No More of This.

On shame, addiction, recovery, heartbreak, Love, and finding sanity:

About a year ago, I found myself basically begging a person I loved to fight for their life. I believed in them more than I believed in myself. I saw what Jordan Peterson references flawlessly in this video, a glimpse of the hidden soul.

Often I see this in people. You look into their eyes and you see God.

You see the Universe.

You see unlimited potential, and gifts that only they can bring to the world.

You see brilliance. You see Love. You see Perfection, despite their flaws.

And when you see this, you believe and devote yourself to it so fully, and because you hold them in such high regard, you don’t want to see them settle for anything less than the total liberation of that soul.

You know what it’s like to be trapped under layers of trauma and hangups, and you want to pull them out of it. You see yourself in them.

Sounds lovely— kind of.

But it isn’t. Not when you cannot give yourself the same thing.

This can be one of the most heartbreaking scenarios you will ever come across when you see the hidden soul, the infinite cosmos, the God inside of someone, but turns out, as much as part of them may want that, their actions show differently.

Their actions begin to display not just a commitment to their misery and self-destruction (and the destruction of everything around them), but an addiction to it.

Whether or not drugs and alcohol are present is irrelevant, they are but a symptom of this issue, not the cause — however, drugs and alcohol are almost always present in these scenarios.

I know this well. For those new to this publication, I’ve been in recovery for nearly 15 years. I got sober November 27th of 2009.

I don’t say that as a “yay hooray for me” thing- it is fucking devastating to know that nearly all the people I started this journey with are now dead.

This article has a point, so that’s as dark as we’re gonna get, but it’s also the truth, so hold on.

This is the Jordan Peterson video I’m referencing. It’s very short. Worth the time to watch. I think it’s about 60 seconds.

So you may see where I’m going with “no more of this”.

Back to that conversation I had with a loved one about a year ago at this point. I remember listening to myself talking with him, begging him to just TRY to not give up on his life and abandon himself and his children and everything he ever wanted.

Then the thought came into my head:

“Wow. I wish I had someone who talked to me like this.”

Yeah. That part.

That’s how shit gets sideways.

I do have someone to talk to me like that, that person is ME.

But do I talk to myself like that?

No.

Until I can do that, nothing else should take precedence over that. It is heartbreaking to love so deeply and watch people die. They drown in the most LETHAL human emotion in existence:

Shame.

Some people think there’s a necessity for shame, otherwise how would you know you fucked up? That’s true, but it should literally stop there, and go right into the solution of what to do instead.

We were taught early on in recovery that shame or “wallowing in morbid self-reflection” or SELF PITY is the opposite side of the coin of pride.

It makes you completely useless to yourself and those around you, is completely self-indulgent, and just like the self-centeredness that keep us trapped and in delusion, when you’re drowning in shame, it’s still ALL ABOUT YOU.

You say you care about what you’ve done, but you don’t care enough to actually start rectifying the damage, you’re hiding so you don’t have to.

This is not a genuine state of being sorry for one’s actions, otherwise you would be propelled INTO action.

By the way, I’m not “shaming” anyone here, I have done the above mentioned SO many times. I have had to work on this for YEARS. I am not the same person I used to be, but we are all capable of falling into these pits.

We are all works in progress, no one is better than anyone else.

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However, people die over this.

They relapse and overdose and die because of shame, because they cannot stop living in the past. They also take their own lives over it. People also die because they get stuck in this war for the human spirit and they lose their minds. It’s a losing game on both ends.

Any person will continue to create miserable circumstances if all they can think of is what they’ve done wrong, or what they are upset about, because what we THINK ABOUT, we BRING ABOUT.

If you’re in an endless slideshow of the past, what do you think your future is gonna be? THE EXACT SAME THING.

Full disclosure, it took me over 10 years of continuous sobriety (and I was also in therapy for the majority of those years) to finally see this in myself. TEN PLUS YEARS. I think in all fairness it might have been 12 years.

It took that long to realize I was causing all of my misery at that point, and that I had to stop it.

No one else, and no external circumstance, was ever going to do it for me.

So, who am I to think I can break that in someone else, when it took me over a decade to see it for myself?

I can’t tell you how many times I had been told by people to “drop my story” and “leave the past in the past, that’s not you anymore” — I can’t explain why it didn’t sink in, it just didn’t.

Same way as if someone would have told me while I was in active addiction, “hey, you’re a heroin addict, you should probably get sober” it wouldn’t have done a fucking thing.

I had to hit a bottom where something in my head clicked and that survival instinct came on where there was NOTHING ELSE I thought about, other than getting myself OUT of that situation; by any means necessary, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

It required 100% of my will, commitment, and then total surrender to the unknown and the willingness to be honest and open to a new way of life, and all that it would require of me.

Nearly 15 years later, it was absolutely worth it, or I would NOT still be sober.

