AWAKEN today

The Long Walk

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

bell hooks opens her chapter on values with the claim that a love ethic is incompatible with the appetite for control. The two can’t share a life. Where one is, the other isn’t. The thing that makes the appetite hard to give up is that it feels like agency, like getting somewhere. The thing that makes the love ethic hard to begin is that it doesn’t feel like progress in the same way. It feels like slowing down, while everyone else, including me, is still trying to win.

The day before yesterday, I went for a long walk. I can’t honestly explain why that day and not the one before. Three hours. River on the right going out, river on the left coming back. I didn’t take headphones. I didn’t take a list of things to think about. I just walked.

It’s hard to explain how much of a small heresy that was. The voice that’s run my life for decades is the voice of getting things done, of optimizing, of using every hour for some advance toward something. Three hours of walking with no agenda was, by that voice’s metrics, three hours wasted. By another metric, including hooks’, it was the first thing in a while not built on the assumption that my time has to earn its keep.

A love ethic isn’t a feeling. hooks is clear about this throughout the book. It’s a way of arranging the day, of asking different questions about what matters. She names six. Care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, knowledge. None are dramatic. Most look like nothing from the outside.

A long walk can be one of them. Care for the body without asking the body to perform. Commitment to a routine that won’t pay off in any visible way. Trust that something is happening even when nothing seems to be. Responsibility for the day, instead of handing it off to whatever wants me. Respect for the slowness things actually require. Knowledge by attention, which is the only kind that lasts. Six of hooks’ values, hidden in one slow practice, with no one watching.

The other thing that happens on a long walk is that the obsession with power, which I’d been carrying around for decades without naming it, has nothing to grab onto. There’s nothing to win on a long walk. No one to outmaneuver. The body sets the pace. The river chose the route a long time before I got here. For three hours, I’m not in charge of anything, which is a relief I wouldn’t have been able to ask for if anyone had asked me what I needed.

Cornel West has a line that hooks quotes in this chapter: nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. The walk was the most caring thing I’d done for myself in weeks. The version of nihilism that lives in me, the voice that says nothing matters and nothing will help, didn’t survive the walk. It came back later, of course. It always does. But for three hours something smaller and slower was happening, and there’s no fight with smaller and slower. There’s only refusing it, or going.

A love ethic, in the end, isn’t what I believe. It’s what one day, occasionally, accidentally, begins to look like.

What does the design of my day say about what I actually value?

Where am I still confusing motion for progress, or productivity for care?

What would change if I stopped trying to make every hour earn its keep?

Who or what is asking me to slow down to the pace at which love can actually happen?

Whack-A-Mole

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

— Trent Reznor, “Hurt,” Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral (1994)

Patrick Carnes describes addiction as more than a behaviour. In Out of the Shadows, he says, in plain terms, that addiction replaces real relationship with a sick attachment to a process, an event, a ritual, a way out.

It matters to me because I have learned to manage depression with behaviours. My bipolar cycles have their own weather, but somewhere along the way I learned how to survive that weather by reaching for something that could change my state. Sex. Food. Caffeine. Work. AI. The object changes. The relationship does not.

In the rooms, we often define addiction by the substance. That makes things cleaner. Easier to measure. Easier to announce. I can say I am clean and sober, and technically I am. But the rituals have not stopped. They have only become more respectable. That may be part of the lie.

That idea is like a light turned on in a room I had been avoiding. I am here, in my bedroom, my bunker. The computer I could use to work, without even showing my face, is in the other room. The yoga studio is down the street. Friends in the fellowship are a call away. So many texts to return, in fact, the phone has become its own wall.

The funny thing is, I still do not know exactly what triggered it. Stress at work, yes. My aunt dying, yes. Quitting vaping, my favourite dopamine hit since coming back to recovery, most definitely. The weather, dramatically. My mental health, of course. It usually comes down to that. But underneath all of it is the blocky block, the box inside me that encompasses certain people, places, and things I cannot face. Every time I see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, I am flooded with shame, regret, anger, hatred, all of it aimed back at myself. So I run.

This time it started with sex, my usual exit. At that moment, I could easily have landed on the Molly mole. I know that. Instead, I ordered takeout. That was better. It may even have been grace in its plainest form. But the hungry hippo still ate all the marbles.

So now I hide in the machine. I make myself horny, hungry, busy, elevated. I push my thoughts so fast my fingers can barely keep up. No nicotine. No problem. A twelve-pack of Coke Classic will do. The three websites I am working on simultaneously are so great at not being absolutely flawless. Oh, I cannot step away now. I am on the precipice of perfection. This is the bondage of self, handcuffed to this bed inside my mind.

The odd thing is that this is also when I can feel most creative. I produce massive amounts of things that may never see the light of day. My mind explodes with ideas, as if it is trying to blast its way out of the depression by making more, faster, brighter. Some might call it psychosis, who am I to judge? It is not nothing. But it is not freedom either.

This is the real Whack-A-Mole. One thing goes down and another comes up. Carnes describes the addictive cycle as preoccupation, ritualization, compulsion, and despair. First the mind narrows. Then the little preparations begin. Then the behaviour feels less chosen than entered. Then comes the low place afterward: shame, exhaustion, the familiar promise that this was the last time. Then the old discomfort changes shape.

There are birds outside this morning, black silhouettes starting to sing me back into the present. I close the window. Shut up. I order food. Trash gathers by the door. My calves are so tight from staying still that the stairs feel like Purgatory. My extra weight makes me self-conscious enough that sometimes I choose not to eat rather than go down to meet the delivery driver. None of it makes any sense. That is the only way I know I am in it.

And still, I can walk outside and dance. I can go to the NAC with my mother and laugh. I can sit in a meeting it took me five hours of heavy breathing to attend and smile and wave like I have not been hiding. I have had over fifty years of practice at this fancy face. The hidden life knows how to pass. But if someone asks how I really am, if they get too close to the wall, I recoil. I shut down or I run. I am so tied to the escape, and so anxious about slowing down, that being seen feels like a threat.

So what if I had hurt myself today? What if I had let myself feel? Tomorrow may be OK. Or not. That uncertainty is not a reason to keep hiding. It is where recovery usually starts for me: not fixed, not inspired, not suddenly brave, just honest enough to stop pretending the game is working. We interrupt the ritual before it carries us. We tell someone before the hidden life becomes more real than the public one. We stop calling motion recovery just because it is not the thing that almost killed us.

Am I recovering, or am I only changing the shape of my escape?

What am I defending because it is better than the worst thing?

Where has my world become smaller while I called it productive?

What is the next honest action that would bring me back into my body, my work, and my relationships?

Fallow

Sat, 09 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
— Wendell Berry, “The Real Work,” Standing by Words (1983)

A field left fallow looks the same as a field abandoned. From the road, the two look identical. No crops, no rows, no one tending. Just earth left alone. The farmer who chose it knows. The neighbor passing by often does not.

I have not written in months. The depression did not arrive on a single day. It crept in like the cold through a closed window. My world got smaller. The calls I did not return became the calls I could not return. I closed my eyes and the bubble on my text messages went from none to 83. The page I kept meaning to face stayed blank.

I did not pick up. I picked up everything else. Food I did not need, the caffeine euphoria, the endless scroll, the news as prayer beads, hours dissolved into AI. Grindr always could offer the sexiest of escapes. These passed for living. They were no less how I was leaving the room. The program has names for this. We never run out of substitutes. We run out of denial.

I told myself I needed rest, and that was true. I told myself I would come back to it soon, and that was the lie I needed to keep going.

Fallow is what soil does when it has been giving for too long. My bipolar runs the cycle on its own schedule. The up phase plants more rows than the field can sustain. The down phase is what comes when the land has been asked too often. Old farmers knew this. So did whoever wrote the second step. Restoration is the soil’s work, if I let it. The land needs to lie still. It needs to hold its rain, take its frost, let what was buried come up on its own time. The field that looks dead is restoring itself.

What no one told me is that fallow looks like quitting from the inside, too. The shame is the same. I sit with the silence and cannot remember why I used to write, used to call, used to leave the house. I begin to suspect the field was always empty, that there was nothing in me in the first place. That is depression’s lie about rest. It tells me the dormancy is the truth and the bloom was the illusion.

But the field knows. The roots are holding what looks like death. The nitrogen is rebuilding underneath. And one morning the green comes through, ankle-high, and I remember. Nothing was lost. It was held.

Berry’s last line is the one I can only hear now, not then. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Depression could not say that out loud while it was happening. The block becomes the music. The not-writing becomes the next thing to write about.

Coming back is its own work. The tools are where I left them, dulled. The rows have to be cut again. The rooms are where I left them too. Still meeting, still pouring bad coffee while the truth gets told without me. The chairs do not remember who has been gone. They only know who sits down. I am not the same farmer who walked away. This field has been fallowed before. I have stood at this edge more than once. Each return teaches me something the last did not. I am slower now, more careful, less willing to forget what overuse cost the last time. I will plant differently this time.

I am writing this because I am back at the edge of the field with my hands full. Not because I am better. Because I am willing to begin.

Where am I mistaking fallow for failure?

What has been quietly restoring itself while I was not looking?

What tools are waiting where I left them, asking only to be picked up?

What might I plant differently this season, knowing what overuse cost the last one?

The Cavern

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

I was suddenly afraid. Perhaps it was because he looked so innocent lying there, with such perfect trust; perhaps it was because he was so much smaller than me; my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous. But, above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was borne in on me: But Joey is a boy, I saw suddenly the power in his thighs, in his arms, and in his loosely curled fists. The power and the promise and the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid. That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise fulfilled through me. The sweat on my back grew cold. I was ashamed. The very bed, in its sweet disorder, testified to vileness. I wondered what Joey’s mother would say when she saw the sheets. Then I thought of my father, who had no one in the world but me, my mother having died when I was little. A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumour, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid.
— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Published in 1956, Giovanni’s Room was one of the first major American novels to portray gay desire with honesty and without apology. The novel’s protagonist, David, cannot reconcile who he is with what he believes it means. This passage is a memory from his youth, a single night with his closest friend Joey, and the morning after, when everything that felt like tenderness is suddenly rewritten as evidence of something corrupt. He gets out of bed, showers, makes breakfast, and leaves. He will spend the rest of his life running from that moment.

This is internalized homophobia. The verdict David hears that morning was not formed in that moment. It was deposited long before, in the word queer used as an insult, in the quiet contempt or pity directed at people like him, in the silence that shut down any open mention of desire between men, and in stories where lives like his were mocked, punished, or left alone. By the time his desire surfaces, the meaning has already been assigned. He does not interpret the experience. He inherits the interpretation.

Matthew Todd’s Straight Jacket is a frank and searching examination of the psychological cost of growing up gay in a world that has not yet learned to make room for it. He describes internalized homophobia as shame accumulating the way stones accumulate in a pocket, each small moment adding weight until the load becomes so familiar it disappears from view. A boy who moves differently is corrected. A boy who loves the wrong things is redirected. A boy who feels the wrong feelings learns to bury them. None of it presents as damage. It arrives as the texture of ordinary life.

What makes this wound difficult to locate is where it attaches. Todd distinguishes between shame that guides behaviour and shame that attaches to being. When shame is tied to behaviour, there is a path forward. When it attaches to something that cannot be changed, there is no corrective action available. The logic shifts from I have done something wrong to I am wrong. That shift is the cavern. It turns inward and sustains itself, written in the first person, in a voice that feels like our own. The movement continues anyway.

I can see how much of my own life has been shaped by that movement. The ways I have approached intimacy, the intensity I have sought, the disruptions I have created all carry the imprint of something I absorbed before I could question it. It did not feel like a pattern rooted in shame. It felt like instinct. That is how internalized homophobia works. It does not feel imposed. It feels inherent.

Recovery has not removed the cavern. It has made it visible. I am beginning to understand where it came from, how it formed, and what I built around it to survive. That understanding creates the possibility of change. The verdict can be examined. The stones can be set down. The cavern remains, but it no longer defines the entire landscape.

What did I learn to believe about my desire before I understood it?

Where do I still treat my nature as something to control or hide?

How do I continue to move toward and away from intimacy in response to that belief?

What might change if I no longer accept that belief as true?

New Beginnings

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:35:46 GMT

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities. It is out of the formlessness of the neutral zone that new form emerges and out of the barrenness of the fallow time that new life springs.
— William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980)

Most of us expect new beginnings to feel like beginnings. We imagine something clear and decisive, a moment when the next chapter announces itself and we step forward into it. We expect to know when we are ready. We expect the beginning to look like one.

In Transitions, William Bridges argues that this expectation is almost always wrong. New beginnings are often quiet and indirect. They do not arrive through planning or decision alone. They emerge from the interior work that takes place after an ending, during the uncertain period he calls the neutral zone. This is a time when the old structure has loosened but the new one has not yet fully formed. It can feel unproductive or unclear, but it is where the conditions for a genuine beginning are created.

We cannot manufacture that beginning. We can only become ready for it. Bridges describes this readiness through the image of a key card and a hotel room door. When the card is coded to the room, the door opens immediately. When it is not, nothing happens, no matter how many times it is tried. The same external opportunity can be a genuine new beginning for one person and simply an event for another. The difference is not in the opportunity. It is in whether the inner work has been completed.

This is why new beginnings cannot be rushed. When we have not moved through the ending and the neutral zone, we may appear to begin again but are often continuing the old life in a new setting. What looks like a beginning can be a way of avoiding an ending. We may reorganize everything around us and call it a new chapter, while the underlying identity remains unchanged.

In recovery, some of us know this pattern. We made external changes and called them transformation. A move, a new relationship, a different routine. Yet the same reactions and patterns reappeared. The beginning had not yet happened because the inner work had not yet been completed.

At the same time, beginnings do not wait for everything from the ending to be fully resolved. Letting go can continue even as something new starts to take shape. We can feel both movement and unfinished release at once. The process is not strictly sequential. It unfolds with overlap, where elements of the past are still loosening even as a different way of living begins to form.

Bridges notes that genuine beginnings often arrive in subtle ways. A remark that lingers. An idea that keeps returning. An opportunity that resonates without fully explaining itself. These are indications that something has been reorganising beneath the surface and is now starting to take shape.

What distinguishes these moments is not their logic but their resonance. They feel aligned with something that has already been forming in us. Even then, early beginnings are often fragile. They may not feel solid or certain. We can find ourselves holding hesitation alongside movement, and doubt alongside a quiet sense of rightness.

For a beginning to take hold, we often have to recognize and claim it. Without that, it can remain only a possibility. Noticing it is one step. Choosing to step into it is another. That choice gives shape to what has been forming and allows it to become part of a lived life.

Some part of us may resist this. Real change requires leaving behind familiar ways of being that once felt essential. A beginning that does not disturb anything is unlikely to be a real one.

The transition process can be understood as a movement away from the old, through a period of uncertainty, and back again into life with a different orientation. The new beginning is that return. Not a replacement of everything that came before, but a reorganisation of ourselves around what has changed and what endures.

What new beginning might already be taking shape in me that I have not yet recognised?

Where might I be forcing a beginning before the inner work is complete?

What signal keeps returning that I have been too busy or too anxious to follow?

What would it mean to recognise and claim the beginning that is already forming, even if it still feels uncertain?

The Neutral Zone

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence. Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation.
— William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980)

After an ending, there is the neutral zone. In Transitions, William Bridges describes this phase as the period between the life that has been cleared away and the one that has not yet formed. There is no role to step into, no identity that fits cleanly, no clear sense of what comes next.

The instinct is understandable. When nothing seems to be happening, we assume something has gone wrong. We try to move forward quickly. We define a new role, take on new commitments, or fill the space with activity. We treat the in-between as something to get through rather than something to stay in.

Bridges draws a clear distinction between change and transition. Change is external and visible. Transition is internal and unfolds over time. It begins with letting go. We are not just between identities. We are releasing roles, assumptions, and habits that once organised our lives.

The disorientation that follows is part of the process. Without that loosening, nothing new can take shape.

When we feel lost, we tend to reach outward. We add contact, activity, and noise. The need here is often the opposite. We need intentional time alone to notice what is shifting beneath the surface. This is not isolation. It is a deliberate kind of aloneness that gives the inner process room to move. Daily demands keep pulling us back into familiar responses. Time alone interrupts that pull and makes space for a different response to form.

This phase does not always arrive where we expect it. Some of us enter it before the external ending has fully taken place, going through the motions of a life that has already ended inwardly, like knowing a relationship is over but not yet having said it out loud. Others find themselves in it after a new beginning has already started, such as starting a new job or role where everything has changed on the surface, but internally still feeling unsure how to inhabit it. In recovery, it can show up as restlessness even when things seem stable, or a sense that progress does not quite feel real.

The neutral zone can be understood as winter in an orchard. What appears dormant is not inactive. Beneath the surface, conditions are forming that will make new growth possible. What feels like emptiness is often a reorganization in progress.

In retrospect, this is often where the most important changes occur. What later becomes clear was already taking shape during this time. New beginnings do not come from decision alone. They emerge from what has been forming here.

Am I in a neutral zone right now, and am I giving it enough time?

Where am I forcing clarity or identity too quickly?

How do I actually respond when I feel this uncertainty, in my actions and decisions?

What would it look like in practice for me to stay here without trying to resolve things?

Clearing Ground

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one, not just outwardly but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.
— William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980)

Most of us approach endings as obstacles. When something in our lives comes to a close, the instinct is to move past it as quickly as possible. We look for solutions and for forward movement. We want to get to whatever comes next, without staying long in what is being cleared away.

William Bridges argues that this instinct misunderstands the role endings play in transformation. In Transitions he explains that endings are not simply the conclusion of an earlier chapter. They are the clearing phase of the process. Before anything new can take root, what is already there has to loosen. The habits, attachments, and ways of understanding ourselves that belonged to the earlier life cannot simply be carried forward intact.

Bridges describes this clearing as a process that unfolds in three movements. The first is disengagement, a separation from the context that once structured daily life. The second is disidentification, in which the roles and labels through which we understood ourselves begin to lose their hold. The third is disenchantment, when the old arrangement of life no longer carries the meaning or authority it once did. What once felt fixed begins to be seen as something that belonged to a particular time and place. As these movements unfold, the ground beneath a familiar identity begins to give way.

