Why the Steps Matter: The Blueprint for Lasting Recovery

Why it is so important to have structure around you while you work your recovery. 

Transcript

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I'm again for Dr. Addiction Life Guard podcast. I am Dr. Doctor Burger Psychologist, License Professional California Addiction Special. You are suffering from addiction, injury, trauma, whatever it is. I'm here to help. You're in search of help. Try to get your life back together. Join me here at Dr. Addiction Life Guard, the Addiction Recovery Podcast. I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes, but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Hey everybody, it's me, Doc Shock, again. I wanted to have a little talk with you about something that uh comes up really regularly for me in my practice with my clients, but um it's it's the avenue of how in the world do you put structure around recovery, especially if you um have never been to rehab, or if you have been to rehab, what and you're getting out, uh see you're in a lot of structure when you're in rehab. That's the whole point of it, right? Uh structure and function. So what do you do when you get out into the wild amongst the citizens, you know, the civilians? What do you do? Where's the structure? And and uh if we if we go along with the idea that isolation is addiction's best friend, uh you're just gonna start isolating again. I see it all the time. All the time. Clients get out of rehab, or maybe they never went, but they're out there on the streets where they can actually use. And guess what happens? They start using pretty quickly. Um, so what's the structure? Well, the structure is is groups. Um, smart recovery, AA, NA, uh, OA, SA, any of the A's, and or anything else that's like the A's. Um, any other, you know, non-A group, it's a structured formatted group. So what do they do in the 12 steps? The 12 steps, right? That's the whole point of it. It's not just about sitting in a room and talking to people, um, and that's certainly a big part of it, but it's the steps. And so there's a common misconception about what the steps are. And I'm not going to go over each step. I you can listen to my other podcast about that. I don't want to specifically talk about individual steps. I just want to talk about the step props process, the whole step process. That's what I wanted to talk about. So what is it? You know, if you if you've never been to a meeting, and believe it or not, I run into addicts all the time who have never been to a meeting. Uh, some of them won't even consider it because they think it's like too religious or it's just AA. But that's really not what the steps are. That's not what the steps are. The steps you can you can read about the steps. Um, Russell Brand had a great book called Recovery, where each chapter is a step. And he talks about the work that you do in the steps, and he talks about his work in the steps. And a lot of times the work in the steps was not done with another person, uh, it was done outside of that relationship, the other person being a sponsor. And so that's the structure, right? You go to meetings, you become accountable because you're in the meeting. And if you are doing it the right way, you're talking in the meetings. And when you're talking in the meetings, you're now developing relationships. The other thing that's very important in uh meetings is finding a sponsor. So now we're we're getting closer and closer and closer to that confines of structure. So um sometimes, you know, I mean, the the steps were written a long time ago, back in the 30s. Um, so they would a lot of people see them as like they're outdated, or it's it's not even really that important. It's like an option. And you know, for for me, it's not an option. You you must do it. And they're not outdated. Moral functioning and accountability and the action behind those ideas is never outdated. You know, I mean, for gosh sakes, people are reading Marcus Aurelius from the Roman Empire, and they're finding it very relevant today. So is it outdated? No. In reality, they're a psychological and spiritual roadmap for healing, not just abstinence. It's it's the spiritual roadmap. And it's the thing that allows you through psychology and spirituality to gain the foothold and change. But if you compare what happens in sobriety versus what happens in abstinence, you know, you compare white knuckling it uh in sobriety, that's not sobriety, that's abstinence versus transformational recovery through the step work, because that's really what this is. You're transforming yourself, you're transforming who you think you are and what you think is going on. So when you're doing your step work, you have to be honest, you have to be open, you have to be vulnerable, you have to be uh allowing someone to bear witness to what you're doing. That's why we use sponsors and a good sponsor. And if you're listening to this and you are a sponsor, you must work the steps. And that must be the priority in that work with the person that you're meeting with who's a sponsee. You must work the steps, and you must have a structured way of doing that. Um the the people who publish uh all the material for AA amongst all those publications is a workbook for doing step work. And you can get others that are not part of that um that publication, the