Bulletproof Recovery: Stop Addiction Forever!

By Paul W. Anderson, PhD

Relapse can attack and ruin your recovery like the bullets from a drive-by shooting. Fifty percent of all people who attempt recovery from addictive behavior relapse. How do you sustain sobriety?

Bad ideas lead to good people dying. Not because ideas kill, but because bad ideas die-hard and these ideas form the hot beds for addictions to thrive. Addictions kill People dont realize they have killer ideas floating around in their heads. However, if you attempt recovery from addiction and achieve sobriety, you will quickly run into these bad ideas. Certain bad ideas must die so sobriety can live.

Examples of Bulletproof thinking that counteract bad ideas:

Bad Idea: Staying sober has little to do with the shape you or your life is in. Just use your program and you will be okay.

Bulletproof Idea: The better shape you are in, the better your recovery program will work for you.

Bad Idea: What you feel is what is real.

Bulletproof Idea: Thoughts are as important as feelings to sustain recovery.

Bad Idea: Pain can kill you.

Bulletproof Idea: Pain cannot kill you. What you do about pain can.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea! Bulletproof Recovery gives you the keys and step-by-step direction to cure stinking thinking and stay sober from any addiction. The formula is based on this fact: addiction thrives in the lives of people who take poor care of themselves. Chapter 6, The Seven Highly Successful Keys To Sustained Sobriety, starts to fill your recovery tool box. Your thinking changes with chapter 8, From Selfish to Self Care and gets you ready To Prevent Relapse, Put Yourself In Hospital and Stay There (chapter 10). In chapter 13, you learn You Cant Cure an Addiction, But You Can Outgrow One and chapter 15 gives you insight into Balance: Living In the Eye of the Hurricane.

Be good to yourself. Get Bulletproof Recovery and stop addiction forever!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469111285

Paul W. Anderson, PhD

Paul W. Anderson, Ph.D. has learned the patterns of those who successfully defy the odds and avoid relapse. With Bulletproof Recovery, Dr. Anderson uses straight talk and insight to help you discover the path of least resistance to stop addiction forever. Discover the secrets to addiction free living! A licensed psychologist in private practice for twenty years and a national certified addictions counselor, Dr. Anderson regularly conducts workshops and training events in addiction and recovery. He is at ease conveying complicated ideas in simple to understand ways. Dr. Anderson’s earlier written works include poetry and short stories, some of which have appeared in the literary press. He lives in Kansas City, MO with his wife and five daughters.

Book preview

Copyright © 2000 by Paul W. Anderson, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I:

DEALING WITH BULLET-RIDDLED THINKING ABOUT RECOVERY

CHAPTER 1

Stinking Thinking Makes Recovery Stink

CHAPTER 2

Signs of Your Times

CHAPTER 3

What Keeps You Needy and Depleted?

CHAPTER 4

Caution: Danger Ahead. Be Mindful. Stay Awake.

CHAPTER 5

The Pie of Life and the Seven Slices of Human Need

CHAPTER 6

The Seven Highly Successful Keys To Sustained Sobriety

PART II:

PREPARATION FOR BUILDING THE INNER BULLETPROOF SHIELD

CHAPTER 7

Depletion Is Not Your Natural State: It Comes With Great Effort

CHAPTER 8

From Selfish to Self Care

CHAPTER 9

Anatomy of Addiction

PART III:

YOUR BULLETPROOF RECOVERY: MAKING THE CHANGES

CHAPTER 10

To Prevent Relapse Put Yourself In Hospital and Stay There!

CHAPTER 11

The Alarm is Not the Fire: How to Tell Feeling from Thought

CHAPTER 12

Feel, Think, Then Act: The Sober Way to Make Choices

CHAPTER 13

You Can’t Cure an Addiction, But You Can Outgrow One

CHAPTER 14

The Bulletproof Cycle of Solid Recovery

CHAPTER 16

Making Changes That Last

PART IV:

BULLETPROOF RECOVERY FOR LIFE

CHAPTER 17

The Solution to Addiction is Locked in Your Heart: Wants Are the Key

CHAPTER 18

Hodgepodge of Wonder: Tips for Success

CHAPTER 19

A Final Word: Details

READING LIST

MORE

Cartographers who helped me reach the point I could make my own maps for life include:

Ozzie Eggers

Pam Anderson

Deborah Shouse

Chuck Mallory

Carl Whitaker

Wheeler and Eileen Anderson

This book is dedicated to readers who have courage to use the maps for recovery contained herein to assist them traverse the terrain of their lives in ways that are good for them.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Julia Cameron

If you’re in recovery from addiction, you know that relapse can hit you randomly, and unexpectedly, seemingly for no apparent reason. Relapse can attack and ruin your recovery like bullets from a drive-by shooting.

