Rational Recovery ®

If you’re going to have a higher power in your life, then choose it very carefully! However you conceive of a higher power, it will strongly influence your thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior. It will directly affect your self-concept, your identity, your character, and — yes — your soul. Most of all, your higher power will determine the course of your life, and your destiny as well.

Everyone knows how important the higher power is in human affairs, even those who energetically combat such notions. World history is authored by the higher powers of nations and their citizens, and the human condition may be caricatured as a drama with a cast of higher powers. Power itself is nothing more nor less than the triumph of a higher power!

A higher power may be for better or worse, speak truth or falsehood, or manifest good or evil. Every little choice in life is made between at least two objects of concern. The powers that vie for your submission do not fight among themselves, as ancient myth-gods once did. They engage as ideas, values, concepts, hopes and dreams that compete in in the arena of human consciousness — in your human mind, where they are heard and felt as callings for truth, deliverance, and fulfillment.

As the results of your addiction pile up against you, and your struggles against addictive desire appear more futile, you have become depressed, afraid, desperate, and hopeless. These factors add up to a condition of special vulnerability. You are a sitting duck for bad advice. Your obsession with addictive pleasures has not exactly sharpened your senses or your judgment. You may be suffering the toxic after-effects of alcohol or other drugs, plus the depression, anxious moods, and raw emotions that do little to help you make wise choices that are truly in your best interests.

Few are as powerless as an addicted person, and none is so vulnerable to exploitation than an addicted person seeking “help.” When the world is coming down on you, any friendly face may look very good. When you’re sinking in the quicksand of addiction, any warm hand held out to help feels good. That is precisely why Rational Recovery warns all addicted people to stay away from recovery groups of all kinds, and why we reject all forms of addiction treatment and counseling services that deliver new beliefs, new ideas, new philosophies, and new values, all of which contradict your native beliefs and original family values. You are vulnerable, and the help offered to you, even by your family physician, may be more harmful than addiction itself.

Priorities
Now you act against your own standards of decency, bewildered by repeated losses you clearly saw coming. Your higher power (addictive desire) has been governing your life, and it will continue to be your master until you kill it or it kills you. It plays by no rules and does not intend to die. It speaks in your head in a thousand voices, and to sustain itself, it can appear as anything it chooses. It is an enemy within, unseen in the same way that we cannot directly see our own eyes. Addiction’s strain upon your character becomes an increasing burden, so that eventually you may accept any definition to the problem that will make some sense and any remedy that will promise relief from the horrors of headlong addiction.

You should define your problem as narrowly as possible, to avoid the chaos of complexity. Your problem is not, “How do I become a better person?” It is, “How do I quit and stay quit?” Addiction sets one adrift, without a moral compass, to follow breezes of intuition poisoned with addictive desire. Your first concern should be your personal identity, the original person you once were before plunging into the abyss of addiction. You were not only younger, but also excited about the possibilities of life, and you had hopes and dreams that lit your way to a better future. You had a core set of values, always growing and slowly changing, but never in conflict with your core, native beliefs, your moral intuitions about good and bad, right and wrong. You rightly want that back!

When you seek help, your addiction will intervene to make the introductions and set the rules of engagement. When you feel split by an inner debate, the voice of addictive desire will tell you that your better judgment — that for you, self-intoxication is morally wrong — is a horrid disease symptom, the symptom of denial. That inversion is original denial, the centerpiece of an inverted lifestyle called, “in recovery.”

Your higher power will adapt to your desire to be free by organizing the rest of your life around the mandate of addiction, just as it has been doing for much too long. It will give you a set of simple rules for living that will not defeat, but only accommodate, your addiction. It will make addiction a lifelong struggle to remain tentatively sober, sweetening the deal with the promise of innocent indulgences in addictive pleasures, when conditions are perfect for “relapse.” Your addiction wants you to surrender to its will, just as you have been all along, but now in a new and “spiritual” way.

