September is National Recovery Month.
The focus of my blogs throughout the month of September will be on addiction and its life destroying tendencies. The writings derive from my own personal experiences of battling addiction and living a life of recovery.
These specific writings are focused on the ACTÂ acronym.
ACT leads to sobriety…
A – Acknowledge you have a problem and you are powerless over it and you need help.
CÂ – Connect with a power greater than you and people who have solutions that will help you conquer your problem.
T – Take positive, recovery-oriented action every day.
From September 1 through the 7th, I wrote about the importance of Acknowledging there is a problem and the next several days I will be writing about the importance of Connect.
Today is a continuation from yesterday’s post.
For the past week I’ve been writing about the importance of Connection when it comes to 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 longest migraine headache known to mankind and when I didn’t have a migraine I used the drugs to prevent me from getting one. Â BTW…addicts are great rational-liesers.
- It was somewhere in 1984 when 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 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,” and 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 early summer of 1987, Lori and I had our infamous connection with the chemical dependency expert, Bob #2 (see my September 10th post). And I didn’t listen.
- I connected with my brother and the gentleman (Rusty) in recovery sometime in late June-early July of 1987 (see my September 13th post). 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
