glad your housing thing is hopefully worked out.
i'm feeling a bit like that about the program right now. and i hate how they have it inbuilt that if it doesn't work for you, its your fault, you didn't work the steps correctly, you weren't committed enough. i still go to meetings most days but mostly to keep me busy and cos i only have 1 friend up here outside of NA. i'm just hoping that keeping up my step work, something will happen.
can you break building a life down a bit? like, have a shower, leave the fucking house, talk to a human being, find some voluntary work, actually go to your voluntary work, etc? i feel like a hypocrite saying that though cos i bailed on my sponsor, missed my service, and have basically been in bed since thursday cos i exhausted myself epically flipping out.
the success rates can be demoralising. but i find them motivating, i am arrogant enough to feel like i'm special, so should aim to be in the 5% successes, not the 95% failures.
It's the Free Will Fallacy. Of course it's your fault, if you believe in free will. Otherwise it's
no one's fault and no one wants to blame REALITY for you being a drug addict, or the fact that NO ONE IS IN CONTROL. That's a scary concept! 7 billion non-playable characters on auto-pilot! OF COURSE no one wants to admit that to themselves EVEN IF THEY KNOW IT'S REAL.
We might not have any control in anything, let alone JUST our addictions. If that's the case, it really IS NO ONE'S FAULT and you never have to beat yourself up over it again.
I think if you believe in free will, and want to get clean, yeah, your success "rate" (whether or not OTHER People get clean is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to whether YOU DO though, the overall # shouldn't be taken with any seriousness) might be really low. Just admit you are totally out of control. There is no higher power; the higher power is going to be your free will, the drug, or it simply just won't be a real entity. But we really are powerless over our addictions and
much, much more.
I know some of y'all are in programs, and what not, but believe in the determinism thing, guys. Let's say you have free will to not use TODAY. You did NOT possess this degree of free will in active addiction. It's important to admit YES, I
was out of control even if you want to IMAGINE that you have control now (you don't, sad but true, things just happen to be the way they are). It's a freeing feeling to realize that you were truly powerless to stop. Not because you didn't appeal to a higher power (what would that even be? Praying to a non-existent god for non-existent free will? Praying for a delusion of a free will in a world where you don't believe in god?) but just because
none of us were ever powerful enough to control ourselves to begin with. If people didn't like heroin, they wouldn't use it. If they liked it the way I did OF COURSE THEY'D USE IT TOO MUCH. Such is the nature of reality...
Like literally, CJ, Chinup, don't blame yourselves. Forgive yourselves. If you want like REALLY WANT or HAVE TO believe in free will, admit you made the wrong decisions, that you are capable of making bad decisions but you want to try a new way of life. Of course, it's not really like you are doing any of this, you've done it and you're reliving it, but it's not like you get a second bite at the apple. It's already been eaten and this is a slow-motion video of you eating it. Watch carefully as nothing changes. Were you ever really choosing to do the first iteration to begin with? Does it matter?
(Deeply sorry if this went far over some people's heads)