"It's not the bite of the snake that kills you, it's the poison left behind." Tom Callos
Many addicts spend a lot of head space living in the past. And my judgment is that they haven't surrendered. That they haven't accepted the idea that they are responsible for their addiction. They're clinging to false assumptions about why they still use.
"My parents abused me as a child."
"We were poor."
"We lived in the wrong neighborhood."
"I was adopted."
"I didn't have a problem until she divorced me."
These are a few of the reasons addicts give for hanging onto the past. Why they think they're justified in using.
But the real answer comes we look at ourselves honestly. Sure, bad things have happened to many of us. And as long as we decide to hang onto them we're going to live in pain.
And we know how to cover that pain for a while. We can can kill it with drugs or alcohol - the things that eventually will destroy our lives.
The remedy is to look our pain in the face each time it shows up. Eventually you'll find you'll accept that bad things happened. And that you must live with them and move on - or die.
