An Excerpt from Kickass Recovery:
From Your First Year Clean to the Life of Your Dreams,
by Billy Manas
Having lived through a romantic separation recently, I had the opportunity to experience many different emotional states I didn’t necessarily appreciate. Whether it was logging onto Facebook and seeing my ex with her new boyfriend or just dealing with the challenge of being alone, I needed to get a handle on my emotions. I found this to be especially important when I first began picking up my daughters on the weekends. In the first few moments we’d be together, I’d be trying to process the feelings of seeing my ex, knowing we were no longer together, and making my kids feel loved and comfortable in this new and foreign situation. It was a lot to reconcile all at once.
If you’ve been to 12-step meetings, you’ve heard people speak about their “disease” talking to them in the sound of their own voice or about the endless chatter and noise we have in our heads. Have you ever stopped and thought about what that noise really is? I have.
That noise is usually a ceaseless barrage of questions that we keep asking ourselves. That’s essentially what thinking is in the first place, only with the alcoholic and addict brain, the thinking and the questions we ask ourselves are not terribly helpful. Take, for instance, my recent breakup.
The noise in my head was an endless loop of What’s wrong with me? Why does she find him sexier than me? Is this guy going to try to replace me as my kids’ father?
Here’s the tricky part, though: it doesn’t just come right out and ask those questions. I, like most people, have a huge ego, and because of this, the noise often comes disguised as Screw her! They deserve each other. I can do better, anyway.
But when you peel away all the hubris and bluff, the questions are more sensitive and vulnerable. Either way, when we find ourselves looping the same crappy thoughts over and over, we are basically interrogating ourselves like hapless detectives trying to find answers to questions that have none.
I heard self-help guru Tony Robbins tell a story about a Holocaust survivor named Stanislavsky Lech that forever shaped how I view the questions I ask myself when I am in bad situations. This guy Lech was a prisoner in a Nazi camp, and as he witnessed all the other prisoners around him dying, he noticed that these other guys spent the whole time asking themselves how God could do this to them or why they were in such a horrific situation. Obviously, this was very understandable. If you know much about history, you know that the persecution of Jews by the Nazis was one of the darkest periods of world history.
What Lech was able to figure out, as time went on, was that if he asked himself a different question, he could survive. So, he changed Why is this happening to me? to How can I get out of here? Now, he was in a concentration camp that was heavily
guarded by armed soldiers, so there was no easy answer to this question, but waking up every morning and closing his eyes at night, he kept just repeating that question over and over. Inevitably, he was one of the very few who made it out of that situation alive.
What that story taught me was that the brain is a magical vital organ. We will always get output when we feed it input, and the quality of the output is based primarily on the quality of the input. That’s just a fancy way of saying that if we want something good to come out, we need to keep putting good in. So, in my case with my ex-girlfriend, as soon as I realized I was getting trapped in a funk, I began to change the questions I was
asking myself, just as Lech did. So, in those first few moments on the weekend when I’d pick up my children, I would change my questions to How can I make this a good day? and What might be positive about their mother and me not being together anymore?
There was a reason I left that relationship. If I didn’t think it was going to improve the quality of my life in some way, there’s no way I would have done it. All in all, I was able to get through the hardest days, and like most things, it got easier as time went on.
Pushing Against Resistance
A second useful technique for gaining control over our emotions is, of course, how we use our bodies, or our physiology. I understand that seeing your ex walking down the street arm in arm with your best friend can make it difficult to smile and walk with a swagger in your step, but hear me out: you have to try to do it anyway. When you experience less-than wonderful circumstances, the first thing you want to do is slump your shoulders, put a scowl on your face, and walk like you’re headed to the electric chair in one of those old movies from the sixties. Unfortunately, when you allow your body to mourn like that, it only perpetuates more misery. You wind up in a loop of feeling bad and then worse, until you’re so far down, you start looking for unhealthy ways to get back up.