people who have have written all kinds of material about working the steps. But you know what? Don't do the step work just by reading it and going, oh, this is step one. My life has become unmanageable. Okay, let me think about that. No, no, no, no. Do it like you would if you were going to school, taking a class. Like get that workbook out and start working on it. Um, but one of the things that's in uh the workbook that I really like is the vocabulary we use. And there's a great um section of all the words that you could apply for the things that you are, you know, liar, thief, manipulator, abuser, um, you know, all the negative stuff. And then right next to it is the opposite positive. And when you're trying to figure out just who you are, how bad it's gotten, you can take a look at this. Two full pages with um it's four columns, so it's two, you know, one negative and one positive, but it's it's four, it's four columns of two entire pages in a book of all the negative and positive words. Can't miss them when you're doing that. But understand it's the steps aren't about perfection. You're not gonna get to be, you know, some exalted perfect form of your own being. It's about progression. They you're taking the broken pieces and you're putting them back in order. Now, sometimes the things that you've done um really are bad, and you know, it's harder to get through that. But the steps are not about becoming a perfect person at the end of it, it's really about having the structure to be able to do it because you've got to do that psychological and spiritual work. So, what why is it important to have that kind of structure around you? Addiction thrives in chaos. You've heard me say that many, many times. Recovery thrives in structure and accountability. If you answer to no one, another person, to yourself, to God, to nothing. You answer to no one, you're not gonna get very far in recovery. So the steps give a direction when emotions are foggy and distorted and you're feeling really horrible about things. The steps give you that focus, they give you that direction to follow as you're working through it. That's and they're in sequential order. And the order is a good one, I think, actually. Um, if I were to write them, I don't think I would have changed the order of them. But without that structure, relapse skyrockets because there's no grounding, there's nothing there. Um, the most difficult time I have with clients that come into my office are the ones that are um complete atheists, and it's like, wow, you don't you you don't have any higher calling kind of accountability, and it's really tough. Um, the best that I can do with those clients is start to make them accountable. So they uh unfortunately I have to make them answer to me, which is not the most comfortable position to be in, um, because there's a there's a line you're getting close to as a therapist that you you know you're you're uh it's an authority that you don't want to exercise in a clo over a client, but they they respond to nothing and nobody. There's no accountability. But without that without the structure, they're not gonna get very far. So it to help you get back into focus and and and follow that direction, you really have to have something to hang on to. So the 12 steps are important. Um, so the steps are kind of like a a rescue protocol, you know. When you're when when I would roll up on a scene and I I've got to do a rescue, it doesn't matter if it's a water rescue or a first aid rescue or whatever, you're doing assessing, and then maybe you're deciding whether you need to just, you know, if you could just reach out to them, so you just reach to them, or you are going further where you're actually getting out into the water, swimming out to them, but uh reach and then pull them towards you, and then give them support, and then get them out of the water. If you skip one of those steps, someone's gonna drown. And so it's not a good idea to skip those steps. Now, the the problem about the step work is that the emotional honesty and the accountability is something that really, really is important. So the first three steps are about like your life is a mess and you can't do this by yourself. That's the whole focus of that first three steps. Um steps four through nine, that's kind of where the work is, if you will. Um, because the first three steps are about surrendering, right? So I surrender. Now what? Okay, now I gotta do the work. So the whole focus is on taking moral inventory, admitting the wrongs, making amends, you know, so it's about self-reflection and understanding, but it's also about re-engaging in morality. Um, you know, we we as people, we have our own moral compass in our hand, and we have to decide where does our morality come from. And what what I found is with clients uh working on recovery is that they've lost their way, but it's not immediate. You don't go from you know zero to a thousand miles an hour in a second, it takes a while to get there. And so there's a buildup of wrongdoing. This bad decision led to this bad decision, which led to this bad decision, and they kind of exponentially grow. And you know, when we're working on uh getting into recovery, realizing that you've lost a lot of things in the in the process of getting there, you've lost in your addiction, you've lost a lot of things. Maybe you