Introduction

Before we begin, close your eyes and take three, deep conscious breaths. Now try to imagine a world without addiction. Begin to explore your feelings and notice your thoughts. What words come to mind?  Perhaps you begin to feel calm, relaxed, open, peaceful, hopeful and relieved. Imagining a world without addiction may inspire you to feel more grounded, joyous, free and expansive. I would like to invite you to inhabit this alternative reality within your mind and immerse yourself in the positive experience. 

 

Is this the life you have always wanted and know deep down that you actually deserve?

 

The ReBourne Recovery Programme has been designed and engineered to assist people who have identified that the neurological disease of addiction resides within them.  Addiction can translate as; "Having an unhealthy relationship with…".  This could be an unhealthy relationship with: alcohol, gambling, illegal street drugs, legal prescription drugs, sex or codependence (an unhealthy relationship with another person), social media, gaming, shopping or food.  Simply put, this is a step by step guide which helps you to look after yourself.  Each session is designed to make you think and see differently; which affords the opportunity to create a richer and more purposeful life. 

 

One of the most overlooked addictions is the unhealthy relationship with our own thoughts.  I believe that having an unhealthy relationship with our thoughts is the driving force that propels us into the addictions listed above.  We will be dealing with this in later sessions. 

 

Each session ends with a summary of key points titled: Principles of the Programme.  They will allow you to skim read the whole book and revise the key points when you have completed all of the sessions.  Some of these principles will be repeated throughout the programme.  This is to help them become ingrained in your everyday thinking and to increase your ability to self support during your recovery journey.

 

The term 'addict' is very stigmatised, judged and also grossly misunderstood.  My personal definition of addiction is: Any behaviour or ingestion of something that has a negative impact on self or others that is done more than once.  
 

To expand on this description, focus on these questions: 

Does your addiction enhance your overall well-being or deplete you? 

Does addiction make you feel expanded or contracted or even constricted? 

Do you think your addiction makes you grow or diminish?  

Do you think addiction makes you live a larger and expansive life or a restricting and timorous life? 

If your answer is 'Yes' to some or all of the above, there is a problem that needs addressing.  

 

Let me be very clear here when I say: Addiction is not the problem. The problem is believing that addiction is the solution.  The root of the problem is (usually) the result of a dysfunctional childhood.  I would estimate from personal experience that at least 90% of people with addiction have had an obvious dysfunctional childhood laced with abuse, neglect and lack of understanding and nurturing.  The other 10% have come from what 'appears' to be a functional childhood but they have experienced their childhood with a whole host of undiagnosed sensitivities causing discomfort,  anxiety, fear and depression.  It is not what type of childhood you had, it is how you experienced it. 

 

Addiction is often the default coping mechanism to manage thoughts and feelings that are perceived by the self as overwhelming and/or unmanageable.  This may be seen as a choice, but my understanding is that those who act out addictive cycles operate in this way as they simply do not have adequate emotional management skills. Instead, their first instinct is almost always to ‘self medicate’.  To summarise, I would venture to say that the vast majority of addiction is not the problem but rather the symptom of a dysfunctional childhood. 

 

Rewind back in time to when you were seven years of age and sitting in a classroom. Your teacher poses the question, “hands up, who would like to live their adult life in addiction?”. Knowing how destructive and chaotic addiction can be, who would discerningly choose this way of being?  Addiction is not a conscious choice but more the product of programming, borne from trauma, and an ineffective remedy to manage grief.  As with all symptoms, there is treatment and solution. The ReBourne Recovery Programme is a highly effective way to treat this. 

 

All of the teachings in this programme are what I have learned over the last 17 years of personal development since quitting alcohol on 05 November 2007, as well as my previous 25 years in pre-recovery and overwhelming addiction. My understanding of addiction has primarily been gleaned from exploring my own lived experience. This includes continuing to fine tune and apply my thinking. Equally informative and powerful has been hearing the experience of others in everyday life and through coaching my clients. My approach to treating addiction is informed, in part, by my extensive research into this subject matter. This includes the works of Gabor Mate, Carl Yung and James Hollis. I have read numerous books, attended 12 Step meetings in various fellowships, and created a successful recovery programme which has supported many people with addiction. These people are now living a life of sobriety, feeling comfortable and confident in their own skins, and living life on life's terms. 

 

I would say my number one teacher has been stepping into self awareness and being able to notice how addiction plays out in myself and in the presence of others.  This is why meditation is a vital recovery tool.  Meditation has been around for thousands of years for a reason, because it works to improve our overall well-being.  People with addiction spend most of their lives in fear and anxiety of the future or guilt and shame of the past.  Meditation brings us home, into the present moment, and shines the light of awareness on what we need to pay attention to.  This is our guiding light to health and growth. 

 

As I looked back over my years of recovery and sobriety, I realised that there is a plethora of help out there to assist people in becoming sober. These range from expensive privately paid drying out rehabilitation clinics, NHS services, The SMART programme, STAR and 12 Step meetings to name but a few. Although these services have worked for millions of people, the actual success rate percentage is surprisingly low.  I would attribute this to the lack of deep understanding that is required to set the wheels of recovery in motion. Many services focus on the drink, drug or behaviour, rather than what caused the addiction in the first place.  Once we expose the traumatic root of our addiction, it allows us to create a clear divide between our pure sense of self and how our childhood experience has programmed and shaped us to react to life addictively. Some systems are also punitive which diminishes one's desire to move forward. It's not conducive to our wellbeing to weaponise guilt and shame.  Non judgement, kindness, empathy and encouragement will nearly always yield a more positive result. 

