(Part 2) Best products from r/REDDITORSINRECOVERY

I went to one AA meeting when I first got clean and never went back. I understand people have found support and success in it but to me, personally, I felt it only increased the stigma of drug addicts as these broken hopeless people barely hanging on by a thread. It's an outdated system that relies on little science or attempting to progress the participants and relies more on holding people in place and focusing on the past. Instead I just worked towards becoming a normal person. Here are some of the resources I used:

r/Fitness - Getting Started: Exercise is probably the #1 thing that will aid you in recovering. It can help your brain learn to produce normal quantities of dopamine again as well as improve your heath, mood, well being and confidence.

Meetup: You can use this site to find people in your area with similar interests. I found a hiking group and a D&D group on here which I still regularly join.

Craigslist: Same as above - look for groups, activities, volunteer work, whatever.

Diet

This will be the other major player in your recovery. Understanding your diet will allow you to improve your health,mood, energy, and help recover whatever damage the drugs may have done to your body.

How Not To Die Cookbook

Life Changing Foods

The Plant Paradox

Power Foods For The Brain

Mental Health

Understand whats going on inside your head and how to deal with it is also an important step to not only recovery but enjoying life as a whole.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

The Emotional Life Of Your Brain

Furiously Happy

The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

Educational

If you are like me you probably felt like a dumbass when you first got clean. I think retraining your brain on learning, relearning things you may have forgot after long term drug use, and just learning new things in general will all help you in recovery. Knowledge is power and the more you learn the more confident in yourself and future learning tasks you become.

Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse

Why Nations Fails

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

Thinking, Fast and Slow

The Financial Peace Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Restoring Your Family's Financial Health

Continued Education / Skills Development

EdX: Take tons of free college courses.

Udemy: Tons of onine courses ranging from writing to marketing to design, all kinds of stuff.

Cybrary: Teach yourself everything from IT to Network Security skills

Khan Academy: Refresh on pretty much anything from highschool/early college.

There are many more resources available these are just ones I myself have used over the past couple years of fixing my life. Remember you don't have to let your past be a monkey on your back throughout the future. There are plenty of resources available now-a-days to take matters into your own hands.

*Disclaimer: I am not here to argue about anyone's personal feelings on AA**

Get yourself a headset. Make all the music you want, you won't bother anyone. Great investment. headset.

$660 is a lot of money, over the course of a lifetime, it's peanuts. Also, if your parents see that you're actually working hard to make things work out, unless they need that money, maybe they'll just 'forget' about it.

If music is your passion, and it is a great passion!, then make your life about music. Give yourself to that experience. You don't know what it will do for you. Be honest with yourself. If you have talent and perseverance you -will- have a measure of success. If you really don't have the talent and it sounds crap, be honest with yourself. You should always listen to your stuff and ask yourself: would I listen to this myself if it was on the radio? It's super easy to do and you want to be honest with yourself.

Music is your thing. Live your thing. Wait for nothing, wait for nobody. Don't wait 'until the time is right'. The time will never be right, there will always be different bullshit to deal with. All your life. Trust me when I say this.

Don't get tempted into smoking, get her out of smoking. It's bad for you, it's hugely expensive and getting sick from smoking is -really- expensive, and fucking painful to boot [I've seen it, I'm not touching smokes with a 10 foot pole].

You're young. You're entitled to making mistakes. That's how life teaches you not to be a dumbass. It's about not making the same mistake twice. Or too many times.

One mistake you cannot make is: not working on your passion. It needs constant nourishment, in view of negative feedback, bad reviews, off-days, bills to pay. Mind the budget, it's super important. Use a balanced budget to allow yourself to be successful and thrive at what you're good at.

Don't go into debt if you don't have to. You'll need equipment. Buy -good- equipment. Buy it once, take really good care of it, it will last you many years.

Other tchotchkes... you can do without. You're not here to show the world that you can buy 'one' too. Not having debt, as $660 dollars proves you, is a much -much- better life than having debt you have to service for years. There are things you want to spend good money on, there are things you don't want to bother with.

You don't need most of what you see people buying. You really don't.

