Recovery Zone Volume 2: Achieving Balance in Your Life - The External Tasks - Softcover

Patrick Carnes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983271321 ISBN 13: 9780983271321

Publisher: Gentle Path Press, 2021

Synopsis

World renowned addiction expert, Dr. Patrick Carnes, releases his second volume of The Recovery Zone series, an innovative and practical guide focused on tasks and resiliency skills to restore happiness, harmony, and lifestyle balance for those recovering from all types of addictions. Recovery Zone Volume 2 provides real answers about how to stay in the zone when traumatic events, toxic stress, and easy access to escape surrounds you. The goal must be an “Ultimate to do List” so you do not miss out on the life you want and feel a genuine call to do.

Core to this platform is a resilience scale built on ten master skills and thirty operational strategies that users describe as a “defining” passage into a new life.You have made the decision. You realize you can no longer live like this. The costs are too high. For some of us, the decision is remade over time, but inch by inch we resolved to make it different. There is the “dark passenger” in our head who argues about our choice to be better. The even greater challenge with your decision to change, is the question of how to do it? We ask “ how to take the dark corners of ourselves and bring them into the light?” The commitment wavers and so does the struggle.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick J. Carnes, Ph.D., is the founder of the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP) and Gentle Path Press. His extensive background in the field of addiction therapy led him to develop multiple cutting-edge recovery programs. Dr. Carnes’ most recent endeavor is the Founder of Gentle Path and Senior Fellow at The Meadows, in Wickenburg, Arizona. With more than 30 years in the field of sexual addiction treatment, Dr. Carnes is an internationally recognized expert, presenter, and interview subject. His assessment tools and 30-task model treatment methodology deliver an unprecedented approach to addiction recovery for practitioners of trauma, sexual addiction, and co-occurring addictions. In 1966, Dr. Carnes graduated from St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He earned his Master’s in 1969 from Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a Ph.D. in counselor education and organizational development from the University of Minnesota in 1980. His achievements include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH), where they now award an annual “Carnes Award” to researchers and clinicians who have made exceptional contributions to the field of sexual health. He has published numerous articles and books on the subject of sexual addiction and trauma as well as contributed to Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Recovery Zone, Volume 2 The decision is made. You realize you can no longer live like this. The costs are too high. For some of us the decision had to be remade at times, but inch by inch we resolved to make it different. The phrase that makes sense is that there is a “dark passenger” in our head who argues about our choice to be better. To make it an even greater challenge as a decision, the question is how to do it. We ask how to take the dark corners of ourselves and bring them into the light. The commitment wavers and so does the struggle. Yet, consider a child in danger. Even the most hard bitten or self-adsorbed of us instinctively will protect children in danger. Without hesitation, we will place ourselves between the threat and the child. If a child wanders in front of an oncoming car we will grab that child. We will do all that we can to ensure the protection of that child even if it is life-threatening to us. Most everyone upon reflection will remember a previous effort to help a child. There was no deliberation. No stopping to reflect on whether that child was worthy of life. Nor was there consideration of whether the child was a friend, a family member, or unknown to us. We just did it. Collective consciousness, genetic coding, or cultural imprint, it did not matter. The decision was made to save the life of the child. In the world of addiction, the willingness to go to any length to make life different is elusive to both addicts and loved ones. We have compared the addictions and the accompanying attachments and feelings to a “black hole.” The analogy is that negative dark energy in a star becomes so powerful, the star system collapses in on itself. Nothing -- not even light -- can escape. The systems of our life including our very biology, recycles the toxic, the unreal, and the destructive through the electrochemical rivers of our brains. Obsession keeps us in a series of closed loops as families, as persons, and as organisms. The original decision to be who we are is lost in the turmoil and gravity of our own darkness. What we would commit to for a child, we could not do for the child within us. Yet that original sense of self was in us from the very beginning. That part of ourselves that says a profoundly personal “yes” to a dream, talent, or way of being is visible from the outset of life. In traditional peoples, it was common to find the elders of the tribe take on the task of observing the early affirmations and tendencies of the young. Reflections on those tendencies went into a process called a “naming” ceremony around the ages of five or six. The name that was given reflected the gifts and propensities of the child that the elders perceived would be assets to that child as an adult and to the community. The process allowed nurturing of the talent and self-knowing of what trauma therapist Marilyn Murray and others call the “original feeling child.” Busy parents and events in life can obscure these early desires. Furthermore, Alice Miller describes in the Drama of the Gifted Child that the theft, brutalization, or denial of these original