Episode 16 -- May 28, 2020

No doubt about it, this is a stressful time. Especially for those of us trying to maintain our recovery. There's plenty of negativity everywhere we look, but the truth is, the most negative statements we hear are often the things we tell ourselves. One of the most important things we can do to help our recovery right now is to stop the thoughts and behaviors that can make a bad situation worse. In this excerpt from Three Simple Rules: Uncomplicating Life in Recovery, author Michael Graubart gives his advice on how to silence all of that negativity flying around in our heads.

It has been edited for brevity.

The Steps Four through Eleven in Twelve Step programs can really be boiled down to one simple rule: "Clean House." There are a lot of areas we people in recovery need to clean. But, for now, let's look inside our own minds and see what we can sweep away.

How about the "committee," for starters? What committee? The one that resides in the head of virtually every alcoholic and addict and is always criticizing, condemning, and generally making life miserable.

As my sponsor, Milton, once said in a meeting, "I used to have a committee in my head. They all smoked, they all drank, they all criticized everything, and none of them did anything constructive. So, I fired them all. But when I listen to you guys talk, I know they all found work."

So here's an invitation: fire your committee. What did they ever do for you?

If your committee is anything like mine, their basic worldview is that nothing's going to work, so why bother? I even felt a dose of their negativity--"Why bother? No one's going to read this, anyway"--just before I started to write these words.

There's no reason to go through all the work of getting and staying sober only to have those negative internal voices pounding away at you relentlessly.

It's commonplace in AA to say that if someone else did to you what alcohol did to you, you'd never permit it. In reality, through the negative voices in our heads, we do far more damage to ourselves than alcohol ever did. Or as Pogo used to say in the old comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and it is us." How do you fire your committee? Expose them to sunlight. Carry a pad of paper or an electronic device with you, and write down every negative thought you hear from inside your head for a full day. You may be amazed at just how lengthy the list is and how thoroughly we criticize ourselves over every aspect of our lives.

Our committees typically are thorough--you have to give them credit. They hammer away at our appearance, our wardrobe, our punctuality, our relationships or lack thereof, our income or lack thereof, and everything else in our lives, big and small, morning, noon, and night. It's amazing that alcoholics or addicts can get anything done, given the amount of negative energy expended in their own minds. If your mind can convince you of the futility and hopelessness of life, your disease can slip in through the opening thus created and convince you to toss away your sobriety.

So, write down everything your committee says, and read it to your sponsor. The committee will have nowhere to hide, and that's the opposite of their happy place, because committees like to operate in the dark.

Remember how the program tells us that whenever we want to move away from a bad habit, we need to move closer to a positive habit? The opposite of the negativity of the committee is gratitude.

Do you keep a gratitude list? I do. Not because I was clever enough to think of the idea myself--but because making such a list was suggested to me in recovery.

I belong to a group of sober men who share their gratitude lists with each other daily in an email group. Starting the day off with a positive focus is essential for alcoholics and addicts, and probably for everyone else, too.

You could easily start your own email gratitude group. There's something wonderful about checking your email--I have an account dedicated to this group--at odd times of the day and discovering what your friends are grateful for, and sometimes what they're struggling with.

As long as you're going to have a committee, make it a gratitude committee of sober addicts and alcoholics, as opposed to the active drinkers and users who used to get so much time and attention in your head.

Another vital tool for silencing the negativity committee is the aspect of the Twelve Steps that gets practiced the least--meditation.

One time, I called a guy I had met in a meeting. The first thing he asked was, "Did you meditate today?" I admitted I hadn't.

"Aha!" he pounced. "So, you're only working an 11½ Step program!" Never called him again.

Meditation gets awfully short shrift in Twelve Step programs these days, which is unfortunate.

While some meetings set time aside for meditation, by and large, meditation is something that many recovering alcoholics and addicts simply ignore. Either we aren't sure how to do it, or we think we're not doing it right, or we don't understand why we're doing it.

There's a lot of information out there today about the benefits of meditation--lower blood pressure, less stress, better sleep. Those reasons should be enough to convince us to meditate, but they aren't my main reason for doing it.

Meditation is so important to me because it helps me keep my committee out of a job. It provides an alternative to the river of negative, useless chatter that my mind generates, even today.

Left to its own devices, my internal committee only wants to whine about how lousy everything is and how anxious I should feel under the circumstances. Sound familiar?

There must be people out there with sunny dispositions whose minds tell them, all day long, "You're great! You're terrific! You're wonderful and everything is fine!" Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. Napoleon Hill, in Think and Grow Rich, written almost 100 years ago, pointed out that the human mind naturally tends toward negativity.

It is not just your mind or my mind. It is human nature to see the negative--and it's probably an inherited survival skill from cave person days. Back then, if you weren't paying attention to every conceivable danger, your life expectancy was awfully short.

Now, meditation doesn't change thoughts from negative to positive. Trying to control your thoughts is like trying to control your drinking or using. It does not work.

Instead, meditation offers something else to listen to aside from the incessant negative chatter of the mind. It's like having a different channel to tune in to.

When you meditate, you listen to your own breathing. You listen to the sounds around you. You listen, perhaps, to the hum of the electric lights in the room or the birds chirping outside your window or the wind rustling through the leaves. In short, you listen to all the things that you never get a chance to hear, because you are so busy being on autopilot, listening to the nonsense, that incessant chatter, in your mind. You can call this new, alternative channel in your mind the Breathing Channel or the Other Noises in the Room Channel or the Sounds Heard in Nature That I Was Previously Ignoring Channel.

Instead of buying into the negativity in our minds or fighting those thoughts--which is a futile and fruitless activity--we get this other thing to listen to. And it is much more peaceful, friendly, and calming.

So, if you want to do meditation because it lowers your blood pressure, I say go for it. The reason I do it is because it gives me that precious alternative to the sound of my own internal voice. And as a result, I am a heck of a lot calmer, more peaceful, and happier.

About the Author:
Michael Graubart is a New York Times best-selling author who penned Hazelden Publishing's Sober Dad: The Manual for Perfectly Imperfect Parenting, Step Up: Unpacking Steps One, Two, and Three with Someone Who's Been There and Three Simple Rules: Uncomplicating Life in Recovery. He writes under a pseudonym to maintain his anonymity and speak frankly about his experiences in Twelve Step recovery.

© 2018 by Michael Graubart
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