You want to play music. Play music. Find your passion. Allow yourself to be lost in the experience, that all by itself is a far better drug than anything you can buy off the street. There is, IMHO, almost no better medium to achieve that state than music is.

Give yourself to music. Music will pay you back. In joy, in recognition, in opportunities, in legacy, in oeuvre, in doors opening, in admiration, in money. It's -real-, it's something you can work at. It's something that will work for you.

-YOU- have to do the heavy lifting, but it's a journey worth going on. You're not losing yourself to despair. You're not giving some anonymous body the means that would have bought you a better life for questionable moments of 'relief' from the real world.

The real world is there to be explored in all its harshness and beauty. Not with a dull mind, but with a mind that is open to the experiences, the impression and the expression of what it is you feel deep inside that you want to communicate.

Taking drugs is like excessively obsessing over a picture of a candle while making music is the very incandescent light of the sun itself.

Don't live a second-rate life, live a good life!

"So, /u/youngslut_, what made you look at your life in a different way when you felt so depressed earlier in life?"

• There was this dude on the internet, Reddit [you know Reddit, right?], and he told me some stuff, it turned out to make a lot of sense. I didn't really get all of it at first, but the more I got to think about it, the more it seemed to gel. So, here I am.
  
  "Obviously, that must have been some good advice."
  
  
• He even wrote this conversation about it!
  
  /Make music, make your heart sing, touch our souls, have a happy life!

>we admit we're powerless over drugs and alcohol. And once we admit that, we can abstain

If you're capable of choosing to abstain, you're not powerless over drugs and alcohol.

>and THEN we can begin to accept responsibility for our behavior.

If you attribute your bad choices on a made-up disease, you're not accepting responsibility for your behaviour.

>you don't have to be religious to work the steps. At all.

I disagree. Let's open up the Narcotics Anonymous book and see how 'non-religious' it is:

>Throughout the compiling of this work, we have prayed:
>
>GOD, grant us knowledge that we may write according to Your Divine precepts. Install in us a sense of Your purpose. Make us servants of Your will and grant us a bond of selflessness, that this may truly be Your work, not ours—in order that no addict, anywhere, need die from the horror of addiction.
>
>[ Nartorics Anonymous, Introduction, p. xxvi ]

When this is how you introduce your program, you make it obvious that it's a religious program.

>it's a higher power of your choosing

UH-HUH, SURE. Again, let's check the book an see how much 'choice' we really have.

"Our understanding of a Higher Power is up to us. No one is going to decide for us. We can call it the group, the program, or we can call it God. The only suggested guidelines are that this Power be loving, caring and greater than ourselves. " [ NA Basic Text, p. 24 ]

Notice what's going on here. It's saying: *No one is going to tell you how you're supposed to understand a Higher Power...*BUT... We're going to refer to Him as 'God' and assign Him traits such as "loving" and "caring."

Realize that only a personal being can be "loving" and "caring." Clearly, the Twelve Step Religion requires you to have faith in the existence of a benevolent, personal God. If you look at the Twelve Steps, it is obvious that your 'Higher Power' must be (more or less) the same as the Christian God:

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Here, the 'Higher Power' (God) is distinguished from other human beings. If another human being could be your Higher Power, why make such a distinction? According to Step 5, the 'Higher Power' must be a personal God, distinct from other human beings, who is capable of* listening to you* when you admit your wrongdoing to Him.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

According to Step 6, the 'Higher Power' must be a personal God who is interested in helping you become a better person by removing your defects of character.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

I've been to a lot of Twelve Step Meetings, and I've never heard anybody humbly ask "the group" or "the program" to remove their shortcomings. Your 'Higher Power' must be a personal God that you can pray to, who will remove your shortcomings if you ask Him to.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Let's be honest here: Nobody is trying to improve their 'conscious contact with "the group" / "the program" through prayer and meditation. Nobody is praying to the group for knowledge of the program's will. By the time you get to Step 11, it's obvious that the 'Higher Power' must be virtually identical to the God of Christianity.

