After my last relapse in 2017, I was finally serious about sobriety and saw it as a way of life rather than just quitting heroin. Around that time, my dad told me that “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” I do not know where he got this old saying from but it is a good one. Moving forward in a life of sobriety can be scary, it’s not unlike death and rebirth. It can also be a very exciting time because it is an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. I hate to sound cliché but the possibilities are endless, seriously. (More on that in an upcoming episode) I talk a lot about the immense amount of upward momentum that is generated in addicts’ lives just by getting sober. The very act of doing something as big and dramatic as kicking active drug addiction is nothing to scoff at, it’s a total life reset. Sober living is, in and of itself, a whole lifestyle that most people can hang their hats on and be proud of. That’s a beautiful thing indeed but there is always potential for more, much more. When we are doing something new in our lives we usually start out small and gradually build momentum, and once that momentum reaches a certain point then what we are doing becomes a juggernaut that is steamrolling our goals and steadily picking up more steam. Getting that going is the hard part. That’s why our blast out of the rock bottom of active addiction into our lives of sobriety is a very unique opportunity, the momentum is already there. Also, when you’re coming out of “rock bottom” there is nowhere to go but up, right? I encourage people to take this as a chance to do something big with their lives, “Ride the wave!” We are here in this life, this realm, this existence for something! We didn’t go through the hell of addiction for nothing, and we certainly didn’t come out on the other side all clean and sober for nothing, either. So, what are we going to do? All we have to do is decide what it is and then begin moving in that direction, our Higher Power will kick in and take care of the rest.

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Much love and respect!

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When we realized we had had enough of life in active addiction and wanted to get sober once and for all we were told to admit that we are powerless over addiction and needed help. I will take it a step further and say that we aren’t necessarily “powerless” as much as we were just never wired that way, we were never meant to do all the work ourselves, our job is to design this new life free from addiction and then press the start button. What I mean is that we are the architects, our job is to design reality, not to actually build it. So, our part in beating addiction and getting sober is to create a blueprint for what sober living would look like and then take a step in that direction. At that point, our Higher Power steps in and puts into motion the actual “building” of this new life we have created in our imaginations. How things work is none of our concern, architects don’t know (or care) how the machinery that is used to build what they have designed works, they just know that it does.
Addiction taught us this principle very well, that we are not able to do these things by ourselves, we can not by our own sheer willpower get sober. It also taught us that our desire to get sober and designing a life of sobriety in our imaginations and then taking just a few steps in that direction is all it took for something else to take over and make it all come together for us. What is that “something else,” Matty? Well, call it whatever you want, the universe, God, your Higher Self, etc. So, once we’ve learned this and are now living proof of it, why stop now? We’ve learned how we co-create our reality and how we can make it whatever we want it to be just by virtue of our imagination and a step or two to demonstrate our trust in the process, our Higher Power. Why not apply this principle to our lives over and over again? Why not be examples to others still suffering in active addiction and (oh, by the way) also create for ourselves the sober lives we truly want to live?

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Continuing our talk about toxic positivity, we go a bit deeper into the subject. We do have traumas and other negative things from our past that can hang around our necks dragging us down not unlike how it was when we were in active addiction. I say “not unlike” because its not the same thing as active addiction but we do need to recover from things in our past so that we can move forward in recovery with as few relapse triggers as possible. I know, any addict who wants to relapse is going to find an excuse to do so, but I’m referring to those traumas that we may have long ago attached meaning, and subsequently drug use, to in the first place, back when all this started.
As I always say, getting sober and moving forward in your life of recovery (or sober living, if you’d rather) is a huge boost in momentum for your life, so “Ride that wave!” Life after addiction doesn’t have to be scary, we don’t have to live like we are constantly being bombarded with temptations and triggers to relapse. Instead, let’s look at this as an opportunity to completely clean out our “closets” and transmute our addictions and anything from our past into something positive. There’s a very good chance there’s an addict out there still suffering in active addiction who needs to hear your recovery story, who needs to see your example. Transmutation…that’s ol’ Matty’s new favorite word!
Much love and respect!

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