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Today I picked up my 60 days sober chip. This is the longest that I have been sober from drugs and alcohol since I was a 14-year old adolescent. That’s 12 years of chemical abuse using drugs and alcohol, partying and pushing my feelings down well into my young adult life. No wonder these last couple months at Back2Basic Sober Living, Flagstaff have been so hard yet rewarding now as I look back.
It’s been a roller coaster ride for sure. Up and down and all over the place. Some days it is really hard. I was talking to my therapists today and he was teaching me about control and what I thought I had control of when I was using. He used the metaphor of it being like a carnival. The mirrors at the carnival make things look different than they really are in real life. When I was using I felt like I had control. I felt in control of my emotions and life’s outcomes because I had some consistency in my life. Something that always seemed to stay the same. I thought I had a sense of security, turns out that it was all just an illusion. The truth of the matter is that the drugs and alcohol really had the control. It was all an illusion and a lie that I was telling myself, thinking that I am in control when I was totally being driven by something outside of myself.
Sometimes even in sobriety I still feel like I am being driven by something else. I get these obsessive thoughts in my head that block every other possible thought. Every once in a while I will have a wise thought but it is drowned out by the echoing of the obsessive thoughts. The obsessive thoughts are never good, loving, or kind to me. They are always perpetuating some hurtful idea that I have about myself.
That’s why I truly do believe that I have a disease, it’s insanity. My goal is that instead of being driven by a disease in my brain I will be driven by God. The good news is that the obsessive thoughts have gotten quieter and the wise thoughts have gotten louder. Now for me it’s a matter of how I can act on these thoughts. I can continue to live in the illusion and keep telling myself these stories or I can just sit back and observe them. Just watch and see how crazy and destructive my mind can be.
As I reflect back on my 60 days sober, I truly believe that people can think too much. The mind can become diseased just like any other organ. When we are constantly in our head we are not in our bodies and definitely not in our souls. I think that the soul is the essence of who we really are. The soul holds all the answers and I think that is where intuition comes from. So we addicts who have this disease are always in our heads, blindly believing the lies that our disease wants us to believe to keep itself alive. When we shut off our heads and live in our souls, we awaken to the beauty that is always around us. We slowly start to gain an understanding of the beauty and subtle signs that were always there waiting for us. We couldn’t see them before because first, we weren’t even awake to see them and were stuck in the chatter of our minds. I think that is the sickness of the world right now.
I’m still stuck in the quick sand of my head yet I am aware of this and that is half the battle. So I need moments like this to remind myself to get out of self and to remember where I come from, which is a place of love, freedom and happiness. My 60 Days Sober Chip is the perfect reward and reminder to help me stay on track.
Journal from Back 2 Basics Sober Living Client