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!
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Our time in Active Addiction was most likely the most negative time in our lives. What we have learned from this is that we can’t always turn a blind wye to our problems. Yes, I am a firm believer in “Where attention goes energy flows,” but that doesn’t mean to completely ignore past traumas or bad things that have happened in our lives. A lot of times we need to forgive ourselves so that we can truly get over it and move on. Transmutation is when we take something and turn it into something else. In the case of addiction, we get sober, forgive ourselves, and then transmute the addiction into something good. We can be examples to others who haven’t yet gotten sober and are feeling hopelessly lost in addiction. Sobriety is possible and we are living proof of it. We are living proof that you can take the worst thing that ever happened to you and turn it into something good, and then be inspirations to others.

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After a bout with Shingles, I am in recovery and back on track! In the interest of preserving my sobriety, I steered clear of the pain meds and was reminded how important it is that we, addicts in recovery, stay healthy so that we aren’t faced with the possibility of needing pain medicine in the first place. Just sayin! Shingles is one of the most painful and miserable things I’ve ever had to go through…and I’ve detoxed off of heroin in jail, so…yeah…
As stated in a recent Substack post, my beliefs are starting to congeal and while I’m sure i will still research other philosophies and ways of thinking, I find myself leaning toward Hermeticism and Gnosticism. These are not religions, they are philosophies and ways of viewing reality. I do believe that we are in some sort of simulation be it spiritual or otherwise. I have found myself thinking that this whole thing is layers upon layers deep, so maybe it’s some spiritual and some technological mixed in deeper down the spiral. Anyway, this episode begins my unraveling of all that.
Also, recent deaths in the family have caused me to do a lot of reflecting on relationships. Particularly, those relationships that our active addiction all but destroyed. Now that we are in recovery and living sober, we can now go and repair and restore those relationships. We may have to give our loved ones time to come around, though. Remember, for years they watched us go down the spiral of addiction. All the lies and everything else we did to lose trust don’t just go away because we went to rehab and got sober. Let’s do everything we can to show that we are dead serious about our recovery and so very sorry for the damage we caused while in active addiction and, now that we are sober once and for all, we are focused on getting our lives back on track and repairing relationships. We have to do it before it is too late.
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It seems like every time I get on here saying I need to get more consistent with my uploads something always happens. It’s not unlike back during active addiction, something would always come up giving you a reason to put off getting sober until tomorrow. The difference is, though, during active addiction, an excuse to keep using drugs was always welcomed. This time, the lovely Kitty’ s mother passed away and we’ve been dealing with that. I have lost my stepmom and that has been extremely difficult but this is the only parent Kitty has really ever known so. It has been different this time. She’s getting there, all your thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated. Also, I am currently getting over having Shingles. This came as a huge surprise since I was always under the impression that I’ve never even had chickenpox…well, apparently I have…so there’s that. Shingles is one of the most physically painful things I’ve ever endured, and I even got it in my eye and the possibility of going blind was very real. I couldn’t even look at a computer screen for a couple weeks, so getting this podcast edited and published has not been possible until now. I really appreciate your understanding and support. All these things all happening at once tells me that we are on the verge of something good and the adversary is trying to hit the brakes on us. All we can do is keep pushing trough it.
In this, the 25th episode of My Sober Addiction, I mostly go into some clarifications and expand on some things that were brought up in episode 24. Our purpose here and what we are here to learn aren’t always the same thing but can (and often do) intersect. For example, I feel that we are here to learn to be creators, just like The Creator is. In my case, learning that also crosses over into addiction recovery and how I have came to understand that active addiction taught me the dark side of Manifestation. We are always taught that the Law of Attraction is this love and light and rainbows and unicorns and everything we ever wanted type thing, rarely are we taught that we are always manifesting, be it good or bad. I have learned that while Law of Attraction is almost everything we need to know to create amazing lives, it isn’t everything. We must also get into action, give the Universe a means to bring us the end we desire. Intention, emotion, vibration and action is what I have found to be the Secret. The part that is usually left out is the part about action. We have to DO something!
My Sober Addiction has grown quite a lot despite my inconsistency and I am so grateful for your support and understanding. I am writing a lot, and have every intention of continuing this work so I am pushing through all the adversity with the knowing that it is a sign that I am doing the right thing and on the verge of something big. Please consider giving me a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts as well as a subscribe. Also, a subscribe on Substack (Matt Stevens) and on YouTube (MattStevensMSA) would be so appreciated. I haven’t done anything on YouTube yet but have recently been shown how it would definitely be good for me to do, so please give me a subscribe there, too, so that I can begin doing live streams there.
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The Kolbrin bible is very interesting for sure and I have to give credit, once again, to Jason Breshears of Archaix.com for introducing me to it. In doing that, he has also inspired another episode of My Sober Addiction.
In this episode, we talk about how life in this reality is all about learning some very important lessons. Active Addiction taught us the ugly side of manifestation, it taught us that we create our own reality, for better or worse. In the grand scheme of things, addiction was just a bump in the road, as long as we learned from it. What did we learn? Well, two things really. One, life in addiction is our own doing, everything we went through was self-imposed. The good news is that for every Yin there is a Yang. We learned to manifest our lives, we learned to be creators. The problem is that the live we created for ourselves was hell on earth but if we can manifest This then we can also manifest That. The second thing we need to learn is that we are the architects of our lives, not the builders. We set the plans, we design what we want our life in sobriety to be like and then hand it over to the Chief Creator and then truly trust that it will be done. We only need to focus on the What, not the How. When we stop trying to dictate how we will move on into sobriety and create amazing lives and instead just focus on what we want life after addiction to be like and let it go and trust our Higher Power to get it done. When we do this, we will be amazed and how good life will get and how fast.
Please leave a rating and review of the show, and also look me up on YouTube where I usually post videos about my thoughts after the show, things that I either didn’t think about until afterward or forgot to talk about. While you’re at it, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, in the very near future, i am going to start doing some live streams on there. Love you all!

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In this episode of My Sober Addiction, we discuss the importance of breaking patterns in your life to create change. It goes a lot deeper, though, the ultimate goal is to throw Reality some curve balls. During active addiction, we became slaves to rituals, it wasn’t enough to use drugs, we had to make entire rituals out of it. While we are now living sober, we still do some things religiously, the same way every time. From the routes we drive to work to our routines at home and what we do in our free time, we follow set, predictable patterns. We have to learn to break out of those patterns and enhance our Reality Creation.
Also, I’m reading a few of my posts from my Substack page that are relevant to the topic.
I am keeping this description short and sweet and I’ll see you on the inside.
Much love and respect, Matt

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