One of the books I took on my recent trip to Japan was “The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking” by Nicholas Capaldi and Miles Smit. Not wanting anything work or even blog/recovery related to bog down my vacation into the same old ruts, I picked up the book on a lark just because it happen to look interesting at the bookstore. Yeah, foolish me, that’s right- I picked up a book on deception (not) thinking that somehow this would be a break from alcoholism and addiction issues!
The book describes the basics of arguments and critical thinking in a novel manner, mostly by explaining different mechanisms to subvert logic and even truth- ergo the title and why I should have immediately thought “alcoholic”. When I hit chapter 5 entitled Defending Your Case- the book went into overdrive shifting out of critical thinking into how to lie like an addict. With sample addiction scenarios in parentheses, Chapter 5 includes ways to defend a losing argument including Never Admit Defeat (until you hit rock bottom), Refuse to Be Convinced (denial), In Defense of Definitions (well, I wasn’t addicted to beer- just pills and vodka), and my favorite Damning the Dilemma (I’ll hurt myself sober or drinking, so it’s better to maintain a moderate buzz). The book is suggested as a primer for “intellectual self-defense”, but after reading it I think it serves just as well as a how-to for deconstructing the lies of an alcoholic or a codependency self-defense manual.
Regardless of the direction it steered my thoughts, the book was still very enjoyable. It is very basic without getting to technical and is a quick read. It has been reviewed fairly positive in the past with the few pans coming from what I assume are pure sophists that confuse the term introduction with comprehensive and Pollyanna’s irritated it could be used as a style manual for deceit. If you go looking for this book, keep in mind it is a revised and updated version of the 1987 original paperback. Don’t get it confused with Kevin Mitnick’s recent book on tech security with the same opening title that comes up in many searches (just click on the pic, it will steer you true).
I have a colleague that decided 2010 would be his year to quit a 20 year plus smoking habit citing several very sound and logical reasons for the lifestyle change including his health, the sake of his kids, and financial reasons. He had originally planned to go cold turkey starting New Year’s Day and scoffed at the thought of using any kind of smoke cessation medication. He promised his kids, steeled himself, and made a point to tell me and other colleagues of his plans to be smoke free as we neared last year’s Christmas/New Year holiday break.
Cue the all too familiar same old song and dance of the addicted mind and body (start the video if you please).
First the rationalization that no one wants to end a beloved addiction during the holidays, a time of frolic and excess not abstinence and denial. Back to work the following, now’s the time… to procrastinate. The inevitable guilt mounts with spurs, but the course has been altered – now instead of a sprint to abstinence it’s a tapering enduro. Owww- this is too hard, maybe medical help is notsuch a bad idea. On the drugs for a week – but it’s too expensive (not compared to cigarettes) so he practices quitting by giving up on the Chantix. Kids make unplanned visit with dad- embarrassing- still smoking. That’s the final straw.
It’s March. Ten days cigarette free and the reward… a cigarette. It took me thirty minutes to explain to him that a single puff resets the clock- he has now been smoke free for 12 hours.
Been there done that, in a way I think the craving for a harmless puff is much tougher to resist without the immediate and dire repercussions of a bender- it’s the same old song and dance.
My thanks to author and blogger Patrick Meninga of The Spiritual River for sharing his recovery experience and advice in this most excellent guest post.
Anyone who lives and grows in addiction recovery for any great length of time will start to recognize certain truths about the process that seem to be universal. These are ideas, concepts, and processes that just about everyone seems to go through and experience, if they are willing to keep learning and growing in their recovery. These ideas are not specific to certain recovery programs such as the 12 step program of AA, religious programs, or Women for Sobriety for that matter. They are just things that we notice on a broad scale when we look at people who have stayed clean and sober, and found a new life in recovery. Thus, would could consider these ideas to be fundamental to recovery.
These 10 universal truths are:
Abstinence is the foundation for recovery.
Personal growth must become a priority.
An emphasis on learning is important.
What got you clean and sober will not keep you clean and sober.
Addiction, and recovery, are complex.
Action beats thinking every time.
Helping others in recovery is critical.
Complacency is deadlier than resentment.
The strongest form of relapse prevention is building real self esteem.
The key to success is in taking massive action.
Abstinence is the foundation for recovery
Within the recovery community, this pretty much goes without saying. Those who try to moderate or learn how to control their drug and alcohol intake will either walk away from recovery successfully, or they will come crawling back with their tail between their legs facing utter defeat at the hands of their disease.