For twenty years I have worked with people in their struggles to deal with alcoholism and other addictions. The biggest problem has not been getting them sober. What ever the addiction, the toughest goal to achieve is relapse prevention. Fifty percent of all people who attempt recovery from addictive behavior relapse. How do you sustain sobriety?

Eventually I realized that bad ideas were killing good people. Bad ideas die hard and these ideas form the hot beds for addictions to thrive. Most people do not realize they have killer ideas floating around in the sea of their emotional and conceptual framework. However, if you attempt recovery from addiction and achieve sobriety, you have to confront these bad ideas.

Here’s what often happens: one day you make a break for recovery. You stop your addictive behavior of choice and make progress with sobriety. Life begins to gain some sanity. Recovery seems possible. Day by day, whatever it takes, you do it; meetings, getting a sponsor, counseling, self-help books, and even treatment.

You keep plugging away at your recovery plan, but you notice things around you are shifting. People you care about resist relating to the new, sober you. They don’t take you seriously about this recovery stuff and begin to innocently offer you your addiction ofchoice. Your kid says you lost the right to have authority over him when you were using. Your spouse says he or she liked you better the way you used to be, drinking or using. You’ve lost the old people and places and have not yet replaced them. Loneliness, self-doubt, confusion, craving and stress repossess you.

Then it happens. When you least expect it, some life event drives by, shooting relapse bullets straight at you and you have no protection. You relapse or change to another addiction. Perhaps you stop the addictive behavior once again, but your recovery is hollow, white-knuckle sobriety. You worry when you will again lose sobriety; you wonder where is the joy and serenity you had been promised? Dodging relapse bullets can be exhausting and self-destructive. You need a Bulletproof way to stay with recovery and prevent relapse.

Addiction Lives In the Lives of People Who Take Poor Care of Themselves

How do you sustain sobriety? To find the answer, I went back to basic questions about addiction. What do people get out of addiction? What are they trying to do for themselves when they drink or use or addict in whatever way? Answer: they feel better, if only for a short time. And, What makes them feel bad in the first place? The stress of living. What happens to people under stress? Answer: people become anxious. Then I saw the bottom line: anxiety and addiction go hand in hand.

Addictive behaviors come into your life when you do things that make you feel better, but do not reduce your anxiety in the long run. There is nothing wrong with trying to feel better. People always drink or addict for good reasons, meaning they are trying to feel better and deal with stress. Addiction comes from trying to deal with anxiety in ineffectual ways. Most of us have not realized that anxiety is the real culprit. Neither have we been taught how to take care of anxiety head on.

I found two kinds of anxiety: acute and chronic. Acute anxietyis occasional. It’s what happens when you see a lion in the road. A problem presents itself. You deal with it and your anxiety goes back down.

Chronic anxiety is always present. Its high and stays high, giving rise to a life-style of chaos and perpetual intensity. You are born into it and you swim in it. If you live chronic high anxiety and you see a lion in the road, the anxiety spikes off your already high anxiety level.

What does anxiety do to people? At first, it increases certain physiological conditions such as heart rate, adrenaline level, blood pressure and blood flow.

If the anxiety level goes higher, eventually it shuts down problem solving ability. The thinking side of the brain under-functions. Poor decisions are made. Later, when the anxiety subsides, you ask, What was I thinking when I did that?

You weren’t thinking, you couldn’t. That’s the problem with high anxiety. It compounds and complicates already complicated, difficult life situations. Now, you really want relief, quick!

Neediness and depletion feed high levels of chronic anxiety. If you are chronically anxious, you do not take good care of yourself. As a result, survival is constantly threatened. When survival is threatened, you get anxious. Chronic, high anxiety is created and maintained by a lifestyle of poor self-care.

Feeling bad is a daily fact if you are stuck in chronic anxiety. The bad feeling may not register consciously. It is embedded in your lifestyle and you are accustomed to feeling this way. To be able to cope and function, you will likely form addictive patterns in your life around substances and activities that give you enough relief from the anxiety and bad feelings to keep on functioning. This reinforces the addiction.

