Transcription
[Music] Hi everybody. You know we're spending four weeks in a rehab program. For some of you, it's the first week, and for some of you, it's the last week. But regardless of which end we're at, uh, it's probably good to think a little bit about what should be accomplished in a rehab program.
I think the first thing to realize is something that came to my attention one day when I walked in. A young woman came over to me and said, "Oh, I'm so happy I'm finishing the program here, and I'm leaving for home tomorrow, and everything out there looks so wonderful to me." I said, "Oh, Lord, you've just wasted four weeks' time." I said, "You really think that while you were sitting here for four weeks, the world out there turned out to be a better place?" I said, "If you're going home with those kinds of ideas, you're going to be drunk by tonight." I said, "Look, there, the world did not change. Whatever problems were out there before you came in are still out there. Family is family, and husbands are husbands, and wives are wives, and employers and employees—nothing changed. See, the change has to occur in us, not in the outside world."
Now, the question is, what is the nature then of the change that is to occur in us? And one would say, "Well, we're supposed to be learning how to become sober; we're supposed to learn how to become abstinent." Well, that's true, but abstinence and sobriety are not the same thing. There's a difference between being dry and really being sober.
Now, there are a lot of causes that go into the development of addiction, whether it's to alcohol or chemical dependency, and I'm not sure that we know all of them. But one of the things that seems to me to contribute to it is that many people use chemicals as a method of escaping. Now, there's nothing wrong with escaping per se. Obviously, if your car is stalled on the railroad tracks and there's a diesel coming at you, I mean, that's not the time to figure out how to cope with a challenge. You know, in a situation like that, you get the hell out of there, and the faster the better. So there are times when escaping is clearly the appropriate thing to do. But to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of anybody who's yet reached for a bottle, even people who keep it under the front seat of the car when a diesel is coming at them. I mean, those are not the times when you escape into chemicals. The time that we use chemicals for escape is when we are escaping from things that we are perfectly capable of coping with, like the kinds of everyday stresses that are occurring, whether it's family or job or some social pressures. Those are the kinds of things for which we, uh, go for chemicals, whether it's a Valium or a Percodan or cocaine or marijuana or booze. And I guess the legitimate question is, why the need to escape all the time?
Now, we know why they need to escape from a diesel because it's overwhelming. It's—a diesel weighs 250 tons; I weigh 152 lbs, and there's no way that I can cope with that. But if we use that as a as a paradigm, we can see that probably the reason that so many people escape from challenges that they are actually able to cope with is because, in their perception, all of these challenges are overwhelming. Now, the diesel is overwhelming because it is so much bigger than I am; that's a fact. So many other challenges appear overwhelming because I feel so much smaller. And there, I think, lies one of the keys not only to addiction but to many other maladjustments in life, and that is when we underestimate ourselves. We think of ourselves as being inferior, inadequate, unlikable, negative in whatever sense. And I've harped on the theme of the negative self-image because I think that it's a crucial concept in addiction, and that until we recognize ourselves as being what we really are—much, much, much better than we ever gave ourselves credit for being—we're still going to be hung up in the "ism" part of the disease. So that even though we may put away the alcohol and the drug, we may get into other pathological adjustments unless we get over the "ism." And part of that "ism" is recognizing ourselves for for what we really are: a great deal more competent and capable than we ever thought ourselves to be.
And incidentally, this feeling of inferiority is not the one that comes only after the alcohol or the drugs. Obviously, there is nothing at all ego-edifying about waking up with hangovers and all the other kinds of horrible things that occur in the process of addiction. But before we ever got into addiction, people will tell us, "I remember when I was seven years old, I didn't like myself then. I thought everybody was better than me. I never felt that friends liked me. I never felt really comfortable going out on a date. I always had a fear of rejection." And you'll hear this over and over again about people saying that they had problems with their self-image long, long before they ever took the first drink. And so I think it's the question of correcting the self-image, getting to make an adequate self-discovery that is so terribly important in a recovery that lasts.
Now, I'm not even sure where these original feelings of negativity come from. We, you would think that they only come for people who've been brought up in deprivation—not true. People who've been brought up in broken homes—not true. You can find these in people who've grown up in homes where there was good care and love and whatever, and yet, for some strange reason, people grow up with feelings of negativity about themselves. And before too long, they begin to reinforce those feelings. They do the very kinds of things that are self-fulfilling prophecies, and they indeed make themselves fail. And of course, that's one of the constant, uh, features in the history of addiction: that people seem to precipitate failures and almost get a feeling of feeling more comfortable with failures because there's no challenge then. I don't have to worry about a challenge; I know what to do already. I know how to fail; I'm expert at that. And in order to switch that around, we've got to have the strength of a good self-awareness.