Your first priority in your short journey to life after recovery is to set your anchor in who you are, in your true origins, not in the fellowship of other lost souls. You are neither an “an alcoholic,” nor part of any society governed by rules of addiction. You are a human being, endowed by nature and/or God with free will, which is simply the ability to act upon principle rather than bodily desire.

Rule One, as you set your course toward addiction recovery, is to name your inner enemy so there is no confusion in your own mind when the idea of self-intoxication comes to mind. From here on in, call your addictive desire “the Beast.”

Your desire to drink/use arises from your animal nature, not to be confused with your human nature. You have become accustomed to having addictive desire, the Beast, as your higher power. As you first attempt to name addictive desire “the Beast,” you may feel it resisting you, so that it can remain your higher power. Your animal nature does not comprenend morality; morality is in your human nature. The Beast knows you are infinitely greater than it, and must occupy the pronoun “I” in order to survive. Once you name it, it is no longer you, but an entity you have named, the Beast. Your Beast is very frightened — of you!

Rule Two is to always recognize the Addictive Voice (AV). The Addictive Voice is any thinking that supports or suggests the possible future use of alcohol or other drugs. The AV is the voice of the Beast talking to you in your head, telling you how and when to drink/use, and it sets the stage for endless addiction.

AV —> Beast = Bark —> Dog

For example, the Beast does not want to be exposed for what it is, just an animal desire for addictive pleasures. It may insist that you call it something else — anything else! — in order to conceal its diabolical nature. It loves to be seen as a disease, so that your self-intoxication appears to be an innocent symptom, or a “maladaptive coping mechanism,” rather than as a voluntary indulgence in pleasure at the expense of others, i.e., immoral conduct.

The Beast wants you to identify yourself as someone who is quite different from “normal people,” and therefore exempt from common standards of self-restraint, and it wants you to socialize mainly with others who have also experienced the unspeakable, unspoken pleasures of addiction. They will understand, and tell you that self-intoxication is not a moral issue, but a symptom. Because the Beast is the animal side of your nature, you may become more comfortable in groups of addicts or alcoholics than in your home, with your own family. The group may say, “We are your new family.” They may also say, “Let this group be your higher power.”

Most of all, your Beast wants you to surrender to it, so that it can be your higher power for the rest of your life. No matter what you currently believe, the Beast will tell you to turn your life over to a higher power, any higher power you can think of or imagine. If you won’t do this, then it will threaten to kill you by your own hand, predicting a frenzy of addictive pleasures ending in death.

Key Insight
So, as you may now possibly see, the Beast merely refers to itself when it implores you to “turn it over,” and to “Let go and let god.” Cunning? Yes. Baffling? I hope not, for long. Once you unravel the Code of the Beast, you will have to be very easily baffled to remain addicted for very long. Any Beast that describes itself as cunning and baffling simply hasn’t been identified quite yet. “Cunning and baffling” are merely examples of Addictive Voice that appear perfectly silly upon recognition. How baffling is that?

Although it may not seem so, the thoughts and perceptions of addicted people are in essence the Addictive Voice. Logically, you will remain tightly in the grip of the Beast as long you search for help and guidance with addiction recovery. If this paradox were not so, then you would not be addicted.

When you try to conceive of a higher power that will come to your aid, return you to sanity, or illuminate your way to recovery, who do you think will step in disguised as your loving, rescuing deity? If you think Mr. Nice Guy will come to show the way, then you might learn a little more about the nature of the Beast. It is in the nature of the Beast to be anything at all, especially you. Playing god is a natural for the Beast. I suggest you not wait for a miracle; you may die in the meantime.