Many of us encounter this process in recovery. Stopping a behaviour can be decisive, but the identity that formed within that way of living does not disappear at the same pace. For some of us the inner ending had already begun long before we stopped, the life loosening from within over time. For others the stopping came first, and the internal shift only became visible afterward. In both cases, what is being cleared is not only behaviour, but the sense of self that had been organised around it.

Because this clearing unsettles identity, it often brings grief. That grief does not mean the earlier life was good or desirable. It means something real is being removed. Even when change is necessary, even when it saves our lives, the self that existed within the earlier circumstances does not disappear without leaving a trace.

Bridges is clear that this clearing is not a failure in the process of change. It is what allows transformation to occur. The old identity cannot be reshaped to fit the new life. It has to loosen so that something different can take hold. When endings are rushed or avoided, what remains in place continues to shape what comes next.

Endings therefore serve a creative purpose. They clear space in which a different identity can eventually emerge. Nothing new takes root until the ground has been made ready.

What ending in my life am I still resisting or rushing past?

What part of my identity is tied to something that has already ended?

Where might something need to be cleared before anything new can take root?

What am I expecting to begin that cannot take hold until something else has been released?

Moving Furniture

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t take.
— William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980)

In his book Transitions, William Bridges explored why major changes in life often fail to produce the transformation people expect. Bridges began his career as a literature professor before turning his attention to the psychological experience of change, and his work focused less on the external events that alter a life and more on the internal process through which a person gradually reorganizes themselves around those events.

At the centre of the book is a distinction between two different processes that occur during periods of change. Change refers to the external event that alters the circumstances of a life: a new job, a move, the end of a relationship, the birth of a child, or the decision to stop a behaviour that has shaped our days. Transition refers to the internal process through which we gradually adjust to that altered reality, a psychological reorientation in which our assumptions, habits, and sense of identity reorganize themselves around the new circumstances. Because changes are visible and decisive, they are often treated as the entire transformation.

When the external change occurs but the internal transition has not yet taken place, the structure of life may look completely different while the deeper patterns that once organized it remain largely intact. We may enter new environments, adopt new routines, and present a different version of ourselves to the world while still interpreting events through the assumptions and emotional reflexes formed in the earlier life. The behaviour may stop, the surroundings may change, and the outward story may appear to have turned a corner, yet internally we continue to react according to the logic of the life we have left. In that situation the furniture moves, but we do not.

Many of us recognize this experience in recovery. The decision to stop may be immediate and decisive, and a behaviour that once dominated our lives can end in a single moment of clarity. From the outside the transformation appears obvious. Routines shift, environments change, and the visible signs of the earlier life disappear. Yet internally those same patterns can continue to shape how we respond to the present. Patterns formed over years remain active, and familiar ways of interpreting ourselves and others continue to operate, and situations that once triggered particular reactions can still produce them long after the behaviour itself has ended. The external change has occurred, but the inner structure that once supported that life is still present, gradually loosening as the deeper transition unfolds.

When this happens it can feel as though the change has not really taken hold. If the behaviour has stopped and the circumstances have shifted, we may expect the inner experience to transform just as quickly. When it does not, we may conclude that we have somehow failed to carry the change through to its conclusion.

Part of what makes this so disorienting is that we have almost no cultural preparation for it. Earlier societies built rituals around exactly this experience—rites of passage that named the in-between and made clear that the disorientation was normal. We have largely lost those structures. Without that framework, the inner lag feels like a personal failing rather than a recognized stage in a process everyone goes through. Fortunately for us, the fellowships and the Steps offer something close to that structure.

External change can happen quickly because it involves decisions and visible actions. The deeper reorganization of identity unfolds more slowly as the patterns that once structured our lives begin to loosen their hold. Roles that once defined us release their authority, assumptions that once guided our reactions become easier to question, and a different sense of self gradually takes shape. Over time the life that began with a moment of change becomes a life that can actually be inhabited.

What change in my life has already taken place while I’ve been waiting for the transformation to begin?

Where might I be living in a new room while arranging the furniture as if nothing had changed?

What habits or assumptions from an older version of myself still shape how I respond to the present?

What would it look like for me to begin living in the life that has already begun?

Place of Mystery

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honours principles of inter-being and interconnectedness.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

In the chapter “Spirituality: Divine Love” in All About Love, bell hooks approaches spirituality not through doctrine, belief, or religious identity, but through the question of how people actually live. For hooks, spirituality is not defined by what someone claims to believe but by the way a person thinks and behaves toward others. It is a commitment to recognizing that lives are bound together, that human beings exist in relationship rather than isolation.

Her definition also leaves room for uncertainty. Spiritual life includes recognizing a place of mystery within human experience. There are moments when events unfold beyond the reach of personal will or desire. Circumstances shift in ways that cannot be controlled or fully explained. Different traditions have given different names to this dimension of life. Some call it God, some speak of soul or the Beloved, and others simply acknowledge that there are forces and connections larger than individual intention. No single explanation is required. What matters to her is the willingness to live with the awareness that life is not entirely self-directed.

That awareness, she suggests, naturally leads to a different way of relating to others. When we understand ourselves as connected, love becomes less of a feeling and more of a practice. Spiritual life then means acting in ways that recognize the dignity and reality of other lives. It means choosing behaviour that supports connection rather than domination or indifference.

hooks also warns about what happens when spirituality becomes purely private. In a culture that values individual achievement and personal improvement, spiritual language can easily be absorbed into the marketplace. It becomes something we pursue for personal fulfillment, often detached from responsibility to anyone else. Meditation, reflection, or belief may remain inward experiences, but they do not necessarily change how someone lives with others.

When spirituality is separated from community, much of its meaning is lost. If the idea of interconnectedness is taken seriously, then spiritual life cannot exist only inside the self. It must appear in relationships and in community. The recognition that lives are intertwined brings with it an obligation to act with care toward others. Spirituality becomes visible in the ways people listen, respond, support, and remain present to one another.

Many people have experienced harm or exclusion within institutions that claimed to represent love. At the same time, the mystical traditions within many faiths have long pointed toward a similar insight. Beneath doctrine and hierarchy lies the idea that love is the unifying force of life, and that living in love is a daily practice rather than a fixed identity. The institutions that surround these teachings may succeed or fail in embodying them, but the underlying insight remains.

Seen this way, spiritual life is not a destination for us. It is an ongoing practice that unfolds through ordinary actions. It appears whenever people choose to act in ways that reflect their connection to others. The awareness of mystery and interdependence does not remove the difficulties of life, but it can shape the way those difficulties are faced.

Awakening to love is itself a form of spiritual awakening. Recognizing that love is not merely an emotion but a way of living changes how we understand both spirituality and community.

Do I treat spirituality as private, or something lived with others?

When have I felt the mystery of life beyond my control?

How do I respond to the idea that my life is connected to others?

What ordinary actions in my day express love in practice?

The Princess Behind the Dragon

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

Many of us reach a point when it becomes harder to keep believing that the real problem lies somewhere outside ourselves. The substance may be gone. The behaviour that once dominated our days may have stopped. But the patterns underneath it are still there. Beneath the turmoil we once blamed on circumstances or other people, we begin to encounter our own reactions: anger that surfaces before we fully understand why, fear that turns into control, the instinct to pull away when someone or something gets too close. These reactions can feel like enemies. Much of the language surrounding personal change encourages that view. We are told to root out our defects and eliminate the troublesome parts of ourselves. Before long it can feel like a war taking place entirely inside our own minds.

But the closer we look, the harder it becomes to see these patterns as simply destructive. Most of them appeared long before we understood what we were doing. A sharp tongue may have helped when we felt cornered. Control may have been the only way we knew to create stability when life felt chaotic. These patterns were not born as flaws. They were attempts to manage what once felt unmanageable. The difficulty is that adaptations can outlast the conditions that produced them. What once helped us cope can begin to limit us. A pattern that protected something years ago may now be the very thing standing between us and the life we want.

So the work begins to change. Instead of trying to destroy these patterns, we begin to understand them. Understanding does not excuse the harm they may cause, and it does not mean we remain unchanged. But it does change the stance we take toward ourselves. We are no longer fighting an enemy. We are examining something that once served a purpose and asking whether it still does.

Rilke, writing to a young poet who was frightened about his life, turns to an image from ancient myth. In the familiar story the hero defeats the dragon. But Rilke points to another version: the one in which the dragon, at the last moment, becomes a princess. What looks monstrous may not be monstrous at all. It may be something wounded, something that has waited a long time for a different kind of encounter.

The courage Rilke describes is not the courage to conquer. It is the courage to stay. To stand before what frightens us without immediately attacking or escaping. When we can do that, the nature of the encounter begins to change. The dragon does not simply disappear. But what once looked terrifying may begin to reveal the vulnerability it was guarding. The transformation Rilke imagines was always possible. Someone simply had to be willing to stand there long enough to see it.

What is one pattern in my life that I try to eliminate rather than understand?

What happens when I look at it with curiosity instead of judgment?

Where might that pattern have first learned its work?

What would it mean to stand before that dragon long enough to see the princess behind it?

Repression

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only cheerful, “beautiful,” and “good;” they also can display the whole scale of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and mourning.
— Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1981)

Alice Miller was a Swiss psychologist who explored how childhood emotional adaptation shapes adult life. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, she argued that the strategies children develop to survive emotionally can become, in adulthood, the very thing that keeps them from living fully.

Some of us grew up in homes that looked fine from the outside. Our parents were caring and well-meaning, but often unable to give what they had never received themselves. We were praised for maturity, capability, and sensitivity to others. We did well in school, helped around the house, and caused little trouble. Miller called this child “gifted,” not because of talent but because of an extraordinary ability to adapt to what the environment required. The gift was survival. The cost often appeared later in depression without explanation, emptiness behind accomplishments, and the feeling that life is happening somewhere just out of reach.

Many of us spent years trying to feel better without understanding what was happening inside us. We reached for substances, busyness, or the approval of people who could never quite give us what we needed. When none of it worked, we assumed something was wrong with us. Miller suggested something different. The problem was not that we felt too much, but that we learned very early not to feel at all.

She called the mechanism repression. A child who depends completely on the adults around them will do whatever is necessary to protect that bond. When those adults cannot tolerate emotions like anger, disappointment, protest, or grief, the child learns quickly that expressing them threatens the relationship on which survival depends. Those adults were often not indifferent. They were carrying what had never been processed in them, unable to tolerate in their children the feelings they had never been allowed to feel themselves. What gets pushed out of awareness, Miller notes, can include not only anger and sadness but discontent, protest, and even the enjoyment of one’s own body.

This adaptation is difficult to recognize later because it was usually rewarded. Some of us became the reliable one. We became the child who stopped crying, swallowed anger, and buried loneliness so completely that adults called it maturity. Miller observed that these children were often helping capably with younger siblings before they even had language for their own needs, while their inner world went entirely unwitnessed. The repression looked like strength because, at the time, it kept us safe.

Repressed feelings do not disappear. They accumulate and often find two exits. Some collapse inward into depression: heaviness, numbness, emotional flatness. Others inflate outward into grandiosity: the drive to achieve, to be admired, to stay on top. Miller saw these not as opposites but as reflections. Grandiosity defends against depression, and depression defends against the deeper pain over the loss of the self. The crash after inflation is the buried emotions beginning to surface.

Miller saw this in therapy. Patients would arrive heavy and flat and leave in tears but visibly lighter. The depression had not been treated. It had delivered its message. The numbness was not the wound but the signal that the wound was close. The true self, she wrote, remained unconscious and undeveloped in its inner prison.

What restores vitality is not insight alone but mourning. Mourning what was actually missed, and mourning the illusion of the happy childhood we were told we had. When that illusion can be grieved rather than defended, the repression that sustained it begins to loosen. What emerges is not a return to the past, but the beginning of a life that can finally be lived in the open.

Where do I notice myself managing feelings rather than experiencing them?

What emotions may be asking for my attention?

What small step might allow those feelings to be felt safely?

What becomes possible when more of my emotional life is allowed into the open.

The Only Requirement

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought A.A. membership ever depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation.
— Alcoholics Anonymous, Tradition Three (Long Form), first published in The A.A. Grapevine, April 1946

In the earliest days of Alcoholics Anonymous, many groups kept their own lists of rules about who should be allowed to join. When the Alcoholic Foundation office eventually gathered those lists together, the total ran, as Bill Wilson later wrote, “a mile long.” If every one of those rules had been enforced at once, he observed, nobody could have possibly joined at all. Beggars, people leaving asylums, former prisoners, those who were openly gay, people with other addictions, atheists, and people of colour were all viewed as possible threats to the fragile young fellowship. The fear behind those rules was not imaginary. These were people who had watched friends relapse and die. Many believed that one wrong decision about membership could destroy everything they had begun.

In the second year of AA’s existence, a man came to a meeting and asked to join. He was clearly an alcoholic. Before entering, he told them he carried another stigma, one that at the time was widely condemned. Many later accounts suggest he was attracted to men, though the record has never been formally confirmed. Three of the group’s most senior members stepped aside to discuss the situation. Their concern was not the man himself but what admitting him might mean for the group’s reputation. Then one member asked a simple question drawn from their religious experience. What was the right thing to do? Nothing more was said. The man was welcomed. In time he carried the message to many others, and his case later became what the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions described as an early step in the formation of Tradition Three.

Not long after, another test arrived. A travelling salesman named Ed began attending meetings. Ed was an outspoken atheist who frequently challenged the group’s references to God and irritated nearly everyone. Many assumed he would relapse. He did not. Eventually some members proposed that he be asked to leave for attacking the program’s spiritual language. When confronted, Ed picked up a draft manuscript of what would later become the Big Book and read aloud the sentence that would stop them. The only requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking. He then asked whether they meant it or not. No one answered. Ed stayed and remained sober for the rest of his life.

A decade later, in 1945, a man walked into AA’s clubhouse on 41st Street in New York. He was Black, an ex-convict, carrying all his belongings on his back, his hair bleached blonde and his face made up. He told the members at the desk that he was a drug addict. No one knew what to do. The member on duty called Bill Wilson and described the situation. Bill asked him to go through the list again. Then he asked one question. Was the man a drunk? Yes, there was no doubt about that. Bill replied that this was all that could be asked. The man was invited in. He did not stay long, but his presence set a precedent that endured.

The situations look different today, but the underlying question has not changed. Who belongs? It appears when someone arrives still struggling with other substances, when a newcomer questions the spiritual language, when someone walks into a meeting carrying a past that makes them feel they might not fit. These moments still test the spirit of Tradition Three. They remind the fellowship that its role is not to judge readiness or sincerity, but simply to make room for anyone who says they want to stop drinking.

I can see parts of my own story in all three of these moments. I am gay. I am an agnostic. I also struggled with many different substances, including alcohol. Reading about these early experiences, it is reassuring to know that the fellowship developed as it did and that other fellowships later grew from that same spirit. Those decisions created a space where we did not have to prove ourselves before we walked through the door. For that, I am grateful.

Where do I find myself deciding whether someone else belongs in recovery spaces?

When have I questioned my own right to remain when my willingness felt uncertain?

How does Tradition Three challenge the instinct to measure sincerity or readiness?

What becomes possible when belonging rests only on the desire to stop today?

Personal Integrity

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

The sixth and final pillar of self-esteem is personal integrity. If the earlier pillars cultivate awareness, acceptance, responsibility, expression, and purpose, this one asks whether we are actually living what we claim to believe. Integrity is the alignment of values and behaviour. When our words and actions match, self-esteem is strengthened. When they do not match, Branden describes the result as incongruence, and self-esteem is the first thing to suffer.

When people imagine bringing even a small increase of integrity into their lives, the answers tend to come quickly. “I wouldn’t break my promises.” “I wouldn’t say yes when I mean no.” “I wouldn’t lie just to make things easier.” Most of us already know where the gap lies between what we believe and how we behave. The difficulty is rarely ignorance, but the ways we justify the compromise.

One of the most common justifications is the thought, “only I will know.” Only I will know I was dishonest. Only I will know I broke my word. Only I will know I acted against what I believe is right. But when we behave in ways that conflict with our own judgment of what is appropriate, we lose face in our own eyes, even if no one else sees it. The implication behind the thought is that our own judgment does not count. Yet it is the one judgment we cannot escape. We can avoid the people we have disappointed, but we cannot avoid ourselves.

The same instinct operates in our relationships with others. We trust people whose words match their actions and grow suspicious when they do not. Children recognize this instinctively, long before they have the language to explain it. Many of us grew up in homes where incongruence was normal, where what was said and what was done rarely matched. That early confusion can make integrity harder to practise later, because the template we absorbed was one of contradiction.

Hypocrisy is self-invalidating. It is the mind turning against itself. When a breach of integrity wounds self-esteem, only the practice of integrity can repair it. Repair begins with acknowledging what we did and understanding why we did it, with compassion but without excuse. We acknowledge the harm involved, take whatever action is available to make amends, and commit to behaving differently going forward. Anyone who has worked through recovery will recognize the pattern. Self-respect begins to return as our actions begin to change. Integrity restores trust in our own judgment. When our behaviour reflects what we know to be right, the mind no longer needs to defend, excuse, or conceal.

Sometimes the values we fail to live up to are values that deserve to be questioned. We may struggle with “integrity” because the standard being applied was never consciously chosen. Moral rules absorbed from families, institutions, or cultures can conflict with who we actually are. In such cases the task is not self-condemnation but examination. Integrity requires that the values guiding our lives be ones we have thought about and accepted as our own.

When that happens, the inner conflict begins to fade. The mind no longer needs to manage the strain of saying one thing while doing another. Integrity is not about being perfect but about the continuing effort to act in accordance with the values we have chosen. In that sense, it means remaining loyal to one’s own mind.

Where in my life do my actions reflect my values most clearly, and where do they fall short?

What small compromise have I been overlooking because it seems insignificant?

What inherited rule or expectation might deserve to be questioned rather than obeyed?