The strangest thing about this thing is that sometimes the worst feelings of inferiority, the most intense feelings of negativity, are apt to occur precisely in those people who factually have the most going for them. Just as an example, there's, uh, one dear lady who, uh, underwent treatment here in 1972, and, uh, she was terribly depressed, very, very down on herself. She was a physician, highly accomplished woman with many, many fine skills and wonderful personality attributes, and she couldn't see any of these. Now, remember saying it to her one time, "Tell me something good about yourself," and she sat there silently, obviously not being able to think of anything good about herself. And I pulled out her chart and I said, "Look here, it says you graduated college summa cum laude; you won the Five Better CPPA award." Now, if I asked you to tell me something good about yourself, the least you could have done is you could have said, "Well, for whatever it's worth to you, I'm not stupid. You know, I did win the Five Better CPPA award." She looked at me and with every bit of sincerity she said, "But Dr. Tski, when they told me that I won the Five Better CPPA award, I knew they made a mistake. I was ready to tear my hair out." How can you be that blind to yourself? And yet it's a relatively constant feature: people are unaware of their own strengths. And of course, this has many implications.
One young woman in recovery called me up, and, uh, she was crying bitterly, and she said that her husband was terribly cruel to her. She had—now been so—three or four months, and he was telling her that she's a failure as a wife and a failure as a mother. And I said, "No, no, wait, stop right where you are." And after she came down a little bit, I said, "Now, I want you to listen very carefully to what I'm going to tell you." I said, "I think that the ugly scar that you have on your face is just, just, just terribly repulsive." And she said, "Pardon me." I said, "Didn't you hear what I said?" I said, "That ugly scar across your face, it's, it's just terribly repulsive." She says, "I don't understand." I said, "What don't you understand?" She says, "I don't have a scar across my face." I said, "No, well, what did you think when I said you did?" She said, "I didn't, I didn't understand what you were talking about." I said, "You see, when somebody says something insulting to you and you know that it isn't true, right, you don't go to pieces, right? You just say, 'I don't know what you're talking about; you must be crazy,' right? I don't have a scar." Now, when your husband tells you you're a failure as a mother and you're a failure as a wife, and you know that's not true, right, then your reaction should be, "I know what the hell he's talking about; he's crazy," right? Now, if you react to that the way you're reacting, it's because he hit on a sensitive spot. You know you really believe that what he said was true, right? So in order to be able to deal not only with our personal stresses but also with the kinds of things that we sometimes have to take from others, we have to know what we really are. We have to know how good we are.
In fact, I think that's one of the things that I—I see ourselves accomplishing. I always picture ourselves as the guys who are sitting at the diamond mines, you know, where they bring up the diamond ore, you know, these clumps of earth come, and you have these people there who are really sharpened; they've been doing it for 25 years. They pick up a clump of ore and they say, "This one's got a tremendous gem." And say, "Well, how can you tell?" Well, I can tell just by the feel of it. Well, well, you—you haven't X-rayed it or anything. I said, "Look, I could just tell. I know what's inside here; this is a gem; it's probably worth $5 million." Now, all that has to be done is it has to be washed; the layers of dirt have to be gotten off it; it has to be polished up, and then everybody will see where the beauty is, right? But the beauty is there, and this is, I think, what we redo in rehab, and this is, I think, what we do with the program: the beauty is there; the strength is there; it just has to be uncovered so that everybody can realize it, and most of all, the person themselves.
