Energy & Values
Is your energy going towards what you should value?
Through different processes of Self-Examination we can find out what we are acting as if we value. Too often, this tends to be things that we didn’t consciously choose to value - but learned to value after putting energy into. This could be drinking or getting high, which we learned to value after it changed the way we felt, “protecting” us from the harsh realities of life. Or, it could be comfort, which many people have learned to value as it “protects” them from failing, exerting effort, or becoming tired. Whether you know it or not, all day, every day, you are making decisions on where to put your energy, time, attention, and money.
I’ve had clients spend the first week in treatment excusing why they act the way they do, and why they value what they do. Inevitably, we both learn its all garbage. It’s our way of speaking to make ourselves feel better about the day to day action we take or don’t take.
While I wouldn’t assert that all action taken by addicts and alcoholics is a waste, I would argue that the majority of it is too caught up in unconscious programming that doesn’t serve our growth. This becomes clear the more we pay attention to ourselves. The more we pay attention to ourselves, the less we pay attention to others. Because of this we become more conscious of why we act the way we do. We begin to see, once our distractions are removed - that we’ve found ourselves in a life we don’t really want.
I’ve discussed this before, but it’s an important reason as to why inpatient treatment centers can be successful: they force you to stop hemorrhaging energy. You are removed from your environment, friends, significant other and children. You don’t get to go to work anymore. You don’t get your cell phone anymore. And, if the situation is ideal, you probably don’t know anyone in treatment. Through this process, and time, you learn to see your world more objectively. It almost gives you an aerial like view of your life, more unobstructed by emotion and desire than ever before. It is here we begin to see, because we aren’t distracted, that our actions have always told us what we value - our words were used to cover up what our actions showed that we valued. We were lying to ourselves and to others because we don’t like some of our values. It was easier to do that than to admit we wish we had other values. This creates a break in reality. In treatment, after some time, reality sort of “re aligns” if you’re being honest with yourself and what you want. This is usually when clients will approach me to figure out how to stop pursuing some previous value.
It usually goes something like this:
I’m seeing more clearly that I don’t actually want to be with ________. I see now that I was with her/him because it was comfortable and we shared misery together. To be honest, now that I’m clean, I can see I stuck around because it was easier than confronting the truth and growing.(value: comfort, new value: truth, growth)
After thirty days in treatment without my cell phone, I’m realizing I spend way too much time on it. Now that I’m not on it constantly, I see that I didn’t actually want to be on it at all. It was just easy and far too accessible. The truth is, I have an incredibly hard time being alone with my thoughts. To be an honest, now that I haven’t been on it for a month - I’ve increased my ability to watch my thoughts and I want to continue this path.(value: distraction, comfort, ease, new value: challenge, growth)
I thought I was a good dad. After reflecting, I realize I barely try at all. I tell everyone I’m doing the best I can but I’m seeing that the truth is I give more effort to drinking on Saturday night. Now that I don’t have beer or my son, it’s clear that what I really wanted was to feel like a good father. It was just easier to feel drunk. (value: comfort, ease, new value: fatherhood)
I thought my group of friends and I were super close. Now that I don’t have them, I see I didn’t value them, I valued what being around them got me. Being around them got me high, which made me feel comfortable. My family didn’t let me get high, it made me uncomfortable. Now that I don’t have my friends, family, or drugs, what I truly want is my family and some self esteem. (value: friends, comfort, new value: family, growth, self esteem)
This is where the rubber meets the road in recovery. This is where I made the choice not to return to Arizona. It’s funny you know, I used to say that I would never move from the South West. I used to say I could never live in the high humidity. I used to say I have too many friends and family in Arizona. In hindsight, literally all of it was bullshit. Dont get me wrong, it was kinda the truth. It just wasnt the full truth. The full truth was: moving across the country is hard and scary. Rebuilding a life is hard and scary. The full truth was I was actually willing to give up Arizona and everything if it meant I had a good life. I just didn’t believe it would lead to a good life (probably because believing Arkansas could work meant I couldnt go back to Arizona). It’s funny right? Our “beliefs” are usually in line with our own bullshit. We just don’t know it’s bullshit at the time until we transcend it.
Our actions tell us what we value. Our words try to explain it with half truths. When we stop the action and the words, we tend to see things more clearly and uninterrupted by emotion.
If you want to get real serious with trying to see what you value and why pay attention to yourself for some time. Try a ten day challenge, where you follow the actions you take, and document the intention behind them. You know, this tends to happen to people sometimes around half way through life. They have some crazy need to “find themselves”. It’s as if they woke up one day and realized they didnt actually want that life. Some call it a midlife crisis, I call it fighting for who you truly are.
