, and need help.
C – Connect with a power greater than you and people with solutions to help you conquer your problem.
T – Take positive, recovery-oriented action every day.
Today continues yesterday’s post as we dive deep into our ACT acronym’s C – Connect area.
For the past week, I’ve been writing about the importance of Connection when battling addiction. I struggled with my problem for a few years before I ever began Connecting with the right people. Here is an abbreviated timeline of how we got to this point in my story.
- 1983 is when I found myself liking drugs, especially opiates, more than alcohol.
- By early 1984, I noticed the need for me to take pills every day. Of course, I rationalized I was experiencing the most extended migraine headache known to humanity, and when I didn’t have a migraine, I used the drugs to prevent getting one. BTW…addicts are great rational-liesers.
- It was in 1984 that I went cold turkey and went through my first withdrawal from opiates. Opiate withdrawal is like having the worst case of the flu tenfold. After going through withdrawal, I vowed to be off drugs forever. Eventually, I began to drink alcohol, and it led me back to my drugs.
- I tried going cold turkey a few more times from 1985 to 1987 and would stay sober for a couple of weeks but always turned to alcohol to “take the edge off,” The alcohol always led me back to my drugs of choice. Today I know a drug is a drug is a drug.
- My first real connection was with Dr. Bob, the psychologist, during the spring and summer of 1987 (see my September 8th post). And I didn’t listen.
- In the early summer of 1987, Lori and I had our infamous connection with the chemical dependency expert, Bob #2–and I didn’t follow his advice.
- I connected with my brother and the gentleman (Rusty) in recovery sometime in late June-early July of 1987, and I didn’t listen.
- By late July 1987, I had given up any hope of thinking I would ever conquer my addiction…probably because I didn’t do anything my connections advised me to do.
- Acknowledging and Connecting without Taking positive recovery-oriented action leads the addict nowhere.
Due to giving up on having any chance of whipping my addiction because I was unwilling to do what all of my expert connections suggested I do, I began isolating myself from the world…which is a horrible place for a hopeless addict to be…more on this tomorrow.
Proverbs 14:23, “All hard works leads to profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”
P.E.A.C.E.
Jay@EagleLaunch.com