Now, one of the questions is, how are we going to accomplish this? How are we going to help people get an accurate self-awareness? One of the things to realize is that we cannot do it by self-analysis, because we've been looking at ourselves through distorted lenses all of our life. And if we've been doing that for 40 years or for 30 years, we're going to continue doing it. So you cannot do it by yourself; you have to have some outsiders. Okay, well, what about friends? Well, the only way you can even get some semblance of self-awareness is if you can rely on the input, on the feedback that you're getting. Now, how sure can you be that your friends are being truthful with you? How sure can you be that when they come over to say, "Oh, John, you're a really great guy, really a lot of fun being together with you; like you a great deal," what does that mean to you? Well, social compliments mean nothing. When's the last time you ever told the truth to a friend? I mean, you're not going to tell somebody anything negatively about themselves; they're going to be offended by it. So what we do is we tell people the things they want to hear. Well, then people tell us the things that we want to hear, right? So obviously, that's nowhere. Do you know how bad social lying can get? Let me tell you this little story. Back in the days when I was a rabbi, a young couple came in to arrange their wedding. Lovely kids; they came over several times; my wife and I got to meet them; they had a wonderful ceremony. And then several months later, they called us up and invited us to dinner. So we went over, planning to have a wonderful evening, and I had no way of knowing that this young woman fancied herself already to be a gourmet cook. And it was a disaster. I saw the first course that was being served; I was in trouble. But I had to be polite; I was trapped; you know, I was in somebody's house. So I tasted it. Oh, Lord, it was repulsive, right, obnoxious. And I had to be polite, so I nibbled away, waiting the second course would come; I'll push this away, and I'll take something else. Well, the second course was worse than the first; the third was worse than the second, and it was the worst ordeal that I ever had in my life, sitting there trapped, right, getting more nauseous by the second, right, and having to sit there and smile, you know, make believe you're enjoying it. I was once told that if you're ever trapped in a situation, you see no way out, pray, right? Well, I wasn't trapped, so I sat there and prayed. Yeah, in my mind, you know what I prayed? I prayed to Dear God, don't take me from this Earth before I have a chance to vomit. There was nothing I ever wanted in my life as just to be able to get rid of and throw up. And yet, after the ordeal was over, okay, we were standing in our coats ready to go home, and I think only one thing: I am 10 minutes away from my bathroom, right? In 10 minutes, I will throw up to my heart's content. And with that thought going through my mind, I say good night to this young couple, and I say to the young woman, "What, right, thank you for a wonderful evening; the dinner was superb," right? Can you imagine saying a bigger lie than that? Now, if you can talk like that, then what value are social compliments? And incidentally, what value did that have to her? I gave her a compliment to make her feel good; what did it do for her? Nothing, because next week she invited another couple over. What do you think she served? Same, right, same garbage she gave me. Why? Because I told her how great it was, right? Okay, do you know that I could never go back into that house again because I would get a nauseous reaction reflexly, right? And you know that probably all the couples whom she ever served have never been able to set foot in her home again, for all I know, that poor little woman is sitting isolated without a friend in the world, right? Now, had I been—had I been really kind to her, I would have called her aside and I would have said, "Grace, now look here, uh, we did not come over here because we were hungry; we came over here to have a good time and enjoy an evening with you and your husband. Now, L—Hy, you're not a gourmet cook; don't ever do that again, right? Next time a couple comes over, get some TV dinners; open the can of beans; everybody will have a good time." The point that I'm making is, in order to be able to get a handle on ourselves, we need to be—to be—to have some reliability that the feedback we're getting is legitimate, and you're not going to get that socially. So what do you do? You come to Gateway; you come to a rehab program, right? And here we have a staff who are told, "Look, you are not out to make brownie points, right? We don't give a damn whether the—our residents like you or whether they don't like you; your job is to give them your accurate perceptions." So all of you can know that when our staff is telling you an observation about yourself, they may be right; they may be wrong; that's not the point, right? But they are accurate as far as what their perception is, right? And they are not telling you anything to make friends with you, right, or to impress you; they are telling you what they see. And this is probably the first time in your life that you can begin to get an accurate reading about yourself.