 

One of the many common denominators of people with addiction is their inability to make healthy decisions.  Our default primary choice is to self medicate with an unhealthy relationship with something.  Self medicating with addiction is a temporary and illusory fix that will nearly always end with a negative outcome!  Recovery is fundamentally a series of healthy decisions with the goal of being as free as possible from addictive cycles.  This programme offers support, guidance and a range of practices and methods to keep you from returning to addiction as an ineffective solution to life's problems.  Remember, addiction isn't the problem, the problem is using addiction to solve a problem. 

 

Over the years I have seen many people quit addiction and live under the illusion that their problems are now over and they can live a 'normal' life.  Stopping addictive cycles is actually the easy part.  The hard part is dealing with what resides within you that made you a hostage to addiction in the first place. Although all people with addiction use it to self medicate in some shape or form, we are each an individual in the sense that we require different methods to remain in harmony and balance with life.  Imagine that the addict who resides within you is like a safe with a combination lock. You need to learn precisely what combination of recovery methods work for you to unlock the safe.  There is a saying in the rooms (12 Step Meetings): take what you want and leave the rest.  This for me is a great way to view the entire world of recovery.  

 

Ultimately, one of the most profound realisations we can have is to know that we CAN'T act out our primary addictions. The ones which have caused the most destruction, devastation and carnage to self and others. The consequences are simply too great. The risks far outweigh the short-term rewards. When we realise that we host this condition, we have both a personal and a social responsibility to free ourselves from the confines of addiction. Addiction is a wound that bleeds on other people. Mainly the ones we love the most.  

 

The fear of your own power.  

Many of us have heard the phrase "One of the things we fear most is our own power". But what does this actually mean?  The power that we fear in ourselves is the power that we ALL have. This is the power to CREATE.  Although I personally do not subscribe to organised religion, I have a deep respect for beliefs which have stood the test of time. One of these beliefs is that we are made in the image of God and that God is the great creator. Therefore, we are also born with the infinite superpower of creation.  Think of everything you have ever achieved or accumulated in your life.  It has always started at a point of your own desire to create. However, many people are also hindered and restricted by their fear of failure. If we live a larger life of creation, we may also fear setting ourselves up to fail.  It is important to emphasise here that there is no failure in recovery from addiction. It is more like ongoing coursework.  Each “failure” or “mistake” is actually an opportunity to learn, to plug leaks and to strengthen our overall plan. 

 

Fearing the failure of creating a larger more purposeful life, outside of addiction, invites the fear of not being able to deal with the feeling of overwhelm.  If you are reading this, then you are actually dealing with that fear of overwhelm right now by choosing to create a recovery plan to replace your addiction. 

 

When we have low self esteem, we often fear success more than failure.  The understanding here is that the low self worth that resides in most, if not all, people who host addiction simply cannot handle success.  This is where procrastination and pathological demand avoidance (PDA) will play its role. 

 

Addiction is about leading a restricted, confined life, deprived of growth and connection. A life that yields the same painful, negative and corrosive outcomes governed by old worn out complexes.  These complexes shackle us to our own childhoods that we had NO PART in creating. This prevents us from growing up.  Addiction is living small in the illusory comfort of groundhog day stuckness, doing the same thing and getting the same tiresome result.  Purpose is the opposite of addiction. Choose to live larger by being your God self, creatively visualising how you wish your life to be and boldly stepping into that life. YOU DESERVE THIS so choose it!

 

Principles of the Programme: 

 

• Addiction is not the problem. The problem is believing that addiction is the solution

• Imagining a world without addiction will inspire you to feel more grounded, joyous, free and expansive.

• Addiction can translate as; "Having an unhealthy relationship with…".

• One of the most overlooked addictions is the unhealthy relationship with our own thoughts.

• Addiction is: Any behaviour or ingestion of something that has a negative impact on self or others that is done more than once.  

• Does your addiction enhance your overall well-being or deplete you? 

• The vast majority of addiction is not the problem but rather the symptom of a dysfunctional childhood. 

• It is not what type of childhood you had, it is how you experienced it. 

• Addiction is not a conscious choice but more the product of childhood programming. 

• Meditation is a vital recovery tool as it sharpens your awareness. 

• People with addiction spend most of their lives in fear and anxiety of the future or guilt and shame of the past.  Meditation brings us home, into the present moment. 

• It's not conducive to our wellbeing to weaponise guilt and shame.  Non judgement, kindness, empathy and encouragement will nearly always yield a more positive result. 

• Self medicating with addiction is a temporary and illusory fix that will nearly always end with a negative outcome!

• Stopping addictive cycles is actually the easy part.  The hard part is dealing with what resides within you that made you a hostage to addiction in the first place.

• Take what you want and leave the rest. Employ the recovery tools that work for YOU. 

• The risks of addiction far outweigh the short-term rewards. 

• Addiction is a wound that bleeds on other people. Mainly the ones we love the most.  

• There is no failure in recovery from addiction. It is more like ongoing coursework.  Each “failure” or “mistake” is actually an opportunity to learn, to plug leaks and to strengthen our overall plan. 

• When we have low self esteem, we often fear success more than failure.

• Addiction is about leading a restricted, confined life, deprived of growth and connection.