"Best Advice" - a Compendium
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- Find people
with significant recovery to learn from. If you cannot find
people and groups in your area, call national fellowship offices for long
distance contact. Also, each fellowship has national conferences every year
at which you can meet people.
- Remember that
Twelve Step support is essential. Twelve-Step support lays
the foundation for the repair you need to do and sustains growth.
- You must use
the phone. Overcoming fear of using the phone is critical if
you are to stay in touch with group members and sponsors. It is okay to call
as many times as you need — even many times in one day or in an hour.
- Be patient.
Going through the stages takes time. There are no magic solutions — only
time and constant use of the program principles.
- Go to
meetings consistently. Find groups that are right for you
and make a commitment to them. Remember, you are building a support network
for yourself.
- Use your
sponsor(s). A sponsor is someone who knows the detail of
what has happened to you and coaches you on using the program. You can ask
for a temporary sponsor. You can have more then one sponsor.
- Use program
literature. Find program material. Study them. Ask about
whatever you don't understand.
- Maintain
contact outside the meetings. Often more happens outside the
meeting than in it. Groups often adjourn for coffee or supper. Some have
standing breakfasts and lunches. Some offer retreats and open meetings.
Participate in the life of the fellowship by going to these events.
- Be careful:
tell only those you trust. This was far and away the most
frequent comment. Addicts say that in deciding whether to tell someone, the
key criterion is this: how much do you trust that person.
- Wait.
Even after having decided to tell someone, take time to think over your
decision before actually going through with it.
- Know your
motives. What payoffs do you seek? Do you want support or
are you looking for approval?
- Do it if you
can help others with the same problem. Sharing with people
who need to be in the program or who already are in the program helps them
and the group as well as yourself.
- Remember, it
is not necessary to tell many people at all. You don't have
to tell — even when people ask or pry.
- You must tell
your therapist, family, and the people closest to you. It
would be unfair to them if you did not share something this significant.
Besides, these people are all vital to your healing process. You might
consult your therapist about appropriate points to make in talking with your
family and friends.
- When in
doubt, check with your sponsor and your group. They can
provide the support you need to make safe decisions.
- Mistakes will
happen. All addicts tell someone they later wish they had
not told. It is okay to make a mistake.
- When in
doubt, check with your therapist, your sponsor, or a group member.
Living in the extremes is part of the old addictive mold that the Big Book
of A.A. calls "cunning and baffling." Addicts and co-addicts need ongoing
input from others to keep in balance and as a check on their own deal.
- Be clear
about your needs. Many addicts emphasized that recovery
offers human and spiritual resources to help people understand what they
need and want. Take care of your basic needs of hunger, rest, and support.
- Make balance
an important goal. Figure out boundaries that help you
maintain balance. Make those boundaries your priority.
- Learn to do
kind things for yourself. One addict told us, "Now I see a
better way: we need to be more gentle with ourselves."
- Develop
self-awareness. Be an observer of yourself by using
meetings, journals, and meditations.
- Work on the
old hurts. Your feelings will become important guides to the
balance you need.
- Act "as if."
At first, not being in the extremes will seem awkward and unrewarding. In
order to distance yourself from your fear, pretend that this is okay. Ask
your sponsor about the Third Step.
- Leave cyclic,
destructive relationships. Avoid partners and friends who
persist in old patterns of escalation. If they are not committed to pursuing
balance, you must take action. Leave or at least separate from them until
your recovery is solidified.
- Pick an
extended period of celibacy. The top priority for most
addicts is to experience a period of celibacy. Celibacy helps the person
clear out unmanageability, to feel more alive again, and to reclaim
repressed memories.
- Be patient
with yourself. Gentleness, kindness, and self-care are
watchwords. To change after years of compulsion is a huge task, and you will
make mistakes. As one addict observed, "Don't make self-love contingent on
abstinence."
- Accept
yourself as a sexual person. Sexuality and sobriety are, as
another addict advised, "possible, and not a contradiction in terms... sex
is not dirty and shameful." You must distinguish between your addiction and
your sexuality. Sobriety is about addiction, not about sexuality. Your
sexuality is to be embraced, not denied.
- Work on
boundaries. Boundaries give you clarity about your sexual
self and help to reduce shame. As guidelines, they serve as a bulwark
against denial, obsessive thinking, and relapse.
- Keep others
current. Always keep others in your program informed about
happenings in your sexual life. When in doubt or when confronting something
new, check it out. Have no secrets, and avoid becoming isolated.
