We really believe that we can stop in mid-stride, change our whole self into some envisioned epiphany. In my experience it rarely if ever happens as we dream it.

Substituting addictions is a big reason we become swept away in an idea only to find ourselves drained and disappointed later. Pretending to be Neophytes to addiction one can not understand why others are not as excited or determined as they are. In their enthusiasm, they do not understand they are not the first nor the last to suddenly want to change for anyone except themselves.

The addict is soon crushed by physical cravings and feelings of separation brought about by their previous life choices. it is hard to think of the coming disconnect in a moment of clarity shortly after receiving that last fix. Perception of what is compared to an idea do not meld together well. For example a heavy tobacco user right after a cigarette finds it easy to envision how easy it will be to quit.

Ideas powerful, finding religion, a better way to live, discovering a purpose to ones life that never before existed is one of the most powerful chemical free experiences we as humans will ever have. Roads, byways, and families are littered with shells of people who failed to conquer their new fervor.

The addict after suffering the pain of withdrawal, or the new convert instead of finding bliss and peace, find pain, loneliness and emptiness, and despair, slinking back into the previous lifestyle. The focus occasionally shifts initially from the process, to the idea of the process, and then collapses upon itself. The addict and convert all too often are the carnage on the road of life adding feelings of defeat and worthlessness to their list of life problems.

There are two major processes working against success. The largest block to success is the years or decades one spent getting to this moment in ones life. We can not live a life of any type for any length of time and walk away from it in a moment of revelation without weighty repercussions to follow shortly.

The second major block to success is in the change itself. Because one suddenly chooses to embrace change does not mean change is ready to embrace them. No matter how hard one tries to change, nothing has initially changed except the desire to change.

It is impossible for anyone to make an immediate and permanent change to ones life without the intervention of something powerful and life changing outside of what is normal life. One of the best examples is the life of Stanley Tookie Williams.

Stanley Williams’ life was one one of polar change. Unfortunately, even Stanley Williams in his dramatic life changes, could not or would not let go of portions of his previous life outside of prison. Yet every moment of every day, someone decides they are going to change and leave everything of their previous life behind and believes they are now walking down a flower lined path.

Change happens in small difficult to measure steps. Anything faster is not change but a series of coincidences strung together appearing as change. At some point along the series of coincidences, change stops, and one is forced to contemplate nothing big has changed other than minor external events.

Instant change is a harmful illusion promised in infomercials. Real life is a series of challenges. Every one of us faces a lifetime of challenge. When the fervor of instant change seeps into your mind, and you start to be swept away by possibilities, remember the idiom, “Rome was not built in day”. Real change is a slow process measured in little victories over a long period. Anything else is a false promise leading to self blame and pointless recrimination.

Most of it is all illusion. Sure people are having fun, throwing parties, going to parties, and trading presents, but not all of them are having as much fun as they appear to be having. The number of people really having fun is about the same number that have fun all year round. Many people are feeling just as alone, unhappy with their life or their circumstances as they do any other time of year. Or perhaps a little more so because of the stress of the holidays.

Jim and Alice look so happy as always, but we never know the real story about Jim and Alice. We don’t know that Jim and Alice haven’t been able to pay all their bills in five months now. Jim has a drinking problem that he hides very well, but it is starting to take over his life. Alice is a compulsive shopper and has placed them in credit card debt hell so far that they will work until they are seventy to pay it all off.

Then there is the Marshall family. They always look so happy and the children are so well behaved. What we do not know is that Brad is a tyrant, wife beater, and child abuser. His wife Sharon acts so happy because she is terrified of the consequences when they get home if she does not. The kids are so well mannered because they live on pins and needles every day getting slapped around for reasons they can not understand.

Jill is having fun, but what we do not know is her gas was turned off last week, and she has no heat or hot water. She is cooking out of her microwave and taking cold showers.

Tom has a gambling habit, and is into the neighborhood loan sharks for more than he can ever pay off. He was roughed up last week and threatened with worse if he does not come up with the money he owes.