In other words, the need for abstinence is what defines addiction. If you can manage and control your life just fine without complete and total abstinence from drugs and alcohol, then you don’t really have a problem to begin with. Go live your life in peace and be thankful that you are not an addict.
If, on the other hand, you find that you cannot find long term success in your life while continuing to drink or use drugs, then it might be time to make a decision. Real addicts and alcoholics suffer major consequences and lose a lot of ground when they relapse–no matter how innocent or minor a slip it may have been.
Addiction recovery is a pass/fail proposition. Relapse means that you are back to square one, and often times much worse off than before.
Personal growth must become a priority
There are different programs of recovery that are available to recovering addicts and alcoholics. It should come as no surprise that most any of these programs have at least some emphasis on personal growth and development. This is a fundamental aspect of success in recovery, that the person is striving to become a better person, rather than to simply coast through life without seeking improvement.
Success in recovery is a holistic path. It can be no other way. This is because every part of our life is affected by addiction: our physical body, our mental acuity, our social relationships, our spirituality, and so on. There is no portion of our overall being that is left untouched by the disease. Therefore, success in overcoming addiction must address every area of our life.
Some people mistakenly focus too heavily on spiritual growth at the expense of other areas of their life. Addiction plagued our whole being, and our recovery solution must encompass our whole self as well. Recovery is more than just spiritual….it is holistic. Personal growth will happen on many different levels.
Those who relapse in recovery can look back at their journey and say “Yes, at some point I stopped growing as a person. I let myself revert back to my old ways without pushing myself to improve instead.” Thus, personal growth is fundamental to success in recovery. It has to be present in order to prevent relapse in the long run.
Thank you author and speaker Lisa Frederiksen of Breaking the Cycles for this regular series sharing her decades long experience of dealing with family alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Click here to see the rest of the series.
One of the key messages I share in a number of my talks is the role early childhood trauma plays as one of the risk factors for developing the disease of alcoholism and/or an ongoing problem with alcohol abuse. And here is why.
We are born with approximately 100 billion brain cells but only a fraction are “wired.” It takes neurons (brain cells) talking to neurons — or “wiring” — for us to do whatever it is we do. Dr. Norman Doidge uses the phrase, “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself. This “firing together, wiring together” causes the brain to form “brain maps” for everything we think, do, feel or say. For example, the act of my typing this blog post involves my fingers, my eyes, my mind recalling research, my body and its posture — all working seamlessly together in a manner I don’t even think about. It just happens; happens thanks to neural networks wiring together because they fired together to form the brain map for how I “write.”
“Research has found that core brain development, 85 percent of which occurs in the first three years of life, shows differences in brain structures and function based on the child’s experiences in relationships with others and with their social context.” Shonkoff, J. & Phillips, D. A. (Eds.). (2000). From Neurons to Neighborhoods. Washington, DC: National Academy of Science
It makes sense when you think about it. For although we are born with approximately 100 billion brain cells, at birth about all we can do is sleep, eat, poop and urinate, cry and breath. If our neurons were all wired at birth, we’d come out running, laughing, reading, talking and doing calculus. Now read Shonkoff’s quote again.
Because the brain continues to form brain maps and input gets more advanced and complicated (think school, sports, music, relationships…), in the first decade of life, trillions of neural networks are formed. So here is where childhood trauma comes in.
If a child is being raised in a home with undiagnosed/ untreated alcohol misuse, their neural networks for how to see, process and cope with the world are all being influenced by how their family members interact. For a better understanding of what I’m saying here, please read this excellent piece on Huffington Post by Dr. Tian Dayton, “Diane Schuler, The Heartbreak of Denial.”
Bottom line… long before the age at which we start to have a memory of our lives, our neural networks are being formed in response to what is going on around us. And that “what is going on around us” has a profound impact on how our neural networks wire. All of this to say, here is another reason to address alcohol misuse — whether it is the person drinking too much or the person reacting to it — for our children’s sake.
Straight from the Hiroshima train station, the public streetcar pushes into the crowded city center following a narrow channel through a blaring landscape of music, horns, and hawkers. Much unlike the corner inset of the tourist map, the actual guide keys to this area are a garish display of commercial signage that both overwhelm and yet substitute for the minimal municipal markers. Everything may not be bright and clean, but there can be no doubt that this city is fervently alive. After just a few stops, I see my destination. Now I am walking through an epitome of order where even the natural wildness of the river and the trees are tamed harmoniously with cut stone and planned lines. Children gallivant, couples bump shoulders, and teenagers carry out hidden agendas while those old enough, wise enough, or perhaps just unlucky enough ponder why and what happened here.