What changes when I stop asking whether anyone else will notice and ask instead whether I can respect my own choices?

Living Purposefully

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The root of our self-esteem is not our achievements but those internally generated practices that make it possible for us to achieve.

— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

The fifth pillar of self-esteem is living purposefully. If the earlier pillars concern awareness, honesty, responsibility, and expression, this one concerns direction. To live without purpose is to live largely at the mercy of circumstance, responding to whatever happens rather than deciding what we want to achieve. Living purposefully means organizing our actions around goals we consider meaningful and developing plans of action to reach them rather than drifting from one situation to another.

We rarely apply the concept of purpose to our personal lives with the same seriousness we bring to work. In a professional setting, no one would say “I hope this project succeeds” and leave it at that. We would ask what actions are required, what resources are needed, and what milestones will tell us whether we are on track. We would monitor progress and adjust when something isn’t working. If a strategy failed, we would try another. At work, purpose means specificity, accountability, and a willingness to respond to feedback.

Yet in the areas of life that matter most to us, we often substitute hope for planning and wonder why nothing changes. That may be why more people succeed in their careers than in their relationships. In our closest bonds we imagine that love alone will sustain what only deliberate effort can maintain. Purpose without a plan of action is not purpose. It is frustrated yearning. Daydreams do not produce the experience of effectiveness.

Purpose does not require grand ambitions. The essential element is intention. It can take the form of writing a page, improving a skill, strengthening a relationship, or contributing to something beyond ourselves. The scale matters less than the clarity of commitment behind it. But purpose demands self-discipline, the ability to defer immediate gratification in service of a longer aim. Without that capacity, goals remain fantasies. Recovery teaches this lesson daily. We learn to trade what we want right now for what we actually want.

There is a trap here. Some of us tie our self-esteem directly to achievements, income, or status. Branden warns against this. The root of self-esteem is not our accomplishments but the internal practices that make accomplishment possible. When we identify our worth with external results, circumstances beyond our control can shatter us. A job lost. A business failed. A career disrupted. If our self-respect depends entirely on outcomes, we hand it over to forces we cannot predict.

Equally important is the willingness to track whether our actions are producing results. Repeating an approach that fails will not make it succeed. Yet in our personal lives we often do exactly that, escalating intensity rather than reconsidering strategy. Living purposefully means paying attention to outcomes and adjusting course when the evidence asks us to.

Kindness offers a useful example. It is easy to think of kindness as something that happens when the mood strikes us. But kindness by impulse is different from kindness by intention. When it becomes a conscious purpose, something we choose rather than something we wait to feel, it changes the experience for everyone involved. It also changes how we experience ourselves, because we begin to see our values expressed in action rather than left to chance.

What goals in my life genuinely reflect what I value most?

Where have I been hoping instead of planning?

What relationship or part of my life might benefit from the same purposeful attention I bring to my work?

How might my day change if I treated kindness not as an impulse but as an intention?

Self-Assertiveness

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Self-assertiveness means honouring my wants, needs, and values and seeking appropriate forms of their expression in reality.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

The fourth pillar of self-esteem is self-assertiveness. If living consciously asks us to see, self-acceptance asks us to face what we find, and self-responsibility asks us to own it, self-assertiveness asks us to express it. Branden describes it as the practice of standing for our perceptions, our values, and our needs in the world rather than consigning them to what he calls “a perpetual underground where everything that I am lies hidden or stillborn.”

Branden once asked a group of psychology students to stand and say aloud, “I have a right to exist.” Every one of them struggled. One sounded belligerent, as if preparing for a fight. Another pleaded, as if begging forgiveness. A third was arrogant and unconvincing. Yet the same students could say “two and two make four” with complete ease. The difficulty was not about public speaking. It was about what the statement meant to them. “It means my life belongs to me.” “It means I can say no.” “It means what I want matters.” “It means I don’t have to build my whole life around not upsetting Mother.”

Many of us learned early that silence was safer than honesty. Families, schools, and workplaces often reward compliance more readily than independence. Over time, withholding our thoughts and needs becomes so familiar we stop noticing the cost. But the cost is real. When we do not express ourselves, when we do not assert our values in contexts where it is appropriate to do so, we inflict wounds on our sense of self. The world does not do it to us. We do it to ourselves.

Self-assertiveness is not aggression, domination, or reflexive rebellion. Branden makes an important distinction: it is tested not by what we are against but by what we are for. Saying no to everything is not self-assertion but another form of stuckness. Self-assertiveness means the willingness to stand up for who we are openly and to treat ourselves with respect in all human encounters. It is the refusal to fake who we are in order to be liked.

In practice, this appears in ordinary moments. We hide our reaction to a film because we do not want to appear uncool. We stay silent when someone says something we find offensive because we fear disapproval. We hold back from telling someone what their work meant to us because we are afraid of being dismissed. We agree with a partner’s opinion to keep the peace, knowing we believe otherwise. Each of these small surrenders registers. The average life is marked by thousands of unremembered silences, capitulations, and misrepresentations that slowly corrode dignity and self-respect.

Self-assertiveness does not guarantee that our wishes will be met. Control over outcomes is not the point. Integrity is. We participate honestly in the world rather than hiding from it. Practicing this when it is not easy is itself one of the ways self-esteem is built. It takes courage. Healthy self-esteem asks that we enter the arena of life and be willing to get our hands dirty.

Where in my life have I been withholding my voice out of habit or fear?

What values or perceptions have I hesitated to express?

What small act of honesty might allow my actions to better reflect what I genuinely believe?

What might change if I allowed myself to be visible as who I actually am?

Self-Responsibility

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The essence of self-responsibility is the realization that I am the author of my choices and actions.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

The third pillar in Nathaniel Branden’s model of self-esteem is self-responsibility. Living consciously asks us to see reality clearly. Self-acceptance asks us to acknowledge what we find in ourselves. Self-responsibility goes a step further. It asks us to recognize that our lives are shaped, in large measure, by the choices we make.

This does not mean we control every circumstance we encounter. Life presents conditions we did not choose. Branden draws an important distinction. If we hold ourselves responsible for matters beyond our control, we set ourselves up to fail. If we deny responsibility for matters within our control, we hand our power away. Self-responsibility requires learning the difference. Our responses, our actions, and the consciousness we bring to each situation remain ours.

The habit of shifting blame is one of the mind’s most common defences. When things go wrong, attention easily moves outward. Someone else made the mistake. The system is flawed. Circumstances made the outcome inevitable. Sometimes those explanations contain truth. But self-esteem grows when we ask a different question. What part of this situation belongs to me?

There are several areas of responsibility worth examining. We are responsible for the level of consciousness we bring to our relationships and for the quality of our communication. We are responsible for how we prioritize our time, for whether our daily actions reflect our stated values or contradict them. And perhaps most confronting of all, we are responsible for raising our own self-esteem. It is not something another person can give us.

One sign of immaturity is the belief that it is someone else’s job to make us happy. If only someone would love us enough, take care of us, spare us the difficulty of making our own decisions. Taking responsibility for our own happiness can feel like a burden. In practice it is the opposite. It places our life back in our own hands. Few recognitions are more freeing.

Self-responsibility also means thinking for ourselves. Often what passes for thinking is simply repeating the opinions of others. We absorb values from our families, our culture, and our peer groups, then treat them as our own without ever examining them. Living responsibly means questioning those inherited ideas and choosing deliberately what we believe and how we act. It means recognizing that without productive goals and sustained effort, we remain dependent, regardless of our age.

There is a moral dimension to this as well. When we take full responsibility for our own lives, we stop placing that burden on others. We stop expecting people to sacrifice themselves for our needs. The principle is simple. Never ask another person to act against their own self-interest. When we are responsible for ourselves, our relationships are built on mutual respect rather than unspoken obligation.

And beneath all of this lies a difficult insight. No one is coming. No one is coming to save us, to make life right for us, or to solve our problems. If we do not act, nothing is going to change. The hope that someone else will step in and fix our lives may offer temporary comfort, but it leaves us passive and powerless. Self-responsibility begins when we accept that the work of shaping our lives belongs to us.

Where in my life might I be ready to take greater responsibility for my choices and actions?

What part of my current situation is genuinely mine to influence or change?

How might today look different if I approached it as the author of my choices rather than a spectator of events?

What opportunities open up when I accept that shaping my life ultimately belongs to me?

Self-Acceptance

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

Many of us entered recovery convinced that the solution was to become someone better than we were. If we could correct enough flaws, control enough impulses, or repair enough damage, we imagined that self-respect would finally arrive. Nathaniel Branden suggests that the order is reversed. Self-esteem does not grow from condemning ourselves into improvement. It begins with self-acceptance, the willingness to face what is real about ourselves. While self-esteem is something we experience, self-acceptance is something we practice.

Branden describes self-acceptance, the second of his six pillars, at three levels. The first is the most fundamental. The decision to be on our own side. Not because we have earned it, but because we are alive. It is the stance that refuses to abandon oneself, even in moments of despair. This impulse fights for us when everything else seems to have collapsed. It is what makes someone pick up the phone instead of giving up. It is the voice that finally says no after years of enduring what should never have been tolerated. Some of us are here because something in us would not allow the story to end the way it was going. That insistence on remaining alive to ourselves is self-acceptance at its most primitive and most powerful.

The second level is the willingness to experience what we actually think, feel, and have done without denial or evasion. This includes our bodies, our emotions, our desires, and our actions. If anger is present, we acknowledge it. If we acted badly, we own it. We cannot forgive ourselves for an action we refuse to acknowledge having taken. Nietzsche captured this tension precisely: “‘I did it,’ says memory. ‘I couldn’t have,’ says pride, and remains relentless. Eventually memory yields.” Self-acceptance means allowing the truth of our experience rather than permitting pride to rewrite the record. Often, fully experiencing a difficult feeling is what allows us to move through it. Anger may reveal anxiety beneath it, and beneath that a fear of abandonment or isolation. Feelings have layers that only become visible when we stop resisting the surface.

The third level is compassion. Not the absence of standards, but the willingness to understand why we did what we did. A good friend would not simply condemn us. They would say, “That was beneath you. Now tell me, what made it feel necessary at the time?” We can offer ourselves the same inquiry. Self-rejection rarely produces change. It produces avoidance. When condemnation is the only response, the mind turns away from what it cannot bear to face.

If we cannot accept a feeling, we can begin by accepting our resistance to it. Fighting the block only strengthens the resistance. Acknowledging the feeling often begins to dissolve it. We do not have to force ourselves into acceptance. We only need to stop warring against what is already true. Branden suggests a simple practice. Stand naked in front of a mirror, look at yourself honestly, and say, “Whatever my defects or imperfections, I accept myself unreservedly and completely.” The words may feel hollow at first. Over time, he observed that the practice changes the relationship we have with ourselves.

There is another dimension to this idea. We often not only deny our flaws but also our strengths. We disown our intelligence, our creativity, our capacity for joy. If our shortcomings raise the problem of inadequacy, our gifts raise the challenge of responsibility. Some of us find it easier to believe we are broken than to accept that we are capable of far more than we have allowed ourselves to live. The greatest refusal of self-acceptance is not the denial of what is worst in us. It is the denial of what is best.

What feelings or experiences might I be ready to acknowledge more honestly right now?

Where might compassion toward myself open a door that self-criticism has kept shut?

What strengths or abilities might I begin to recognize and accept?

What might become possible if I allowed what is true about me, both my struggles and my gifts, to be fully acknowledged?

Living Consciously

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Self-destruction is an act best performed in the dark.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

The first of Nathaniel Branden’s six pillars of self-esteem is living consciously. He describes it as the practice of bringing awareness to the factors that shape our lives, including our actions, motives, values, and goals, while also acting in accordance with what we honestly see and understand. Our mind is our basic tool of survival. We cannot feel competent or worthy while conducting our lives in a mental fog. And consciousness, Branden insists, is volitional. We choose it. Every day, sometimes every hour, we face the option of seeking awareness or avoiding it.

Branden’s quote points to the cost of choosing avoidance. People rarely destroy their lives while fully aware of what they are doing. The damage accumulates in darkness, in the small moments when we turn away from what we already know. Most of us recognize what that looks like: the relationship that is failing while we pretend it will fix itself, the habit we know is harming us but return to anyway, the apology we owe but keep postponing. Addictive behaviour can intensify this pattern by narrowing awareness in order to create distance from what we do not want to feel, but Branden’s point is broader than addiction. Any life conducted on autopilot, where we drift rather than choose, erodes the reputation we hold with ourselves. Self-esteem declines not in dramatic collapses but in the accumulation of small evasions.

Living consciously means choosing an active mind over a passive one, reaching toward relevant facts rather than withdrawing from them. It means distinguishing between what actually happened, the meaning we attached to it, and the emotion that followed. For example, a friend’s expression changes and we conclude they are angry with us. The expression, the interpretation, and the feeling are three separate things. Many conflicts begin when we treat our interpretations as facts. Learning to pause and examine our conclusions is one of the simplest ways to restore clarity.

Awareness without action is its own form of evasion. We can see clearly that something needs to change and still do nothing about it, telling ourselves we are “still thinking.” That hesitation is not consciousness but another form of avoidance. Living consciously requires acting on what we see, not merely seeing it. Feedback becomes valuable, especially when it reveals that we are off track and need to adjust course. The same willingness applies to our assumptions; they must be reexamined rather than defended out of habit or pride. To find it humiliating to admit an error, Branden writes, is a certain sign of fragile self-esteem.

There is also another dimension to this practice, something that might be called the art of noticing. Noticing the tension in our body during a difficult conversation. Observing emotional reactions before acting on them. Recognizing what gives us energy and what drains us. Paying attention to whether the values guiding our decisions are ones we have genuinely chosen or ones we absorbed without examination. This kind of attention is not obsessive self-analysis. It is the practice of being present in our own lives rather than sleepwalking through them. And it is available to all of us, regardless of intelligence or circumstance. What matters is the willingness to stay awake.

Living consciously ultimately means accepting authorship of our own lives. When we see clearly, excuses become harder to maintain. We may still delay difficult conversations or avoid necessary change, but we can no longer pretend we do not know what we are doing. Awareness brings responsibility. Self-esteem grows when we begin to live in accordance with what we see and know.

What would it look like to pay closer attention to my own life today?

Where might I benefit from separating what happened from the story I told myself about it?

What is one area where acting on what I already know would make a difference?

How might my day change if I practised the art of noticing?

Commitment

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage.
— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)

bell hooks devotes the fourth chapter of All About Love to the subject of commitment. But she is not writing about loyalty to another person. She is writing about the commitment to love ourselves. Much of what we call love in relationships has little to do with love at all. It often appears as dependency, projection, or the search for someone who will confirm our worth. Without self-love, hooks argues, love for others cannot be sustained. Sooner or later insecurity, resentment, or fear begin to shape the relationship. Genuine love asks for more. It requires a commitment to treat ourselves with the same honesty, responsibility, and respect we hope to receive from others.

For many of us this is not a small adjustment but an entirely new way of living. The messages we absorb as children shape how we see ourselves. Some come from neglect, criticism, or indifference. Others come from expectations about who we were supposed to be. Over time they settle into a fixed assumption about our own worth. Looking back at those experiences can bring clarity and relief. Whether through therapy, step work, or honest self-examination, understanding where the wound began matters. But hooks warns against staying there. Telling the same story on repeat can become its own kind of paralysis, a way of holding on to grief rather than moving through it. At some point the work shifts from looking back to living differently.

Without that shift, self-sabotage becomes the pattern. We pick fights when things are going well. We relapse after a period of stability. We walk away from a job or a relationship just as it begins to work. Or, sometimes it takes a different form. We search for repair through another person, imagining a partner who will finally see us clearly and provide the acceptance we have been waiting for. Whether we destroy what we have or hand our worth over to someone else, the root is the same. We have not yet learned to tolerate our own happiness. Relationships cannot carry the weight of repairing a wound we have not addressed in ourselves.

Some of the most effective tools are the ones that are easy to dismiss. Affirmations. Gratitude lists. Daily readings. Morning intentions. They can feel pointless, even childish. But repetition reshapes how we think, and small daily commitments build the self-respect that grand resolutions never do.

Self-love is not only an interior project. It shows up in how we live. Work that degrades us erodes our sense of worth, even when we tell ourselves it doesn’t matter. The homes we keep, the routines we follow, the environments we choose to inhabit either reinforce who we are trying to become or work against it. Many of us spent years in recovery before we realized that how we treat our daily lives is how we treat ourselves.

No one else can reliably give us the unconditional acceptance we can learn to give ourselves. When we begin offering it internally, something changes. Relationships become less about rescue and more about shared growth. Commitment to love is no longer a feeling we wait for. It becomes a way of living.

To describe what self-love looks like in practice, hooks turns to Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. Branden identifies six disciplines, each a daily choice rather than a personality trait. They are living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and personal integrity. We will explore each of these topics over the next few days.

What would change if I offered myself the acceptance I keep hoping to receive from others?

Where am I still telling an old story instead of building a new one?

Does my daily environment reflect someone who values themselves?

What is one concrete act of self-respect I can practise today?

Cultivation

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

“Character is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

“Then it may be rescued and healed.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)

When people begin working the Steps, they often encounter a familiar list of character defects. The exercise asks for honesty about patterns that create harm in our lives and relationships. Yet the language itself can be difficult. The word defect suggests something fundamentally wrong with the person who carries it. For many who arrive in recovery already carrying a long history of shame, that framing can deepen the sense that something inside them is broken.

Jeffrey Munn offers a different way of understanding these patterns in Staying Sober Without God. He argues that people are not defective. What they develop over time are thought and behaviour patterns that once served a purpose but have become dysfunctional. The term defective suggests a fundamental flaw in the original design. Dysfunctional describes a learned response that no longer fits the present conditions.

Munn goes further. Most of what recovery literature calls character defects are, in his view, character assets that have been taken to an extreme in response to life events. Selfishness may develop in someone whose needs were rarely met growing up. Determination hardens into stubbornness when flexibility was never safe. Self-protection becomes isolation when connection consistently caused harm. Resourcefulness drifts into manipulation when honest asking never worked. These traits did not appear without reason. They were shaped through experience and repetition, often during periods when healthier options were not available.

