For me (and I believe all 12 step members) love and bonding were not available in my childhood formative years and to manage my mood and my emotions I developed self-reliance attachment to things (addiction). Fantasy became a big part of this as it was more reliable than love and affection. Alcohol and drugs soothed my heart and made me even more emotionally self-reliant. These pathways formed are deep. We never recover, we can only ever work around them.
The steps break your ego enough to form some new pathways and then instructs you to get obsessed with helping others do the same. It requires a God like idea, an ego correction, a practical exercise in humility and then hard work. You have to work with what you have – broken equipment, there is no other way. If you are a real addict you have to be obsessed with the mission and growth of the fellowship for any long term abstinence. It has to become your calling. You cannot derive meaning of life from family and community like non addicts so you have to take the obsession from drugs and transmute it to the obsession with helping others and growing the fellowship.
It’s a constant ego deflation and then helping others do the same. You build fragile new neural pathways that require constant work to stay open. The original neural pathways were poisoned with self-centredness, fear and hatred just so you could survive as a child. Drugs, sex, and whatever else fires your pleasure centres will always be so attractive because they offer instant gratification and don’t require the same vulnerability of love and boding. They are etched deep and will always be deeper than the new ones of love and bonding.
It’s like building a rickety wooden bridge over a river. It needs constant maintenance. Over the years the bridge gets stronger and stronger, until many years down the track it feels so solid that you feel comfortable jumping back into the river and having a swim, some of the water is so cool and refreshing, like workaholism, some little hot and bubbly pools, like sex. There are always some areas of the river that are just no go zones, where the crocodiles sunbake, like heroin and alcohol.
You can swing down from your recovery bridge and have a dip and when you are tired reach back up with ease, grab a rope and pull yourself back up. It becomes so easy you neglect the maintenance of the bridge and one day you go to grab it and the rope snaps. Fuck! You sail down the current of the river, but before long there is another spot to grab onto. This time it doesn’t break and you get out safely. I’ll repair that part of the bridge you say, but the rest of the recovery bridge looks fine and you forget about it until the next time it breaks on you. That’s it you say. I am repairing this fucking bridge. And sometimes you do – sometimes you don’t.
Red Pill Recovery 