lost a relationship with a loved one. Um, you become estranged, maybe you self self-eliminated from a relationship, or you just blew it up. Um, committing crimes is a pretty regular part of it. And if you certainly if you're a drug addict, you most likely have engaged in criminal activity. And sometimes that becomes uh an occasional thing, and sometimes it's a daily thing. Um if you're an alcoholic, you know, there's a lot of social destruction that seems to go on. There's also a lot of money loss going on, no matter what the addiction. So you might have lost some things, because that's pretty much how you move into recovery, is you've lost the one thing you didn't want to lose. So the admitting those wrongs and making amends, that's the the last step, step nine in the in the four through nine. Making amends is trying to figure out how to um mend the fences either with the person or if you can't do it with them because they refuse or whatever, then within yourself. So it's an emotional detox, it's cleaning out the resentment and the shame and the denial that goes on in the process of of spiraling down further and further and further into addiction. So the accountability is really important, but the cleansing of the resentment, the shame, the denial, I kind of look at it as like if you had a really bad infection, you had a cut on your arm or your leg or something, and it got really infected, it's not gonna heal until you get rid of the infection. So I look at the damage that's going on in your life, that's what you need to cleanse. That's what you need to clean out, and that's the resentment, shame, denial, manipulation, destruction. You know, you gotta clean that out before you can heal. Um so the accountability helps you with something, it helps build humility which dismantles the ego-driven thinking that goes on in your addiction. Now remember, I've said in these podcasts over and over and over again um ca you know, chaos and and destruction happens. So the only way you can defend that in this distorted mind that you have is to use your ego, to use your arrogance. You you it's like a weapon, you weaponized arrogance. Um, so the the the ego-driven thinking is a problem, and you need to engage in the mo emotional. When I'm sitting here in my in my uh practice and I'm talking to somebody, there's a lot of there's a lot of sadness, there's a lot of tears, there's a lot of resentment that uh self self-resentment for actions taken, things happening. There's a lot of that that goes on. So the humility de uh dismantles the ego-driven thinking. Um if you speak the words, they lose their power, the bad things. So um it's really interesting when people commit crimes and they're being questioned, uh, interrogated by the police and questioned, the police are hoping that the person after a while will get to the point where they just are tired of of lying. Now, if if you're a psychopath or a really severe sociopath, you're probably not going to do this. But the normal person, the person without those personality defects and disorders, they're gonna say it, and they're gonna say it, they're gonna say it, they're gonna keep feeling it every time they say it, and eventually they're gonna just say, Okay, yeah, I didn't mean to kill her, or I didn't mean to burn the house down, or I didn't mean to. And that's what happens with interrogation many times, and that's a technique that police use, to um, they're they're playing on the person's emotional responses to things and and get them out of the ego, the arrogance, um, and into that that shame that you feel with humility uh at what you've done. So you can't heal what you refuse to feel, and you can't feel what you refuse to face. If you speak the words that you dread, many times they will lose a bit their their power. So let it you know, let it rip. So you've worked for a long time, perhaps, hopefully, in the step process. And and by the way, uh just to frame this, I should have probably said this in the beginning. Uh for me, uh I really like to see somebody spend six to twelve months working the steps. I mean, preferably um a month, but I know for a lot of sponsors that's an an extremely long time. But to really work the steps, now in that process, you know, you can you can be abstaining from drugs and alcohol, and you can be, you know, further along in your recovery than three months in saying I have to turn myself over to a higher power. Yeah, I understand that. But the step process is one about function and understanding and learning, right? So you're it's an intellectual pursuit as well as an emotional pursuit. It's not just emotional. Um, so I you know, I I I want somebody to spend a significant amount of time doing it. When you go to rehab, they're gonna work the steps, and you're there for 30 or 45 or 60 or 90 or 120 days. You know, the longer you're in there, the more work you're gonna do on the steps. But you know, I've many people come out of uh residential treatment in rehab and they'll say, Well, I worked the steps in rehab. It's like, okay, well, we're gonna we're gonna really work the steps this time. Well, what do you mean? Well, that was for 30 days. Now I know you were in there seven days a week, 168 hours a week, but you're out here in the real world. So this is where you know, your your forced structure is now gone. So we need to really work