Anger

A long time ago I used to get angry about most everything that didn't go my way.

If someone cut me off in traffic, I'd want to get even and do the same to them.

If I had to wait in line too long at a store I'd leave my basket and simply walk out - leaving it there for someone else to deal with.

Sometimes if someone looked at me sideways I'd get angry.

And my anger turned into a fertile breeding ground for resentment that I couldn't identify. That's how much of it there was stored inside me.

But one day - not long after I got sober 26 years ago - I realized that when I got angry I just had to get over it. And the sooner the better.

Today when things don't go my way I still might get angry - but I'm much quicker to let it go. It's not good for my blood pressure. It's not good for my attitude. Angry is not who I am today.

The bad thing about getting angry for me is that I just have to get happy again. So why not stay in a good mood and not take the detour into anger and all it's bad side effects?

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Power of Belief

Prior to 1954 it was believed impossible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes.  It was supposed to be beyond the limits of human physiology.

Yet in May of 1954 Roger Bannister of England did it.  In 59.4 seconds.  

But a lesser known fact is that within two years afterward 37 others also ran sub-four minute miles. Today high school athletes routinely run sub-four minute miles.

So what happened?  Did athletes become better within two years? Or even 75 years? No.

What happened is that beliefs changed. Athletes saw what was possible and made the breakthrough. 

I bring this up because a lot of alcoholics and addicts don't believe they can stay sober because they never have.  Yet if they look around the recovery rooms there are many who have been sober for years. 

The secret of accomplishing anything is we first must believe we can do it.  Then we can.

I got sober because somewhere deep inside I knew the program worked.  But I didn’t want to believe it because I still wanted to shoot heroin and drink.

The reality that came to the surface for me is that I knew that millions of others had changed their lives and that I could do it too.

I’d seen it work for others and I knew it could work for me too.  It's about believing we can do it.

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Establishment Bias

“A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones” Nelson Mandela.

Yesterday a staff member mentioned a tour he'd given to a local businessman. The man had apparently heard negative things about TLC.

Our staff member did a good job of describing our mission. Because by the time the tour was over the visitor's body language was different. And it seemed that his opinion had shifted.

Local businesses and government officials - who know little about what we do - hold a mostly negative attitude about our program.

At one period, during the late 1990s, the City actually passed three ordinances that would have prevented us from operating in our downtown locations.

Only after a five year Federal lawsuit did they rescind their ordinances.

However, the negative attitude towards addicts and alcoholics persists. A small example can be seen in the directional signs posted downtown. For example they don't describe our Macdonald Street location as a treatment program or a sober living facility. Instead, our location is called "TLC Apartments." We don't rent apartments to anyone. But those signs are another not-so-subtle reminder of the establishment bias toward addicts and alcoholics.

When a community can't have compassion and support for those who are battling the deadly disease of addiction it tells the world a lot about how they care for our citizens.

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Not Ready

A man who claims to be sincere about his recovery talks his mother into buying him a plane ticket to Arizona.

Since she had picked him up as soon as he walked out of detox, she thought he was clean. And that's probably what he told her. So she spent the money to put him on a plane to Phoenix, far from his home in the Midwest.

Once he arrives and gets settled into a room I hear from his mother. She says that TLC was not at all what he thought it would be like.

The second day he was here - on a Sunday - he was put to work, holding a sign on the street advertising our weekly donation only car wash. The only part he told her about was the donations - he didn't tell her the part about the car wash.

The next day we sent him to work on one of our labor crews. He didn't expect that either because the last place he was at was free - he was there on a scholarship plan.

When he found out that he was going to have to work he asked for a ride to the airport. He said he wanted to go home and shoot some heroin.

In our opinion, he wasn't ready for recovery anyway. Because his roommates claimed he kept asking them if they knew where he could buy heroin.

I let her know that when he was ready we'd take him back. When he gets enough pain he may call.

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Letting go of the Past

"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.

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Neighbors

It's easy to be judgmental. I find my self doing it, mostly unconsciously, every so often. But along with that I must be developing some compassion I never knew I had.

This comes up because I have an older neighbor who lives behind me who's been a minor irritant over the past 15 years. Nothing big, just nit-picking things.

I remember the first time I met him we barely said hello before he told me he had a 35 year old mail order bride from Asia. Which seemed to me a strange thing to tell your neighbor the first five minutes you meet him. Later I figured he might still be on his honeymoon.

Because he takes pride in his back yard he's always having crews trim trees and so on. And once in a while they drop branches in my yard. Which I promptly put back over the fence.

One time they even came on my side of the fence and trimmed some branches off one of my trees that were sticking over his fence. At that point I wrote him a letter. And explained that he could legally trim anything growing over the fence line. But couldn't have his people in my yard cutting my trees. And I cited the Arizona Revised Statutes to make my point. He never wrote back. Nor did he speak after that when he saw me in my back yard.

Another time, a few years earlier, he chastised me for trimming one of my own trees. He liked it the way it was before I trimmed it because it partially blocked the view of his pool from my side of the fence. I told him I'd let it grow back - even though I wasn't especially interested about what was happening in his pool.

Over the years it's been a series of small incidents like that. Once he filled in a hole in the wall between our yards with some kind of liquid insulation that discolored my side of the fence. And it took me a while to clean it off.

Like I said, nothing big, just irritating stuff.

But for the past few months I haven’t seen him. He used to make a circuit each day, picking up leaves and doing other chores. And the only reason I’d notice him is because my second story bedroom overlooks his back yard.

But lately I've been wondering what happened to him. I wonder if he's okay. Is he sick? Did his wife go back to Asia? Did he have an accident?

And I mention this because all 15 years I've lived here I've been mostly negative about him. Now I'm wondering if he's okay and can't figure out why.

Am I developing compassion for a neighbor who seemed to enjoy being an irritant?  Have I lost my ability to be resentful?

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Helping an Addict

I talk this evening to a mother in the Midwest.

Her son is being released from a detox unit at ten in the morning. She wonders if we have room for him.  If we can help him get sober.

She has anxiety and sounds worried as she asks me the kind of questions that many mothers ask when they send their grown children to our halfway houses.

For example, she wants to know what our success rate is. I tell her that's a question I can't answer. Because I don't know. We don't have the ability to follow addicts around to see if they revert to using after they leave. And neither can any other program. And if they tell you they can, then they're lying.

I tell her a little bit about the structure of our program. And what he can look forward to when he gets here. I tell her what kind of clothes he needs to bring, mostly work clothes. Plus toiletries and personal items.

I do tell her that if he does everything we tell him to do he has a 100% chance of staying sober the rest of his life. I think she sounds relieved because she knows I'm not telling her any bullshit.

She says she's making arrangements to put him on an airplane tomorrow.

I tell her to text me his flight number. And to have him call when he arrives. One of our vans will pick him up from the airport, Which is about a mile from our Phoenix facility.

If he gets here, we may have helped another addict save his life. All he needs to do is follow directions and he won’t have to use anymore.  It's simple, especially if he's had enough pain.

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