This perspective changes the nature of the work. If we believe we are defective, the task becomes removal. Something inside must be cut away or erased. Traditional language around Step Seven reflects that assumption by asking a Higher Power to remove shortcomings. Munn proposes something different. Instead of trying to eliminate traits, the work becomes understanding how they formed and learning to redirect them.

Compassion is essential in that process. Before attempting to change a behaviour, Munn encourages looking honestly at what these patterns were originally protecting. Aggression may have defended us in an unsafe home. Avoidance may have helped us endure conflict we could not safely confront. Dishonesty may have kept peace in a household where truth was punished. These responses were attempts to manage difficult conditions. Acknowledging that history does not excuse the harm caused. It makes genuine change possible without adding another layer of judgment.

Part of what makes this possible is awareness. Many of these patterns operate below conscious notice — we act from them without recognising them as patterns at all. Naming the behaviour, tracing its origin, and seeing how it once made sense is itself a form of change. The pattern loses some of its power once it can be seen clearly.

Munn describes the next step as cultivating goal traits. For each unhealthy pattern, a healthier direction can be chosen and practised. Instead of concentrating on stopping selfishness, we practise generosity. Instead of focusing on eliminating dishonesty, we practise honesty through small, repeated choices. The emphasis shifts away from what must disappear and toward what can be developed.

Change then becomes a process of repetition. Healthy traits do not appear through a single decision. They grow through behaviour practised over time. Each honest conversation strengthens the habit of truth. Each act of generosity reinforces the capacity to think beyond the self. Gradually the older patterns lose their grip because something new is being built in their place.

Munn describes this as cultivation because growth requires patience. A garden develops through attention and repeated care. The same principle applies to behaviour. We return to the work day after day, not because we are defective, but because learning new ways of living takes practice.

What pattern in my life once served a purpose it no longer serves?

Where can I bring more compassion to understanding how that pattern began?

What goal trait am I ready to begin cultivating?

What small behaviour, repeated today, would begin to water that growth?

Rehearsals

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The use of strong drink is at first a matter of choice. It afterwards becomes a habit, and at length a necessity.
— Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (1784)

Benjamin Rush wrote at a time when most people understood heavy drinking as moral failure. He was one of the first physicians to notice a progression that did not depend on character. What began as voluntary behaviour could gradually harden into habit and eventually into compulsion. His work helped shift the conversation from simple vice toward a more careful understanding of how behaviour develops and persists.

The older moral explanation, however, has never fully disappeared. It remains tempting to reduce addiction to a failure of will. The idea is simple and emotionally satisfying. It preserves the belief that people who stop are strong and people who cannot stop are weak. Many of us absorbed that story long before we entered recovery, and some of us continued to carry it after we arrived. This is internalized stigma—we absorbed the dominant cultural narrative about who we were and began to believe it ourselves. We assumed that if we had possessed more discipline or moral fibre, the pattern would never have taken hold.

Jeffrey Munn, in Staying Sober Without God, describes the cycle differently. Addiction develops when two conditions meet. The first is emotional discomfort, often subtle and sometimes outside our conscious awareness. The second is a previous experience with something that powerfully relieved that discomfort. The sequence is ordinary. A feeling becomes difficult to tolerate. A substance or behaviour reduces the intensity of that feeling. The brain registers the relief and stores the association. When the discomfort returns, the same response is retrieved. The process requires memory, not moral judgment.

Understanding addiction as a process of learning explains why the pattern becomes so persistent. Behaviours that regulate distress get reinforced. Each time the relief works, the association strengthens. Repetition deepens the connection until the response begins to operate automatically. By the time many people start to question the pattern, it already functions faster than deliberate thought. Insight alone rarely dismantles something that has been reinforced repeatedly over time.

This reframing does not remove responsibility. It clarifies where responsibility actually lies. If the behaviour developed through repetition, it will not disappear through condemnation. Shame intensifies the very discomfort that helped establish the cycle in the first place. The practical question therefore shifts. Instead of asking whether we are flawed, we begin asking what responses we are reinforcing now.

Another complication is that the discomfort driving the cycle is not always obvious. It may appear as restlessness, agitation, loneliness, or a vague sense of not fitting in. Sometimes it is anxiety that has become so familiar it feels normal. Sometimes it is grief that never found expression or shame that quietly shaped our thinking for years. The substance or behaviour functions as regulation. It reduces emotional intensity quickly, even if the long-term consequences become severe.

When the behaviour is removed, the discomfort it once regulated becomes visible. This stage can feel like deterioration when it is actually exposure. Without the familiar escape, the nervous system encounters the feeling directly. Recovery begins here. The system must learn alternative responses to the same internal states that once triggered the old reflex. That learning takes repetition and patience.

From this perspective, recovery is less a transformation of identity than the gradual construction of new responses. People practise tolerating discomfort without immediately escaping it. They practise honesty when concealment once felt safer. They practise boundaries when impulse demands otherwise. None of these actions appears dramatic in isolation. Their power lies in repetition. Over time the brain adapts to what is done consistently, and new patterns begin to take the place of old ones.

The story we carry about addiction matters. If the behaviour proves we are broken, we wait to be repaired. If it reflects something the brain learned under pressure, then change depends on what we practise next. The same capacity that once reinforced the old cycle can reinforce something different.

The question gradually changes. It is no longer why we were defective. It becomes what we are rehearsing today.

What am I rehearsing in my recovery today?

Where is shame still driving my behaviour more than I realize?

What discomfort am I ready to face rather than escape?

What would I choose to repeat, deliberately, starting now?

The Container

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The wording of the steps often leads to people believing that all good things in their lives are a result of God, and all (or most) bad things are a result of them not being in line with God’s will for them.
— Jeffrey Munn, Staying Sober Without God (2018)

Some of us hit a wall in the program that had nothing to do with the work. We were willing to be honest. We were willing to look at ourselves. What we could not do, or could no longer pretend to do, was believe. The word God appeared in half the Steps. Many meetings ended with hands joined and prayers spoken. Some sponsors tried to assure us that if we only sought long enough, tried hard enough, something would arrive. For those of us for whom that never happened, the implication was difficult to ignore. Our recovery felt defective before it even began.

Jeffrey Munn spent years in that position. A psychotherapist with two decades in recovery, he eventually left meetings rather than continue faking a faith that would not come. What brought him back was not belief. It was the recognition that he had been confusing the container with the contents. His book is not an argument against the Steps, nor is it an argument against faith. It is written for those standing at the edge—unwilling to pretend, unwilling to walk away—who need to know there is a third option.

That option begins with a simple observation: the obstacle is often not the work itself, but the theological framing around it. References to God, surrender, and divine removal of shortcomings can suggest that recovery depends on correct belief. Munn argues the power of the Steps has never been theological. It has always been structural.

But the framing does more than confuse. When credit for every good thing flows to God and responsibility for every setback lands on personal spiritual failure, we end up in a position that is intrinsically disempowering. Progress becomes something that happens to us. Relapse becomes evidence that we weren’t aligned with God’s will. The agency that recovery actually requires, the willingness to own our choices, examine our patterns, and change our behaviour, gets attributed elsewhere. For people whose belief is solid, this may work. For those of us for whom it doesn’t, it can undermine the very foundation we’re trying to build.

Beneath the language, the early Steps describe psychological movements. Step One requires admission that a cycle is causing harm, and that admission disrupts denial. Step Two introduces the idea that our own thinking has been unreliable. We have been trying to solve a problem with the same mind that created it. That recognition challenges ego authority. Step Three formalizes commitment to something beyond immediate impulse. Whether that framework is described as God, community, shared values, or disciplined process, the effect is the same: isolation is reduced and self-justification is limited. None of this requires supernatural intervention. It requires participation and repetition.

Munn’s reframing preserves the demands of the program while removing the assumption that transformation must originate outside human agency. Humility becomes recognition of cognitive limits rather than submission to a deity. Surrender becomes abandonment of strategies that have repeatedly failed. Faith becomes trust in a structured process tested through collective experience. The emphasis shifts from belief to behaviour. Belief cannot be manufactured on command. Behaviour can be practised.

Community remains central to this model. A group provides corrective feedback and modelling that an isolated mind cannot generate on its own. Shared experience counters the illusion that personal reasoning is sufficient. In this sense, “Higher Power” can be understood functionally as the stabilizing influence of collective wisdom and shared principle. What matters is not the terminology but the outcome—the reduction of ego isolation and the reinforcement of accountable behaviour.

This is not a claim that faith has no value. For many people, belief is genuinely central to their recovery, and Munn says so plainly. He is a fan of what works, and he has no argument with those for whom God works. What he disputes is the insistence that recovery is impossible without it—an insistence that turns away a growing number of people who might otherwise benefit from a structure that has helped millions.

When stripped to its operational core, the program functions as a disciplined system for interrupting self-deception and building habits aligned with chosen values. Structure replaces chaos. Accountability replaces secrecy. Repetition reshapes identity over time. The invitation is not primarily to adopt a belief but to adopt a disciplined way of living. The outcome depends less on what is professed and more on what is practised—and that is something all of us, regardless of where we stand on God, can work with.

Where does the language of the Steps help me, and where does it get in the way?

Which Steps open up when I focus on what they ask me to do rather than what they ask me to believe?

Where in my recovery have I already been building something, without naming it that way?

What becomes possible when the structure is enough?

My Safety, Our Responsibility

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

We do our best to safeguard those who are vulnerable without making others feel unwelcome. — Guiding Principles: The Spirit of Our Traditions (2016), Tradition Three, Narcotics Anonymous

An atmosphere of recovery does not happen by accident. It grows from the way we treat one another before, during, and after meetings. We speak honestly when we feel safe. When pressure, harassment, or manipulation enter the space, honesty retreats—and with it, the possibility of genuine recovery.

Safety begins with respect for boundaries. Unwanted physical contact erodes trust. Sexual comments, propositions, or suggestive behaviour distort the purpose of the space. Pressuring someone for money, housing, work, or private meetings pulls attention away from why we are here. When we pursue romantic or sexual relationships inside the rooms—especially with newcomers—we undermine the vulnerability that makes getting well possible. Offering access to drugs, sharing personal contact details without consent, lobbying for service positions, or exerting control through a role weakens the foundation on which recovery stands.

Such behaviour is not limited to the meeting room. Parking lots, social events, text messages, online chats, and social media all form part of the same environment. The setting does not redefine the impact. Harm remains harm, wherever it happens.

We do not need to defend our boundaries. No is a complete sentence. When concerns arise, we can raise them with a sponsor, a trusted member, a home group member, or a chairperson. Speaking up interrupts behaviour that might otherwise continue unchecked. Silence protects patterns that place others at risk.

Listening carries equal weight. When we take concerns seriously, we reinforce our shared responsibility to one another. It takes courage to name what has happened, and that courage deserves to be met with care. Dismissing or minimising reports of harm weakens trust and leaves members isolated, wondering if they were wrong to speak at all. Accountability, offered with care, strengthens the community. It does not weaken it.

Addressing unsafe conduct requires clarity and gentleness in equal measure. A direct conversation, held in a safe setting, can name what occurred and make clear that it is unacceptable. Change must follow. We can offer support without excusing harm. We can make clear that the behaviour is unacceptable while also making clear that the person is still seen, still welcome to find help. Firmness and compassion are not in conflict. Both are necessary.

Home groups carry this responsibility too. A group conscience around safety provides direction before a crisis demands it. Greeting newcomers, remaining attentive to those who seem uneasy, offering alternatives to physical contact, and creating ways for members to raise concerns privately all reinforce the safety of the space. These are not complicated measures. They are the ordinary work of a community that takes care of its people.

Recovery depends on trust. When safety weakens, some members step away, and for some the cost of leaving is serious. The atmosphere we create together determines whether the rooms remain accessible to those who need them most. That is not a small thing to be responsible for.

Our safety and our collective responsibility are not separate concerns. Each action shapes the space others enter.

The ideas in this reflection are drawn from “My Safety, Our Responsibility: In and Out of Meetings,” created by the Asia Pacific Forum of Narcotics Anonymous.

Where have I remained silent when something felt wrong—and what kept me quiet?

How do I respond when someone brings a concern forward?

What boundaries do I need to state more clearly?

In what ways does my conduct contribute to the safety of those around me?

The Firefly

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

I feel a stirring deep within
Slowly picking up momentum
Like the tide coming in to shore
Over and under in its course
I never want to lose what I have finally found
There’s a requiem, a new congregation
And it’s telling me go forward and walk under a brighter sky
Every nerve glowing like a firefly
— Delerium with Jacqui Hunt “Euphoria (Firefly)” from Karma (1997)

My grandparents’ farm lay in the foothills of the Canadian Shield, in Western Québec, where I spent my summers as a child. From the house atop a hill, fields stretched in every direction—hay, mostly—rolling outward, downward to the little stream at the bottom of the valley, then upward again toward the tree line. To a small child raised on a quiet suburban street, the scale was staggering. The world was immense.

In my earliest years the farm was still a working dairy. There were chicks in the spring, hens year-round, pigs, barn cats chasing mice, and Rex the dog circling everything. As haying season approached, my father, uncle and extended family would arrive and the whole place hummed in preparation. I was too small to be helpful but not too small to absorb it all.

On those June evenings my grandmother rocked in her chair on the veranda, curlers pinned to her hair, knitting steadily. My aunt sat nearby with her circle-a-word puzzles, a Rothmans cigarette burning between her fingers. My grandfather napped inside on the couch. The humid air would cool. The sky would widen. I drifted between them and the yard.

And then dusk would settle.

I would lean against the white picket fence and stare into the field, waiting. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they would begin. Small lights blinking across the hay. Rising and dipping. Appearing, disappearing. Fireflies. Dozens of them. They were, to me, the most fascinating creatures I had ever seen.

One of my earliest memories is of a night when I asked my aunt if we could catch some. She found a mason jar and punched holes in the lid. She took my hand and we crossed the lawn, unlatched the gate, and walked into the field. There had been a lot of rain that year and the hay was taller than I was. I thrashed my arms in front of me to part the wet stalks as we made our way to the damp hollow where the lights gathered most thickly. I ran after them, cupping them carefully in my small hands. She opened and closed the lid for me.

One. Two. Three.

I hugged the jar to my chest as we climbed back up the hill. I held it up triumphantly to my grandmother on the veranda and she smiled. That night I lay in bed beside my aunt as rain came down and lightning split the sky and thunder rolled across my world. I watched the lights flash inside the jar until sleep took me.

In the morning, the fireflies lay still at the bottom of the glass.

I cried. I had wanted to possess them—to keep them close, to make them mine—and in doing so I had taken away the very condition that allowed them to glow. They needed the open air, the movement, the vastness of their field. They needed freedom. Without it, they shrivelled and died.

As I grew, my world became more complicated. I was not very socialized, so I was shy and introverted, and as a consequence I was bullied relentlessly through high school. I had no real friends I could count on. I stayed inside my own mind. I felt broken on the inside. Then the miracle happened. I found alcohol, and all of that anxiety and pain disappeared. For a while.

The substances multiplied. Addiction did not feel like a problem at first. It felt like relief. Like the end of loneliness. Like possibility opening up where before there had only been walls. But slowly my world narrowed. I stopped going to the farm. I stopped participating in family life. I got pulled deeper into the abyss, until it closed so completely around me I could no longer remember what open fields felt like. I had become trapped in a jar, barely able to breathe, sealed in a life I could not escape. The entirety of my adult life I have spent trying to escape that jar—the addiction, the mental illness, the trauma—surfacing at times, but always getting pulled back under.

But the truth is that I am free now. Free from the bondage of self that once kept me gasping for air. I have spread my wings, and in the delirium of it all I have found a new life, a freedom I never thought possible, that shines as brightly as the spark of hope in the darkest of nights.

I have become the firefly.

What did I once try to capture and hold that could only survive when given freedom?

What does it feel like in my body when I am living openly rather than enclosed?

Where in my life right now am I still pressing against glass, waiting to be let out?

What would it mean, today, to walk out under a brighter sky?

Unmanageability

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

We are never immune from having our lives become unmanageable, even after years of recovery. If problems pile up and our resources for coping with them dwindle, we may feel out of control and in too much pain to do anything constructive for ourselves.
— Narcotics Anonymous, It Works: How and Why (1993)

November 26, 2023 stays with me. I remember it because I journalled exactly what I had been feeling that day. I was again at the end of a week-long binge, now grasping at that flimsy reed for help out of the quagmire that was my life. My mind was racing so fast it felt like it was exploding. I was alone in my room, and the only outlet I had was the jumbled thoughts pouring out onto the screen. I had been sober before—five years, then six years—but those seemed to exist in a different timeline, out of reach. I knew what recovery looked like. I had lived it. And I was sitting there unable to get back to it.

What came out was raw and scattered. I wrote about the binges—how once I started I couldn’t stop, how the using would go for days without sleep or food, one substance bleeding into the next until I was physically unable to continue. Then a few days to recover, and the cycle would begin again, the periods between getting shorter, the damage getting worse. I wrote about the lies I kept telling myself—that I wasn’t as bad as some people, that I was still functional, that I still had room.

And then somewhere in the middle of all of it, I wrote the sentence I still return to: I want to recover, but I do not want, or am too afraid, to change. I become frozen in inaction.

That sentence is unmanageability. Not only the wreckage on the outside, which was considerable. The paralysis on the inside. I believed the fellowship carried the solution. I had experienced it, watched it work in my own life. I knew what meetings did, what sponsorship did, what living the principles did. And still I could not make myself move toward it. That gap between knowing and doing is where I lived for a long time. Knowing the answer and being unable to pick it up is its own kind of misery.

What I understand now is that my emotional life was running the show, even when I believed I was being logical. The most frightening realization was not the physical consequences—it was the growing awareness that I could no longer trust my own decision-making inside the cycle. The logic was downstream of the feeling. If I felt urgency, I created reasons to act. If I felt fear, I justified escape. If I felt shame, I told myself it was already too late. My thinking was fast, convincing, airtight. The story held together in my head, and that made it harder to question.