- Understand
that things will change. Your vision of your sexuality will
change dramatically with time in recovery. You will need to allow yourself
that process.
- Accept the
imperfect. The search for perfection in relationships and
sex cause many addicts to discard relationships before they recognized their
potential. The search was futile and the losses real.
Manaing life without
- View it as a
time-out, not an end. A celibacy period will provide you
pace to refocus on other needs. It is not a sentence, not the end of your
sexuality. On the contrary, celibacy will make you fully aware of your
sexual self.
- Work through
commitment issues with your partner. The decision to be
celibate will affect your partner. Respecting your partner means involving
him or her in your thinking so you can commit together to the celibacy
period.
- Get support
from therapist, sponsor, and group. You will need their
guidance and help to maximize the experience. Being open with those in your
network will help you implement your plan.
- Expect that
it will raise issues. For many, this change is drastic and
places life issues in sharp relief. Make this a goal and not a surprise.
- Understand
that resistance is typical. You may experience anger and
resentment at first. This isn't surprising. We seldom embark gracefully on
any ordeal that involves significant change and insight.
- Prepare
yourself to experience new feelings. The new feelings that
emerge will be guides to parts of yourself you need to reclaim. As
uncomfortable as these feelings may be, they will serve as significant
allies in helping you become all you are.
- Plan active
tasks to enhance the experience. Select a specific step to
work on, follow through on assignments from your therapist to help you
accept nurturing and develop spiritual and sexual awareness, and keep a
journal about the experience.
check whether your thoughts or actions are narrowing down
and constricting your experience of life or are opening up and enhancing it.
Addiction searches for the most immediate pleasure and prevention of pain. This
is quite different from a life that is expansive - open to the pain of grief,
the despair of healing from loneliness and the enriching joy of living life
fully.i
- Develop
Spiritual Strategies. Whatever strategies you choose to help
you connect with yourself and the rhythm of the universe — meditation, yoga,
or prayer, for example — need to be deepened, strengthened and practiced.
Number one on almost everyone's list is the development of a spiritual base
— a calm center which helps you resist turmoil on the periphery.
- Decode
feelings. Sex that is about addiction and not sexuality is
usually accomplished by feelings of shame, loneliness, fear, pain, and
anger. Always check for these feelings. Remember that to act out a feeling
sexually does not resolve that feeling. If you cannot decode your feeling,
consult with a sponsor, a therapist, or a group member. Remember the old
Twelve-Step aphorism: Horniness equals loneliness.
- Avoid trigger
situations. Identify situations, persons, and circumstances
that can trigger addictive responses. Respect your powerlessness, and avoid
those triggers. Remember, when in doubt, don't.
- Forgive
yourself for slips. If a slip occurs, turn it into a
learning experience. Be gentle with yourself. Your shame will cause you to
beat up on yourself, and that will make you even more vulnerable.
- Work on
nurturing yourself. Exercise. Walk. Eat well. Rest. Enjoy a
massage, baths, and safe indulgences. Seek out nature, music, art, humor,
and the companionship of good friends. Find time to take care of yourself.
Make your living space a cocoon for your transformation. Buy yourself a
teddy bear. You deserve this treatment.
- Avoid keeping
cravings secret. Keeping your cravings secret will add to
their power. When you feel like acting our, go to people you trust so you
are not alone. In general, secrets are about shame, and shame always makes
you more vulnerable. Secrets will keep you from others in recovery.
- Find
alternative passions. Seek hobbies, sports, and activities
you enjoy. Cultivate these parts of your life so compulsive patterns in
working, obsessing, or acting out compete with activities and interests that
are rewarding. Alternative passions become new arenas for growth.
- Acknowledge
your choice. Avoid the feeling that you are a victim. You
are powerless about your addiction, but you are in charge of your recovery
program and your lifestyle. In most areas, you have the choice which can
help you achieve the balance needed in your life. Be proactive instead of
reactive by acknowledging to yourself and to others what your choices are.
- Use the Steps.
The Twelve Steps are a proven recipe for spiritual wholeness. Remember that
the program started with the realization that without the spiritual
component, recovery could not happen. Decide that a spiritual life is
essential, not an option.
- Find guides.
Listen to others share their spiritual experiences and ask how healing
happened in their lives. Brokenness, failure, and tragedy have helped many
find parts of themselves they had not known. Most also started with anger or
fear, skepticism, or detachment.
- Separate
religion from spirituality. Many come with "baggage" about
religious institutions that damages or constricted their growth. Resentment
about these experiences can cast shadows over genuine spiritual development.