Guess what, nearly 15 years later, I still have things I need to do as DAILY MAINTENANCE to maintain sanity and sobriety.

If those things start to slip, I get sideways. I am far from perfect and far from doing everything correctly on a daily basis.

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However, we are either growing or dying. Nothing in life stands still. Nothing.

My heart breaks for so much death. I’ve been alive now 35 years, and I’ve lost 30+ people to overdose, suicide and in a few cases, murder.

I am not the only one either. And this is NOT normal. The fact that the crises with untreated trauma and addiction and the total chaos ensuing in humanity is barely being talked about is beyond wild to me.

One person in this country dies of an overdose every five fucking minutes.

Last I checked, there was one suicide every 11 minutes.

The leading cause of death for children age 10-14 is suicide.

How the fuck are we not talking about this. It doesn’t go away just because you look away. It actually does the opposite. It gets worse.

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Regarding the ones we have lost -

All of these situations could have been prevented if the wretched spell of shame could have been removed, and they could have seen themselves for who they were, and not sold themselves so fucking short.

Self-hatred will cause you to only accept conditions in your life that validate self-hatred. You cannot accept love or happiness or anything good in your life — not for long at least. You’ll burn it down, because the subconscious will not allow it.

You’d think this is good news, because the answer is pretty simple, start working on your shit, do the opposite of what you always do, the more uncomfortable it is the better, just fucking DO SOMETHING and get the out of that space. Ask for help, ask others how they did it, join them and walk with them on the road to recovery.

SIMPLE…. but the hardest thing anyone can do. This is why so many do not.

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To a degree I understand, because I suffered well into sobriety with these issues that even people who had been in recovery for decades had no idea what to do with me.

I was not an “easy case” to help at all — and I watched a lot of people who loved me eventually have to back away from me because they didn’t know what to do, and it was too painful to watch.

I do not blame them one bit for it.

There wasn’t just one magic thing that did it, it was several things, done consistently over time, with LOTS of fuck ups (lessons) along the way.

We are never done learning and evolving, ever. We are literally put on this earth TO EVOLVE our own consciousness. And as our consciousness evolves, so do those around us.

When one is healed, all are healed, that is a saying for a reason. We are all interconnected.

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At the end of the day, we have to be willing to be the person who goes to bat for us.

When we do not, we often compensate for the fact that we are unwilling to save ourselves by trying to save others.

I have done this more times than I’d care to admit.

I had to come to terms with my own cowardice around this issue just within the last year.

I realized I was trying to save other people so by proxy I’d somehow be saving me. Was this my conscious thought and intent?

No, but if I did an honest inventory to figure out why the fuck I kept getting myself in insane situations and sticking around to try and help someone who was more often than not causing serious harm to me, that was what I found.

There’s also a huge element of unresolved grief. This is why connection and making sure we’re enjoying life and honoring that basic human need for love and connection is so important.

Grief and loss can create a serious poverty mindset. Not around money, but around people, around Love.

When you watch enough people die, or vanish into thin air and god knows what the hell happened to them, it becomes really hard to let go.

You’re always feeling like it’s the last time. The last chance to ever see life work out. You feel as though you will die if you have to experience one more loss, one more heartbreak, one more death. You can’t see life continuing beyond taking one more hit in that area.

So, yes, the lesson is how to learn how to let go and how to learn how to prioritize yourself again when you’re in that situation.

I realize I’m addressing two sides of the same shit show right now.

One must come to terms that you cannot save the world. You cannot save everyone who suffers. You cannot save them.

Then… one must come to terms with the fact that actually, you cannot save ANYONE. Not a single fucking person.

You can certainly help people who want to help themselves, but ultimately you are just holding space and providing support while they do their own work, you’re not saving them.

You can see the most horrific conditions in someones life, but if they do not have the full willingness to face the absolute paralyzing terror of doing a complete 180, jumping into the unknown and facing every monster in their labyrinth, or to “burn” as Jordan Peterson put it, it’ll go sideways, and very fast.

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One must look in the mirror.

We are all mirrors for each other. That’s what all relationships are.

Some people run from relationships because they don’t like their reflection. Meaning what they see reflected back about themselves, their fears, their insecurities, their shame, their wounds.

Often they have no idea this is what they are doing, but all of us have done it. No one is better than anyone else. This is a human thing.

Some people run to relationships because they can’t see their reflection. They don’t know that’s what they’re essentially looking for in the relationship either. It is not in the conscious mind.

They’ve lost themselves too, so they run into the fire trying to find something familiar — themselves.

This is when you get really fucked up dynamics, to say the least.

We all do this shit. And it doesn’t stop until we stop. The EXACT SAME LESSON will continue to show up in different people and situations until we learn what we need to learn, or rather, face what we need to face in ourselves.