This week during my Step Working group we talked about how unmanageability was never only about substances. It was about the inability to align behaviour with what I knew to be true. It was about wanting recovery without surrendering what fed the cycle. I had been trying to negotiate with something that does not negotiate.

Admitting unmanageability is not dramatic. It feels like relief, like finally letting the evidence count. Willingness is not a feeling. It is a series of behaviours. If I want a different result, I must change the conditions of my life, not merely the story I tell about it.

Those words I journalled then feel distant, like they belong to someone else’s life. But they are a reminder. Never take recovery for granted. That day I wrote the truth when I couldn’t say it out loud. Today I can.

Where in my life am I still frozen in the gap between knowing and doing?

What emotions most often override my logic and steer my behaviour?

When I say I want recovery, what actions actually prove it?

What conditions in my life must change if I am serious about not repeating the same result?

Shelter in Place

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.
— Robert H. Schuller, Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do! (1983)

There are predictable points in the year when my mental health worsens. Seasonal transitions are difficult for me, but late February into early March is especially hard. Winter has dragged on. The calendar insists that the light is returning, yet internally it does not feel that way. Energy drops. Motivation thins. My thinking shifts in tone and scale. I live with bipolar mood patterns, and these passages have always required more discipline than the steady stretches of the year. The danger is not only the darkness itself—it is what it tries to persuade me is permanently true.

In these dips, the mind becomes a revisionist. A hard week writing these reflections turns into evidence the whole project was a mistake. One piece of critical feedback dominates my attention while every meaningful response disappears. A strain in one relationship becomes proof that I have failed at connection broadly—not a particular difficulty, but a fundamental character fault. I feel purposeless, and the feeling files itself as fact. I assume people close to me are secretly noting the gap between who I say I am and how I am functioning. I ought to be further along by now. Further ahead at my job. My mental health ought to be more manageable at this point in recovery. And underneath all of it, the quiet catastrophizing that the darkness will not lift this time. This is just who I am now.

The thoughts seem coherent, arriving with urgency as if they demand action. The urgency becomes anxiety, and the anxiety feels like paralysis. I want to escape. Yet cognitive therapy offers a sober observation: acute mood states alter perception. Depression narrows the field of attention and retrieves darker material more readily. Aaron Beck, who developed cognitive therapy, called this the cognitive triad, a pattern of negative views of self, world, and future that feel true not because reality has changed, but because the filter has shifted. In bipolar management, clinicians give practical advice during episodes. Do not end relationships. Do not change careers. Do not rewrite identity. Wait until things stabilize before evaluating permanence.

For me, this has become a form of sheltering. Shelter in place does not mean pretending there is no storm. It means acknowledging that visibility is poor and that movement carries additional risk. During these weeks, my task is containment rather than transformation. I maintain routines, protect sleep, and eat predictably. I work at maintaining self-care and staying connected. I continue ordinary responsibilities without adding ambitious new ones. The temptation when energy drops is expansion—the mind wants to match its internal intensity with external change, to dismantle and rebuild in order to relieve the pressure. But decisions made under distortion can create consequences that outlast the state that produced them.

I have lived through enough late winters to know that this period always feels irrevocable while it is happening. It has never been. The season shifts. Perspective widens again. Remembering this does not eliminate the heaviness, but it prevents me from mistaking a temporary state for a final verdict. There is a difference between a passing mental pattern and the truth of my life. Not every season demands reinvention. Some require preservation. This one, for me, has become about holding ground.

When the mind turns a hard week into permanent evidence, can I name that as distortion rather than data?

When urgency demands I act or conclude, can I wait until the filter clears?

When late winter feels irrevocable, can I remember it has lifted before?

And can I treat sheltering in place as discipline rather than defeat?

Sick as Our Secrets

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretence.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

In the third chapter of All About Love, bell hooks writes that love and habitual lying cannot coexist. Her focus is not on dramatic betrayal but on the ordinary ways we distort reality to preserve attachment. Most of us grew up hearing that honesty is a virtue, yet when we expressed uncomfortable truths as children—anger, fear, unfairness, disappointment—the adults around us often responded with denial, correction, withdrawal, or punishment. We learned early that truth threatens connection. To maintain belonging, we edited what we felt before speaking. Over time, that editing became automatic. It shaped who we became. What began as adaptation became identity.

This pattern does not end with childhood. Many of us say we want love while consistently avoiding the vulnerability that truth requires. We soften what we feel, conceal what might cause conflict, and maintain versions of ourselves designed to keep approval intact. These distortions may appear harmless, even polite, but they create a barrier to real intimacy. If another person is relating to a curated version of us, they are not relating to who we are. The surface may stay smooth, but genuine connection is not what we have. Love, as hooks defines it, requires truthful knowledge of one another.

The Twelve Step saying, “We are only as sick as our secrets,” describes the same structure from a recovery perspective. We lied about how much we were using, how bad things had gotten, how fine we really were. Secrets divide the self. One part presents; another part conceals. That division creates strain, and maintaining an image requires constant monitoring of speech, behaviour, and exposure. Addiction flourishes in this divided state because concealment is already normal. For many of us, the secrecy did not begin with substances. It began with early lessons that honesty was unsafe. When addiction later demanded deception, it was extending a long-practised habit.

hooks draws a clear distinction between privacy and secrecy. Privacy protects boundaries and dignity; it allows us to choose what to share and when. Secrecy is something different. It withholds information because disclosure would challenge the image we are working to maintain. Privacy supports autonomy. Secrecy supports distortion. When secrecy becomes routine, our relationships are built on partial truths, and over time this produces a kind of isolation even in the presence of people we care about.

Recovery emphasizes rigorous honesty not as spectacle, but as alignment. When what we speak matches what is real, something settles inside us. Energy once spent protecting an image becomes available for repair and growth. Truth may disrupt comfort, but without it there is no stable foundation for trust, and without trust, love has nowhere to stand.

The movement away from secrecy is rarely dramatic. It often begins with small corrections—admitting resentment instead of masking it, acknowledging harm instead of rationalizing it, stating a boundary instead of pretending agreement. Each act narrows the gap between who we present and who we are. Healing is not perfection; it is the end of concealment.

Where am I still protecting an image instead of speaking honestly?

What truths feel risky because they might disrupt approval?

How do I distinguish privacy from secrecy in my relationships?

What would greater alignment look like in my life today?

Not God

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

You, a drinking alcoholic, are not God, as I, a drinking alcoholic was not God. And I am not God even now, as a sober alcoholic. Precisely because I accept my alcoholism, my weakness, my limitation, I have found that I have something to give — something to give from that very limitation.
— Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979)

When I first came into the rooms, I was fragile and uncertain, and I was listening carefully. People approached me quickly, with warmth and conviction, and told me how the program worked. Read the book. Get a sponsor. Work the Steps. Get involved in service. Do the next right thing. Most of it was offered generously, and much of it helped. I needed structure. I needed direction. I needed people who believed in something when I could not yet believe in myself.

But I also remember a tension rising in me when certain suggestions were delivered not simply as experience, but as something closer to certainty. I did not yet have the language to articulate that discomfort, I only knew that if staying in recovery required me to adopt someone else’s worldview wholesale, I might not last. Looking back, I can see that sometimes it wasn’t the principles I was resisting. It was the fear that belonging required uniformity. I confused conviction with certainty. I confused structure with conformity.

As Kurtz discusses, the breakthrough of AA was not theological precision but humility. “Not-God” was the discovery. Sobriety did not elevate anyone to authority; it revealed limitation. The problem was self-centredness, and the solution was displacement of that centre. Spirituality, in that light, is not about adopting the correct doctrine but about relinquishing control.

I love the Big Book. Its language carries gravity and history, and I understand why many members guard it carefully. It has saved lives, including mine. But the line near the end of the 164—”Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little”—has become increasingly important to me. It is the founders admitting, in their own words, that even they were not God. Over time, I began to notice how easily suggestion becomes prescription. “This worked for me” can easily shift into “This is the way.” The difference is subtle but consequential. One opens a door. The other narrows it.

It seems to me the founders built flexibility into the program deliberately. “God as we understood Him” was radical language in the 1930s—a deliberate refusal to collapse something broad and human into a single theology. Willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness were understood from the beginning as the essentials of recovery. The principles woven through the Steps do not specify a tradition. They specify a direction.

I count myself as a secular member of the program. My own spiritual bearings draw largely from Buddhist thought and yogic traditions. I do not consider those religious, rather philosophical. I experience them as practices that keep me well and connected. I have friends in the rooms who are Christian, who live their faith with genuine integrity and compassion. They have helped me. I have grown to respect them deeply. We do not share the same worldview, and that difference is not a conflict. It is the program working as it was intended.

What I have had to keep learning is that fundamentalism—even when it arises from love, even when it comes with the best intentions—can become ego dressed in spiritual clothing. If the program begins with the admission that I am not God, then it must also include the admission that my interpretation is not final.

What I believe is there is one program, but many interpretations. I realize that some reading this may not agree with those words. And that is all right. That, to me, is the beauty of this way of life—that I can accept you exactly as you are, and hope, in return, that you might accept me.

Where in my recovery have I confused certainty with strength?

Where might humility ask me to loosen my grip on being right?

When has my experience quietly become authority over someone else’s path?

How does the admission that I know only a little open space for someone else to find their way through?

The Contortionist

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

People collectively reflect back to us the inauthentic, masked self we are projecting, and their reactions only serve to further cement a false personality. Before long, we have almost entirely forgotten who we really are.
— Erica Spiegelman, Rewired: A Bold New Approach to Addiction and Recovery (2015)

Erica Spiegelman is a California-based addiction counsellor, author of Rewired, and herself in recovery. She observed that around 80 percent of her clients are lifelong people-pleasers. For many, the pattern begins in childhood—the first place we learn whether who we actually are is safe to show. The self learns to place less importance on its own thoughts and emotions, and more on the validation that comes from pleasing others. Repetition becomes habit. Habit becomes identity. Over time, a gap opens between who we actually are and how we are living.

She describes how she became a contortionist, bending over backward and forward to accommodate other people’s wishes, so focused on keeping those around her happy that she stopped noticing she was doing it at all. For some, these adaptations happen without awareness, we said fine when we weren’t fine, stayed when we needed to leave. In each case, the authentic self gets quietly set aside.

Spiegelman identifies three masks that often form in response to early relational stress. They are roles shaped by environment, not character. Left in place, she argues, they repel intimacy and fuel the need to escape through substances and maladaptive behaviours.

The Rock absorbs instability. Competent, composed, and undemanding, this role learns early that needs complicate things, so they are minimized or suppressed. Valued for strength and depended upon for consistency, the Rock is rarely known for vulnerability. The interior cost is isolation, a self that is relied upon by everyone and truly known by no one.

The Loser occupies the opposite pole. When positive attention feels uncertain, negative attention becomes the more reliable currency. Acting out, underperforming, exaggerating flaws, all of it can secure a place in the family system. Shame becomes familiar territory, even comfortable, because it confirms an identity that others have already accepted. The persona fuses with personality until defying it feels impossible without help.

The Invalid organizes life around helplessness. In environments where expressing emotional needs was dismissed or punished, incapacity can succeed where honesty did not. Fragility draws caretakers close, and in doing so makes them necessary. The arrangement offers connection, but at the cost of autonomy.

Spiegelman illustrates how these roles solidify through an acting exercise. Three participants leave a room while a fourth remains. The three agree they will treat the fourth as a deaf widow—raising their voices, offering condolences, altering tone and posture. The fourth participant is given no instruction. Yet as the interaction continues, she begins to adjust. Her responses slow. Her movements shift. She is not pretending. She has simply become what the room decided she was.

This is what happens to some of us over years of performing a false self. The people around us don’t set out to harm us. They simply respond to what we project, and those responses confirm the projection, and the confirmation deepens the performance, until one day the mask and the face beneath it are almost indistinguishable. We have forgotten there was ever anything underneath.

Early recovery can feel disorienting even when things are going well. We are not just putting down a substance or behaviour. We are renegotiating who we are allowed to be in every room we enter. The mask does not only belong to the individual, it organizes the group, and removing it alters the structure. Some people will prefer the old version, the one that never asked for anything and never said no. That resistance is real. But Spiegelman is clear about what waits on the other side: a person living authentically has nothing to fear. No story to keep straight, no performance to sustain. Just the reality of being known.

Where am I still contorting myself to manage the comfort of others?

What would it feel like to let one person see behind the performance?

Where in my life is authenticity already beginning to take root?

What becomes possible when I ask for what I actually need?

Would

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a relationship or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.
— Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (2000)

“Would” is the conditional tense. It describes things that depend on circumstances not yet in place. In ordinary language, that is useful. We need a way to speak about possibility. But the conditional can also become a posture toward life. It can turn from grammar into a strategy. I would make that amends, but I’m not ready yet. I would deal with that relationship, once things settle down. I would show up differently, after I feel more solid. The sentences sound responsible. They contain intention. But they also keep action suspended just out of reach.

Oliver Burkeman begins Four Thousand Weeks by questioning a familiar assumption: that one day everything will finally be under control. The workload will ease. The right partner will appear. The internal confusion will settle. Then we will relax. Then we will live. His point is not about productivity. It is about our relationship to time. When life is treated as something that properly begins only after certain conditions are met, the present becomes a waiting room. This is the Would-life. The life always about to start.

Burkeman calls this the “when-I-finally” mind. When I finally get organized, when I finally sort myself out, then I can begin the life I was meant to live. The person caught in this pattern often believes the problem is external—that they simply haven’t accomplished certain things yet. What makes it so durable is that even when the conditions improve, postponement continues. A new requirement takes the place of the old one. The issue was never the workload or the relationship. It was the assumption that life begins later.

Von Franz described a similar pattern psychologically in her study of what she called the puer aeternus, the “eternal youth.” She observed a tendency to live provisionally, with the sense that real life is still ahead. Beneath that attitude she saw a fear of being “pinned down,” of fully entering space and time as a specific, limited person. To commit to something is to accept exclusion of other possibilities. To act is to risk failure. The conditional keeps those risks at bay. As long as the real thing has not begun, the self remains protected.

Addiction is one form of deferred living, the belief that real experience will happen later, once something changes. Recovery brings attention back to the present, but the mind can rebuild its postponements in subtler ways. Once I complete more step work. Once I repair this relationship. Once I feel stronger in my recovery. The target shifts. The deferral remains.

Burkeman’s answer is not to try harder or plan better. It is to accept that the conditions will never align perfectly. There will always be unfinished business, unresolved emotion, competing demands. This is not a problem to solve. It means recognizing that this imperfect set of circumstances is the only place life ever occurs. The present is not a corridor to somewhere else. It is the location.

Where does “would” still appear in my thinking, and what condition is it waiting on?

What am I postponing in the name of readiness?

What would change if I accepted that this day, as it stands, is already real life?

What is one step I can take now, under present conditions, instead of waiting for better ones?

Could

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual — the ultimate If Only. Its very purpose is to make us feel worse — because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
— Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret (2022)

No regrets. We say it at funerals. We put it on t-shirts. We offer it as hard-won advice to people younger than us, as if the goal of a life well lived is to arrive at the end having felt nothing about any of it. Daniel Pink opens The Power of Regretby taking this philosophy apart. The no-regrets posture, he argues, is not wisdom. It is avoidance with better branding.

Regret, Pink found, is the most common negative emotion human beings experience. More common than anger, sadness, fear, or jealousy. In study after study, across cultures and decades, the only emotion people report feeling more often than regret is love. It is not a sign of weakness or poor character. It is a sign of a functioning mind. Pink argues that people who cannot feel regret are not paragons of emotional health. Research links the absence of regret to lesions on the orbitofrontal cortex and serious psychiatric illness. It is a deficit, not an achievement.

Yesterday we examined the should—the voice that compares us to an imagined ideal self, a standard always slightly beyond reach. Could, on the other hand, does not look forward. It looks back. It does not ask who we ought to become. It asks why what already happened did not go another way. I could have said something. I could have stayed. I could have stopped sooner. Where should imagines a better self, could imagines a better past.

Of all the regrets Pink’s research uncovered, the ones that persist longest are the coulds rooted in inaction. Not the things we did badly, but the things we didn’t do at all. The words left unspoken. The risk not taken. The relationship allowed to lapse. Action regrets fade because we know their outcome; the wound is specific and can heal. Inaction regrets stay open because we can never know what could have happened. The mind keeps returning to revise them because they are, in a strange way, still unresolved. The past we didn’t choose remains available to the imagination indefinitely.

Pink identifies the core mistake as treating regret as something to eliminate rather than something to use. He offers three responses. We can bury it, wave it off, insist the past is past and pay the price in self-deception. We can wallow in it, returning to the same scene endlessly, rehearsing the pain without extracting anything useful, which research links directly to depression and anxiety. Or we can do the harder thing: treat regret as information. Ask what it is pointing at. Ask what it reveals about what we value. Let it instruct rather than indict.

Many of us spent years using as a way of not feeling the coulds. Substances are efficient at that. They quiet the voice that asks what might have been different. Getting well does not erase the catalogue. It surfaces it. The coulds are still there, sometimes larger now, more numerous, harder to face without the buffer we used to reach for. This is not a reason to despair. It is the beginning of the work. The could examined honestly, without cruelty, tells us something true about who we are and what we still care about.

Pink’s argument, at its core, is simple. Regret is not the opposite of a good life. It is often evidence of one. The ache of could means something was real—a relationship, a value, a version of ourselves we were still reaching toward. The could that hurts longest is often pointing at what matters most.

What do my oldest coulds reveal about what I still value?

What becomes possible when I treat regret as information rather than verdict?

Is there a could that might point me toward something I still want to build or repair?

What would it mean to let one old regret teach me something and then set it down?

Should

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Forget about the disgraceful creature you actually are; this is how you should be; and to be this idealized self is all that matters. You should be able to endure everything, to understand everything, to like everybody, to be always productive.
— Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth (1950)

Some of us might recognize this inner voice. It arrives without announcement, in the middle of the night, in the wake of a small failure, sometimes for no reason at all. It does not ask. It convicts. It speaks with the confidence of a judge who has already reviewed the evidence and reached a verdict.