Organizations and institutions are not ends in themselves, but are instead
designed to help you have a spiritual life and build a spiritual community.
Use only those which help.
- Connect with
nature. Spirituality starts with a sense of wonder at our
existence and at the wonders of creation — other living things, the oceans
and mountains, forests, deserts, and weather. Go for a walk. Watch stars.
Take care of a pet. Notice your body. Play with children. Then connect these
miracles with what you see around you.
- Make a daily
effort. Key to spiritual life is constancy. Daily rituals
that anchor your sense of stability help you achieve incremental spiritual
growth. Then when leaps of faith are required and stress overwhelms you, a
reservoir of accumulated strength awaits.
- Find ways to
promote reflection. Spirituality is about what is meaningful
to you, what gives your life value. Inspirational writing, daily meditation
books, liturgy, prayer, journals, yoga exercises, and letter writing are the
kinds of things that need to be part of your daily rituals. These also help
you make sense out of special spiritual events.
- Surrender.
All inner journeys start with an "emptying" of self — a fact reflected in
religious traditions. Addicts begin recovery with an admission of
powerlessness and live their lives according to the principles of "letting
go." Serenity, according to the prayer, is doing all you can and accepting
that that is enough.
- Heal the
sexual/spiritual split. Much damage has been done to
sexuality in the name of religion. The result inhibits progress on both
planes. To heal, start by acknowledging that sexuality is about meaning and
that spirituality is about meaning. Search for common areas between the
two. Be gentle with yourself about old, tortuous conflicts. They are not
about you. They never were.
- Make a sexual
leap of faith. Sexual change is gradual, not sudden. You
have to trust and believe that it will happen. (This most often-used phrase
in this area of advice was "let go and let God.") Attempts to do otherwise
and control outcomes will destroy sexual experiences.
- Sustain sex
with intimacy. Sexual vitality comes from relationships. The
challenges of closeness renew sexual interest and deepen the meaning of sex.
- Talk before,
during and after. Verbalizing, passion, needs, and fears are
perhaps the best ways of facilitating sexual intimacy.
- Overcome
sexual shame through affirmation of each other. Couples
that did the best emphasized the strategy of mutual affirmation. Compliment
your partner. Affirm all the positive things you can see about his or her
sexuality and about your sexuality together. Don't stop.
- Respect
boundaries and limits. Building trust helps heal the sexual
wounds of the past. Both partners need permission to say no without fear of
reprisal or abandonment. Give profound respect to the other's vulnerability
and wishes — even when you don't fully understand them or approve of them.
Remember, trust is the goal. To seduce, manipulate, or test your partner's
boundaries is extremely destructive. Healing will shift perspectives and
boundaries. Breaking the trust again may lead to irreparable damage.
- Pay attention
to feelings. Addicts and co-addicts learned to sexualize
their needs and pain, yet their needs remained unfulfilled, their pain
unattended, and their sexuality stifled. Attend to your feelings. You might
have to begin by just labeling them. With time you will get better at
sorting them out.
- See sex as
legitimate joy. Abandon the grim rules you learned that kept
you in addictive and co-addictive obsession. Have fun. Play. Within your
sobriety plan and your boundaries, allow for spontaneity and
experimentation. Your recovery principles carve out an area of safety so
that you can risk yourself sexually in new, positive and rewarding ways.
- Take care of
your body. Physical health is basic to sexual health.
Exercise. Eat good food. Sleep well. Limit the use of drugs like alcohol,
nicotine, and caffeine. Do these things and you can trust that your body's
responses will be limited only by your mind.
- Heal first.
Wait for your program to stabilize. Take the time you need to work through
celibacy, to develop support, and to understand your addiction. Most who
took this time felt it was the "greatest gift" they could have given
themselves.
- Take time to
be known. You have plenty of time. Aim for friendship.
Avoid urgency. Enjoy yourself.
- Be selective.
Only date people in whose presence you feel most like yourself. If you find
yourself slipping into shame — feeling the need to defend yourself or seek
approval — consider it a warning.
- Share you
plan. When dating becomes steady, share how and under what
terms you want to be sexual. Elicit from your partner his or her reaction to
this as well as his or her intention and values.
- Share your
recovery. Tell your partner about your history so you are
not carrying a secret. These are two critical things to remember here: 1) If
it is not safe enough to share this fact about yourself, it is not safe to
be sexual; 2) If you are sexual before your partner knows your history, it
may be perceived as a betrayal when he or she does find out. If your partner
accepts you as a recovering person, your fears of abandonment will
dissipate. Seldom did we hear about addicts who were rejected for sharing
their recovery if they did it up-front.