Carl is a coke head, but he hides it well. As long as they do not start random testing at his work, he will be okay for a few more months before it starts to take over his life.

Carol and her husband Earl? Well they have not shared the same bed in two years. She manages to fall asleep in front of the television, and Earl sleeps in the spare room. They say they are staying together for the children’s benefit.

Around ten all of us are ready to whip the world, there is no stopping us. By the time we become adults a lot has changed. Due to circumstances either of our own doing or too many bad breaks out of our control, life has worn many of us down and turned us into something we never imagined we would be.

Sometimes we all feel down and alone. That is perfectly natural, and balances all the times in our lives when our life is full and we haven’t a care in the world.

For many couple, though most are scared to admit it, the only thing worse than being alone is wishing you were. All those fictitious couples above probably wish they were alone, or had never become involved with the person who is sharing their nightmare of a life.

It is possible the non existent couples I wrote about thought that having anyone around was better than being alone. While in some cases that may be true, in most cases grabbing the first person that comes along and expecting them to make your life whole is not one of our better decisions.

Nothing stays the same in life, that is true. Some things only get worse until there is no worse to get to. Other things in our life are just temporary moments. A few days or weeks when we feel very vulnerable and alone. When these days occur instead of thinking how miserable our life is, we should take some time and consider how much worse our life could be.

Take a moment to know that what we feel at this moment is not our whole life. It is when our life is not the way we think it should be, an over examined piece of a normal life.

A few years later as I was nearing my teenage years there were the Hippies. I saw Hippies on television. They dressed kind of funny and they smoked a lot. They also seemed to be having a lot of fun and enjoying life. They were not serious and troubled like the adults around me seemed to be.

According to the adults around me they were bad kids who were on their way to big trouble. They were doing drugs. I was not sure what drugs were as they had not made their way into my little world, but being adults they seemed to know. At parties or small friday or have a beer or mixed drink get together at the nearest bar these hippies were discussed over glasses of beer and various concoctions of liquor some of the adults preferred instead of beer.

During my teenage years some of my friends and classmates started experimenting with pills they stole from their parents medicine cabinets. I could not see anything in taking pills for heart trouble, boys taking birth control pills, or what other pills they found in their quest to discover, but the effects were funny and probably fairly serious at the same time. Watching them get sick, they did not look anything like the hippies on television or the drinking adults that were still talking about them.

Somewhere along the line probably from anti smoking campaigns at school led by those few teachers who did not smoke, I learned about addictions. After graduation between late teens and adult hood, I took up smoking and learned about addiction first hand. It is something I would not recommend anyone try out. It goes from new and interesting to something you aren’t happy about, but can’t seem to change, to deciding it’s either quit or eventually die from.

I eventually realized people with addictions were constantly in my life. People with drinking addictions, smoking addictions, even some of the women who talked about the characters in, The Valley Of The Dolls, probably never realized the book was also about them, as they were addicts and did not know it. As I left those things and some of those people, I thought I left addiction behind me.

Over the years as I opened my eyes to what was, and not what I thought there should be I had to come to terms with the idea, that I never left people with addictions somewhere else, in my past. All I had managed to do was distance myself from the addictions that I saw in those around me. I had been living in a rose colored bubble and did not see what really was.

Every day no matter where I go, or what I do there are people who are addicted to something. Shopping addicts, gambling addicts, excitement addicts, food addicts, gun addicts, political addicts, internet addicts, even work addicts to name a few addictions. Whatever we as humans do and most of us enjoy, someone is addicted to it, and it is causing untold problems in their lives.

One of the most frustrating truths of life for me is knowing no one can help any of these people. Unless they reach a point that they are willing to change, they continue feeding their addictions, or jumping from addiction to addiction because that is there personality. Legal gambling is a good microcosm of addiction.