inclinations gives wounded feelings the power in addiction. As we now know, trauma and shame are not just toxic thoughts but become encoded as biological realities. They are etched into the synapses of the brain. Massive scientific evidence shows that these dark events are encoded at a cellular level. Even though the cells reproduce, the message is carried forward in the new cells. Like circles in the core of a tree which encodes the impact of the year, the tree will always know. The human body does keep score. More than voices of the past, they become us. I now have had some firsthand experiences with the power and value of those early inclinations. After Recovery Zone I was finished, my wife of twenty years, Suzanne died. When we met as single parents, we had seven children between us and ultimately ten grandchildren. One of those was a granddaughter named Kiran who at the time was six going on seven. She was a very gifted first grader. She had an older sister who had blazed a trail in high school of many accomplishments. Yet Kiran was very talented and also very different. She admired her sister but was already determined not to be in her sister’s shadow. After the funeral, Kiran and her family stayed with me at our cabin in northern Minnesota. It was Christmas time and the snow, the smell of pine trees, and the presence of family was a great comfort to me. Kiran’s parents came to me concerned for Kiran because she was having difficulty sleeping. The issue was that Kiran knew how proud Suzanne was of her sister, Brianna, and of all of her achievements. Kiran wanted her grandmother to see who she was and all she was about, but now her grandmother would not be able to see it. She felt cheated by her grandmother’s early death and being denied that affirmation. I understood that loss, but was at a loss myself about how to help her through that. I had the task of sorting through Suzanne’s clothes and personal items as part of post funeral realities and I asked Kiran to help me through this painful task. As we sat there touching the things that Suzanne had touched, her energy was around us. I asked Kiran about her sorrow and her sleep. She told me about profoundly wanting her grandmother to know her the way she had got to know Brianna. I shared the history of the naming ceremonies of Native American tribes and how elders were more than just old people. They had many responsibilities, but one special task was to watch their young ones with great care. Then at about age six the character traits, abilities, interests, and behaviors were discussed at length by the elders. At that time a new name was given in a ceremony that reflected the true nature of the person. I shared with Kiran that Suzanne and I were the elders of her clan. We watched our young carefully. I told her of the many conversations her grandmother and I had about her. I was very specific how Suzanne would remark about how creative and witty Kiran was. Suzanne was often impressed at how disciplined and determined Kiran was and how she speculated about her artistic abilities. Kiran and I spent a couple of days together sorting and talking. I am not sure who helped who more. I do know that Kiran started to sleep soundly and that I got through Christmas. The bottom line is how important the early acknowledgement of the inclinations and strengths of a young person is. Already the DNA pulls energy like little tuning forks that tell the body how to develop and call for the strengths and abilities that person is to have. Natural inclinations had started to emerge, and Kiran knew them already. When I brought those specific examples up, she knew . Sometimes we laughed and sometimes we cried, but I knew she knew . Kiran knew enough about life to know she needed the validation. As an elder of the tribe, I was a witness to her reality. Being a witness is sometimes all that we can do, all that is necessary, and sometimes enough. Randy Pausch wrote a very moving account of this phenomenon in his book The Last Lecture. The book describes his struggle in learning that he was dying of cancer. He realized that it was important for him to leave a legacy of the most important realizations of his life in the form of one last lecture at MIT. His family resisted this effort at first because they had little time with him left. But his passion won the day and in part he speaks to how he was able to reconcile his passion with his love of family and leave an important legacy to all. I encourage you to read the book and actually watch the lecture on Youtube.com. Core to his message was that to be fulfilled you have to be in your passion, but to do that you have to be true to yourself and do whatever you have to do to make it part of your life. And the parallel truth was making his intimate relationships more meaningful as a result. Pausch states that at an early age he knew his dream was to be an engineer who designed adventures for kids and he knew that he wanted to work for Walt Disney. His career as an engineering professor at MIT was integrated with assisting in the design of the Disney theme parks. He got to do his childhood dream and fulfilling that dream brought him happiness. And a happy person is a great person with whom to be in a relationship. This formula was so important that he felt a significant catalyst of his legacy was to tell people that. (Note the importance of legacy is passing it on – a form of being a witness.) Once you know your dream, he urged his listeners to use the formula that you follow a vision with a priority. The guiding phrase he suggests is “if nothing else, I will….” (A phrase that parallels Alcoholics Anonymous’ call to “going to any lengths” or Yoda’s famous phrase from Star Wars, “Do or do not. There is no try …” Randy Pausch was clearly living in his best energy even in his dying process. Not always is everyone so fortunate to have that clarity from the beginning. I knew that by the fourth grade I wanted to be a writer. I loved words. I