- Do pre-dates
and post-dates with others. Before and after dates, check it
out with others, especially if they have any anxiety. No one does it
perfectly. Everyone makes mistakes. The real problems arise when you cease
to share your process.
- Remember:
This is a date, not an encounter group. Acknowledge your
feelings. If you feel anxious or awkward, say so. Watch the intensity,
however. You do not have to tell your life history or share childhood pain
the first evening. Trust should be incremental, not instantaneous. Build up
some history with your date — spend some time together first.
- Beware of
cosmic relationships. Intensity is not intimacy.
Fast-forwarding the future — as when, after a very brief courtship, you are
certain you have found "the one" — can be a fix for the emptiness of the
present. Life mates are not determined in two days, even two dreamlike days.
Many addicts spend one night that takes years to untangle. There are magical
evenings, however. Enjoy them. Listen to your intuitions. Trust history and
recovery.
- Work for
win-win solutions. Shame-based couples tend to look at all
issues in terms of right and wrong, and to see all conflicts as ending with
a winner and a loser. Search for solutions that make each partner a winner.
Seldom is there just one way to do things. Find the alternatives.
- Use the
Twelve-Steps. Stop the fight and share with each other what
Step you need to use in connection with this problem. Use the tools your
recovery gives you.
- Agree on
times to work on problems. Fighting when you are tired and
depleted is counter-productive. Agree that it's all right to talk about the
problem at another time that's acceptable to you both. Have a rule about
times of the day when intense issues need to be tabled.
- Avoid
dramatic exits. Threatening abandonment is great drama, but
also destructive to those whose history is filled with it. Remember, shame
is about abandonment. If you need time-out, ask for it.
- Focus on the
issues, not the history. Shame-based couples do not resolve
things because they keep escalating the conflict by adding in other
unresolved problems. Cut down on the backlog by concentrating on the current
disagreement.
- Avoid cheap
shots. Partners know each other's vulnerabilities. Fighting
is an act of trust and an invitation to intimacy. Do not sabotage it with
demeaning, disrespectful, or expletive comments. Support, do not exult, when
your partner admits an error.
- Accept issues
and feelings of others. They are realities for the other
person, even if they seem alien or unreal to you. Validating your partner's
experiences will add dramatically to your ability to solve things together.
- When stuck,
consult with others. Therapists, trusted friends, sponsors,
other couples — all can be resources. If as a couple, you have no one to
talk to, you do not have the resources you need. Find support for your
relationship.
- Give a lot of
time. This was universally seen as the most important piece
of advice. Phrases like "patience," "go slow," and "one day at a time," were
very common. This reflects the old Al-Anon wisdom: "nothing major the first
year."
- Be willing to
lose it in order to get it. Both partners have to resolve
not to give up parts of themselves in order to keep the other from leaving.
If you can fully be who you are and your partner does not leave, you have
something. Fidelity to self is the ultimate act of faithfulness to the
other.
- Restore self
first. Do the repair work that you yourself need, and your
perceptions of the relationship will change dramatically. Most people's
unhappiness in the relationship is about themselves and not their partner.
You have to trust before you can trust the other.
- Accept the
illness in the other. Start by acknowledging at the deepest
level of yourself that you both are powerless and fully involved in the
illness. It is as hard for your partner as it is for you.
- Admit
mistakes promptly. Avoid blame. Work for honest and
accuracy, not for proving what is right. Self-righteousness inevitably kills
intimacy.
- Share
spirituality. Explore ways to be spiritual together that are
simple for the two of you.
- Use the
"amends" Steps. Reverse the blame dynamic by taking
responsibility for pain you have inflicted on the other. Do what you can to
make up for it. Use Steps Eight and Nine as a model for daily living with
your partner.
- Remember,
it's never going to be perfect. Just as the "ultimate
partner" does not exist, neither does the "ultimate relationship." Accepting
human limits in ourselves helps us in being generous with our loved one.
- Be with other
recovering couples. Attend open meetings together. Join
fellowships of couples. Go on couples' retreats. Socialize with couples.
Support other couples. Have couple friends.
- Have fun
together. All work on recovery with no play makes for great
intensity, not intimacy. Closeness comes from shared common experiences,
including the fun ones. Remember, play is, in its own way, and act of trust
See also: Recovery - Therapist's Perspective
Last update:
Thursday, February 15, 2007.
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