Recovery Month – Day 4 – Insanity

Insanity is doing things the same way over and over and over, and expecting different results.

— Unknown —

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.

For the next few days I will be focusing on the Acknowledge part of the acronym ACT.


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.


Today’s blog is a continuation of yesterday’s (Sept. 3) post…

I lived with the insanity of addiction for several years.

I knew I had a problem and tried fixing it several times–MY WAY–and MY WAY never worked. This process of me “fixing” my problem MY WAY began in mid-1984 and continued until August 9,1987. In the later stages of this timeline I began to suffer from depression, anxiety and paranoia.

Insanity had set in for good…at least that’s what I thought.


On August 9, 1987 I went to Greene Hall in Xenia, Ohio, to get help for my problem. My wife had organized an intervention to bring reality to me with hopes of getting me to see just how crazy (my words not hers) I had become. Thankfully, the intervention worked.

A few days into my stay at Greene Hall, I began attending group therapy and my counselor began chipping away at getting me to see how out of control my life had become.

A turning point in my recovery is when she had me take a written 1st Step. What this means is she had me write a history of my drug and alcohol use and the consequences associated with their use. She then had me share the 1st Step with her.

This exercise helped me to begin gaining clarity around how messed up and insane I had become. It was in that moment where it became clear to me I had more than a problem, I was powerless (addicted) and my life was a mess.

In that moment I had officially taken the entire 1st Step–We admitted we were powerless over our addiction and our life had become unmanageable–which is the most critical step in the recovery process.

A problem cannot be fixed if you don’t admit you have one.


Tomorrow I will write about why it took me so long to Acknowledge that I was powerless over my addiction and that my life had become unmanageable.

Romans 7:15, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

P.E.A.C.E.

Jay@EagleLaunch.com

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