loved reading. I had no idea I would be a psychologist or a specialist in addictions. That call came much later. All I knew is that I loved reading stories and science. My father and I had a constant struggle over “book learning.” He felt that I needed to be in the real world and that I was escaping. He saw it as laziness and a way to avoid my school work and chores. He put a limit on how many books I could read in a week for most of my elementary years. When I completed my Ph.D., one of his cutting phrases was “even a Ph.D. should know that.” My uncle, who was a physician, felt compassion for me and told me that both my mother and father flunked out of the University in their freshman years, a secret kept well hidden from me, and that alcohol was a part of that. I know that my father struggled in school and life. He and my mother both were brilliant people who struggled through the depression and World War II. Together they had a number of successful careers. For example, at age fifty my dad taught himself electrical engineering and went on to make a fortune. This self-made man formula was something he took pride in. His shame about school was real and his fear was that what he had done would not count. We shared that actually. I had trouble in school but that was because I had trouble focusing. Trauma and anxiety actually affect brain function. The ability to focus and the capacity to calm oneself are impacted. Given the uproar of alcoholism in our family I had no real support about school. I have lesions on my frontal lobes from when I was battered as a child. I had to learn how to focus and compensate. For a long time, I did not know how badly I had been hurt so I had shame about academics. When my brain was scanned, I was stunned at how many things I had misperceived about myself. I was not defective. When I would graduate with honors or succeed in some task, I would feel surprised or unworthy or that a mistake was made. Now I see all that. But the dreams of being an author were obscured. The inclinations were buried to me but not to others. Beyond Sobriety in the Eye of the Storm Notice what you do not have! TIME. This seems like so much at once. Can we spread this out and live our lives a little? Not if we have a disease and we need to manage it to have a quality of life different from the hell we were in. Most of us were selfish or selfless, and many, many of us did both. Most of us are surrounded by those who are invested in returning to the old patterns. They do not expect or believe that we are serious. Whether it is a spouse who is ready to give up or a parasitic employee who lives off of your income, and the many others who have some investment in your failure, they are betting you will not make this happen. One guideline really helps to clear up the dilemmas: Only do that which matters. Make your mental health a priority. Watching football does not matter. Helping out the neighbor who really does not like you much does not matter. Spending time with people you do not like does not count. Doing work for others because you fear their disapproval degrades the self. Hafiz wrote, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you in better living conditions.” The “promises” have been echoed so many times and in so many cultures. Deepak Chopra observes “And if you really get in touch with it, if you become familiar with this center of your awareness that you really are, you will see it is your ticket to freedom.” Iyanla Vanzant adds, “The truth will make you free, but you have to endure the pains of birthing it.” Do what is necessary. Let go of what you do not need. Focus on this work. Have others in your life who are doing the same. Notice your resistance and name it. Your Inner Observer starts with four challenges. First, is to reorient all perceptions from the point of view of a platform of gratitude. Gratitude is the most powerful change strategy humans have. Second, the real you has to start sorting out your window of tolerance. This space starts first with what you can tolerate in order to live in recovery but eventually leads to a profound sense of your own zone and what matters. Third, your inner observer with its wise mind has to referee the swirl of currents in your brain. Then it has to reach confluence and transparency of who you are to others. Translated: the real you will have to stand up. Finally, the inner observer searches out the paradoxical in making choices. Life puts you constantly where you have to decide between competing realities and simultaneous truths (paradoxes). Because this is hard, we learn who we are. Here is each challenge broken down. Building a Platform of Gratitude Gratitude is one of the most important game changers of personal perspective that we know. There are a variety of researchers of happiness who suggest that everyone has a “set point” to their emotions which limits how happy one can be. This perspective says that even major happy events will raise your joy juice for a short time but then the brain will regress back to its usual settings. However, there is a body of literature on the impact of gratitude which says that set point not only can be moved significantly higher but could change brain architecture and function. You can find references to this in our bibliography. One of the best examples comes out of psychology. Psychologists spend a lot of their careers measuring various aspects of being human. For some time there has been concern about focusing just on the negative aspects of human behavior. One effort to change this orientation is an instrument called the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory) which measures more than just problematic behaviors with additional measures of well being based on things like no depression or little conflict with authority. These key measures are called the PSY 5. (You can find the details in Google.) If someone is high in an ongoing sense of gratitude, studies show that it trumps the PSY 