Waking the Dead: addiction and recovery

Winter is coming. I can feel it in the cold chill of the morning when I wake up for work and the last echoes of the night are clinging to the coat tails of morning. Sometimes when I wake up I feel a sense of unease or a physical symptom manifesting itself but then I say a gratitude prayer and give thanks that I'm not waking up dopesick or having to use just to drag my broken body out of bed.

I can taste food properly again but, most of all, I can taste my emotions. At first this is a frightening prospect as they tend to pinball around you bumping against the corners of your soul without any regard for whether you want them there or not. This is a blessing not a curse but if you're the sort of person who uses drugs to mask and hide your emotions, it's bound to come as a big shock.

Just recently I relapsed after 3 months clean and this had a devastating effect on my personal life, work life and involved an encounter with the law..again. In the words of my sponsor, I got past the "little fluffy clouds" stage where the relief of being clean began to pass into the cold reality of having to micro manage your life and addiction on a daily basis. Recognising what went wrong when you encounter a relapse is one thing but acting on it and putting things in place to prevent it happening again is another thing altogether.

For me, each relapse feels like a little fragment of my soul comes loose never to be seen again. I wonder how many pieces I can lose before I become unable to put myself back together again.

Sometimes your actions result in devastating consequences and the ripple is felt for a long time to come. Other times you fall over and pick yourself up again with not so much fuss. I know that once you start to isolate yourself and believe that the addiction voice is your voice. Well, that's the moment that things truly begin to unravel. And if you don't pick up the phone then relapse becomes more than just a thought but an inevitability.

But what happens when your sponsor isn't available and the feelings of wanting to use begin to cascade and feel like they are taking you over?

Let them.

Sorry, say that again?

Let them.

They are happening for a reason and the more you try to resist them and follow them then the more likely you are to build up the levels of frustration and anger that will make a relapse more than likely.

Yet, a strange thing happens when you sit and observe your thoughts rise and fall like your breath. You start to accept them for what they are. No more and no less. Advocates of mindfulness will know what I am talking about here.

It isn't easy to accept damaging thoughts when your cunning addict brain wants to act on them but one of the paths to recovery is discovering that you have a real choice when it comes to how to look after yourself. A question you might want to ask yourself when in the grip of consuming thoughts about recover is this: Will using drugs make things better for me?

The answer is a resounding "No".