The Root of the Relapse Repetition

November 11, 2016

How many times will I do this same thing before I learn? Stop smoking, good for awhile, then it happens. Then I rationalize it and do it here and there, and then before you know it, it’s daily, habitual. For a little while now I have really been thinking that I need to quit. It just isn’t necessary, and especially on a daily basis it can get to the point where it is more harm than good in my opinion.

So, a decision needs to be made, but part of me already knows what I should decide. The icing on the cake was that last night when we went for our usual lunch break, me, lonnie, and chris got pulled over. Nothing happened fortunately. But it was the same cop who arrested me, and I thought for sure he would hassle me after running my license. After that my mood was all screwed up. It’s kind of like I’ve just been doing my best to pretend it didn’t happen, but that just made it super real again. I can’t change what happened, and I can’t change the fact that I started again, but I can change everything past this moment.

I noticed when we weren’t smoking things just seemed better on average. We got along better, we were eating better, cooking more, I was doing different things, meditation, reading more, writing some. But now I just seem to waste a lot more time, and feel out of it alot. My diet has reverted back to being pretty shitty and irregular.

Like I said though, what worries me is I can stop now, and probably be okay, but I feel like the temptation will never go away. The further I get from this feeling the less I remember it…

March 9, 2025

Into the Light

This is a tough post to write, but I am trying to bring my authentic self to my writing because there is power in shedding light on the darkness within and pushing through the fear of vulnerability in order to find freedom. Things fester in darkness that cannot grow in the light and so I will bring the shadow within me out into the light of consciousness, not to annihilate that part of me but to see what it has to show me and what I can learn in order to fully integrate it and stop repeating these cycles.

Getting past Denial

I am an addict. Those words are still hard to admit. My mind wants to run from them, wants to rationalize, justify, defend myself, but the evidence in my life is undeniable. I started smoking weed at around 13. My best friend in my youth was the first to introduce me to it. I would go to his house a lot and tried it for the first time there. I can’t really remember that exact experience, but it drastically altered my life going forward. We can so often underestimate those little moments in life and what an impact they can have.

How I Got Here

Despite dabbling with it I didn’t really enter full-fledged addiction until I had more freedom, after high school. Spending way too much time at the plug’s house with an ex became my main form of entertainment. Despite graduating within the top 10 of my class and being accepted to the University of Texas I did not attend. Instead, I turned my back on my family because they tried to tell me that the relationship I had become involved in was not good for me and I did not listen. I didn’t want to hear. I was so intoxicated with this relationship and with the rebellious spirit within me that I went down some dark roads.

When the relationship ended, I was devastated. I fell into a deep depression, moved into my dad’s because I felt so ashamed to go back to my mom after how I had left her home and went out on my own to pursue such selfish desires. I remember a long stretch of not wanting to wake up in the morning, not wanting to do anything. I found God, got super religious, did mission trips, sought meaning through self-exploration, art, writing, introspection. All throughout this time I was using drugs off and on, mostly on. There are several points in my life where one of two things caused me to again attempt to get clean. The first was I just got fed up with all the dysfunctional behavior and consequences of my drug use and I would resolve to quit for good, sometimes with extended success. The next thing that did it at times was a really severe consequence of my drug use, such as the two times I got arrested. However, nothing ever seemed to do the trick because I never really got to the root of why I was using drugs.

Root vs. Symptom

Even now it is still not completely clear, but I have not used in over a month, and I do not intend to go back. I have slowly been rebuilding myself in the first months of this year, gaining clarity as my mind reverts to a more balanced state without all the overloading of serotonin and dopamine I was artificially creating for so long. Now I have more sustainable methods to create these positive feelings which I am learning to foster, such as this, my writing. I have begun exercising again, worked to develop a schedule that I can use to manage my time better (although I fail miserably at keeping to it still). I started a YouTube channel, and I started this Substack. I dusted off my novel manuscript that I wrote back in 2013 and am determined to finish it. I have played out this pattern I am in before, where I shed the symptomatic behavior, and my life begins to improve.

However, what my past self has to offer me in this post is the realization that removing the symptom is not enough. I must dig up the root and cut out the disease that keeps causing the fruit to rot on the branch. This will ensure I do not fall into that pattern again despite how many repetitions of the cycle I have gone through.

What is the disease at the root that makes me keep going back to self-sabotaging behaviors? Why have I run from my potential to indulge in these unproductive patterns that have brought such misery to my life? What new awareness can I gain so as to endure the inevitable temptations that will come to revert back when life gets difficult?

Core Beliefs

There is a core belief lying at the root of my addiction. By bringing that core belief into awareness there is hope that it can be examined and evidence to disconfirm its truth can be set beside it in juxtaposition. This allows for something extremely powerful to happen in our brains. This process is referred to as memory reconsolidation and is deeply explored in Coherence Therapy developed by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley. Bringing the core belief into conscious awareness without trying to supplant it or resist it but just trying to deeply understand it is the first part. The difficulty is there are a lot of these core beliefs intertwined like a network of diseased roots beneath the surface choking out what fruit I could produce. This is my aim through this writing and my healing journey. To uncover these diseased roots and heal them so they can produce the fruit I am destined to produce. Here is the state of it as clearly as I can currently define it.

Symptom: Continued relapses into substance abuse despite bouts of clean time and the improved quality of life they bring

Root Problem: Deep sense of inadequacy and feelings of failure for not living up to the unrealistic standards of perfection that I developed as a child

This root is the one I have to heal to ensure that this will be the final breakthrough that guarantees I will not relapse, EVER! With the help of a higher power I don’t even fully understand, and the continued fostering of my True Self, I finally have hope that this root can be healed, and that my life will become bountiful.

I feel there is so much more I want to say but for now if you got this far I cannot thank you enough for taking time to read my words and if anything here resonated with you please leave a comment and let me know, it really does mean so much to me. I will leave you with a couple questions for you to consider.

What in your life has held you back from being the person you are meant to be?

What core beliefs can you think of that may be at the root of these behaviors?

Are you interested in becoming curious about those beliefs to see if maybe there is some deep pain hiding in them that, if healed, could potentially transform your life?