I came to this conclusion: poor levels of self-care result in chronic, high levels of need and in turn, chronic, high anxiety. Ultimately, the anxiety feeds addiction. If your needs are met and you are well cared for, you are in better shape than the person who is not taking good care of self.

If you are having trouble maintaining solid, lasting sobriety, you are not in good shape. You have high levels of unmet needs and, as a result, you are not managing your anxiety. You are feeding an addiction and giving it strength with your anxiety, the very thing you use the addiction to try to take care of.

I began working with clients with this premise in mind: if you focus on self and put daily self-care foremost, the addiction(s) will automatically dissolve and stay dormant. This is the path of least resistance to solid recovery. With regular self-care, your life will not produce enough consistent anxiety to feed a full-grown addiction. The addiction gets starved into a weakened condition and can no longer run your life. This approach worked!

This is effective and efficient relapse prevention. This is whole living. This is abundant recovery. This is the healthy and successful lifestyle you crave and deserve.

Despite such a simple and effective idea, the old, bad ideas in the minds of my clients did not simply move over and give way to self-care. To deal with this, I developed a system of therapy and training that shielded them from relapse bullets. This program exterminated bad ideas and gave Bulletproof Recovery ideas space to grow.

This book gives you that system of thought and practice. It is simple and straightforward. Bulletproof Recovery presents the sequence of ideas and actions you need to quickly and efficiently achieve relapse-free recovery.

Bulletproof Ideas Save Lives

Before you start on the path of least resistance to lasting Bulletproof Recovery, let me give you some examples of Bulletproof thinking that can counteract bad ideas:

• Bad Idea: Staying sober has little to do with the shape you or your life is in. Just use your program and you will be okay.

•   Bulletproof Idea: The better shape you are in, the better your recovery program will work for you.

•   Bad Idea: What you feel is what is real.

•   Bulletproof Idea: Thoughts are as important as feelings to sustain recovery.

•   Bad Idea: Pain can kill you.

•   Bulletproof Idea: Pain cannot kill you. What you do about pain can.

•   Bad Idea: The high road to recovery is something outside yourself, a program, a person, a book or what others think of you.

•   Bulletproof Idea: Your thoughts and actions feed you, not what you get from others.

There are many bad ideas that need to die so sobriety can live.

Stay awake as you read. Be willing to let your thinking change.

Use these pages that follow to acquire Bulletproof ideas and bringlasting, addiction-free recovery into your life.

Synopsis of Bulletproof Recovery

Here are the bulletproof premises of this book:

•   Addictive and compulsive behaviors stay alive on only one food, anxiety. The higher chronic anxiety in your life, the more active will be your addictive and compulsive behaviors.

•   Anxiety management will control addiction. Keeping anxiety low will starve the addiction. Focusing on relapse prevention to stay sober is like thinking about hunger to stay healthy.

•   The source of chronic, high anxiety is a lifestyle of neediness. When your needs are not meet on a regular basis, there is an accompanying high level of anxiety.

•   To keep anxiety down, take good care of yourself on a regular basis and meet all your needs.

•   To meet your needs and take good care of yourself on a consistent basis, you must be alert, conscious, willing and able to focus daily on the task of taking action for yourself in each slice of the Pie of Life. This may require learning new patterns in your life that can keep you awake to self and your needs.

•   When attending to your needs becomes a matter of fact and characterizes your lifestyle, anxiety lowers and stays low. With this comes better balance between critical opposites such as your inner and outer worlds, yourself and others, and separateness and togetherness in relationships. With balance in your life, you are able to avoid extremes that generate anxiety.

•   Success with regular self-care builds the structure that channels the natural and powerful energy of recovery into your life. This is recovery on the path of least resistance.

PART I:

DEALING WITH BULLET-RIDDLED THINKING ABOUT RECOVERY

CHAPTER 1

Stinking Thinking Makes Recovery Stink

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. from A New Path to The Waterfall, by Raymond Carver (writer and recovered alcoholic)

Are you sober? I ask my client. Dave, the client, says, Yes. I nod, and Dave can see a small smile of approval flicker on his therapist’s lips. Good, says Dr. Anderson. That’s good. Keep it up. Now, what shall we talk about today? The client relaxes and settles into the chair’s cushions.

Yeah, that is good. I feel good, but, I have trouble at work with my boss, Dave says and the rest of the hour is spent discussing how to manage his work problem. Neither Dave nor Dr. Anderson gives another thought to sober or what each person may have meant when they used the word.

If Dave was an active alcoholic for 12 years, went through treatment, gave up alcohol and embraced the AA program in