This is important to understand:

As a truly non-religious person, I am unable to believe in a personal God who is interested in helping people overcome their drug addictions if they humbly ask God to remove their defects of character (Step 7). I don't believe in any God who has "will" for anyone's life, and I don't believe that I can obtain knowledge of God's will for my life through "prayer" (Step 11). There is no such thing, and these are obviously religious beliefs.

>I can't imagine anyone in any 12 step program would assert that being a member is the only way to get/stay sober.

Go to a Meeting and tell a bunch of Twelve Steppers that you plan to stay sober on your own, without the Twelve Steps: "I am never coming back to these Meetings, and I'm going to stay sober without them." All the Twelve Steppers will guffaw, because according to the Twelve Step Religion, sobriety is impossible outside of the Twelve Steps:

>We sought help and found none. Often doctors didn't understand our dilemma. They tried to help by giving us medication. Our husbands, wives and loved ones gave us what they had and drained themselves in the hope that we would stop using or would get better. We tried substituting one drug for another but this only prolonged our pain. We tried limiting our using to social amounts without success. There is no such thing as a social addict. Some of us sought an answer through churches, religions or cultism. Some sought a cure by geographic change. We blamed our surroundings and living situations for our problems. This attempt to cure our problems by moving gave us a chance to take advantage of new people. Some of us sought approval through sex or change of friends. This approval-seeking behaviour carried us further into our addiction. Some of us tried marriage, divorce or desertion. Regardless of what we tried, we could not escape from our disease. [ NA Basic Text, p. 14 ]

Then you say:

>I'm not religious. My family didn't do "god," so the concept of Higher Power in the rooms has been, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. And yet I've managed to work the steps,

Oh, really? You've managed to work the Steps? How? As someone who doesn't believe in God, I suppose you've been praying to a non-existent Higher Power to remove your defects of character? You pray for "knowledge of His will" for your life when you believe He doesn't exist? Interesting. I'm going to suggest that you are a religious person who believes in (more or less) the God of Christianity; you just don't like to call yourself religious so you say 'spiritual' instead, and you call God a 'Higher Power.'

>White-knuckling through sobriety...being merely "dry" is no better than living in addiction...I hope you and OP (and anyone suffering through sobriety) find happiness and inner peace.

You know, it's disgustingly arrogant to assume that anyone who has found happiness and inner peace apart from your religion is "white-knuckling" and "suffering through sobriety." This is one of the many reasons why the Twelve Step Religion pisses me off. Get off your high horse:

>In 2006 the Cochrane Collaboration, the internationally recognized gold standard of impartial assessment and evidence-based practice, issued a report on the effectiveness of AA and other 12-step programs in achieving and maintaining abstinence, improving quality of life, and reducing alcohol-associated problems. The committee pored over every major database they could find, medical and psychological, involving men and women who were attending voluntary or coerced programs. They ended up with eight trials that involved 3,417 people and concluded: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or [other 12-step] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems."

The Twelve Step Religion is not actually an effective way to deal with addiction*.

It's just a religion. If you're part of the tiny minority of people (5-10%) for whom this religion appears* to be helpful, that's great! Enjoy your religion.

But stop pretending it's not a religion when it obviously is, and stop pretending it's a great way to deal with addiction when the evidence proves that it isn't.

Same. And if you're anything like me, at 7 years it gets to a scary dangerous point. I'm still struggling but I've been to rehab this past year and now I'm in a better place after an 8 year adderall addiction. First: you need a support system. Family, friends, just someone who will not judge you that you can be totally honest with about your addiction. Sometimes it helps to have a good therapist but I never stuck with one for very long. I've been to NA meetings and they are not for me. I do recommend rehab, if anything to just get 30 days straight clean and clear your head. Set some goals and try to figure yourself out while you're there. Once the drugs were gone for a couple weeks I realized I had no idea who I was. I still have no idea what to do with myself sometimes because I really made myself believe I needed Adderall to get anything done. If you can get a solid couple of weeks clean, I will tell you it does get easier. The first few weeks are the hardest. It's also hard when you relapse. Besides rehab, I also highly recommend this book: I Want to Change My Life: How to Overcome Anxiety, Depression and Addiction https://www.amazon.com/dp/1897572239/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_p4XeAbDJWYGWC. I hate therapy. This book is my therapist. It preaches mindfulness and helps you really understand what's going on when you can't stop taking more pills. If you're hesitant about rehab, you have to make a hard decision. This drug took 7 years of your life from you. Are you going to keep giving into it, or are you going to take your life back? Good luck to you and feel free to PM me if you need support. Adderall is one hell of a drug.

