We can accidentally be addicted to harsh, harmful, and negative thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and emotional responses. This dependency is perfectly suited to promote our fears and insecurities, rather than support our courage, autonomy, and comfort. Facing these mental and emotional habits are powerful opportunities to “recover” our true and complete selves.
I don’t know anything about the journey of recovery from addictive substances, so that must be said. I’m thinking instead about the ways we cling to limiting ideas, negative thoughts, and invalidating judgements.
Tangled up in this negativity, we experience unpleasant emotions and unnecessary drama.
To manage our confusion, we engage in behaviors that don’t promote our own best interests, such as poor food choices, excessive media consumption (including porn), over-spending money and emotional capital, and all manner of self-neglect, including (of course) using substances.
With little self-awareness and self-control, we suffer accordingly. Unhealthy, unhappy, stuck.
I’m thinking about the long-ago days when I first discovered the intense anxiety that clouded my entire life experience. It was a shock to witness. Somehow, I had been walking around in the cloud, yet completely ignorant of it. I knew I wasn’t happy. I knew life felt “off.” I felt like I functioned in a shell (that was the word that always came to my mind), separated from the world, and separated from myself. I was depressed. I was stuck.
I was looking outside myself for every manner of healing because I didn’t know where else to look. But one night I got very high on marijuana, and I witnessed the anxious thoughts and tumult commanding my mind and emotions. That night, irrational worries continually distracted me from an otherwise fun activity. I could not subdue the worries, I could only helplessly watch the mess. That was a blessing.
When people say they don’t smoke pot because it makes them anxious, I jokingly respond, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Of course, it must be said that I’m not advocating the use of pot or any drug. I’m recommending self-examination. In this story, marijuana knocked me upside my head with self-examination.
I realized that anxiety didn’t simply cloud my experience. It was my experience. It’s who I thought I was. It defined the way I navigated the planet. I sincerely believed that if I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t being responsible. It was the crux of the personality, a vital aspect of the character I played. I was convinced: I am anxiety.
I discovered the process of self-study as a powerful cure. Engaging in journaling, discipline, being quiet, examining custom-made challenges, bad habits, and all the other opportunities to go within and face the confusion.
Inward is where life happens, with or without our awareness.
Negative thoughts, harsh self-criticisms, and insecure beliefs cannot withstand the light of attention. Fear-based functioning is a natural response to the pain, shame, disappointment, guilt, and trauma of developing in an unhealthy, greedy, dishonest, fear-based culture. It’s not our fault. In fact, many of these mechanisms served and protected us once upon a time. But no longer.
When negativity clouds our experience, the operating system needs to be updated. Each of us is the perfect technician to fix it. In fact, we are the only ones who can.
Shining a bright light on the internal landscape gives us a chance to untangle the confusion that tells us we aren’t good enough, that we’re meant to suffer, that there is something wrong with us and the world.
As we examine each idea and face each moment bare and vulnerable, we find our true strength and power. We find that the “ugly” truth we’ve been avoiding is surprisingly beautiful. We remember that if we or the world was meant to be another way, we would be. We are enough, and the business of the world is just life unfolding, one simple and complete moment at a time.
Investigation can only happen now, in this brief flash of life. Choices can only be made now. As we make less desired choices, we have an opportunity to study ourselves with curiosity and tolerance. Negative self-talk is not helpful, so we observe that, too.
We need only return to this moment and tend to it. Let the next moment take care of itself. We will find ourselves there: aware, active, interested, engaged, connected.
It took years of self-study to therapeutically manage my anxiety. It is a disease that sneaks back under the radar if I’m not diligent and mindful. But I’m grateful for the experience of facing it. It was through misery that I found myself and the only moment that is.
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