All the Way to the River

Here’s what you need to understand about other people’s addictions: You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. There’s nothing you can do to manage Rayya at this point, and the more you try to control the situation, the more you will lose. When it comes to other people’s addictions, whatever you try to control ends up controlling you.

The only thing anyone is ever trying to do is survive their minds, their histories, their dilemmas, their destinies, their days.

A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?” Because what if that’s really what it’s all about?

PRAYER FOR A RECOVERING CODEPENDENT What is missing from your constitution right now, my darling, is not empathy, but courage. It takes fortitude not to leap into somebody else’s suffering with them and call that love. It takes faith to know that you are not the appointed arbiter of anyone else’s journey. And it takes humility to admit that you cannot control anyone— that you might not even understand what you’re looking at. What you call a “crisis” might be someone else’s awakening, ten thousand lifetimes in the making. (The awakening, my love, might even be your own.) And what you call “care” might be dangerous disruption of an ecosystem of unimaginable delicacy. How hard that person’s soul might have fought its way through the cosmos for millions of ages to finally arrive here—on the final precipice of egoic collapse. How close they might be, at last, to freedom. All they have to do now is shatter. Maybe stand back. Maybe let it happen.

What if everything in Earth School is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be working, in other words—by teaching us things we can learn in no other way? What if everything (and everyone) that we label as “difficult” or “an obstacle” or even “dysfunctional” is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures—a divine crowbar, you might say, that is sent by the cosmos to knock down the doors of our ignorance, demolish our illusions, and give us the opportunity to move past our fears, find our innate courage, propagate wisdom, and help us to remember that we are of God? Of course we cannot know if this is how fate works, because none of us know how fate works. But in my life, I have certainly found that the Earth School model is a useful thought exercise during times of darkness, pain, and betrayal—for it takes me out of a victim mentality and offers up a worldview that feels far more empowering and fascinating than the limiting, anguished cry of “Why me?” A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?

I understand now that unsolicited advice is always driven by panic on the part of the person bestowing it, and I am frequently guilty of that panic myself. (I would much rather tell you what to do, in other words, than sit with my sadness or anger or fear about what you are doing.) And the more we love and need someone, typically, the more we try to control them—especially when we are afraid.

But some of the really brave students—the ones who wanted to make the most of their experience in Earth School—asked, “Okay, who will volunteer to be my abuser this time?” or “Who will be my alcoholic family member?” or “Who will be the lover who betrays me?” or “Who will be the child who breaks my heart?” or “Who will be the one who dies and leaves me all alone?” Now here comes the miracle. To each request, some benevolent soul on the other side of the boardroom raised their hand and said, “I’ll do that for you, my love. I’ll do that.” And so our teachers arranged to meet us. They agreed to bring us gifts not only of kindness and compassion but also of pain and trauma—by being exactly the people we needed to crash into at some prearranged moment so we could be broken open enough to perhaps learn something essential from the encounter, graduate from that lesson, and evolve ever closer to the light. Wouldn’t that be incredibly generous of someone, to do that for you? To help you grow like that?

secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes.

What we commonly call an “addict,” I believe, is just an exaggerated version of all of us—just a person so desperately in search of relief from the sting of life that they will use anything (or anyone) to soothe it.

The only chance you have for survival is not to fight anymore. Submit before the utter impossibility of orchestrating your life exactly according to your desires, and you'll find that things get a lot easier. You control so much less of this world than you think you do, newcomer-- and if you want to be happier, try controlling even less than that. Stop blocking the one miraculous gift we have given you for immediate release. It's called surrender. You're holding it in your hand right now, but you're also crushing it to death.

We cannot access tomorrow’s wisdom today, much less yesterday. And when wisdom finally does arrive, it often enters our minds through the pain of a lived experience. If you haven’t lived the experience yet, then you don’t get the wisdom.

And I must also remember the heartbreaking rules of Earth School. The reality is that, at any given time in a human life, we cannot see beyond what we understand to be true right then.

Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)

It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.

I remember once listening to Rayya counsel a friend whose younger brother was lost in heroin addiction. This woman kept trying to save her beloved sibling by paying for one rehab after another, by trying to get him jobs, by bailing him out of jail, by letting him borrow her car, sleep on her couch, exploit her financially, use her soft heart as a landing pad. She was wrung out by years of heartbreak. I remember Rayya reaching across the kitchen table for this exhausted woman’s hand and saying, “Listen, babe. Let me break it down for you—you don’t have a brother anymore. He’s already gone. You need to understand this. There is no more brother, okay? What you have now is a vampire. I know it’s confusing, because this guy looks like your brother, and he sounds like your brother, but it’s a vampire. And that vampire will drain you of every dime and possession you have, and then he will discard you once there’s nothing left to take. And trust me—that vampire doesn’t give a shit about you. So you better start giving a shit about you, or else you’re gonna wake up one morning and discover that everything in your life is gone, including him.” “But he could die if I cut him off!” the woman protested. “Your brother is already dead,” Rayya told her. “And you might need to grieve that. But the only question now is whether he will ever decide to come back to life. That’s a matter between him and God. It’s got nothing to do with you.” I also heard her tell somebody once, “You can love an active addict for sure—but they can’t love you back.

But for anyone out there whose life is being ruined by an active addict right now, please allow me to say the one thing that I don’t think gets said strongly enough or often enough: it’s okay for you to leave them. Don’t get me wrong: Addicts are precious and suffering children of God, and they do not deserve your contempt. But if you can ever save yourself from one—run. It’s okay for you to leave them. That’s what Rayya used to tell me, anyway, back when she was sober—or at least semisober. It has nothing to do with love, she said. Nothing to do with loyalty. Of course you love them, and you will always love them! But having the courage to cut off contact with an active addict is often the only way to survive their rampages—and it just might be the wake-up call that the addict needs, too.

As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.

One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.

What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement? Or at least, what do they think they’re getting? Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism. So what is the payoff, exactly? In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love. And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met? Are you kidding me? To earn love? I will give up everything I have. I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation. But only always.

I’ve heard it said that addiction is giving up everything for one thing, while recovery is giving up one thing for everything.

I took solace from old-timers who told me in simple terms that withdrawal is indeed excruciating—but it’s a pain that will eventually end, whereas addiction is a pain that will never end.

For others, God is nature (as indicated by the helpful acronym GOD, for “Go Out Doors”).

It is truly incredible what you cannot see, when you cannot bear to see it.

But Rayya both demanded the truth and could deal wit’ it—and that, to my eye, was a miracle. If there was anything tense or unspoken between Rayya and another person, she’d say to them, “Let’s just lay it on the table, man. The sooner we see this mess, the sooner we can start cleaning it

Partially, the reason I don’t blame anybody for my problems is because I don’t think it’s particularly useful to hold others responsible for my fate or for my behaviors. But I also believe that the people who harmed me had no more control over their compulsive actions than I’ve ever had over mine. And that is nobody’s fault. We are all descended from the same confounding human bloodline, after all—every one of us born of the same long and tangled lineage of addicts and their enablers; narcissists and their prey; the mentally ill and their beleaguered civilian orderlies; abusers and their apologists; manipulators and martyrs; secrets and secret keepers; suicides and sorrows.

My desperation to be loved is certainly outsize, and it has caused me to act out in ways that are undeniably insane. Yet I suspect that parts of my story may feel familiar to many of my readers—especially my female readers, who, like me, may have been socialized since birth to believe that they did not possess much inherent value but were estimable only insofar as they were capable of making themselves attractive enough to be chosen. Failing to succeed in this massively important project of proving yourself worthy of being chosen meant that you were a failure, and that nothing else you ever manifested would have much significance in anyone’s eyes.

God gives the brightest students the toughest assignments,

We live in solutions, dude, or else we die.