So, try this out. Walk around like you’re on top of the world, especially if you feel just the opposite. Hold the door for someone, and smile at them, like “I got this” — and guess
what, soon you will have this. Put your shoulders back and take a deep breath. Keep doing it. Then do it some more. Get up and move around. Moving your body will move your mind. A friend who taught second grade told me that when the kids were stuck on a math problem, she encouraged them to get up and march beside their desks, to switch their brain patterns. You can switch your brain pattern by moving around at any
time. Use your body to take you where you want your brain to go — forward.
As difficult as it may sound, you need to push against the inertia of your own sad emotions. Easy? No. Important? Without exaggeration, it is as important as it is to feed yourself and breathe. I’m sure, if you’ve been to more than one 12-step meeting,
you’ve heard the cliché “Move a muscle, change a thought.” I’ll be honest: I wanted to punch my sponsor the first time he said that to me. That was not the advice I was looking for, if I remember correctly. All these years later, I finally understand the wisdom in that trope.
One of the most perplexing secrets of life is that the answers we are all looking for are usually in those simple clichés we hear and quickly shrug off, with an “I know” or “No kidding.” How do I know this? I used to do the same thing. For decades. When I finally found the secret to making my life incredible, I realized it was because I put all those simple and overused expressions into practice.
I cannot stress this enough. Everyone knows the only way to succeed is to never stop trying, but how many people actually keep trying to accomplish the same thing every morning they wake up — day in, day out for weeks, months, and even sometimes years? Not that many. Just the famous ones you read about in biographies and newspapers.
This is somewhat puzzling, too. I have listened to some of the greatest people of our time give incredible commencement speeches — Jim Carrey, Denzel Washington, J. K. Rowling,
Steve Jobs — and the message is generally always the same: Do. Not. Ever. Give. Up. Unfortunately, it’s one thing to know something on an intellectual level and another thing entirely to put it into practice. As Edgar Allan Poe mused in his famous story “The Purloined Letter,” sometimes a secret hides in plain sight.
The Choice to Be Happy
Finally, what we choose to focus on will ultimately determine our emotions. My experience with finishing this book turns out to be a useful example. January and February in the Hudson Valley region of New York can be somewhat brutal. As hard as I push against it, by the middle of February, my mood and morale are almost always dark. It feels as though winter has been going on for an eternity, and more often than not, I even get some kind of bug that puts me down for a few days. Not this winter! This winter I had an entire book to write, and January and February kind of slipped by without my notice. They could have been April and May for all I cared. I was too immersed in what I was doing. It almost makes me feel as if I should probably try to write a book every winter.
This is no small thing. I used to dread winter. This year I went to work whistling every day. Snowstorms, icy roads, scraping off my car after work — none of it affected me. I was usually lost in thought about what I was writing, what I had written, or what I was going to write. Now that I realize I have a choice, I will most likely never experience winter the same way again.
I am telling you this not as some great authority but as someone who has just experienced this magical fact firsthand: what we choose to focus on, how we communicate with ourselves, and how we use our bodies will dictate our feelings and, ultimately, the quality of our lives.
We get to choose. Our circumstances are not that important. They never have been. When you realize this on a visceral level, you, my friend, will have some Kickass Recovery!
Billy Manas, author of Kickass Recovery, is a regularly featured columnist for Elephant Journal, a contributor to Good Men Project and The Fix, a published poet, a working musician, a full-time truck driver and a dad to three daughters. His journey from Adderall-chewing, methadone-swilling, pot-smoking maniac to speaker/author with over nine years of sustained recovery is, as is so often the case, fraught with excitement and a few valuable anecdotes. These anecdotes have found their way into his many talks at jails, detoxes, rehabs, and his new “Kickass Recovery” workshop. www.BillyManas.com
Excerpted from the book Kickass Recovery. Copyright © 2020 by Billy Manas. Printed with permission from New World Library.