Karen Horney called this the tyranny of the should. We develop an idealized self, a flawless version of who we are supposed to be, and set it in authority over the actual self. The gap between the two is not experienced as distance to be travelled, but as failure already confirmed.

The inner dictates run long. We should be able to endure everything. We should like everybody. We should never feel hurt. We should always be productive, always be understanding, always be serene and unruffled. Taken together they describe not a human being but a weather system that never changes. And when told we expect too much of ourselves, many of us will defend the demands. It is better to expect too much than too little. What we rarely notice is that the shoulds operate with complete disregard for actual conditions. They do not adjust for circumstance or exhaustion. A person feels they should have resolved a friend’s complicated marriage after a single conversation, or produced serious work alongside a nine-hour day. The standards don’t bend. So when we fall short, the response arrives with a force entirely out of proportion to what happened, because we believed, until that moment, that we should have managed it.

But something else is operating beneath all this. The “should” is not merely demanding. It is backed by self-hate. Behind every unfulfilled inner dictate waits a punishment: not disappointment, not gentle correction, but contempt. It is the threat of punitive self-hate that lurks behind the shoulds that truly makes them a regime of terror. The idealized self is a prosecutor with no interest in acquittal.

When we cannot comply, we rebel. But rebellion accomplishes nothing. The inner dictate remains in force even when we defy it. Compliance produces chronic strain, the feeling of standing on tiptoe indefinitely. Rebellion produces its own guilt. There is no freedom in either direction, only two ways of registering the same coercion. A person caught between two contradictory shoulds—I should be completely dedicated to my work, I should give everything to my family—cannot make a rational decision between them because the opposing demands are equally absolute. The question of what we actually want does not enter the picture at all.

Over time the tyranny reaches something deeper than behaviour. The shoulds begin to replace genuine feeling with a convincing imitation. We become so thoroughly trained in how we should feel that we lose access to what we actually feel. One patient described what remained when she finally saw through it: “All was negative, reactive, compulsive, imposed from without. Inside, there was absolutely nothing of mine.” These are pseudofeelings, not felt experience but a performance of it, run by the regime.

Genuine ideals behave differently. They have obligating power but leave us free. We pursue them because they are ours, because they reflect something we actually believe. The “should” cannot offer this. It can only demand compliance or punish its absence. The work of recognizing that difference, between a value we hold and a verdict we have been living under, is slow. But it is the only direction in which something genuinely ours waits to be recovered.

Where does the “should” appear in my inner life, and what emotion tends to follow it?

What genuine value or longing might be hiding underneath one of my recurring “shoulds”?

Where is the difference between a standard I actually hold and a verdict I’ve been living under?

What would it feel like to pursue something I truly want rather than something I’ve been demanding of myself?

Childhood Love Lessons

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

We learn about love in childhood. Whether our homes are happy or troubled, our families functional or dysfunctional, it’s the original school of love.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

One of my earliest memories is playing alone in the front yard of our small red bungalow on Rex Avenue. My father worked full time for the government and sometimes travelled. Many weekends he spent helping my grandparents on their farm or going hunting. On weeknights, I remember him in the basement at his workbench, absorbed in the work of carving out more space as our family grew. He took his responsibilities seriously, and time to play felt scarce.

He had inherited a quiet, reserved nature from his own father. My grandfather was a farmer and a man of few words, though when anger surfaced, it could fill the room. My grandmother was the matriarch of the family, and looking back now, I can see she struggled with sudden and intense swings of emotion. My father grew up in that house. He carried what he learned there.

We were churchgoing people. Good people. But affection was not spoken. I was a shy, introverted child who did not care much for hunting or farm work. Inside, I was lonely. What I wanted most was my father’s attention, and I suspect he did not quite know how to give it, not because he didn’t care, but because no one had ever shown him how.

It was spring. The small garden near the front door was a sea of colour, the tulips in full bloom. I was very young when I decided that if he loved those flowers so much, perhaps I should pick some and bring them to him. I remember the certainty that this would be a good thing.

I carried the tulips up to the house and rang the bell. He came to the door. I held them up.

The smile I expected did not come. Instead, there was shock. His face turned red. I have never forgotten that face.

The tulips fell to the floor. Off came the belt.

I was left stunned and confused, with the sense that the flowers mattered more than I did. For years I carried anger toward my father, blaming him for far more than that single day. But beneath the anger was something more painful: a longing for acceptance.

Over time, I have come to see that my father did not fail me out of cruelty.He learned what love looked like in a house where anger and silence carried authority. He passed that lesson on, as these things are often passed on, without malice and without awareness.

This is what bell hooks writes about in the second chapter of All About Love. We absorb love’s shape from the adults around us. When punishment is labelled care, when silence passes for steadiness, when control is mistaken for concern, we take that in. As children, we do not have the luxury of discernment. We accept what is given and call it love because our survival depends on it.

John Bradshaw called this mystification: the way families teach children to doubt their own perception of what they are experiencing. hooks goes further. Most parents who cause harm were themselves raised without a clear map of love. The cycle is not a moral failing so much as an inheritance. My grandfather’s temper became my father’s. My father’s became mine.

Recovery gave me a place to begin looking at this honestly. The 4th Step asks us to take stock, and often what surfaces is grief, not just for what happened, but for what was called love and was not. Naming it does not undo the damage. But it changes our relationship to it. We stop treating ourselves as the problem and begin to understand that we were always worth more than what we received.

My father is older now. So am I. I have come to see that even though I once believed we were so different, we are in many ways so much alike. He is a good man. I love him, even though connection still comes awkwardly between us. And there is still time.

I have never felt entirely safe loving someone. Somewhere in me, love still carries the risk of sudden disappearance, the belief that I can never quite be enough. But perhaps love is not the belt, not the silence, not the shock on a reddened face. Perhaps love is the slow work of seeing clearly what we were given, and choosing, patiently, to give something different.

What did I learn about love in the home where I grew up, and am I still living by that lesson?

Who have I blamed for my wounds when what I really wanted was acceptance?

Where have I mistaken inheritance for identity?

What relationship in my life still has time to heal?

More and Better

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

He is driven by a hunger for validation, yet when he achieves it, the feeling is emptiness. The harder he tries, the less he is satiated. More and better yields only less and worse.
— Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage (2012)

Alan Downs wrote The Velvet Rage as a psychologist and a gay man. He grew up knowing who he was didn’t fit the world he depended on, and he wrote from inside that experience. But he was clear the mechanics of shame he maps belong to anyone who learned early that they were not enough. The velvet rage is like a curled fist inside a soft glove, the anger of someone continually driven to seek validation that can never truly satisfy. It turns inward, sublimated into overachievement, perfectionism, and creating the illusion of a perfect life. He maps this wound across three stages.

In the first stage, shame tends to dominate. The individual becomes skilled at reading expectations and presenting what is rewarded. Certain traits tend to be amplified; others concealed. The goal is not authenticity but safety. For many of us, substances became part of that strategy, a way to get through life without falling apart. The nervous system learns to monitor for rejection. Over time, this vigilance can become automatic and largely invisible. Life organizes itself around the secret.

The second stage begins when hiding alone stops being enough—when the cost of concealment becomes too great and the person starts trying to outrun shame through achievement instead. For many of us, this is exactly where we find ourselves in early recovery. The substances are gone, but the shame that drove them remains. Validation tends to get pursued through success, attractiveness, influence, or competence. Because the performance is rewarded, it can feel like progress. But the relief is temporary. Validation earned through a curated version of the self only reinforces the need to curate. It rarely reaches the part that feels defective. The behaviours vary—overwork, compulsive fitness, sexual conquest, perfectionism—but the function is always the same. The applause confirms the strategy works; it does not confirm inherent value.

This is what Downs calls the vicious cycle. Mistakes can become intolerable because they threaten the entire structure built to defend against shame. Instead of being examined, they tend to get rationalized or buried. Effort intensifies. Standards rise. The hunger for validation sharpens. More and better becomes the default response, even as satisfaction decreases. The pattern can resemble addiction not because of substances, but because of escalation without fulfilment.

The collapse of stage two brings a crisis of meaning. Stage three begins there, with disorientation rather than clarity. The familiar drives lose their authority. What once felt urgent begins to feel hollow. We do not yet know who we are without the performance. Downs describes this as the beginning of authentic living, not because the path is clear, but because avoidance has begun to loosen its grip. A life begins to orient around genuine passion, love, and integrity. It tolerates ordinariness without panic. It allows for mistakes without collapse, and for intimacy, the willingness to be known without the armour.

Downs credits AA directly in the book. Insight into why we are the way we are, he says, is not sufficient to change behaviour. What changes a life is practice, one day at a time. Stage three is the ongoing discipline of noticing when validation is being sought as a substitute for self-acceptance, and choosing differently.

Authenticity, in this framework, is not self-expression for its own sake but alignment, a gradual reorientation around genuine interests and values rather than the avoidance of shame. Achievement can be meaningful. The question is what function it serves. When performance quiets, what remains?

What stage am I moving through now, and what does that tell me?

Where in my life am I beginning to want something real rather than something earned?

When the hunger for validation rises, can I pause long enough to notice it before it becomes a behaviour?

What might open up if I trusted that who I am is already enough?

Running from the Cops

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Among the thirty-five thousand people who ran the New York City Marathon were sixteen former drug addicts, a number of whom joked openly that they’d spent most of their lives “running from the cops.” When they crossed the finish line, the distance they had come was far greater than 26.2 miles.
— John J. Ratey, MD, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2008)

John Ratey is a Harvard psychiatrist whose book Spark examines what exercise does to the brain across a range of conditions—anxiety, depression, aging, and attention deficit. His chapter on addiction argues that the neurological damage substance use causes is something physical activity can directly repair.

One of his case studies was Odyssey House, a New York rehabilitation program operating since the late 1960s, serving people living in recovery, many of whom arrived from prison or from the streets. In 2000, a staff member began taking residents to Central Park under a program called Run for Your Life. They started by walking and built up to running around the reservoir. Those who became serious runners stayed in treatment twice as long as those who didn’t.

Addiction fundamentally alters the brain’s reward system. Understanding why movement helps means looking at what that damage actually is. The nucleus accumbens, the cluster of neurons responsible for registering motivation and desire, gets flooded by drugs at levels it was never built to handle. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth—and even behavioural addictions like gambling and compulsive eating—all work through the same mechanism. Each one boosts dopamine far beyond what any natural experience produces. That flood drives compulsive seeking regardless of whether the substance still brings any pleasure, reinforcing the memory and pushing everything else further into the background. The brain has learned something too well, and other stimuli simply can’t compete.

Physical activity works on this from two directions simultaneously. From the top down, it forces the brain to adapt to a new stimulus and appreciate experiences that aren’t the substance. From the bottom up, it physically blunts the urge to use by engaging the more primitive elements of the brain. Central to this process is BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which Ratey calls Miracle-Gro for the brain. Aerobic effort triggers its release, nourishing neurons and rebuilding the synaptic infrastructure that years of use have eroded. Over time it builds what he calls synaptic detours around the well-worn connections looking for the next fix. The substance created an autopilot. Exercise begins to install a different one.

Ratey is clear that intensity matters. The Odyssey House residents started walking and built up to running 1.58 miles around the Central Park Reservoir, eventually training for races. Sustained effort drives the heart rate up, triggers neurotransmitter release, and instills what he describes as a more diffuse sense of well-being—one that won’t replicate the immediate rush of a substance, but that over time becomes a craving in its own right.

Somewhere in the early months of consistent effort, ordinary life starts to register again. A meal tastes like something. A conversation holds attention. A morning arrives that doesn’t feel like something to survive. This is dopamine sensitivity returning, the reward system slowly recalibrating to a life that doesn’t require a substance to feel real. All the other work of recovery—working the Steps, being of service, building a community—depends on a brain that can feel motivated and engaged.

The neurological capacity to rewire through movement belongs to anyone whose brain has been altered by what they put into it. A walk that gets the heart going. A swim. A bike ride. The brain doesn’t require a finish line. It requires repetition and a new design for living.

What has movement made possible in my recovery that nothing else could reach?

Where in my body does the evidence of repair first show up?

How might treating exercise as medicine rather than self-improvement change my commitment to it?

What would a sustainable movement practice look like that could do the slow, necessary work of rebuilding a life?

Between the Covers

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The ultimate treatment goal for recovery from addiction is mastering the experience of forming enduring and trusting intimate connections. And I would add to that, a connection with oneself. It has to start with knowing and believing in yourself.
— David Fawcett, quoted in Jennifer Matesa, Sex in Recovery (2016)

For some of us, substances allowed us to avoid honesty during the most vulnerable moments of intimacy. We could use drugs or alcohol to be what we thought another person wanted rather than risk revealing ourselves. The difficulty in recovery is not a lack of desire. As Matesa explores in Sex in Recovery, the challenge is that the old pattern of self-judgment remains. Without substances, the mind can fill with worry during intimate moments—I’m not good enough, I’m too fat, I’ll fail, this relationship will fail—and those thoughts lock us out of our physical selves. We want to be present, but we get trapped in our heads.

So how do we stay present between the covers? Matesa offers several grounded, repeatable approaches.

Staying consciously present during the act is the foundation. This means focusing on what the body is physically feeling rather than getting trapped in the stories the mind constructs. When we notice ourselves drifting into worry, judgment, or putting on a performance, the task is not to force those thoughts away but to redirect attention to actual sensation. This is mindfulness applied to connection. The book emphasizes that pleasure is physical, not psychological—it is what the body feels and enjoys. As sex educator Emily Nagoski writes, pleasure is the best measure of sexual wellbeing we have: focus on sensation, and do more of what feels good, and do less of what doesn’t.

Honest speech in the moment is another suggested practice. This means speaking out loud what is actually happening internally to whoever you’re with during sex. Not confession or disclosure for its own sake, but the willingness to say something like: This really has nothing to do with you, but I want to tell you how I’m feeling. Or: I’m not fully here right now, but let’s just play around and see—I’ll get there. Before recovery, we often did not know what was going on inside ourselves. The honesty comes after awareness, not before. Naming internal experience mid-connection is not weakness, it is an act of trust that deepens the very intimacy it interrupts.

The book also mentions the importance of distinguishing secrecy from privacy. Recovery teaches rigorous honesty, and rightly so. But there is a difference between naming what is happening in the moment and feeling compelled to disclose every detail of our inner lives. The pressure to tell everything can feed the same approval-seeking and self-mistrust that addiction thrived on. Secrecy involves concealing something that has caused harm. Privacy involves sitting with a feeling long enough to understand it before choosing whether to share. Learning to trust our own perceptions, rather than compulsively checking them against someone else’s judgment, is itself a recovery skill. Recovery is not meant to keep us dependent for life on the judgments of others. It is meant to build the spiritual strength to trust our own.

The final suggestion is to have patience with the body’s timeline. Different drugs affect sexuality differently, and the nervous system does not heal on command. People who used sedating drugs like alcohol, opioids, or benzodiazepines might go months or years not thinking about sex. Those who used stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine might have had sex compulsively, and the physical damage can be severe. For some, regaining the capacity for sensation takes only a few months. For others, a year or longer. The book recommends periods of stepping back from sexual activity entirely to focus on individual healing. This allows the nervous system to recalibrate without the pressure of performance or expectation. There is time.

During active addiction, substances allowed some of us to avoid honesty during intimacy almost entirely. One of the gifts of recovery is we can now stay present, speak the truth in the moment, and trust our own perceptions. We do not need to master intimacy. We need to practice paying attention.

What does it feel like when I focus on physical sensation rather than the stories my mind creates?

What would it sound like to speak my internal state out loud to my partner during sex?

How do I distinguish between secrecy and privacy in my intimate relationships?

Where might I need more patience with my body’s timeline for healing?

Sex is not a Higher Power

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Or we chased sex the same way we chased drugs, feeling just as powerless and out of control. Some of us followed those drives into relationship after relationship without ever really feeling fulfilled. Many of us confused sexual connections with intimacy, and became so divorced from our feelings and desire for emotional connection that we would settle for physical interaction. This can follow us well into our recovery and may point to an ongoing struggle with opening up to emotional intimacy.
— Living Clean: The Journey Continues (Narcotics Anonymous, 2012)

Addiction trains us to seek relief. It narrows desire until what matters most is the removal of discomfort. Substances do that fast. They lower inhibition, amplify sensation, dull shame, and temporarily silence self-doubt. For many of us, sex was part of that package long before we arrived in the rooms. Vulnerability felt manageable when chemically supported. For others, drugs killed desire altogether, and stopping meant encountering sexual feelings again for the first time without knowing how to handle it.

When recovery interrupts either pattern, the disruption may feel not only chemical but existential. Sex no longer comes wrapped in sedation. The rawness of being seen, touched, or desired arrives unfiltered. For some, the instinct is to pursue sex with greater urgency. If drugs are gone, perhaps connection will provide the same elevation. Attraction produces dopamine. Anticipation produces adrenaline. The brain does not easily distinguish between a substance and a surge of romantic or sexual intensity.

In Sex in Recovery, Jennifer Matesa traces the history of the One-Year Rule, the common suggestion in 12-Step rooms to avoid new romantic or sexual relationships during the first year of recovery. She finds that it doesn’t appear in any program’s recorded literature. It is folk wisdom, passed down through decades of shared experience by people who watched what happened when newcomers chased romance before they had found emotional stability. Matesa interviews people who followed the suggestion, people who ignored it, and sponsors who enforced it too rigidly. What she found was not that romantic relationships or sexual contact should be avoided at all costs, but that our motives can be distorted in early recovery, and most of us benefit from keeping our program first while we figure out what we’re actually seeking.

Early on we can be physically and emotionally raw, still craving the relief that substances once provided. In that state, the excitement of these new relationships can light up the same chemistry that drugs once did. Intense attachment can feel profound while actually being driven by fear, loneliness, or the need for validation. Relationships begun in that state often burn hot and end abruptly, not because love is impossible, but because we are still becoming whole. Sometimes what feels like heartbreak is really the weight of emotional intensity we weren’t ready to carry.