Near the Miyuki Bridge, there was a police box. Most of the victims who had gathered there were junior high school girls from the Hiroshima Girls Business School and the Hiroshima Junior High School No.1. They had been mobilized to evacuate buildings and they were outside when the bomb fell. Having been directly exposed to the heat rays, they were covered with blisters, the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms. The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs. Some of the children even have burns on the soles of their feet. They’d lost their shoes and run barefoot through the burning fire.
Even today, I clearly remember how the view finder was clouded over with my tears.
This is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial where the twisted, tattered remains of the old Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall now commonly called the Atomic Bomb Dome are preserved, an edificial testimony to the devastation of the world’s first nuclear weapon target. It is an ugly scar among 30 acres of pristine monuments dedicated to remembrance and peace; without it one could walk the grounds never realizing the absolute destruction of the first ground zero. Looking around, it seemed that many do just that… isn’t that what recovery is all about?
At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial the utter destruction, painful memories, and the slow rebuilding process have all been documented and molded into a recovery program. At least here, the lessons of the war are not forgotten. No anger, resentment, or revenge is displayed- just a message, a peaceful reminder to others that they should not repeat the mistakes of the past and suffer such dire consequences. In fact, as you exit the onsite museum you get exactly that- an audio presentation, a speaker’s meeting of the survivors like Toshiko Saeki who lived through the blast.
I could not help but think of Hiroshima as a recovery Mecca, ideal for the pilgrimage of recovering alcoholics. A vibrant city that was scoured down to the rock bottom by nuclear fires only to be built up again bigger and better under no pretenses of victimization or singular blame, just pure acceptance and a vow to honor the past, enjoy the present, and to protect the future.
If you need a spiritual reminder of what real recovery is all about, I suggest you make the trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
It has been a full year since I had taken a break from work not to mention the daily updates of TDA, so this vacation in Japan (minus the brief work-related foray) has been a Godsend. The original plan was to continue with daily updates of TDA along with some strategic guest posting, but the frantic pace of my trip preparations beforehand combined with multiple stops of the first half have made this too difficult.
I guess it’s time for a few days of private recovery that will consist of relaxing at natural hot springs (onsens), sampling/digging into the many dining opportunities of Fukuoka (yatais), and leisurely reading some books I brought along (the first will be The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking). No doubt I’ll slip in a post or two, but I’m weary and for the most part the next week will be all about me… resting, at peace.
Nestled in the mountains of Japan north of Tokyo is the city of Matsumoto. I rolled into to town yesterday evening via the Super Azusa with a little daylight to spare, but because of the light mist and overcast weather I ruled out a quick excursion/fact finding mission and instead went ahead and set up shop at my hotel. Once settled in, I did some internet research on restaurants in the area and came across this nicely done post from a travel blog (Kudos Paul!) which reviews in detail one of the traditional meals of Matsumoto, basashi . Basashi is raw horse. Wow.
Needless to say I immediately set out find a traditional basashi restaurant of my own and ended up at Shin-Miyoshi. They don’t have a website, but are in the same area close to the train station and the experience was very similar to that of the travel blog.
I thoroughly enjoyed the basashi, especially the horse liver served sushi style wrapped in seaweed with rice. I also tried a fish sashimi that was served along with its skewed donor- still flopping (see right side of picture). At least to my unrefined palate this sashimi was tasty but otherwise unremarkable, however the dish’s presentation and the realization I had midway through the meal that was absolutely not. While sitting there devouring that poor little fish with its dead yet still twitching body in full display… his colleagues were staring at me not three feet away in a fish tank (see left side of picture). Poor little fishies, it made me think of myself as the monster of Matsumoto!
What’s the recovery twist to this story? It’s a tenuous tie-in at best, but hey, I’m on a break! These days eating a raw fish in front of an aquarium audience is about as monstrous as I get, that’s a far cry from my past days as a guzzling Godzilla that left a far greater path of destruction.
When it comes to traveling in recovery, it’s always smart to drop an anchor upon arriving at your destination. Whether it be a call to the family at home or spending thirty minutes blogging, importing a routine from you home base lifestyle help keeps away addictive thinking… and relapse.
