Addiction & Recovery , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Nick Shepley

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62 pages

English

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All the best recovery meetings I have ever been to start with a story, so I will tell you mine. If you identify with it - good - but try to look for the similarities and not the differences. Addiction and Recovery is contains teachings from many different sources; some are the ideas of eminent psychologists, others are from the pages of spiritual books and the minds of spiritual thinkers. Much of the book combines aspects of the AA 12 Step Programme. However, this book is not endorsed by them it might challenge you in places, ask you to at least entertain a few new ideas or give you directions to places you've dreamt of visiting all your life but have never believed you could reach, but for now, think of it as sanctuary.

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Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	20 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849899277
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page

ADDICTION & RECOVERY

By
Nick Shepley

Publisher Information

Addiction & Recovery published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

Copyright © Nick Shepley

The right of Nick Shepley to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Welcome Dear Friend

I feel very much like a host who, after receiving a visitor has the great pleasure to invite them in from the cold and offer them a safe place to relax, feel looked after and at home. Think of this eBook as a haven for you as you use it. It might challenge you in places, ask you to at least entertain a few new ideas or give you directions to places you’ve dreamt of visiting all your life but have never believed you could reach, but for now, think of it as sanctuary.
If I were literally greeting you at my door as a traveller, what would I see? Would I welcome in a weary and exhausted person? Comfort someone who felt impossibly alone most of the time, and then at other times desperate for their comforting fix of drink or drugs, but constantly fearful? Would I welcome in someone who was still hopeful that they could be free from fear, anxiety and loneliness at last? Or someone who has given up all hope? Whoever you might be, know that you are safe here, that there is nothing to fear in the coming pages and everything to gain. I have included in this book some of the most essential things that have been taught to me which have brought me from the very brink of death and despair to my current life now; a happy, sober and free-world where I have a destiny and purpose at last whereby fear and aloneness are things of the past.
Firstly, I must make one or two things clear. This book contains teachings from many different sources; some are the ideas of eminent psychologists, others are from the pages of spiritual books and the minds of spiritual thinkers. Much of the book combines aspects of the AA 12 Step Programme. However, this book is not endorsed by them (simply because at least two of the 12 Traditions of AA prohibit the organisation from getting involved in any outside programme. Tradition 6 states: An AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
So that’s part of the preamble out of the way. Now there are just a few other things to mention. Firstly with each section there are going to be a few exercises, things for you to write down and to do.
Don’t skip these. It is essential that you complete these simple exercises. If you don’t then you will probably not achieve a lasting recovery. We cannot simply think ourselves better, we must take action.
Secondly, I will create summaries at the end of each of the first four sections, so that they are easy to cut out and keep. You might want to keep them with you during your day as something you can refer to and look at just to remind yourself of the basics that will keep you sober and away from your addiction.
Finally, I will tend to talk about alcoholism a lot because that was my addiction. If your addiction is spending, heroin, sex, eating, gambling, risk taking or something else, remember the principals of recovery are all the same, irrespective of the drug. The drug is simply the means for triggering a change in state that we addicts crave, and the reason we crave it is because we have learned to use this change in state to deal with life….instead of actually dealing with life.
This is an eBook devoted to getting well and also finding your true purpose in life, if you’ve been sick with the illness of addiction, maybe you’ve daydreamed once or twice about what you’re really in this world for, now you’re here to really find out.
If you’re new to recovery or if you’ve been sober for a while, or even if you’re just wondering if the time has come for you to address whatever has been holding you back from real happiness, this is the site for you. It might be a good idea to do the written work in this eBook in a journal or diary so that you have a completed record of everything should you wish to refer to it later.

My Story

All the best recovery meetings I have ever been to start with a story, so I will tell you mine. If you identify with it - good - but try to look for the similarities and not the differences.
I had a relatively normal childhood in suburban England and the Far East. I grew up in the 1980s and had loving parents, an affluent lifestyle and nothing particularly to complain about. From about the age of 13 though, I had what Lawrence Fishburne in the Matrix might describe as a ‘splinter in the mind’. There simply seemed to be something amiss in my world, something, that as a young boy I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I seemed to be constantly restless, bored, discontent, frustrated and lonely. Other kids wanted to talk about football, play tennis or look at magazines of fast cars. I just wanted to escape, always to escape. I was a fantasist, disappearing into my own worlds, occasionally bringing those worlds back with me by being an appalling liar and a fantasist.
Have you ever had an overwhelming feeling of being different? I think everyone has, it’s innate in all of us to some extent, but I think most people in the teens or early adulthood shake it off. Not so with me. As a young boy and a teenager I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere, every new town I lived in, every country that I visited seemed unable to be a home to me. I think perhaps I found alcohol in the end because I had a deep feeling of being adrift in the world, like a leaf on a pond, not anchored to anyone or anything. Where did all this come from? I don’t know, I’m no psychoanalyst and maybe the point isn’t about where it came from but what to do when it manifested itself in drinking.
Alcohol had held little interest for me the first few times I tried it. It was really waiting for its moment to arrive, waiting for the conditions to be just right and those conditions arrived when I was about 16.
After years of horrendous bullying at school, the fantasist was desperate for escape. I felt a perpetual and perennial shame at being myself and when I properly discovered alcohol, I knew it had an effect on me that it didn’t seem to have on any of my contemporaries. I recall getting drunk on cheap cider whilst I was with friends, they were content to have a drink and go home. I got extremely drunk on a small quantity of the stuff and quickly began to crave more. I was astounded when they simply decided to go home. I couldn’t believe they didn’t feel the way I did. I had found something extraordinary, a ‘magic door’ as I thought of it as.
This magic door took me to a place where nothing mattered, I was free to be and do anything I wanted, liberated from consequences and from the cacophony of fears, doubts and the ongoing sense of loneliness that never seemed to leave me. This place made me relax, made me feel, well, whole... For the first time I felt complete and I would constantly be trying to recapture that feeling for the next 15 years.
When I went to university the brakes came off my drinking. I knew from the outset that that was what I had gone away for. I purposely went to the far north of Scotland, 300 miles away from my family, to hide away and lose myself in alcohol. I was so full of fear and anxiety that I concluded (unconsciously) that at the age of 18 I would simply use drinking to construct a new identity for myself. I had vague rock and roll fantasies that alcohol would be an easy and accessible portal to some dimension of popularity, sexual abundance and kudos.
It was not to be alas. Unlike in the movies, where someone has half a sherry and next thing they’re drinking the bar dry, or a once good kid has a joint and winds up addicted to crack the next day, my illness played a long game and this is the skill of the illness, it creeps up on you so slowly you don’t know it is there until it is too late. The things that had not been acceptable a few years beforehand became commonplace when I became a regular drinker. Missing study, failing exams, ignoring essential tasks like tidying, cleaning my clothes and food shopping, all these things that would have been an anathema to me started to be regular features of my life.

When we change as individuals for good or ill, it’s always a gradual process; otherwise our sense of ‘who we are’ will not tolerate anything too drastic. However, when things happened to me that were dramatically out of character (I say happened to me, but it was normally me doing these things), I had moments where the drinking was threatened. By this I mean that the landscape of my drinking was illuminated from time to time by a great lightning flash, the places it was taking me to and the things that I was starting to do when drunk led to that fleeting moment of fear that everything was completely out of control.
I woke one morning after a university ball, still wearing the formal wear from the evening before, and my housemate came in and, trembling with anger, he asked “do you remember hitting me last night?”
I thought I had dreamt it. No, no, it was real. I had had a row with him over