Over time, we know that what we use to numb ourselves eventually stops working. The rush fades. Validation thins. What remains may be confusion or a familiar emptiness. No partner can serve as a higher power. When we expect another person to quiet our restlessness or stabilize our sense of self, we hand them a burden no human being can carry—and set them up to fail us.

Sex is not inherently dangerous. But when we ask it to steady our identity, repair our worth, or anesthetize discomfort, it begins to function like the substances it replaced. At some point the question shifts from “Am I having sex?” to “Why am I reaching for this right now?”

Something shifts when we start asking ourselves that question honestly. Matesa’s book makes clear that there is no single right answer. But emotional sobriety has to come from the inside. And when it does, sex becomes right-sized. Intimacy stops being a transaction and starts becoming something we can offer rather than something we need to take.

What is happening inside me as I move toward someone?

Is there anything I am hoping intimacy will regulate or soothe?

What belongs to me to tend before I ask someone else to hold it?

What does it mean to share connection rather than seek completion?

Skin Hunger

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Addiction does not only isolate us socially; it estranges us from our own body. We speak easily about loneliness, cravings, triggers, and the psychic emptiness that substances once filled—but we rarely consider what happens when a nervous system that has been numbed, overstimulated, or deprived suddenly comes back online. Recovery is often described as an awakening of the mind and spirit. It is also an awakening of the skin.

In Sex in Recovery, Jennifer Matesa describes a moment of tenderness between two people: one running fingers through the other’s hair, an act the Brazilian Portuguese call cafuné. The word traces back to enslaved Yoruba people in Brazil, who comforted one another in circumstances of unimaginable brutality. When safety was stripped away, tenderness remained possible.

Modern North American recovery culture has no equivalent. We have extensive vocabulary for boundaries, trauma, and “working a program.” Yet when it comes to safe, caring physical contact, we grow cautious and clinical.

The research, however, is not ambiguous. As Matesa reports, caring touch releases endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. It lowers cortisol, the stress hormone that keeps the body on high alert. It increases oxytocin, strengthening trust and bonding. These are measurable physiological events, and each one has a strong chance of reducing relapse risk.

When this contact is absent, the effects are equally measurable. Psychologists use the term skin hunger to describe the effects of touch deprivation. Infants who do not receive sufficient physical contact can fail to thrive; their development falters. Adults deprived of safe contact show increased anxiety, depression, and dysregulated stress responses.

Addiction complicates this hunger. Touch may have been associated with harm or coercion, or it was transactional, charged with expectation or demand. For many of us, physical contact and intoxication became braided together so tightly that the body could no longer distinguish between intimacy and anesthesia. The chemical buffer softened the edges of contact, blurred fear, amplified intensity, and dampened vulnerability. Over time, the skin stopped expecting kindness. It either braced for harm or learned to equate closeness with altered states.

When we stop using substances, sensation returns without chemical mediation, and it can be disorienting. Long-buried memories may surface not only as thoughts but as bodily reactions. What feels like restlessness, irritability, or unexplained longing may in part be the body’s response to touch deprivation. The body is not simply craving a substance; it may be craving safety.

The fellowships rightly emphasize connection, and many of us first experienced safe human contact in those rooms, holding hands during a closing, a hug after a meeting. As Matesa observes, institutional settings remain risk-averse around physical contact. Touch becomes suspect, legally fraught. Yet the body does not respond to policy; it responds to experience. Recovery may need to include relearning how to inhabit the body without fear—how to differentiate between intensity and safety, between being used and being held, between stimulation and regulation.

This is not an argument for indiscriminate touch, nor a dismissal of trauma or boundaries. But rebuilding begins somewhere. It may be therapeutic massage or acupuncture. It may be a yoga class that emphasizes breath and body awareness, or the simple act of asking someone trusted for a hug. It may be allowing a hand to rest on a shoulder without pulling away. With time the body learns to recognize the steadying quality of safe contact.

Our journeys are not solely about abstaining from substances. They are also about becoming reacquainted with the body as a site of healing rather than harm. That body carries memory, but it also carries capacity. To honour skin hunger is not to regress. It is to acknowledge a need that may have become distorted but was never erased.

When has safe contact steadied me, and what made it feel different from the closeness I knew in active addiction?

What kinds of touch bring calm rather than intensity?

What would it mean to trust the body’s ability to recognize safety?

How might welcoming caring touch become part of how I heal?

Love as a Verb

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (1999)

Most of us learned about love the way we learned about gravity. It was just there, or it wasn’t. We didn’t question the definition. We absorbed whatever version our families handed us and carried it forward, often without realizing how much damage that unexamined inheritance could do.

bell hooks spent years searching for a definition that actually worked. She found it in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, where love is described as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” A deliberate act. She built her book All About Love on this foundation, and it remains one of the most clear-eyed guides to what it means to practise love as a way of life.

Many of us know what it’s like to confuse intensity with intimacy, attachment with connection, need with devotion. We’ve told ourselves we loved people while treating them poorly. We’ve accepted treatment that looked nothing like care and called it love because the feeling was strong. But love and abuse cannot coexist. If we are hurtful and neglectful, we cannot claim to be loving, no matter how deeply we feel.

When love becomes a verb, it stops being something that happens to us and becomes something we choose. This echoes the recovery principle that runs through every 12-Step program. We didn’t stumble into healing. We made a decision, and then we backed it up with action, one day at a time. Love operates the same way. It isn’t sustained by grand gestures or peak emotions. It lives in the daily practice of showing up with care, honesty, respect, and commitment.

hooks grew up in a home where affection and unkindness existed side by side. She could be praised for her intelligence in the morning and shamed for it by evening. Some of us may recognize that pattern. We learned to tolerate contradiction because the alternative meant admitting we hadn’t been loved the way we needed. Naming what was missing isn’t betrayal. It’s the beginning of honest repair.

“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination,” hooks writes. “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.” If we can’t define love clearly, we can’t build it. If we keep the word vague, we protect ourselves from having to change. But clarity, however uncomfortable, is where growth begins. Today we begin a series that walks through hooks’ thirteen chapters on love. We start where she starts, with the courage to say what we mean.

Does the definition of love I grew up with still serve me?

Where have I confused strong feelings with genuine care?

What would shift if I treated love as something I do rather than something I feel?

What is one way I can practise love as an action today?

Neurosis

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (1978)

Many of us carry an unexamined belief that life should settle down at some point. That the struggle we are in now is temporary, and that if we organize ourselves correctly, choose well enough, or grow enough, the friction will ease. When difficulty persists, we interpret it as evidence that something is wrong. Either with us or with the world.

Peck opens The Road Less Traveled with a direct assertion: life is difficult. The process of confronting and solving problems is inherently painful. Problems evoke frustration, grief, fear, regret, loneliness. They require adjustment. They require us to change. Problems are not interruptions to growth. Instead, they create our courage and our wisdom. But because that process hurts, we instinctively look for ways around it.

Carl Jung put a sharper edge on it: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” The issue is not whether we will suffer, but which form we will choose. Legitimate suffering is the unease of taking responsibility, telling the truth, setting limits, grieving losses, and accepting consequences. It is finite, even when intense. It leads somewhere. When we refuse it, we don’t escape the pain. We circle around the problem instead. The original issue remains unresolved, now layered with resentment, anxiety, confusion, or delusion. Avoidance does not eliminate pain. It multiplies it.

Some of us go to quite extraordinary lengths, proceeding far afield from all that is sane and sensible, building elaborate fantasies in which to live. We procrastinate, rationalize, pretend problems do not exist. We take drugs or act out to dull our awareness. But the substitute ultimately becomes more painful than the suffering it was designed to avoid—the neurosis becomes the biggest problem, and many then attempt to avoid that too, building layer upon layer. The details may vary, but the structure remains the same.

What Peck offers as the alternative is not willpower but discipline, which he defines as the basic tools required to solve life’s problems. He calls these tools “techniques of suffering”—ways of experiencing pain constructively so it can be worked through rather than stored. Delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, dedication to truth, balancing competing demands. Each requires us to sit with discomfort rather than escape it. The 12-Steps provide a framework for exactly this. They work because they move through pain rather than around it.

To accept that life is difficult is to stop being surprised by friction. We stop interpreting each obstacle as injustice and begin asking what it requires of us. The pain of confronting a problem remains—but the added pain of resisting reality falls away. What is left is simply a question of participation.

Where am I postponing a discomfort that would lead to growth?

What legitimate suffering have I been substituting with distraction or rationalization?

What might open up if I stopped resisting difficulty and began working with it instead?

What would it look like to meet what is hard with full engagement today?

Be Here Now

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

It was a terribly frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was and you felt these new states of awareness, and then you got cast out again, and after two or three hundred times of this, began to feel an extraordinary kind of depression set in—a very gentle depression that whatever I knew still wasn’t enough.
— Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971)

Before he was Ram Dass, he was Richard Alpert. A Harvard psychology professor with four appointments, a Mercedes, a sailboat, and every credential his world offered. But none of it filled the emptiness he carried inside. In the early 1960s, he and Timothy Leary began experimenting with psychedelics, and something stirred inside him. He glimpsed states of consciousness so vast that his old life looked like a waiting room. However, every time, no matter how high he went, he came down. Hundreds of experiences, each one a door flung open and shut again. He called it a gentle depression. The knowledge stayed, but the experience wouldn’t.

Everything changed when he met his teacher in the Himalayan foothills. His guru didn’t offer peak experiences or fireworks. He offered presence. Steady, unremarkable, and completely alive. The teaching Ram Dass carried home and put at the centre of Be Here Now is simple. Where are you? Here. What time is it? Now. He suggests setting reminders throughout the day to ask ourselves these two questions, and each time, feeling the immediacy of the answer. Wherever we go, whatever the clock says, it is always here and now. We cannot actually leave the present. We can only think our way out of it.

The mind, Ram Dass writes, is like a lake whose surface is covered with choppy waves going in all directions. We cannot see what lies beneath because we are too busy generating thought after thought, reaction after reaction. Mantra, meditation, conscious attention are not ways of forcing the waves to stop. They are ways of ceasing to believe we are the surface. Beneath the chop, awareness is already calm. Already whole. We don’t create it. We uncover it.

His teacher Hari Dass Baba put the pace of this uncovering plainly. You can’t rip the skin from the snake. The snake sheds when it is ready. We wake up at the rate we wake up. We finish with our old patterns at the rate we finish with them.

Ram Dass learned that transformation doesn’t arrive as a permanent lightning bolt. It arrives as practice. Unglamorous, unremarkable, repeated. He writes about returning from a peak experience only to hear someone say “Hey Sam, empty the garbage” — and suddenly the old identity snaps back. Just Sam who empties garbage. But eventually the understanding arrives that the sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s in the garbage, too. Every act consecrated not by ritual but by attention. The teaching isn’t that daily life is something to endure between breakthroughs. Daily life, lived consciously, is the breakthrough.

Where have I been leaving the present in search of something better?

What would it look like to treat an ordinary act today as the practice itself?

What am I uncovering when I stop trying to force my own transformation?

How can I show up fully today without needing it to feel like a breakthrough?

The Joy of Being Wrong

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction. While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.
— Tim Urban, quoted in Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021)

There’s a concept in psychology called the totalitarian ego. Like a dictator controlling the press, it filters out any information that threatens what we already believe. It feeds us comforting lies. It tells us we’re right, we’ve got this, we don’t need to look any closer. It’s the cognitive bouncer at the door of the mind, deciding what gets in. Its most reliable trick is the one we call denial.

We all know what denial looks like from the outside. We could see exactly where everyone else was going wrong while remaining completely unable to see ourselves. Recovery begins the moment we stop believing our own story.

But the dictator doesn’t always stay gone. We get some time, we gain a little knowledge, and we might start to confuse experience with expertise. We might preach our version of recovery as though it’s the only one. We stop questioning what we think we know.

Adam Grant calls the antidote “confident humility.” The ability to trust ourselves while remaining honest about what we don’t yet understand. We can have faith in our capacity to grow without pretending we’ve already arrived. That’s a crucial distinction. Arrogance says, “I’ve figured this out.” Confident humility says, “I’m figuring this out, and I might need to change course.”

The practical test is simple. Can we enjoy being wrong? Actually welcome it as evidence that we’ve just learned something new. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman put it plainly: “Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything.” He described his attachment to his own ideas as provisional. No unconditional love for them. That’s a radical posture for anyone, but especially for those of us who spent years constructing elaborate systems of self-deception. Letting go of a belief used to feel like losing a piece of ourselves. In recovery, we learn that it’s the opposite. Letting go is how we find out who we actually are.

The Tenth Step asks us to do this daily. Its language is precise: “and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” Not “if.” The Step assumes we will be. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re human. The inventory is a practice of staying permeable, keeping the filter open so that life can pass through and we become something useful. When we stop taking inventory, we start building rubber shields. Life bounces off. We stop growing without noticing we’ve stopped.

Humility absorbs. Around the rooms, we call it being teachable. We call it open-mindedness. We call it admitting, one more day, that we haven’t arrived—and recognizing that this isn’t failure. We give up the comfort of being right. What we get back is the capacity to keep changing.

What am I most certain about right now, and when did I last question it?

Where might my confidence be outrunning my understanding?

What would it feel like to welcome being wrong about something today?

How can I stay teachable without losing trust in myself?

The Escape Fire

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
— Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021)

In 1949, a smokejumper named Wagner Dodge found himself running uphill from a wildfire that was about to overtake him. He stopped, lit a match, and set fire to the grass at his feet. Then he lay down in the ashes. His crew thought he’d lost his mind. Twelve of them died. Dodge survived because the ground he’d burned had nothing left for the wildfire to consume. He called it an escape fire.

Adam Grant uses Dodge’s story to illustrate a point. What happens when we stop defending what we know and start getting curious about what we don’t? Most of us, he argues, default to one of three modes. We preach when our beliefs feel threatened, prosecute when we spot flaws in others, and politick when we want approval. Any of us who have sat in a meeting will recognize all three. None of them involve actually questioning anything.

The alternative is what Grant calls “scientist mode.” A scientist treats beliefs as hypotheses, not identities. When the data contradicts the hypothesis, they don’t dig in. They get curious. Grant offers a handful of concrete practices for living this way, and most of them will sound familiar to anyone working a program.

First, we define ourselves by our values, not our opinions. If “I’m the kind of person who values honesty” is the foundation, we can change our minds without feeling like we’ve lost ourselves. But if our identity is built on being right about how recovery should look, what sobriety means, or which meetings matter, then every challenge feels like an attack on who we are.

Second, we build a challenge network—not people who cheer us on, but people who push back. Recovery gives us both. But a friend who only agrees with us isn’t doing the job. The people who help us grow are the ones willing to say what we don’t want to hear. When we do disagree, Grant suggests asking how rather than why. When we explain why we hold a view, we dig in. When we try to explain how we’d act on it, we soften.

Third, we ask ourselves a simple question on a regular basis. “What evidence would change my mind?” If we can’t answer that, we’ve stopped thinking and started preaching. The Tenth Step is built on exactly this principle. A daily inventory not to confirm what we already believe, but to catch ourselves where we’ve been wrong and promptly admit it. Grant also suggests we learn to enjoy being wrong—to treat each mistake not as a failure but as a discovery. That’s scientific thinking in spiritual clothing.

We live in a world changing so fast that rethinking is no longer optional. The First Step is exactly this. We admit that our most deeply held belief—that we can manage our addiction on our own—is wrong. Everything that follows depends on our willingness to keep doing that, one day at a time.

Wagner Dodge survived Mann Gulch because he let go of the plan that was killing him and invented a new one in real time. We can do the same. Not abandon what we know, but hold it loosely enough that when the ground shifts, we can shift with it.

What belief about my recovery have I stopped questioning?

Where might a challenge network change the way I grow?

What evidence would it take to change my mind about something I’ve held as certain?

How can I practise curiosity today where I’d normally dig in?

The Ledger

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

When a person is motivated in two opposing directions at the same time, that’s ambivalence. Ambivalence is a defining feature not just of struggles with substance use, but of change in general.
— Jeffrey Foote and Carrie Wilkens, Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change (2014)

We are taught to shame ambivalence. We call it weakness, fence-sitting, lack of commitment. We expect ourselves to want one thing cleanly, to move toward it without hesitation. When we waver, we assume something is wrong with us. But ambivalence is information. It tells us we’re weighing competing values, that both sides of the equation carry real weight.

Foote and Wilkens frame this tension as a ledger: costs on one side, benefits on the other. The challenge is that short-term benefits usually outweigh long-term costs. The relief is immediate; the consequences accumulate slowly. Using quiets anxiety right now. The damaged trust shows up months later. Gambling delivers a rush tonight. The financial wreckage builds over years. Our brains are wired to prioritize what’s in front of us, which is why substances and behaviours that work fast hook us hard. We discount future costs because they feel abstract, while present relief feels desperately real.

Change happens when something shifts the balance. Costs that were distant become immediate—the hangover stops us from showing up at work, debt collectors start calling, we can’t look ourselves in the mirror anymore. Or benefits that seemed essential start feeling less so—we find another way to relax, the escape stops working as well, we notice we’re trading hours of relief for days of misery. The research shows most people who recover do so when they realize, in their own time and their own way, that the costs finally outweigh the benefits. Not because someone told them so, but because they felt it themselves.

In the rooms, we’re taught early on to inventory the wreckage. We list what substances or behaviours cost us: relationships, jobs, health, self-respect. But we rarely acknowledge what they gave us. It matters, though—not because we’re supposed to miss them, but because understanding what we got shows us what we need to replace. If cocaine gave us confidence in social situations, we need to learn another way to feel confident. If drinking numbed chronic pain, we need to address that pain directly. The benefits don’t justify the costs, but they explain the pull. And that pull won’t stop just because we ignore it.

Ambivalence doesn’t go away just because we’ve decided to change. It shows up in early recovery when we miss the ease of using. It reappears months later when we’re tired and the old solution seems simpler than the new one. If we treat this wavering as failure, we’ll hide it. If we understand it as normal—as the brain honestly assessing two familiar options—we can work with it. The ledger doesn’t shame us for being pulled in two directions. It shows us exactly where the work lives.