When I play poker, I play with people who are addicts. Some of them hate poker, but think playing poker hides their excessive drinking, or need for excitement craving. Other people who think poker is immoral, yet spend too much of their income on state sponsored gambling, lottery tickets or scratchers. Such is life as we know it.

We also are not very understanding of other people’s battles with personal demons that torment them. For example, it is hard for a woman with a model’s figure to have anyone take her serious when she says she battles constant cravings for chocolate cake, or candy bars. In the same light, it is hard for someone in a bar downing their third bottle of beer, to find someone to feel sorry for them when they say they can not control their drinking.

I find it odd that we are so quick to judge others for not being able to control those desires that attempt to run their lives, but we expect to the world to rally behind us and help us with our daily struggles. The irony of this thinking is it is almost like Moses parting a  Sea of desire, but with unhealthy desires on one side of the dry land pathway, and our own demon driven desires on the other. We tend to rationalize our desires and cravings as being more serious than the cravings and desires of others.

I imagine if we looked deep into our self, we would find that we have passions and wants that drive us just as hard, but they are what most people see as healthy desires. Because they are seen as healthy, we give into them easily, and do not spend a lot of time thinking about how hard it would be not to give into them.

The gauge we use as a serious meter for fighting with our own personal demons is rather weighted also. For example pretend there is an addiction group of some type meeting in a room right now. It is a non specific addiction group, and open to anyone with an addiction. There may be several different people with as many addictions or personal demons present. One person may be at the far end of a serious drug addiction, another may have root beer flavored hard candy addiction, one may be a porn addict, and a fourth may have an eating problem. They all would be there battling their own personal demons of addiction, but with ourselves looking in from the outside, would be quick to rate and judge the degree of seriousness of each persons separate addiction.

Generally we would rate the drug addict as the most serious person in need, and the root beer hard candy eater as something trivial and probably not to be taken seriously. We do this because we rarely judge someone’s addiction on the level of pain it is causing in a life. Rather we rate the seriousness of an addiction on how it affects a person’s life, health and well being. Yet in reality, all the people in the group are suffering in their own hell, all with about the same level of torment in their day to day lives.

Of course when we get right down to comparing addiction or personal demons that torment our daily lives, almost no one has an addictions are as serious as our own. Other people suffering from their addictions can stop them any time they wish. Our personal demons on the other hand are more serious and take much more effort to control.

If only life really worked like that…we would have a handful of people with serious problems caused by their addictions, and it would be much easier to focus attention on those few people. In the mean time, I am going to continue struggling with the demons my life that haunt me because they are much more serious than everyone else’s. If you do not think my personal addictions are more serious than those of others, just ask. Of course anyone else with the same answer is probably lying….

What I do not understand is it appears the program is based on something outside of a person. The idea that addiction is not something I do, but something I can not control and need help with, is the way I understand the program foundation. I am sure I am not the first person to question this concept, but it does seem odd to me. If there were a smoker’s anonymous I would not have shown up at the first meeting and told the group that I can not control my smoking addiction? If I could not control my smoking then logic makes me think I would still be smoking today?

After all how can I not control something, and yet be able to quit when it becomes less important than something else? If I was helplessly addicted to smoking, then I would still be a smoker, or be an almost dead smoker from one of the many smoking diseases. In my case I replaced smoking with something more important to me. That something was not becoming one of the people almost dead from a smoking disease.

If there had been a smokers anonymous, I fail to see what I would have gained joining the group? What kind of mind trick is it to be addicted to something that I can not stop on my own and expect someone else to do it for me? Perhaps it is a need that an Anonymous program solves to mend the reason that causes the abuse? Perhaps the real need is to have another person(s) intervene in someone’s behalf that helps them change their behavior?

I really do not know, and I am projecting possibilities of how these programs work. For myself, it seems I continue a behavior until that behavior is no longer important. I relate it to being young, and lonely. How lonely does a person have to be before they accept that maybe they are responsible for their loneliness? If no one knows you are alive, you can not expect someone to find you, and want to hang out with you, or you with them.