For you, I cannot tell you what that is, but deep down, we all know what it is for us.
For me, I have to learn that I can only save myself, and pre-occupying myself with trying to save others or fix their problems is nothing but an abandonment of the responsibility I have toward myself and my own life.

I am running from myself. This is the most stark way my own cowardice shows up.

So regardless of this fear of losing more people and regardless of the avoidance of my own self — I have to do the opposite. I have to let go. I have to walk away. I have to take care of myself.

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Regarding change from any cycle, from any addiction, from any ingrained destructive tendency: No human power can cure this, yet paradoxically, all of ones human power must be exerted to even make a beginning.

It just can’t stay that way. You gotta have both. I have never seen anything different work for anyone, and I’ve either been a direct participant in this, or a witness to it, for my entire life. Not when it’s at an extreme level and all other measures have failed.

We’re all walking each other home. It’s just really brutal when some of us don’t make it… or when some of us go “home” a little too early, before they ever really got to truly live.

I will take my own advice and continue with the work I’m doing, and I’ll throw this suggestion out to anyone who cares to join:

The best thing we can possibly do is take care of ourselves.

Not in some delusional way where we ignore the fact that we’re not the only people on planet earth, I hope that’s understood here.

But we have to take care of ourselves, otherwise, what the hell can we build on or offer to the world?

Nothing.

Part of taking care of ourselves is cultivating and demonstrating a consistent awareness and concern for the needs of others, but WITH DISCERNMENT. Compassion without Wisdom (aka BOUNDARIES) is absolute madness. You’ll get yourself killed doing that.

Trust me, I’ve nearly lost my life multiple times doing it.

I lacked the wisdom piece. I lacked clarity. I lacked boundaries. I chose to ignore the wisdom because I was SO desperate for it to just work out this ONE time, so I chose delusion, and I got burned every time.

I do not feel sorry for myself one bit, and I am not a victim. These lessons will continue showing up until I recognize them and choose differently. Then they stop.

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So, no more of this.

Never again. I choose different.

When I got sober, there was a really critical moment. I was in jail. My mind was approaching the “point of no return” because I was in the throws of heroin withdrawal and already batshit out of my mind. A survival instinct kicked on.

Suddenly, all my excuses of why I couldn’t get sober prior were completely irrelevant.

Absolute tunnel vision kicked in, as did the primal instinct for survival. It was a death race. And I had NO idea what it was going to take, I just knew I was willing to do anything to no longer be a slave. Addiction is slavery.

I didn’t even really give a shit about the jail aspect, it gave me a reprieve of being yanked off the streets to where reality could hit me and the drugs could start to ware off.

In that moment of clarity / terror, I knew as soon as I got out, I was going into detox and getting help however I could. I stopped caring about anything else. I stopped caring about trying to hide my life and who I had become.

You cannot hide and side-step your way into asking for help and changing your life.

Everyone has shame. AND AS SOON AS A LIGHT IS CAST UPON SHAME, IT VANISHES.

Imagine that.

Imagine going into a room full of strangers and then realizing all of you guys have same or similar stories, all done fucked up shit, all have the same fears and insecurities and shame, and then all realize… holy shit… it’s not just me… I’m actually not alone in any of this… everyone relates.

IMMEDIATELY that thing they call “terminal uniqueness” vanishes. And they call it that for a reason. Thinking you’re “gone beyond recall” or there’s “no coming back for you” gets people KILLED.

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I am so tired of not being able to keep track of how many people are dead.

I am so fucking tired of this.

I will take care of myself so none of you have to add me to your list.

Please take care of yourselves so I don’t have to add you to mine.

We are always going to make mistakes. We are human. The point of recovery (from anything) is just to make DIFFERENT ones.

I have a responsibility to myself to be happy, to be of service, to be thriving, so I can benefit people around me and set my soul free from the imprisonment of falsehoods of the machine.

There is a duty of happiness.

We owe it to ourselves as an amends for how ruthlessly and recklessly we’ve treated ourselves.

We also owe it to the world, because when we have a full cup that overflows, we are a blessing to everyone around us. It’s a win for everyone.

And yes, it is the hardest thing to do, we all have monsters in our labyrinth.

The Duty of Happiness

But if we don’t?

There isn’t going to be much of a future left for the younger generations. We may watch humanity itself die out in our lifetime. Humans will live on, but that which we recognize as humanity or human-ness… we’re already seeing that slip away like sand in an hourglass.

So… do with this message what you will. I’m ending this post now. Bit intense, but I’m not interested in sugar-coating any of this. Not when it’s life and death.

There is no avoiding any of this. We are not here to avoid. We are here to evolve.

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Incase you need any reminders, here’s other articles I’ve written on addiction and recovery:

One person every five minutes: Fentanyl

Reason to Live: Transformation of a Junkie