Being true to yourself means fighting to become that self.
Your identity, who you understand as "you”, is everything we’ve chosen to value. So, if you find yourself in treatment, or just out of treatment, understand that you feel the way you feel due to what you’ve taken action in valuing throughout the majority of your life. This means, that if you invest in other values, over time, you could feel like an entirely different person. Take it from me, I have an incredibly hard time understanding who I was a decade ago. The truth is, I gave very little effort to becoming anyone of true value. Humility is key in understanding that if you weren’t so attached to who you were - you might be able to become who you were supposed to become. I used to ask the guys in treatment all the time: What if a pre-requisite to death was meeting the person you could have become?
Congratulations! You’ve stopped hemorrhaging energy. You now know where your energy is going and why(values). By removing yourself from your day to day responsibilities, you begin to recover some assemblance of control over yourself. It’s in this control you realize you didn’t have much control before. You don’t have the force of withdrawal pushing you to go pick up again. You don’t have the force of the wife, or husband watching your every move. You don’t have the force of your boss texting you because you’re five minutes late. After gaining separation from these forces, you’re able to look at them, see why they controlled you, and see if it’s actually something you want in your life. What happens when you stop hemorrhaging energy is you begin asking yourself questions:
Is this who I want to be?
Is this actually what I care about?
Why do I make these decisions?
What are my priorities really? What do I want them to be?
You decide, after answering these questions, to live out some new priorities. After all, you left your life, so now you see it more clearly. Before returning, it’s become clear that certain things should matter more, certain things should matter less, and acting in accordance with these new values will create a new you. Believe me, I’ve done it. There’s a lot of people who wouldn’t recognize me in the actions I take everyday. Reading? Writing? Fuckin nerd.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transferred.
This is the first law of thermodynamics and probably one of the most important ideas in understanding how to change. You cannot simply just stop doing _______. You actually have to spend energy doing something else. After you’ve spent time examining yourself you will see your values and how you act to achieve those values. What you’ll learn, in most cases, is that our values were destructive, rarely in our control, or they weren’t based in reality in the first place.
If your actions showed you valued being understood(not completely in your control) - try understanding instead of engaging with anger. Anger is trying to be understood, yet most angry people aren’t understanding anyone. In understanding, we may become less angry and better at communicating.
If your actions showed you valued feeling good(not always within our control) - try exerting effort(trying hard is always within your control) and earning the right to feel good. Make sure before you get comfortable, you pay a price. Therefore you value earning comfort more than comfort. Keep in mind sometimes you just don’t feel good. Don’t put in the effort to feel good, that creates expectation. Put in the effort because that’s the right thing to do.
If your actions showed you valued being liked by people(not within your control) - try exercising humility. The fact is, you can’t control whether people like you our not, and it’s tough to even judge whether someone does or not. You may think they like you, only to find out later they don’t. Investing in this is a useless waste of energy when you could value humility or kindness(directly within your control) which is more likely to get you to a better social status anyway as they are more universal values.
Often, our values are all based on instant pleasure. As addicts, this is especially true. For more on this read, instant vs. delayed article.
Because you already have “built-in” means of achieving old values - you need newer values to counteract. Remember, we are an aggregate of what we choose to value. So, if we find ourselves chasing an old value, we need to attempt to redirect it. We cannot simply resist. I’m sure you’ve hold the old adage:
Whatever you resist persists.
Go ahead, don’t think about drinking alcohol for 30 seconds. Don’t think about using drugs for a minute. I used to do this with clients all the time. They would say, “You put the idea in my head when you said don’t think about - of course I’m going to!” While I did say don’t think about drinking or using, I didn’t put the idea in their head. They’re alcoholics and addicts - that’s the point. The idea is already in there, if you leave treatment and attempt to stay sober this idea will be in your head everyday. It keeps drugs and alcohol attached to you. If you do nothing except not drink or use, you will find yourself drinking and using again. You must create new values.
With that said, you will fail. You will excuse going for a run and value comfort over growth. You will talk about how it’s easier for other people to do it. This is using explanations and talking as a means to achieve what you really value: comfort. What you need to make sure, and you should document if you are taking it seriously, is whether you are pursuing your new values more than your old values. This is how change occurs. The number one issue, however, is that we give up. We workout for a month and stop. We stay sober for three months and then drink. We pursue new values for _______ period of time but give up, only to find ourselves pursuing previous values again. This is where non-judgment comes in. You cannot expect you life to change quickly, but it will change if you stick to it.