What am I still ambivalent about in my recovery, and what does that ambivalence tell me I’m weighing?

Where have I shamed myself for wavering instead of getting curious about what’s pulling me in two directions?

What did my substance or behaviour actually give me, and how am I replacing that now?

When the ledger shifts toward change, what tips the balance—consequences becoming real, or alternatives becoming more appealing?

Songs of War and Love

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.”
— Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)

We are all familiar with the script. When someone we love struggles with addiction—or when we struggle ourselves—our culture hands us a playbook written in shame. Confront them. Make them see what they’ve done. Threaten consequences. Cut them off if they won’t stop. We learn it from intervention shows and courtroom dramas, from politicians promising to “get tough,” from news stories that frame addiction as moral failure, from self-help books warning against enabling, from a hundred films about hitting rock bottom, from religious teachings about willpower and weakness, from a society that has pursued this approach for over a century.

For those who have not experienced addiction, tough love may seem like common sense. But as we know, this often fails because the threat of rejection deepens the very isolation that drives addiction in the first place. Johann Hari discovered this watching his ex-boyfriend relapse into a crack house in East London. Here was someone who had survived unbearable childhood pain by learning to cut himself off from people. The drugs weren’t the problem. They were the solution to pain he knew no other way to manage. So when Hari threatened to cut him off, he was deepening the very isolation that drove his ex-boyfriend to drugs in the first place.

The shift came when Hari stopped fighting and tried something else. He showed up instead of shutting out. He went to meetings together with his ex-boyfriend, sat through the urge to use however long it took. He didn’t enable by providing money or excusing behaviour, but stayed present. This deepened the relationship instead of severing it. Clinical evidence from Portugal to Switzerland to Vancouver shows this approach works. But more than that, it makes intuitive sense to anyone who has felt the pull of loneliness, the temptation to numb rather than feel.

As Hari so famously quoted, the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; It’s connection. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee recovery or erase relapse or make the struggle easier. But it creates the ground where healing becomes possible. “If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction,” Hari writes. “If you are loved, you have a chance.”

Many of us in recovery have fought this same battle inside our own heads. The drill sergeant voices start up when we feel tempted by old patterns. You’re an idiot. You’re shameful. Someone should stop you. You should be punished. What if we stopped fighting ourselves the way the culture has taught us to fight each other? When the urge comes (to use, to numb, to escape), what if we reached for someone instead of retreating into shame? Let ourselves be seen, even when that feels impossible.

This war has been waged for over a century. In policy, in families, in our own minds. The approach hasn’t worked because the logic was wrong from the start. Shaming and isolating people who are already alone only makes things worse. The evidence points the other way. The work remains unfinished, but the direction is clear.

Where have I been singing about war in my head when I needed love songs instead?

Who in my life needs me to stay close rather than pull away?

What would it look like to reach for someone when I feel myself pulling back or falling into old patterns?

When someone I love relapses, how can I show up without enabling, stay present without fixing?

Collective Wisdom

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.
— Tradition Two (Long Form), Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

Tradition Two has an odd history. Its long form is actually shorter than its short form. The original 1946 statement ended after “group conscience.” In 1947, when Earl T. from Chicago suggested creating condensed versions of the Traditions, the “trusted servants” line was added to Tradition Two—even while most others were shortened—because the fellowship needed explicit language about what that authority structure meant.

In late 1937, Bill Wilson proposed a plan to spread the programme by publishing a book, employing paid missionaries, and opening hospitals for alcoholics. When the Akron group met, the eighteen members were sceptical. They feared money and professionalism would corrupt what they had. By a narrow margin, they approved the book but rejected the hospitals and paid workers. Wilson later acknowledged they were right—keeping it self-supporting protected the fellowship from the forces that had destroyed other reform movements.

This is the practical origin of Tradition Two’s claim that group conscience serves as ultimate authority. It emerged not from philosophy but from watching how certainty and charisma could destroy what worked. Early Cleveland groups developed rotating leadership out of necessity—six-month terms, monthly turnover, responsibility based on sobriety rather than popularity. Everyone cycled through service. No one could accumulate enough power to become indispensable.

Historian Ernest Kurtz, in Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, notes that this Cleveland innovation enshrined “trusted servants” and rejected what the Twelve and Twelve would later call “senators”—people who believed their experience granted them permanent authority. Servants listen, contribute, then step aside. Senators accumulate power, hand-pick successors, speak as though they represent rather than serve. Bill Wilson himself struggled with this distinction for years.

The tradition names “John Barleycorn” as its uncomfortable disciplinarian. The consequences themselves teach the lesson. As Kurtz observed, the penalty for enough deviation is relapse, and the penalty for relapse is insanity or death. Human authority doesn’t need to supplement this natural teaching. Great suffering and great love serve as guides; artificial hierarchy becomes redundant.

The first real test came at the 1951 General Service Conference, when delegates from across North America gathered and immediately disagreed with headquarters on several policy questions. The New York staff had spent years developing expertise, managing correspondence, handling public relations. Yet these delegates, informed by what was actually happening in meetings from coast to coast, often saw things the centralized office couldn’t. The concentrated expertise at headquarters proved less reliable than collective judgment dispersed across the continent. Group conscience wasn’t just a nice idea—it actually worked better than top-down decision-making.

Today, new challenges arise that Tradition Two couldn’t have anticipated. Social media creates opportunities for self-appointed spokespeople who accumulate followers rather than practise service. Online meetings generate questions about who controls access, who moderates, whose voice counts when “the group” is scattered across time zones. Recovery influencers build personal brands while claiming to carry a collective message. The line between sharing experience and claiming expertise blurs when algorithms reward certainty over humility. Virtual spaces make it easier to speak for the fellowship while harder for group conscience to check individual authority.

Group conscience is not the act voting, though it may involve counting hands. Voting assumes competing interests and accepts 51% majorities. Group conscience seeks informed unity through deliberation—where minority opinions matter, where the newest person’s uncertainty might reveal what long-timers can’t see. Hands get counted to measure the outcome of discussion, not as substitute for it. The process frustrates anyone seeking efficiency, which may be the point. Urgency often masks the will to control.

Tradition Two asks whether we can tolerate disagreement without splintering, contribute without needing credit, trust that something wiser than individual certainty guides collective decisions. It rejects both the autocrat who decides alone and the crowd that mistakes volume for truth. Members may answer differently about whether God speaks through groups or collective wisdom emerges from consensus. What matters is whether our deliberations produce better decisions than individual authority, and whether we’re willing to serve without governing.

How do I respond when the group decides differently than I think it should?

Do I seek positions of service to genuinely help, or to ensure my ideas prevail?

When someone newer or less experienced disagrees with me, do I listen or wait for them to understand what I already know?

Am I willing to be wrong about what I’m certain is right?

God is in the Nod

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.
— Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)

It was a cold Sunday morning, and my friend Gord and I were on one of our adventures. We had planned to hit our regular 7:30am meeting in the West End, but when we got there, a member was out front, sending people away. There was some kind of water issue and the church was closed. We decided to drive across town to the 8am meeting in Vanier instead.

Two others were already there when we arrived. A member I recognized and a newcomer. I had been to this location many times before. One of the rooms would be what you call a “recovery room.” It was dedicated to hosting meetings. The chairs were already set up and the walls adorned with slogans. Today, however, it was empty of people. No one except us four had shown up.

None of us were regular attendees here. For a moment, we stood there staring at each other, not sure what to do. In my head I was debating, “Oh well, time to go home!” But then instinct kicked in. Gord suggested what we were all thinking. We might as well start a meeting. How many does it take? Two. At four, we were ahead of the game.

Three of us sat down in a haphazard circle while the newcomer fumbled with the coffee maker. His hands were shaking. The filter basket slipped, water and grounds spilling everywhere. We smiled at each other. Someone suggested he ask the community centre staff to help clean up. We grabbed some Twelve and Twelves off the front table and started reading Step One.

As we read, more people filtered in. A group member, apologizing for being late. Someone I hadn’t seen in years, just coming back. Another fellow. And finally, a woman visiting from Southern California. Seven of us now. An odd assortment of people who would never have crossed paths otherwise. The last words were read aloud, “Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.”

A long silence followed. I stared at my feet, uncomfortable with the awkwardness of the ad-hoc meeting, a small group I mostly didn’t know. But the silence was finally cut by one willing voice, and momentum built as we slowly went around the room. With each share, I became more at ease. I understood the fear and hope of the newcomer. I felt the shame and humility of the one returning. I heard the hard-won wisdom of those who had come before me, and of those whose story somehow mirrored my own. After the first round, a pause. Then we went again, deeper this time. We met each other’s eyes. We nodded.

I don’t remember what anyone said that day except for one line. The woman from SoCal was reflecting on her experience of arriving at the meeting that morning. She was describing the connection I felt. She looked around the circle and said an expression I had not heard before, “God is in the nod.”

I’m not religious. I don’t even use the word god to describe my higher power. But that line resonated. I knew instantly what it meant. We all did. It named what had just happened between us. The wordless recognition, the unearned belonging, the YES that Buber says can only come from one human person to another. We don’t truly exist just by breathing or thinking—we come alive in relation to each other.

After the meeting, Gord spoke with the man who was just returning. The newcomer’s sponsor offered to drive the woman to her hotel. I chatted with the group member about something he had shared. For someone who has long suffered from loneliness and terminal uniqueness, it’s these unscripted, unremarkable, wonderfully ordinary moments of togetherness that keep me coming back. Spirituality, for me, has always meant connection. And connection often arrives in the simplest of gestures. Just a nod across the room that says “I see you, you belong here too.”

What moments of recognition have kept me here?

What connections are already here, waiting to be noticed?

What nod might I offer someone else today?

Where might I find the wonderfully ordinary?

Watch Us Dance

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric human groups, and this is what still beckons us today.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006)

On October 22nd, we introduced Brené Brown’s ten guideposts for wholehearted living. Today we conclude with Guidepost #10, Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance—Letting Go of “Being Cool” and “Always in Control.”

Throughout human history, we’ve relied on these three to express ourselves, to celebrate and mourn, to tell our stories. In her book Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich found that 92 percent of traditional societies encouraged ecstatic group rituals built around music, movement, and shared laughter. The capacity for collective joy, she writes, is encoded in us “almost as deeply as the capacity for erotic love.” Brown agrees. After years of research, she discovered one thing these expressions have in common. They remind us we are not alone.

True laughter, what Brown calls “knowing laughter,” is a spiritual form of communing. It’s not the nervous laugh we use to deflect. It’s not self-deprecating humour that beats others to the punch. It’s the laughter that rises up when we share our stories and realize we’re not the only ones. Without words, we say to one another, I’m with you. I get it. It’s the relief that comes when shame loosens its grip, when we stop performing and start connecting.

Music offers another form of connection. Whether it’s a hymn, a fight song, or a film soundtrack, it gives our inner life a voice. Brown noticed that even the same dramatic scene in a movie fell flat without music—factual instead of emotional. Music bypasses the mind entirely. It reaches into us and pulls something out we didn’t know was there. A song can bring us to tears before we understand why.

And then there’s dance. For many of us, no form of self-expression makes us feel more exposed. It’s full-body vulnerability. Some of us only move freely at home or in front of people we trust. Others have stopped moving altogether. Yet Brown believes this is in our DNA. Watch children before we teach them to worry about how they look. They move without hesitation. That impulse stays in our hearts, even when our heads become overly concerned with what people might think.

The enemies of laughter, song, and dance are the twin hustles of being “cool” and “always in control.” Cool minimizes vulnerability to reduce ridicule. Control manages perception so we feel good enough. Somewhere along the way, Western culture taught us to resist the invitation to let go—to build what Ehrenreich calls “a fortress of ego and rationality” and call it maturity. But we pay for this protection with our joy.

Brown calls this betrayal. When we value being cool over granting ourselves the freedom to be passionate, goofy, heartfelt, and soulful—we abandon ourselves. And when we consistently do that, we do it to the people we love too. We roll our eyes at their enthusiasm. We shoot them a look that says don’t be so uncool. We teach them to hide.

The Hopi have a saying. “To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.” Ehrenreich notices that despite centuries of suppression, the ecstatic possibility doesn’t go away. Festivity keeps bubbling up. The urge to move together, laugh together, sing together—it survives. It waits. Life is too precious to keep pretending when that joy is still there, ready to be reclaimed.

When did I last laugh so hard I forgot to be dignified?

What song makes me want to sing at the top of my lungs?

When did I last let my body move without worrying who was watching?

Where am I still choosing image over connection?

My Life

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.
— David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (2008)

There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes from loving someone who is actively destroying themselves. We watch, helpless, as they disappear into addiction. Some of us plead. Some bargain. Some stay awake at night running through scenarios. We become detectives, therapists, jailers, anything to stop what we cannot stop.

David Sheff writes with brutal honesty about loving his son Nic through meth addiction. He became, as he puts it, “addicted to my child’s addiction.” He was preoccupied to the point where it consumed him, even at the expense of his wife and other children. He justified it by asking how a parent could not be overtaken by a child’s life-or-death struggle. But this obsession didn’t help Nic. It may have harmed him. Or it may have been irrelevant to him entirely. What it certainly did was harm everyone else—and himself.

Sheff admits he fantasized about erasing every memory of Nic from his brain. He wished for something like a lobotomy to stop the slide show of images, worst-case scenarios looping in his mind. At his worst, he even resented Nic because someone using, at least when high, has a momentary respite from suffering. There is no similar relief for those who love them.

In Al-Anon meetings, Sheff heard the Three Cs: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.” He couldn’t always believe them. Part of him continued to blame himself, searching for what he might have done differently. The self-recrimination was relentless, worse than any external judgment. And yet by the end, he came to accept the last two. He realized he had done everything he could.

A counsellor told families that if their child had cancer, support would flood in. The stigma of addiction silences people. We deny the severity of a loved one’s problem not because we’re naive, but because we can’t know. How do we assess what we cannot see? How do we measure destruction happening behind closed doors, in bloodstreams, in the architecture of a brain? We live in the uncertainty.

Sheff played a game with his daughter using a children’s book about luck and misfortune. His own version looped in his head. Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy. Unfortunately he is in addiction. Fortunately he is in recovery. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is not dead.

One day, Sheff realized he’d been terrified of losing Nic, but he’d already lost him. Nic was absent. Only his shell remained. The person was still breathing, but they were already gone.

Through the unbearable repetition of relapse and recovery, Sheff arrived at a soul-shaking lesson. He accepted that Nic would decide for himself how, and whether, he would live his life.

We all know someone—a child, a parent, a partner, a close friend from the rooms, who has struggled, who perhaps went back out, who seems hopeless. Some will make it. Some won’t. We should never give up hope—for recovery can and does happen every day. But we don’t have to die alongside them in the waiting. We can choose life for ourselves and in doing so, become the kind of steady presence that might actually matter, if they ever decide to reach for help.

Nic Sheff has been living in long-term recovery since 2011.

What illusion of control am I still clinging to with someone I love?

Where might letting go actually create space for something new to grow?

What would it look like to choose life for myself today, regardless of what someone else chooses?

How might my own recovery offer the steadiest invitation to those still struggling?

After the Meeting

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

There is no such thing as false hope.
— Mary Pipher, American psychologist and author of Reviving Ophelia (1994)

William Miller and Stephen Rollnick’s Motivational Interviewing offers practical techniques for helping people change. Here’s what they might look like in a hypothetical conversation.

A newcomer sits down with me after a meeting. He says he wants to stop but doesn’t know if he can. He’s tried before and it didn’t stick. Where do I start?

I could give advice. I could tell him what worked for me. Instead, I ask, “On a scale from 0 to 10, how confident are you that you could do this?” He says 3. “Why a 3 and not a 0?” Not “Why aren’t you at a 10?” That invites him to list obstacles. Asking why he’s not at zero invites him to name what’s already working. He knows what the first week feels like. I reflect it back. “So you’ve been through the hard part before and survived it.” He nods. He hears himself say it, then hears it again from me.

He mentions he was able to stop for two months last year. I ask, “How did you do that?” He tells me he stayed away from certain people, kept busy with work, went to the gym every morning. These are strategies. I reflect them back. “So you already know what works for you.” He hadn’t thought of it that way. Research shows most people need several serious attempts before change sticks. Two months wasn’t failure. It was practice.

I ask, “What qualities do you have that could help you?” He struggles. I try asking, “What might someone who knows you well say about you?” He says his brother would call him stubborn. I ask for an example. He tells me about a time he refused to quit on something everyone else had given up on. I let him hear himself describe his own resilience.

He feels stuck on how to start. We brainstorm together. I encourage him to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how unrealistic. I write them down without critique. Then I ask which seem most promising and why. I’m not solving his problem. I’m helping him discover he has more options than he thought.

I try hypothetical thinking. “Suppose it’s a year from now and you’ve done it. Looking back, what worked?” The distance frees up creativity. He starts describing a life he can picture.

I ask, “Who could help you with this?” Recovery doesn’t happen in isolation. Sometimes naming the people or organizations who could help makes the path feel less impossible. He mentions his brother again. A co-worker who’s in recovery. The people at the meeting tonight.

I raise challenges before they arise. “What might you do if the craving hits hard?” He solves obstacles in advance. When he names the solution himself, he believes it.

He asks what I think he should do. I offer a menu. “Here are three things that have worked for me or other people I know. Which fits you best?” Even in giving advice, I’m drawing out his judgment about what will work.

By the end of the conversation, he has his own plan. I didn’t install it. I drew it out. He arrived thinking he couldn’t do this. He leaves having heard himself say, out loud, in his own voice, why he can.

According to Miller and Rollnick, this is how we help people change. The person across from me has wisdom about themselves that I don’t have. They’ve lived inside their own skin longer than anyone. Our job is to ask questions that help them hear what they already know.

What questions could I ask instead of giving advice?

What wisdom might someone already carry that they haven’t recognized yet?

How could I help someone see their past attempts as practice, not failure?

Who treated me as who I could become before I got there?