If you meditate with an open mind, allowing your thoughts to be accessed or shaped by unknown higher powers, you will feel the presence of the Beast of addiction, speaking quietly, in priestly or godlike tones. To be sure, it will not be the God of your ancestors, unless they are latter day “alcoholics.” Very likely, your addiction-driven search for outside help will hastily find a higher power that is infinitely tolerant of endless substance abuse in the form of “relapses.” It will be a deity or entity quite compatible with the doctrines of one-day-at-a-time recoveryism. The Beast will bless the lie of addictive disease, and its mercy will fall gently on you as forgiveness for the sin you won’t admit. Addiction’s deity will hear confession of a thousand big and little sins and errors common to life in addiction, but will not tolerate a moral appraisal of the one, vile act that brings you to its altar — the act of self-intoxication that disables the hardware of morality.

I have often likened recovery groups to a pool full of non-swimmers. Would you jump in there as a way to learn how to swim? It is impossible for a group of people with unresolved addictions to arrive at a correct solution for resolving or defeating addictions. It is crucial for you to understand that the founders of the recovery group movement, Bill W and Dr. Bob, were in the same desperate straits you’ve experienced when they first met. Behind closed doors, they shared and accommodated each other’s account of the addict’s lament and a bond of mutual dependence, a fellowship of addiction according to the survival mandates of the Addictive Voice.

Rule Three, trust thyself! If you won’t trust yourself, why should anyone else? Whatever your origins, as God’s creation, Mother Nature’s child, or both combined, the Committee of Two, you are endowed with free will and knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, and you have moral scruples to guide you through your life in freedom and dignity. You are capable of freely denying any of your biological drives — for food, for sex, for safety — when conditions and principles call for such action. Any of us can brave fire, bullets, starvation, or death by any means if we have sufficient cause do so so. To think any of us are powerless over the desire to get drunk, get high, or engage in other vice is to deny we are human, and to confirm that we are little more than the animals into which our addictions have made us.

Don’t be your own higher power. That’s just silly steptalk, a logical impossibility. Don’t wait for a miracle, either. Just be the miracle you have always been. Stand up on your hind legs, as a human being, and walk away from your addiction in freedom and dignity. Study Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®) diligently and you will receive immediate, natural rewards for accepting full moral accountability for your past and future indulgence in addictive pleasures.

Go home and stay home.
Rational Recovery is not a place you go; it’s something you quickly learn here and do in your head. Go home! Go home to your origins and the core values you know are true. Stop trying to believe that which in your right mind is false. Recall your own skepticism when you first heard that immoral conduct is caused by an inherited disease! Whatever your native beliefs and original family values are, they are superior to the trash served up in substance abuse counselors’ offices and church basements. Go home to the family you’ve betrayed and become the messenger of hope and reconciliation rather than the carrier of chronic disease. Protect the ones you care about from the animal within you that would destroy them in exchange for a little drinkey-poo, or a little hit of precioussss stuff.

Don’t look here for new wisdom you haven’t known all along, because no such fountain of new age salvation exists. If you don’t know what your original family values were, ask an elder in your family, and you’ll get some authentic help. In a securely abstinent condition, you will finally be competent to unravel the genuine mysteries surrounding the human condition, including matters of religion and salvation.

Here are some starter links that will start your very short journey to the other side of addiction and recovery:

Declaration of Personal Independence

Rational Recovery Sponsor

Nearest recovery group

The Internet Crash Course on AVRT

Remember, being “in recovery” just means “in addiction,” but with mere hope of staying “sober, one-day-at-a-time.” If you want to safely withdraw from the recovery group movement, and take back your indenty and your life from the bonds of your original addiction, AVRT® is your escape hatch, the “easier, softer way” you have been warned about by the group. AVRT® is just as destructive of recovery group disorders as it is hard-core addiction, for they are essentially one and the same.
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• Addiction: Ambivalent, or feeling both ways, about your addictive pleasure. On one hand, you want to quit, but on the other hand, you want to continue it without limits, forever. (Addiction should not be confused with chemical dependence, which is simply the freely chosen use of a substance for its intended effect, i.e., taste, buzz, social effects, etc. Nor should addiction be confused with substance abuse, which is merely someone else’s objective opinion of another’s personal conduct. Addiction has no direct connection to withdrawal symptoms, which may accompany discontinuation of some drugs.)

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Rational Recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.