the steps. And I like it when I see people who are sponsors, you know, really emphasize that. And it's even more important if you never went to residential treatment, because the only structure you're probably experiencing in at this time in your uh in your life in that recovery, is in the rooms and with that sponsor. So it's really important then. So connection and community is part of the step work too. So step 10 through 12 um is about you know that ongoing reflection and then contributing to the recovery of other people, that service part. Now, not to be confused with when you go to, let's say you go to AA, you walk in, and somebody says, hey, you know, you should get a service job. Okay, a service job is setting up the chairs or you know, starting the coffee or or getting books out or or something, right? Or cleaning up the chairs or you know, making sure the room's clean. That's not what I mean by service um uh when it comes to the 12 steps. What I mean by service is you becoming a sponsor. And I'm gonna talk about that in a minute because that's that's the last step. But step 10 through 12, fostering that ongoing reflection and service as part of your recovery. So the emphasis um the with with this is really in the connection that keeps recovery alive. What is a life uh is um sorry, let me try that again. Isolation is addiction's best friend. That's my trademarked uh copyrighted phrase. Isolation is addiction's best friend. Isolation kills the connection with other people because we like to use and we like to use a lot, and people generally don't want to be around us when we're using a lot because we cause problems. So we just learn to kind of isolate and we're full of shame and embarrassment, and so we are not going to do it in front of people. In addition to that, besides the shame and embarrassment, you also want to get trapped in your brain, you want to keep working on that problem that's you're trying to cope with. You want to contain it, and so you don't want people asking you any questions or talking to you in that in that moment. So that's when we isolate. So you recover by giving away what is freely given to you, and this is part of that connection and community. So, in that last step, going out and spreading the good news, um you know, recovery can be further enhanced, and many people take it on almost as a second career, it's like become their mission that they want to um they want to do they want to contribute to helping people, they see in other people the suffering that they have done and they don't like it, and they want to help somebody overcome that. There is a cost for that because if the person is not successful at getting into recovery, or maybe they overdose, they go to prison, uh, ultimately the destruction that you were trying to help them get through and away from, they get overcome by it and they lose. And I can tell you from personal experience with client after client, uh, you know, every year there's a client that either ends up in jail, ends up in prison, ends up with some physical problem that doesn't go away, or they die. And the secondary thing for me that's problematic is estrangement from relatives or divorce. Um, those also are very, very harmful and very long-lasting traumas. So i if you're trying to help somebody overcome, and that's you've taken that on as a duty, it can be uh a painful process sometimes. But on the other hand, when they get into recovery, extremely rewarding. So the tie in spiritual growth um and and emotional growth and and psychological growth um is is when you do service to others. If you can, not everybody is is kind of wired for that, they don't have the the the brain for that, but serving others is part of your self-healing. So let's talk about the 12-step process and therapeutic models. Okay, the 12-steps are not therapy. Uh uh sponsors are not therapists, nor should you pretend to be, nor should you try to be. Um, you are not. Unless you've been clinically trained, uh, you're not really equipped for it, and it's really not even something you should be doing, because you may be doing more harm than good because you have world real world experience, but you don't really understand the clinical aspect of it, and what are you seeing? So it can become very, very problematic and and can be dangerous at times because you might you might miss something or screw something up. So there's a there's a distinction between uh therapist and a sponsor. So let me let me compare 12 steps and therapeutic models, okay? Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is a style of therapy um that is uh typically it's a little more short term, uh, six, eight, ten sessions typically, um cognitive behavioral therapy. So what you're thinking and how you're behaving, and you're working to put those together. So you're restructuring distorted thinking, and that's the whole purpose of cognitive behavioral therapy, which it's kind of goes very similarly with uh dialectic behavioral therapy, DBT. Um, that's more about your self-talk rather than your actual behaviors uh or thinking, but it's more about talking. But anyway, so CBT is restructuring distorted thinking. Well, that's kind of like steps four and ten, isn't it? Um and if you don't know the steps well enough to know those, um let's just I'm gonna give you the assignment of you need to look