My greatest respect to you if you are in one of these programs and it is working for you. More respect for the people who keep the meetings going who were once walking through the doors for the first time themselves. I know I could not spend several hours a week hanging around with smokers, and not take up smoking again myself and become addicted again. It takes some special internal fortitude. How does one be intimate and distant at the same time in these meetings? Perhaps in the anonymous process people find a new kind of courage, or determination that helps them maintain distance while at the same time being close, and able to make real change in helping someone with their addiction.

I have found in my life that bad habits I had were only around until they were replaced by something that I wanted more. Maybe that is the key to why the programs work? People wake up one day so desperate that they want release more than anything else? They look around and the only hand being held out for them is an Anonymous hand, and they take it, because they can’t go through another day living like they are. Then perhaps through the strength of that anonymous hand they conquer their addiction.

Good people all of them. If these good people did not exist, we would have one less measure of how truly wonderful our lives are. Because we can use these people as a measuring stick of how good our lives truly are, we can also see the amazing miracle the people running anonymous meetings really are. I hope I measure up, at least to the length their shadows on a noon day.

I started down the process of what I believed and why. Some of my earliest memories floated into my thoughts. One that I remember fondly is my parents sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes, and talking quietly. The sunshine was pouring its rays in through the windows. It must not have been summer time because all the windows were closed.

So here I am, a young child, and the room is filling with small billowing clouds of cigarette smoke floating in the air, looking like approaching fog in a scary movie. I remember sitting on the floor looking at the clouds of smoke moving lazily around the room filling up the clear spots. Just like the clouds I would see outside. I thought how fun it would be to fly through them!

So I did want any little kid would do seeing the smoke and thinking about the clouds outside. I stood up, put my arms straight out from my side and pretended to be an airplane as I ran around the room tilting to and fro. It is such a happy memory from when I was a child. Everything was right with the world. As young children we play, sleep, and play some more, such is our world at that age.

My next thought was thinking about my beliefs and why did I start smoking when I did? I thought of all the not smoking teaching I had in school when I was older, not the specifics, but the general pertinent points. I remember coming home from school and parroting to my folks how bad smoking was for them, and asking them if they would quit? Back in those days, some doctors still advised their patients to either take up smoking because it would help them relax, or keep smoking for those same reasons. My parents doctor was in that group, so they said.

When smoking and other poor health habits caught up with my Dad, he was forced to go to the hospital having a major heart attack. Not the minor ones, he thought he had suffered from previously that he chose to blame on indigestion. He lived through that heart attack, and was instructed by the doctor that treated him to quit smoking, and start walking at least a mile a day.

One of my fathers brothers had a heart attack within the year (same health habits), and the doctor gave him the same instructions. Quit smoking and exercise to heal his heart and lengthen his life. I remember my Father and Uncle talking after my uncle had been released from the hospital. They were sitting on the porch smoking, discussing their heart attacks and the doctors instructions. It did not take them long to agree the doctors were wrong. They agreed that quitting smoking, and exercising would place too much dangerous stress on their hearts. It would probably kill them. They both agreed with this thought, sitting on the porch smoking.

As I worked through this line of smoking, I knew why it was so easy for me to start smoking. I knew then much of what I believed in, and sometimes believed in strongly came from the earliest memory’s of my world as a child. Almost everything from what foods I did and did not like, to my faith was an auto install from when I was a child. It sure was disconcerting to think that a large part of my belief system came from a time when I was too young to question what was going on in my young child life. I felt suddenly like I was standing at the edge of he Grand Canyon. So started the journey of evaluating almost every thought and belief I ever held. I was already a non smoker by this time…thankfully.

Once I arrived at this point, I knew why they believed what they did, and how haphazard my own beliefs might be. It is a serious undertaking to think that everything you think you know may be wrong and you are living in a belief system that is built on sand that could wash away any moment. I have found it is better for my life, to go through the validating, and throw away process of everything I believed in than to simply wrap myself in what was the cotton candy forming the bedrock of my life.

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