So this then is what begins to happen in rehab. It doesn't stop there, of course; there are many other things that happen in rehab. But if you take a real good look at them, ultimately they all are methods to help you not only get strength and ways in which to deal with stresses and perhaps ways in which to avoid the ubiquity of alcohol and drugs, which is all the way around, but also to give you additional tools to be able to use your own innate skills, which are far, far richer than you have ever assumed them to be. And it's interesting to see people who come back after years of sobriety and who like themselves a great deal more. And as a result of the fact that they like themselves, they stop doing all the kinds of things that come out of a negative self-image, right? They stop withdrawing from people. I mean, why do people withdraw? You know, how many people have you talked to who are alcoholics and have said, "I'm a loner"? What do you mean you're a loner? People aren't born loners; people like to be with people. Loners are people who are afraid to associate with other people because they're sure they're going to be rejected; that's what a loner is. And the reason that we tend to be loners is because we're convinced other people aren't going to like us. There are other people who, as a result of their negative self-image, they go ahead and precipitate the rejection. "Look, I know you're going to tell me to go to hell and get rid of me, right? And rather than live in suspense, let me get it over with quickly," right? So they precipitate their rejection, right? A lot of people do that, right? A lot of people who say, "But you know, if I apply for the job and I get turned down, that's going to be another rejection, uh, and I can't take that," and they're so afraid of failures that they won't risk success, right? And that's another, uh, tendency, uh, uh, very—there's another tendency that we have, many, many of us. You know, if I know that I'm good and my self-image is good and I know that I'm a good person and I'm likable, right, then I think that there's a good chance that you're going to like me; that you're going to like me; that you're going to like me. And I don't have to do anything to make you like me; I just think I'm naturally likable. If I feel about myself that I'm not naturally likable, in fact, I'm naturally despicable, people are not going to like me, well, then I better do something to acquire friends, right? So I start to buy friendship. How many of us have gone around buying friendship? What's the one most common way of buying friendship? Do things for people, and they'll like you. Don't ever refuse anybody; he might dislike you, right? Now, how many of us have been in that business? I can't say no; I can't say no to somebody. So what happens is people ask you to do something for them; you really want to say no because you don't have the time or the energy to do it, but you feel you can't, right? You might reject somebody, and they'll—they'll feel, uh, uh, hostile toward you. So what you do is you go ahead and comply, and you do it. Now, that is typical alcoholic behavior, because what happens after that is internally there's a turmoil. "Damn it, I'm not going to be a pat any longer; I'm not going to let people walk over me and take advantage of me. Next time somebody tries to do that, I'm going to tell them I can't do it." Always next time; always next time; next time never comes. So what happens is we generate a great deal of anger; we become hostile toward people for because taken advantage of us; we don't let them see our hostility, so we smile, right? And inside we're horrendously angry. You know what that leads to? Resentments, anger, resentments, hostility, and booze will take it all away—one of the most common things that'll lead to a relapse. And this is why it's so important to get rid of resentments.
So these are the kinds of things that we begin doing, uh, in rehab to try to show us what some of our pathological patterns have been—pathological patterns that almost all of them, you know, when you come down to it, almost all of them come out of the fact that we have had a misperception about ourselves. Now, sometimes there are people who can perceive another person in a very short period of time, uh, and I think that that's one of my blessings, that I can talk with a person and within a period of three minutes of time, it's like having X-ray vision; you can see the beauty that's there. And then you might have to spend the next year trying to convince them of what you see. But the important point for us, especially in early—in our recovery, is to recognize, to become aware that we may have been mistaken about ourselves for the last 17 years, for the last 35 years, for the last 62 years. We may have had a misconception, and if that's true, then we ought to see how to go about correcting it. Just imagine yourself being a cook, but you've never cooked with a recipe; you have no idea of quantities—teaspoons, cups, nothing like that. All you know is you put the ingredients in, stir them up, and then you taste it, and then you add something, then you taste it again, and you add whatever is necessary. Well, that's a fine way of cooking, but one day you develop a bad cold; your sinuses are all clogged up; you can't taste anything; everything tastes like cardboard; you're stuck, right? What do you do now? You can't go by measurements because you've never used measurements. Well, there's only one thing you can do: put in the ingredients, call somebody over and say, "Hey, do me a favor, taste this," right? And get somebody else to taste it for you, and they say, "Oh, I think it needs a little salt." Call them back a few minutes; taste it again. What happens is recognizing that your own taste buds are shot, that your own sensitivity is not reliable; you call over another person, right? And you rely on them. Well, that's where we've got to recognize where we are, right? Right now, you may have to rely on somebody else's opinion of yourself. And when they call you over and they said, "Look, Jim, Jim, you're really a likable guy; you've got a lot of personality strength; you know, a lot of the kind of shenanigans that you've been doing have been coming because you thought of yourself as totally different. Yeah, you're really a good guy." And if he says that to you, right, believe it, right? Just recognize that for so long your sensitivities, your personal senses have been off that you can't trust them and accept what