at them so you can see what I'm talking about. Now, there's another form of therapy, EMDR or trauma work, um, where you're desensitizing triggers and and guilt, the responses of guilt. And when you're when you're uh desensitizing those, EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and then trauma work, which is um just you know working specifically on trauma and the somatic response, the body response to trauma, you're desensitizing your uh trigger, your guilt. You're desensitizing yourself so that you're reprocessing something. That's like steps five and eight. Um mindfulness, train uh mindfulness therapy is like step 11. The conscious contact, meditation, humility, being aware of self and others, and trying to be very, very focused in on that is the mindfulness thing. Now, if you are not a psychologist or a counselor, um you you really should not be teaching mindfulness because it's an actual uh type of therapy. So I'm against the armchair therapists who try to take the stuff on. But the steps really the steps merge science and spirituality for whole person healing. Okay, so you you got the spiritual aspect in the beginning, like a higher power. Can't do this by myself. That's at the very at the very beginning. That's that's one through three. Four through ten four through uh nine is more about understanding uh yourself. So it's turning it's in instead of looking at the world saying there's chaos in my world, and I can't do this by myself. So you're external, you're looking externally, that's one through three. Four through nine is looking internally and looking at self and evaluating self. And then uh 10, 11, and 12 is about the mindfulness part of it and going out and engaging in uh others and and and helping others. So um there's there's a lot of things that you can do in recovery to get into recovery, and certainly recovery is not a cookie-cutter thing, it's just whatever your recovery looks like, but it's not about checking boxes, all right. So doing the steps isn't like, oh, I did step one and I did step two. You know, it's not checking boxes, it's about transforming through a process and engaging in the process. If you skip the steps, you're gonna probably skip a lot of the healing. Because you know, as a therapist, I'm a private practice therapist. I see people in my office, I might see them once a week, sometimes twice. Uh uh at times I've seen people three times a week, but that doesn't usually last long term. That's one hour. If it's once a week, that's one hour. You're in my office, you're really feeling it, you're really engaging in it. Well, you got 167 hours to get through before you come back to my office. So that's why it's important to have structure around you in recovery every day, every single day. If you're that first year, man, every day you're engaging in recovery. But if you skip the steps, you're gonna skip the healing. So I really want you to find a sponsor and a group and start wherever they are, okay? Wherever that is, you can do that. And I know, you know, across the world, thanks to COVID, the one positive thing that came out of COVID is the awareness that, hey, we are a community and we are everywhere. And so meetings are online. No matter what the language, no matter the location, if you have access to the internet, you can go to meetings if you can't get to them in person. So if you're listening to this in some other country, man, be a be a uh 12-step AANA tourist. I really encourage people to do that. For us in the United States, I regularly have my clients tune in to um or law, you know, try to get into or log on to uh AA meetings or NA meetings in England, in the Netherlands, if they can find one English-speaking, um, New Zealand, Australia, um, anywhere there's, you know, the United States, Canada, any place that there's an English-speaking meeting and you speak English, go do it. See what you see. Learn some things. But just you gotta find a sponsor. So you gotta be accountable. You gotta have structure. You're never gonna get there otherwise. So please. Um don't try to to if you're struggling, reach out. Don't try to rescue yourself. You can't. Um I'm a li I was a lifeguard for a long time. If I'm if I'm in need of like assistance and I'm in the water drowning, I'm looking for that lifeguard to come and get me. Uh I'm not gonna try to save myself. Uh if I can't, you know, it's not possible. So I'm gonna rely on other people. And so if you are a clinician or a practitioner of of clinical services with somebody, man, I and I get them all the time. Um you you need some help, but you gotta surrender to the process. Alright. This is Doc Shock, hoping that you liked this podcast. If you did, please like and subscribe. And if you want to reach out to me, you can. You can reach me through my website, wellspringmindbody.com, send me an email, you can call me, leave me a message, and let me know what's going on with you. But hey, first and foremost, if you need help, get me a rehab, go see a doctor, go to counseling, seek out some help for your problems before they overcome you and kill you. There's no point in you losing your life just because you're trying to save your addiction. Save yourself. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And until the next podcast, this is Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard, saying, See ya.