Some struggle with understanding what values even are. They just haven’t spent much time thinking about it. To value something means you care about it. In this instance, to value something means you spend energy on it in order to receive it. You may say you value knowledge, but for the past ____ years you have only operated with the knowledge you have, or the knowledge given to you by your environment. If you truly want to value knowledge, you have to seek it. Read a book. Put a check mark next to the date and reflect at the end of your day on the fact that you took action to achieve a value. In other words, if you have values you want to start valuing, set a daily achievable goal to reach it. Here are some others positive values, and quick goals to get started in achieving them, and changing who you are. These are positive values because they are controllable. Good values also tend to be internally achieved. Lastly, good values help you operate in the world as the world is. Often, our negative values drive us to operate outside of reality to create the world as we want it.
You can see this in artists who want to "top the billboard charts”(not in their control) rather than just enjoy and create music(in their control). This leads them to not being happy with what the accomplishments they do have. They increase the “I will be happy when” line and continue to suffer.
This happens with authors as well. They start out with a value of writing a book(completely within their control). Once it’s released, however, they want it to be on the NYT Best-Seller list(not within their control). They don’t even give themselves time to enjoy the fact that they accomplished their original value.
This also happens in recovery. We start the journey of getting clean by valuing sobriety. We understand that if we stop using we can make it through withdrawal(in our control). However, once our withdrawal is gone, we begin focusing on other values not within our control. If we were to remain focused on the fact that we aren’t waking up sick, we would be exercising gratitude(in our control) and would feel better than how we do focusing on something outside of our control.
Here are some positive values you can start practicing literally any time you want.
Honesty - catch one lie per day, reflect positively on being honest.
Kindness - go out of your way to show kindness to another, reflect positively on being kind when it’s not usually what you do.
Calmness - meditation practice, reflect positively on the fact that meditation is hard but you did it.
Patience - catch yourself being impatient, contemplate the fact that you want to be a more patient person. Reflect on your success in catching yourself being impatient.
Commitment - Daily check to remember to stay committed.
Responsibility - Daily Action to be responsible with something you normally aren’t: health, diet, exercise, finances, work etc..
Notice all of these values are entirely within your control to achieve. Sometimes we get in trouble valuing things outside of our control. Money is a value we have some control over. Sometimes, however, it falls outside of our control. It’s necessary in these times to understand you don’t have complete control and invest in creativity or discipline as both could lead to more money and have inherent value alone.
The reason I suggest reflecting positively on your change is that when we do something out of the normal, we tend to not give ourselves praise for accomplishment because we are too busy obsessing over the fact that we have to do something new. Reflecting positively on our day, and the goals we achieved helps ensure we will continue in our pursuits, but it is also another expenditure of energy showing we value what we are paying attention to.
Pay attention to yourself. Much of this is in line with the article on self-examination. Read both of these and start the process of changing what you value, to change who you are.
This process of examination is in all programs of recovery. The act of changing, and investing in new values is as well. This is where the twelve steps have step six:
We became willing to ask God to help us remove our defects of character.
Our defects of character tend to be there because we weren’t building our character with positive values. You could think of our defects of character as the things we do to achieve the value that we shouldn’t value as much. God helps us remove these defects because by step six, it’s clear to us that we don’t want our old life-we want a new one. That is precisely what makes us willing, along with the fact that we are surrounded by people who have the new life and it’s bright a shiny relative to ours. In any event, God helps us remove these defects of character by already blessing us with the knowledge of what we should do.
For the most part, for some reason, everyone knows what they should do. They normally start the process at the beginning of treatment saying: I cant drink or use anymore. Towards the end of treatment they say: I need to exercise, and journal, and maybe meditate, or pray more. I definitely need to be honest as well. This isn’t to say their clinicians came up with these new values to pursue, although they may have helped, the truth is - they always knew this is what they should be doing. In fact, if they had been pursuing all those good values they wouldn’t have ended up pursuing the values they pursue today. (more on this in the article on Environment) As they say: You dont get what you want, you get what you become. And again, we are an aggregation of what we choose to value.
Keeping in mind the first law of thermodynamics, and understanding that you already know what you should be pursuing, you can see how God helps us in this endeavor of growth. If you begin to pursue new and better values, your life will improve, and you will have less energy and or desire to pursue old values. And remember, many of our old desires were there simply because our life was a constant struggle. In pursuing new values, your life improves and ceases to be such a struggle therefore removing that incessant desire to change the way you feel.
