Recovery Month – Day 22 – Pain and Change

Nothing happens until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change.

— Arthur Burt —

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 ACT acronym.

ACT leads to sobriety…

A – Acknowledge you have a problem and you are powerless over it and you need help.

– 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.

We’ve spent 17 days looking at the Acknowledge and Connect stages of ACT. We will close out Recovery Month by looking at the most important stage and that is to Take positive, recovery-oriented action every day.


Today is a continuation of yesterday’s post (September, 21)


As I mentioned yesterday, addicts have a tendency of running away from responsibility. They are great at playing the blame game and often get stuck in their childish, immature ways…it takes one to know one.

Late in the first week of my treatment visit, I attended my first class on addiction. It was an eye opener in many ways. The person conducting the class was the program director. He was a recovering alcoholic, and career military guy.

The first thing he did was draw a picture of a barrel, and inside the barrel was a person with the person’s head at the bottom of the barrel. Then he drew a wavy line from one side of the barrel to the other and turned and looked at us and said, “This is you!”

There were thirty (30) of us in the room and we kind of looked at each other and wondered what point he was trying to make. Then he wrote the word ‘POOP’ (censored) next to the person in the barrel to indicate that the wavy substance was just that.

He then looked at us and said, “You are all up to your ankles in ‘poop’ and can’t see the dawn of day in order to get out.”

He then went on to say that for the next few weeks all of us needed to take the cotton out of ears and put it in our mouths and listen, because we obviously didn’t have the solution to our problem or else we wouldn’t be sitting in his class.

He continued by telling us that recovery was a program of action and that those of us who listened and did what we were told, had a great chance of staying clean a day at a time, for the rest of our lives.

Then he made a very sobering statement–literally, when he said, “Look around the room.” We didn’t know what he meant.  Then he said it again, but only louder, “Look around the room, and look at each other.” So we all looked around the room–at each other.

He then said, “Statistics and data tell us only 2 or 3 of you are going to make it. The odds are against you. Those of you who are willing to go to any lengths to stay sober will, and those of you who aren’t, will end up either back here, in jail or dead.”

He had challenged us and more specifically me.

In that moment, I became focused on taking whatever action was required of me in order to not go back to the pain of living in addiction.


Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

What changes do you need to make in your life?

What actions do you need to take in order to change?

Hebrews 12:11, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

P.E.A.C.E.

Jay@EagleLaunch.com

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