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12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery by Allen Berger, Ph.D.

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Michael

There are as many ways to mess up recovery as there are alcoholics and addicts, but Allen Berger, Ph.D., presents twelve common misguided beliefs and attitudes that can lead to relapse, and he provides a useful guide for working through these problems.

This passage is excerpted from 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery by Allen Berger, Ph.D. Berger is a nationally recognized expert on the science of recovery. For more than thirty years, he has been on his own journey in recovery while helping thousands of others discover a way of life free from addiction. He is also the author of 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone.

I believe that if we are truly to recover from the disease of addiction, we must grow up—emotionally. True recovery is the product of humility that emerges from living and practicing a conscious and spiritual life. In order to attain humility, we must be honest with ourselves. This necessarily includes looking at the stupid things we do, today, in our recovery. I use the term stupid to indicate the things we do that are self-destructive and not in our best interest.

Before we move on to a discussion about how to identify the underlying causes of self-destructive behavior, I want to share how I selected the twelve issues that I discuss in this book. There must be at least a million stupid things that we can do to mess up recovery—all of them self-destructive. A book cataloging all of these would be unwieldy. I wanted to narrow down the list to a more manageable size so I used the following criteria for my selection. I chose what I considered to be the most commonly confronted and critical issues during the early stages of recovery. I define early recovery as the first two years of recovery. The main issues that we confront during this time include breaking the bonds of addiction, establishing a spiritual foundation for our recovery, learning effective tools to deal with ourselves and our relationships, and dealing with the wreckage of our past.

Few of us will relate to all of these issues, but the general themes should be familiar. So without further ado, here are my top twelve nominations for stupid things we do to mess up our recovery:

1. Believing addiction to one substance is the only problem
2. Believing sobriety will fix everything
3. Pursuing recovery with less energy than pursuing addiction
4. Being selectively honest
5. Feeling special and unique
6. Not making amends
7. Using the program to try to become perfect
8. Confusing self-concern with selfishness
9. Playing futile self-improvement games
10. Not getting help for relationship troubles
11. Believing that life should be easy
12. Using the program to handle everything

These twelve things are tried-and-true ways of messing up recovery. In the following chapters, I will elaborate on each of them. Please try and keep an open mind as you read this book. It has been my experience that those who do best in recovery are those who are honest with themselves, open to new ideas and experiences, and willing to take direction.

There’s one more thing I want to talk about before we move ahead to the task at hand. As you read about each of these twelve stupid things, please ask yourself, What would cause me to think in this particular way or behave in this particular manner? The rest of this introduction presents a series of questions to help you become aware of the causes of self-destructive behaviors. The more we become aware of the underlying cause of a particular belief or behavior, the less it controls our life: awareness of what we are doing to ourselves—awareness of how we sabotage ourselves—starts the process of change.

Identifying the Causes of Self-Destructive Behaviors
Psychologists and philosophers throughout modern history have tried to understand why we human beings are so self-destructive. Their discussions have ranged from speculating that a death instinct exists deep within our psyches to believing that personality type, childhood trauma, low self-esteem, or an undercurrent of self-hatred are the culprits behind self-destructive acts.
I believe there are four possibilities to consider when assessing the causes of self-destructive behavior. They are numbered because it is important to consider them in order. I recommend starting with number one and working down the list, until the best fit is discovered:

1. our addiction, or our disease
2. ignorance
3. unreasonable expectations and emotional dependency
4. self-erasure and self-hate

Remember to consider each possibility in sequence. When we identify what motivates or causes our stupid behavior, we begin the process of change. Awareness starts the process of change.

Read Alan’s book:
12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery
Softcover, 136 pages
Hazelden Press
List Price: $14.95
Online Price: $13.45

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This coach gets down to business

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Michael

Issue Date: Addiction Professional-January-February 2010,

This coach gets down to business

by Gary A. Enos, Editor
Dave Lindbeck recalls that when he was rising in the banking industry in his 20s, he was the sort of person who would say whatever occurred to him, no matter its impact on others. He says that during his active addiction, he gave friends and colleagues plenty of reason to abandon him, only to receive patience and understanding instead.
“Thank God I didn’t get what I deserved,” says Lindbeck, now 50. One positive influence he lacked, however, was someone with whom he could discuss his career goals and how to keep them in balance during his recovery journey. Later in his banking career he would find himself playing that advisory role for others who somehow would find their way to his office, and he discovered that this put him in a comfortable place.
Lindbeck would leave his job to start a career as a business and life coach, and soon that would evolve into a specialty assisting individuals in recovery as they pursue their professional goals in all types of fields.
“The majority of my folks happened to be on the road to recovery, so I figured, ‘Why not focus on that?’” says Lindbeck, whose InStep Coaching unit of his company (http://www.instepcoaching.com) assists individuals in recovery. “I would hear clients in recovery tell me, ‘You understand me on a level that others aren’t going to.’”
Importance of balance
The name “InStep Coaching” sounds like a reference to 12-Step recovery, but Lindbeck says that’s not where the name originated. “The reason for the name is that my head as a banker was going one way, but my heart was going another,” he explains. “I wanted to see how to keep those in step.”
Likewise, he assists his coaching clients in maintaining balance between their professional and personal lives. “They need to keep their business goals in balance with personal growth, not trading one for the other,” he says.
His approach with an individual client might depend greatly on the person’s stage of recovery. Someone who has been in recovery for more than five years is well on the road and probably needs to talk mainly about maintaining balance, while someone with less than a year of sobriety might still be running into conflicts with work colleagues who remember the recent past and expect their colleague to behave in a certain way.
The presence of an employee in recovery can present numerous challenges in a workplace. A boss might be fearful of what could happen and might be more prone to micromanage. The employee might lack the maturity to deal with certain situations and could adopt a victim mentality. Lindbeck can discuss these scenarios frankly with clients. “Companies are just a big dysfunctional family,” he says.
Lindbeck, who is based in the Phoenix area, conducts his coaching sessions over the phone. Sometimes he will work with someone for whom one conversation will suffice, while others have developed a long-term professional relationship with him. Even in these cases, however, he makes sure that while he serves as a resource the client doesn’t become too dependent on the relationship-and he clearly points out that he is not serving as a sponsor. His work emphasizes the client’s professional life and goals.
“Sometimes I can be coaching the owner of the company and the top employee, and some of the challenges in the company are between the two of them,” Lindbeck says.
Experiences in youth
Lindbeck describes a somewhat familiar scenario in discussing his own progression into harmful substance use, from starting to drink in a public park in junior high school to attending keg parties with football teammates in high school to discovering drugs in college. A couple of important events occurred in his 20s. First, his alcoholic father committed suicide. He says he became determined not to be like his father, although his substance use and some of the bad behavior to colleagues that accompanied it would continue for some time.
Then, in his mid-20s, he and a colleague took a new hire to lunch. When the moment came to order drinks, and Lindbeck prepared for business as usual, the new employee said he didn’t drink and discussed openly his addiction and recovery. It was an epiphany for Lindbeck, who saw what his life had become and observed someone who had taken another path.
The employee would end up taking him to his first 12-Step meeting. It has all led him to defining his own helping role, now in the unique position of helping executives who are in recovery. “I wish I had had somebody with whom to have these kinds of conversations,” Lindbeck says.
Addiction Professional 2010 January-February;8(1):40

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