others are telling you. Now, I'm not saying to go around and trust the whole world, okay? But you can trust your therapist, right? You can trust several people who have gotten to know you and who have the responsibility of helping you. And when you get in the program and you pick a sponsor, you can trust your sponsor. And then you'll find several people who you can get close to, right? And you develop this kind of relationship to where you say, "Hey, look, I need accurate feedback; no holds back, right? Whatever you see about me, you can tell me," right? And that way, within the program, you can begin to get accurate feedback about yourself. And one of the things that happens in the program is that we begin to build self-esteem. And I don't know of any way, including some hifalutin psychotherapy, that has the possibility of giving the kind of self-esteem that working the program can do. Those 12 steps are absolutely fantastic, right? And it's only when we begin to develop rudiments of self-esteem that we go on from one step to another. You know, I've sometimes told people that when they tell me that they—oh, that—that program, like the AA or NA, that's too much religion; it's got to do with God, and I'm an atheist. No, that's not true. I tell them, "Don't tell me that you're an atheist and that you don't believe in God, because that's not true. You see, your problem, my friend, is you do believe in God, but you think you're him," right? Now, people who have to think that they are God are people who are reacting defensively because they feel so little about themselves; they feel so tiny that…
What they do in defense and self-defense is build up these tremendous delusions of grandiosity. When we feel good enough about ourselves, and we feel adequate, and we feel what we really are, and we have a self-discovered self, we don't need that any longer. We don't need the crazy delusions of grandiosity. We don't need to reject help. You know why people reject help? They reject help because it's a put-down. I've got to be able to do it myself. You ever hear that before? I'm going to do it myself; I don't need any help. Well, if you feel good enough about yourself, you'll accept help. The only time you have a problem in accepting help is when you feel it's a put-down, it's demeaning; I should be able to do it myself. So, to the degree that we build self-esteem, to that degree we can accept help, and to that degree we can give help.
It's important to know that we never reach an endpoint. The program and sobriety is a process of growth. Rehabilitation is something that doesn't end in 21 days, or in 28 days, or in 3 months, or whatever; it's a beginning, and we continue, and we never should finish our growth until the day we die. Now, growth and self-esteem are goals, but the goal is never really reached, and it's not all that comfortable because there's pain involved in it. And our grandmothers were right when they said that we we have growing pains.
Some place in a magazine, I read a story that raised a question for me that I never bothered to think about, and that is, how do lobsters grow? Well, I never bothered to care how lobsters grow, but then it did, uh, dawn upon me. Well, how do lobsters grow? They're encased in a hard shell. And the answer is that when a lobster becomes uncomfortable, it goes off into a little nook in the in the underwater formation, and it sheds its shell, and it grows a new one. And then when it grows into that new shell and begins to be oppressed, it repeats the process, and it does so until it reaches its maximum growth. And the author pointed out that when the lobster is without a shell, it's vulnerable because any any predatory fish can come and eat it, right? Any current of water can slam it against the rocks and kill it. And he says that in order to have growth, a lobster has to risk its life. We are fortunate that we do not have to risk our lives in order to grow, but we do have to take some risks. We have to risk failure in order to get success, and there's some discomfort in the process of growth, but it's worth it.
So, during these 28 days that you're here, we're going to try and help you get a correct view of yourself. Please believe me, right? We are all better than we've ever considered ourselves to be. And it's not important as to where the distortions came from. I know that it's popular to say, well, my father, my mother, my teachers, whatever. Where it comes from is not as important as realizing I need to change my self-image. I need to be able to hook into some processes with people who are going to help me get a correct awareness. I need to know that my senses, my taste buds are not working right; my my taste buds, where I estimate myself, are not accurate, and I have to be able to rely on some objective people's opinions, and that there are some people who, by terms of their training and experience, can help me with a self-discovery.
And then once you leave the formal part of this program, right, the AA and NA program are as essential, appropriate therapy and counseling as your therapist will recommend, and solitary counting as an adjunct is essential. And you put those all together, and you come up with a feeling of self-esteem that's just absolutely fantastic. And there's only one problem with this: it doesn't happen overnight. I have a letter that's posted on the bulletin board out there that I received from a woman who said, "Four years ago this month, I was taken into your office utterly beaten, wanting to die but not having the courage to take my own life. The only thing I did right those first two years," she says, "is not drink and go to meetings." And then she says, "I want you to know that it has taken me four years to feel different about myself." Now I know we like to have microwave ovens and recover in 6 minutes. There is no microwave for recovery, right? It has to take time. But if you follow the program, you follow what your therapists are telling you, you do the readings, and you follow, follow the aftercare program, you're going to develop a self-discovery that is not only going to make life more, uh, livable and more productive and take away all of the kinds of negative experiences that we and others have experienced, but also going to ultimately give us a kind of sense of peace and serenity and feeling good about ourselves, feeling that we can be with ourselves and not be alienated from ourselves. That's really going to make life truly enjoyable. Thanks for listening. [Applause]