I suggest that, in truth, there are not more negative things in your life than positive, but rather that you have yet to find the skillful means to relate to the problems you're struggling with as challenges to be met and overcome and the opportunities they truly are.
You were once ignorant of just how bad it actually is to live life actively addicted to anything, as everyone is until they become an addict or is educated (which is pretty much impossible to do as a non-drug using lay person in America given the War on Drugs), to the horrors of addiction. As such you didn't work as hard to make choices and decisions that ensured you would not become an addict, such as smoking pot instead of taking Vicodin.
Eventually, if you had access to drugs, found their use enjoyable and attractive, even if for totally legitimate and justified reasons, you would begin to slide down the slippery slope towards from at least somewhat healthy coping skills towards increasingly maladaptive ones, a.k.a. addiction.
Given the darkness that is the stigma attached to being known as an "addict"* and treated as an addict, unless you do a heck of a lot of work educating yourself and are lucky in terms of your environment and genetic endowment, you will still have internalized and consciously or unconsciously recreated and incorporated at least some of the extremely negative, moralistic mythes about addiction and the addict as the scourge of mankind and evil incarnate, as bad as terrorists and even more evil than pedophiles.
Then one day, you wake up to your life in tatters and your living space a disgusting mess. It would just be any other day for you, by this point in your life, except for the fact that on this particular day, for whatever reason, you are lucky enough to more literally wake up to your circumstances. One day, sooner or later, I believe very strongly that every addict comes to realize that their life is shit. That they hate themselves.
I am not at all speaking of rock bottom here - your life could, if someone else saw you who had no idea about your harmful patterns of drug use or drug misuse, be the epitome of the ideal man or woman, someone they wish they could be - or at least think they do
No, I am speaking here of insight. One day you begin the process of gaining meaningful insight into your addiction. Something like, "Wow, now I understand why I hate New Years so much: I am always too hung over from Christmas to enjoy it!" And with such insights you can begin gather motivation and resources to move towards a lasting, meaningful, fulfilling recovery.
I have kind of gotten off track here, but back to the point I wanted to make earlier. I suggest that you would benefit immensely from the kind of paradigm shift that will occur when we change our relationship to the material bodies like drugs, your cravings, thoughts and your feeling states (what people refer to as "people, places and things" in the 12 step orthodoxy)(craving is a feeling state FYI) through the use of mindful awareness practice.
It is pretty darn hard if not impossible to do this without some form of mindfulness practice. For instance, many religions and orthodoxies employ aspects of what is now referred to as mindfulness (vipassana). While you can easily find mindful practices outside of Buddhism, the Theravada tradition in particular is recognized as the oldest most robust, secular type of mindfulness ever created and still practiced today.
You can do this though my friend! There are some super basic, easy mindful awareness (a.k.a. mindfulness) resources that are free and accessible to all online that you can use to start your own practice. Granted, this is no quick fix. It will take weeks, month and years to produce a real paradigm shift and sea change. However, it does on the one hand begin to free you from old thought patterns of thought and letting your mind run wild as well as impulsive and less than skillful patterns of behavior, while on the other hand allowing you to experience true joy, which is not what most people in the West know as joy, but rather the equanimity that is appreciative joy, a particular type of joy that allows you to bring compassion to any moment of life, even those considered by others as nothing but painful.
Check out the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Resource sticky. In particular scroll down until you find my post with the STOP exercise in it. That will be the most valuable practical mindfulness based tool you can start using right away.
Go to the Mindful Awareness Research Center's website and download Diana Winston's guided meditations.
Start off with a short 3-10 minute meditation once or twice a day for a week that you do at the same times each day in the same environment (whatever you can manage, but start slow because, although challenging yourself is not a bad thing, there is no reason your practice should be particularly difficult - we are after decreasing the stress in our lives here after all, and some practice is always better than none at all). When you're ready do a ten or 15-25 minute meditation once or twice a day for twice as long as the short sit. If you're ready to move on to a 30-45 minute sit after one week, go for it!
Although the current research indicates that we need a minimum of about 30 minutes to really benefit from, you will benefit from longer sits more than you would from shorter ones (as long as you are sitting safely and other medical issues and social obligations are taken care of). The difference from going from 3 minutes of meditation to 30 minutes will be a lot more dramatic than the changes you'll notice in going from 30 minutes to an hour. This is all probably because it takes a while for you to settle into the meditation and because more challenging stuff comes up to work with and untangle during longer periods of sitting.
The Case for Making Mindfulness a Priority in Your Recovery:
For the most part modern addiction treatment and therapy in the West is founded on CBT and psychoanalysis. As such they are all about avoidance. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not address all the mass of jumbled underlying issues that made your addiction possible and really shaped what its development. Instead of training you to avoid or attempt to ignore your problems, mindfulness trains you to recognize, allow, investigate and then move beyond your problems.
It was a truly amazing day when I realized that I had genuinely begun to look at my problems and failures in a new light. Instead of just reeling against discomfort and trying to cling on to pleasure, through a mindful awareness (a.k.a. Insight Meditation a.k.a. Vipassana) practice we teach our minds to meet them head on skillfully instead of reactively as the challenges and opportunities our pains and pleasures were all along.
Obviously these issues need to be address to make any kind of meaningful progress in your recovery. Mindfulness fills this need. Look into Against the Stream and Refuge Recovery, the only two auxiliary organizations (similar to 12 step groups in that they are non-formal support to whatever treatment you've found works for you) that are focused if not explicitly certainly wholly on mindful awareness practice.
Feel free to PM me with any questions, and you can always post in the MBSR Resource sticky here in SL. Keep us posted on your progress. Best of luck!!!!
*It isn't my place to characterize yourself as one. It also tends to make me feel a tad sad or frustrated when I hear others describe themselves as one, like how they do it at 12 step meetings. "Yes, obvious I know you're an addict," I tend to think to myself. But this is way too off topic for this thread.
EDIT: OMFG LOL I had no idea I'd written that much. Bet you didn't expect such a long reply, did ya!
Clearly you can see I'm into this stuff.
