Before I dive into the main topic, I want to think through some differences between alcoholism, drug addiction, tobacco addiction, dangerous sports, and even gambling. Some of these addictions have a social component to them. It’s fun to go to a casino and gamble. You might drink alone sometimes, but it’s a lot of fun to drink yourself into a stupor with a group. You don’t feel so pathetic. Even smoking, where you probably smoke most of your cigarettes alone, comes with a smoke break at the office with a coworker.
Now contrast this with sex addiction and food addiction, the kind that would be deeply shameful if people discovered them. Going out for dinner and gluttony with your friends is a social event. There’s no guarantee anyone is doing that addictively, it might be a one off. But food addictions that involve starvation and purging are private. There doesn’t seem to be a social component to that at all. I bring this up because it’s another reason recovery is harder for some people. There’s more shame attached, and fewer places to turn. On the other hand, the addictions with a social component can form a different kind of attachment that makes quitting harder. Losing your friends at the bar is an ominous thought when you already feel delicate. I’m not sure this all connects perfectly, but I wanted to put it out there.
Self-help is the basis of life on earth, for probably all creatures. Each entity must be able to preserve itself, and it’s designed that way. Fast forward to complex humans. Self-help means when we’re thirsty, we reach for a glass of water and drink it. Before our self-help years, as children, we need the support of our elders and caretakers. We’re entirely dependent on them at a certain age. We grow more intelligent and capable, and we have to learn how to do things for ourselves, but we’re all limited creatures. Not all of us are going to learn how to make thirty five million dollars, fly an airplane, or clean a carburetor.
The kind of self-help we’re talking about here, in addiction recovery, is this, since you alone live in your mind, and you alone are responsible for your actions, you alone are responsible for deciding how to stop something. You are responsible for picking up a book and reading it, for getting information, for following suggestions, for doing the daily routines, the regimen. You are responsible for making sure that each and every day you don’t fall into dark mental obsessions, and for regulating your nervous system. If you can’t do it, if you’ve become aware enough to know there’s a task at hand and you simply can’t get it done, can you self-help yourself enough to go find other people to help you? Reaching out to others is itself a component of self-help. It takes willingness.
Some people have to hit rock bottom, to feel the absolute most pain, before they’re motivated to say I’m going to change. Other people don’t have to reach rock bottom. They can raise the bottom up. They can say, I see the danger that’s coming, and I’m going to stop. I cannot write enough words to motivate you toward self-help. I could keep writing, stay with you, put enough words on the page to take you another eighty seven years to read, but at some point it’s you alone who has to say, okay, I understand it, and I’m going to do this particular action today.
Some people cannot motivate themselves. Something is broken, something is missing. The scientific community would call it neurosis, mental illness. They’d offer dozens of accurate diagnoses to explain each cause that prevents a person from doing better for themselves. In my writing I don’t talk about criminality much, but I look at it and ask whether it’s the other end of the spectrum from health and wellness. When a person’s mental faculties and character bring them to the point of doing harm to others and damaging society, that is definitely not self-help, even if it’s getting them something they want.
If you’re reading this now, you’re already working on yourself. You’re in self-help mode. You don’t need to learn anything else. It’s good to learn, and you’ll be better for it, but right now you don’t actually need anything else except to start taking deep breaths and plan your next best action. With eating disorders, the next best action, to me, is to find a fabulous, highly experienced senior therapist who specializes in eating disorders. No matter what it costs, no matter how you get it done, as long as it’s compassionate, get into it. Progress comes in combination with self-help tactics, regulating yourself rather than being reliant only on a therapist to medicate you or tell you that you’re great. Work on your breathing practices, your writing practices, even being of service early on to others who struggle. These are the self-help parts, even if your program involves total reliance on others. If you’re institutionalized and surrounded by mental health experts, you still have to participate. There’s still a component of choice. If you couldn’t make that choice, you couldn’t be reading this.
So if you’re not helping yourself, what you need is some training, and you need to get your nervous system down to a much lower volume of anxiety, to think clearly enough, with enough reason and ratio, to start something today, right now, even if that something is reading. If you want to add to it, I’d do ten full deep cycles of breath through the nose, just observe the thought patterns, then write a little about how you’re feeling, maybe read one page from a good philosophy book. If you completed all that, you had an epic day. Tomorrow we’ll do the same thing, and in time we’ll add a tiny bit more for you to handle.
For now, do the absolute minimum you can achieve, but don’t do nothing. If you can only read one word in a self-help book today, that’s better than reading no words, because willingness increases its power the more you exercise it. Some days you’ll wake up feeling burnt out and tired. Some days you’ll wake up with anxiety and not understand why. Some days you’ll catch yourself in a compulsion. Breathe. Understand. Just watch it happening, like you’re watching a documentary. At the end of the day, if you can find your way to dead body pose and take twenty full deep inhalations and exhalations, you’re making progress.
If you see yourself drifting away, like you woke up and a week went by and you did nothing, stop that right now. Go back to your writing. Remember, it’s natural for people with a traumatized mind to forget to do things that are helpful.
I’m reminded of a metaphor from skydiving. In the data on skydiving fatalities, say there are thirty fatalities, and ten of them can be attributed to the jumper not pulling their handle, or pulling too low. We don’t fully know how a trained person can leave an airplane, not be knocked unconscious, and simply fail to pull their handle to deploy their parachute, separate from someone doing that as a form of suicide. The logical explanation is that something startled them, even traumatized them, and the level of anxiety shut down the mechanical, rational brain. In their anxiety, they fixated on the wrong things. They couldn’t stay focused on the one thing that mattered most, getting a parachute over their head before they ran out of time.
It reminds me of anxiety in general. When we’re startled, and remain in anxious states long enough, we live in traumatized states where simple tasks become impossible. Reading, remembering, hearing ourselves, these become monumental. We need somebody to hold our hand. It’s understandable, and we should be compassionate with ourselves, because look where we came from. Life is hard.