Take for instance a old southern boy like myself while in Japan, definitely a fish out of water (albeit a happy fish) case. Gone are my day to day routines, familiar places and things, not to mention the added stress of trying to communicate and get around. If not careful there are two negative things that could happen, the first being that I’ll do something “stupid” because I’m breaking new ground in the old noggin and gotten out of my routine decision making practices.
That sort makes sense when thinking about the addictive brain, but the second possibility seems to happen to recovering alcoholics more often than not and is totally illogical. I call this occurrence a “New Rules” event. These events may be associated with a holiday cruise, wedding, foreign travel, or even major storms and the alcoholic becomes convinced that these new conditions temporarily exempt them from their disease. Just not true.
The names, faces, and places may have change, but I’ll always be the same alcoholic in recovery and there are no “new rules” and certainly no temporary exemptions.
(Same post, different year, new itinerary- stay tuned for TDA in Japan 2010!)
This is the last North American post and the kickoff of a two week work/leisure excursion to Japan. I still plan to update regularly, but extreme flight times and time zone changes may have my regular schedule off kilter. Keep checking often for updates, and wish me luck!
I guess it doesn’t really matter whether it was underwater nuclear testing or 24/7 intoxication that turns one into a monster, the important thing is how you act after the fact. Unlike my big green friend here that is planning a special party for Tokyo, my intention is to practice the exact same recovery program (travel-version) there as I do here in the US. The first few days of my trip to Japan will be spent meeting and traveling with Japanese businessmen, notorious for the hard drinking after-hours culture. I’m used to it, and will deal with the constant offers and queries about drinking the same way I always do; with a polite excuse- and not drink. It may be their culture, but it is my life and no job is worth drinking for.
One of my favorite actors, I’ve enjoy watching Samuel L Jackson play a drug addict, hit man (Jules Winnfield ruled), and Jedi master over the years but of course that’s not what earns him a post on TDA. I know many might scoff at my use of “earn” when it comes to being the subject of one my post, but I can think of no better word for a recovering alcoholic that has soberly navigated the caustic entertainment industry for nearly twenty years.
Instead of rehashing his bio I thought it might be better to share a few of his quotes from past interviews that I found interesting, like this one where he admits regardless of the high station he has achieved career-wise he still understands the humbling nature of the disease.
The irony is I never got to taste Cristal. Back then, Moët was my champagne of choice. Now I get sent crates of Cristal and I ain’t never tasted the stuff. Ain’t that a bitch?’… Joking aside, does he ever feel like having a drink, maybe raising a glass of champagne or two to his own extraordinary success? ‘Hell yeah, there are days when I feel like that, but I don’t do it. I ain’t the kind of guy who can have one drink. I never could. That’s what I have to remember. I never had one drink in my whole life. ~ Celebitchy.com
And then there is this one on the bastardization of “Hollywood” AA that was very revealing.
“It’s just too weird. You hear guys saying stuff like, ‘I’ve been hitting the red wine too heavy and I need to stop, but I want to keep smoking reefer (cannabis) and doing cocaine.’ In New York, rehab is for real. You sit next to guys who were IV users, guys who stole s#!, guys who sold their bodies. In Los Angeles you are sitting next to a guy who wants to go easy on the fine wine. Man, that’s a symptom of something right there.” ~ Bitten and Bound
Much like another famous alcoholic, Alice Cooper, Mr. Jackson counts golf as a major part of his recovery program. He even goes so far as to include golf breaks in his movie contracts, a smart way to break away from the rat race and “let go of the business of Hollywood”.
If you noticed, I used a picture of his latest role as Nick Fury above because I am very excited about the upcoming Iron Man 2… another tie-in to famous alcoholics. Click below to see the trailer and catch a glimpse of Samuel Jackson as General Fury.
One of the books I took on my recent trip to Japan was “The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking” by Nicholas Capaldi and Miles Smit. Not wanting anything work or even blog/recovery related to bog down my vacation into the same old ruts, I picked up the book on a lark just because it happen to look interesting at the bookstore. Yeah, foolish me, that’s right- I picked up a book on deception (not) thinking that somehow this would be a break from alcoholism and addiction issues!
There are different programs of recovery that are available to recovering addicts and alcoholics. It should come as no surprise that most any of these programs have at least some emphasis on personal growth and development. This is a fundamental aspect of success in recovery, that the person is striving to become a better person, rather than to simply coast through life without seeking improvement. 