5 all the time. One of the founding grandfathers of the modern science of mental health, William James, put it this way: “The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” Out of this perspective came the whole concept of positive psychology. Maslow articulated a whole new way of looking at human achievement. One of the early pioneers, Martin Seligman, coined the term “learned helplessness” as a way of creating a bridge to make achievement and success possible for everyone. Mihaly Czikscentmihaly defined achievement and happiness as a matter of “flow” ― the essence of which is key to this series of Recovery Zone books. Today we live in an abundance of meditation, mindfulness, and consciousness raising. The core skill that keeps bubbling to the top is the ability to keep close to their core self a sense of gratitude. Thus, the inner observer – no matter how bad things seem – approaches all things by finding even in the worst of occasions, that there is still much that matters, always scouting for the meaningful and finding value even in the smallest events, realities, or qualities of the moment. When teaching about gratitude, people nod their heads and are ready to go on to the next topic. But I stop and tell them about Rhonda Byrne’s little book, The Magic. In it she challenges her readers to a thirty-day process of gratitude. The bedrock exercise is to record a list of ten items you are grateful for on each of the thirty days. If you miss a day you have to go back and start the book over. I personally thought it would be easy because I thought my daily disciplines were good. However, it took two weeks for me to begin a sustained thirty day drive to get it done. I had to start over three times. After sharing my story, I challenge the audience to try the exercise and the book and see if they can do it in thirty days. I have done this with therapists with advanced degrees and patients with very mixed backgrounds. My challenge to every person participating was that at the end of the course, those who could honestly say they started and did the thirty days in a row would receive a personal gift from me. Whether highly trained professionals or people new to recovery, it has worked out to be about the same. No matter the size of the group, the ratio is about three out of fifty. Eventually all do it. They all have similar responses at the end. Thinking about it each day creates a “habit” of perspective. The commonalities most people notice are: ■ Gratitude for what is right in your world is an important framework for thinking about what is not going well. ■ Problem solving is easier because you have in mind other times of distress which turn out to have contained real gifts, and that will be true of this moment too. ■ Gratitude teaches you to focus on what matters which changes your priorities, decisions, and focus on your own state of flow. ■ Gratitude assists with feeling deeply necessary grief, letting go of what you cannot control, and unnecessary drama over that which changes. ■ Being grateful helps you to notice traits in others you need to affirm to deepen your relationships, promote successful teamwork, and sustain positive family function. ■ The positive attitudes of gratitude improve body functions including heart, brain and organs which in turn add significantly to immune response and longevity. ■ In times of challenge, gratitude helps with courage because you are aware of assets you must protect, of risks worth taking, and of your clarity of purpose. ■ Gratitude is key to intimacy because you do not lose track of why you must show up for those in your circles of intimacy. ■ Great achievements are possible when gratitude sustains the persistence necessary to say, “I get to do this.” ■ All spiritual traditions recognize that gratitude is the doorway to the here and now or what some term “stillness.” Determining the Window of Tolerance Another lens for the Inner Observer to use in being a “wise” mind is what we call the window of tolerance. Bonnie Phillips and I developed this concept for a book called Betrayal Bond. The central concept is that recovering people have things (negative stressors) which can trigger us into over-reacting and old behaviors. ■ Critical judgements made by spouses and other family members (real or unreal) ■ Feeling unheard ■ Overwhelmed by many things to do ■ High stress at work ■ False accusations ■ Being talked about behind your back in a negative way ■ Lack of appreciation after lots of effort ■ Emotional distance and lack of communication ■ Constant criticism ■ Attacks on your children or family members ■ Topics that are volatile or sensitive ■ Shameful history that is exposed or referenced ■ Making mistakes with inordinate reactions by others ■ Certain types of people ■ Threatening behavior including violence or sexual assault The list can actually be quite extensive. The problem is they can trigger despair, rage, acting out, drug or alcohol relapse -- or any dysfunctional behavior which disrupts your calm center. The Window of Tolerance exercise is a way to map out your responses. You list the possible triggers and then you list the tools and strategies you need when things come up. This helps keep the eye of the storm calm and as time goes on you are integrating your skills into your flow. Integration is really another word for the “wash on/wash off” experience being knitted together as an expert system. Searching for the Paradoxes Recovery often places us on the edge of truth. The edge is hard and sharp at times. Yet, the choices we make do define us. It is the matrices of these choices that bring and define our own spiritual lives. These edges of truth also take us from a life in which our choices are taken from us, and we live with intention. Intentionality is the path to living in the zone. In this chapter we have explored the path of recovery, and where we are in progress. Now is a good time to return to the decision table. Only now we will organize the table into a search for the paradoxes in your life as part of the edges of your truth and your quests for meaning. Let’s divide the table into what we shall call the core paradoxes: ■ The discernment paradox – one of the most difficult areas to resolve in human experience is captured in the Stockdale paradox. It is the conflict between the realities to be faced now and the realities of what I want in my life in the future. Reconciling my choices about here and now with my choices about what I want is a conflict we all battle with. This ability to decide will be critical to how well you use this book. ■ The resilience paradox – Einstein said that the most important decision a person makes is to decide that the universe is friendly. In other words, we must come to believe that there is purpose and meaning to life. The other truth we face is captured the title of Rabbi Kushner’s famous book Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? There is the reality of human suffering. At times it is not about fairness or justice, but chance and tragedy. This is the transformation of suffering into meaning. Only your inner observer can help you by using perspective on the truth of the moment to move to a higher level. ■ The presence paradox – This conflict is the one Jung said was the most difficult. To be present requires being true to myself and true to others. But he also says this is the most spiritual of places a human will experience. ■ The creativity paradox – We must rest ourselves and literally smell the roses in order to keep ourselves healthy. We are truly then a human being with the emphasis on “being.” It is in stillness that our inner observer knows the best next decisions and is at its most creative. Having a “zone” in which we can be our most creative requires action, effort, and focus. The risk is becoming a human “doing” in which life is all about work, responsibilities, deadlines, and obligations. How we balance these will determine recovery success and a viable window of serenity and zone living. The Great Idea …. Every reader will identify with having an idea that everyone around you thought was crazy, impractical, or even dangerous. Yet you did it anyway. And they were right. It is one of the most common experiences people with “medical conditions” have. They go against their doctor’s advice, family wishes, and the warnings of trusted friends. It is the nature of addiction and mental illness to think they are right. So relying on support groups and others, is key to recovery. You do this because you learned how your best ideas brought you and maybe others serious harm. But herein is a very, significant paradox. Consider the movie Star Wars. George Lucas insisted on keeping creative control despite extreme skepticism of the concept and prolonged financial struggle. Eleven of the best directors turned him down. His integrity literally changed the culture and a profound paradigm shift occurred. He literally introduced quantum physics to the masses as well as the wisdom of Joseph Campbell who was the model for the character Yoda. Financially, the series has become one of the most profitable film ventures of all time. Money was not the motivation for Lucas. The “Great Idea” was his guiding values and integrity. He had this rudder that told him he was right to take the risks. Dan Goleman in his book Focus describes Lucas in terms as an example of an “inner compass, a North Star that steers them through life according to the dictates of their deepest values and purposes.” Goleman’s description of the brains’ process of keeping this focus is important as we reflect on the brain pool of our talents: The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in subcortical neural networks that gather, store, and apply algorithms from every event in our lives – creating our inner rudder. The brain harbors our deepest sense of meaning in these subcortical regions – areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the new cortex but richly to the gut ….this inner radar holds the key to managing what we do -- and just as important, what we don’t do. This internal control mechanism makes all the difference between a life well lived and one that falters. Sometimes this process uncovers passion about a great idea. The reset button is there. What does this guidance system tell you about how to spend your remaining time? Remember Doc Childre’s caution that your passion can remain elusive until you allow yourself the stillness and have the courage to listen. Remember the Great Idea will test you and, for us in recovery, the paradox awaits all of us. To be true to ourselves in face of risk and challenge or can we trust our recoveries of taking a deep dive into something and hope it is not a rabbit hole or an old behavior? The truth for us in Recovery can be a very thin edge. Remember to implement a great idea requires a certain level of personal coherence. Having a great idea can occur at any stage of personal disarray. Chaos invites the leap. Yet, no creative act occurs without focus and emotional certainty. The great idea always disrupts others. Focus is how those who have created success for themselves summoned the level of effort, discipline, and vision to overcome the inertia that awaits all change. Focus stimulates solutions and harnesses necessary pragmatism. But it emanates and is sustained by the deep passion of the self. It never is accidental although it counts on the spontaneous. Seldom is success of the idea about one’s ability although such contributions come from those able to mobilize ability. Nor is it only about discipline and planning, although being willing to prioritize is key. Otherwise boredom kills the spirit. In short, focus requires the commitment of the self – to help the self. -- Patrick J. Carnes

Edition details

• Publisher: Gentle Path Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0983271321
• ISBN 13: 9780983271321
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300