NA Step Guide

Buy the book and start working the steps privately. It might help you sort through some of the 'stuff' that keeps you struggling.

THEN maybe you can find a trusted person (even from another town) to share your work with.

At a minimum it might help you feel proactive and that you are doing SOMETHING!

Also - some professions have closed private groups to assist with privacy and anonymity concerns. Nurses are one of them. I have known several people in medical professions that needed greater anonymity to protect their jobs and public exposure.

Good luck and hugs!

Let me know when you figure it out....I literally don't enjoy anything but reading, video games, sex, and playing with my son without chemicals. After years of abusing myself I barely enjoy those things a lot of the time and I'll spend hours psyching myself up to read a book or play a video game only to find out my time is up. And then 'I don't do anything.'

And I can't stay sober longer than a week. This isn't the only reason--a big reason is that drugs literally just are shoved in my hand due to my job. But if I actually enjoyed doing something, anything, I would be happier and it would be easier to just say no.

I think for now just go to meetings and don't be too hard on yourself, you come back gradually. That's what I'm doing and hoping for. Longer you're sober the closer you get to the person you used to be that liked all that stuff without any help. We've been running the other direction for a long time.

(p.s. check this out, it's helped me before
http://www.amazon.com/The-Artists-Way-Julia-Cameron/dp/1585421464

TL; DR: We're not going to enjoy stuff until we're sober for a while. Everything sucks in the beginning. Stick it out. You aren't alone.

Don't get too caught up on the higher power thing. A lot of people are too literal (on both sides of the coin) and end up missing the point.

I'm an staunch Atheist but have no problem relating to and using the concept of a higher power in my recovery. Religion and Spirituality are not the same thing. I have met a lot of people who come into AA or NA and immediately get defensive or riled up when they start hearing the word god. They start calling people out or putting them down. Thats wrong and disrespectful.

On the flip side, I see people who think because that word is used, its OK and appropriate to read bible passages in a recovery meeting, or speak about Jesus as if he should be (or is) everyones higher power. Thats wrong and disrespectful too. "God" in this context is really just a place holder for wherever your personal strength and understanding comes from.

There are some really great books that deal with the compatibility of Athiesm and Spirituality, and explain the difference between those and Religion.

For example, I can look at a mountain and know how its made, how it formed and the process that created it. That doesn't mean when I'm hiking and look up at it, I can't be in complete awe of how beautiful it is, what it needed to come to be, and the fact that its something so much bigger than I am. Not in size, but in the fact that I couldn't create in on my own, its been there millions of years longer than me and will be there for centuries after I die. That feeling of being so small compared to the enormous existence of that mountain(in size, in history, in the pure power if it just being there), is connection with with something. Its Spiritual.

Heres one of my favorite books, if you are interested

[The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Little-Book-Atheist-Spirituality/dp/0143114433), Its a great jumping off point.

In my opinion, you can take recovery at your own pace. If you feel like you're not ready to give it up yet, it's perfectly valid to investigate recovery without immediately committing to giving it up, to think about it, consider the consider the costs of using and the benefits (and you know you'd be lying to yourself if you said there weren't benefits--it feels fucking good and makes it easy to just exist without having to think about how hard it can be sometimes just to exist).

If you are the reading type, I suggest Over the Influence. It's got some really helpful suggestions about what to think about when thinking about quitting (or reducing use).

And a lot of people have found a lot of help in NA, though personally I recommend looking into Smart Recovery if there are any meetings in your area.

I "do the next right thing"..I put others first, help my mom and dad, and anyone else who needs it. When I put others first, it puts ME second. an that usually works for the best lol.

if you havent seen it. AA world services has a book called "living Sober"
is very cheap, and easy to find. In tandem with the big book and 12 and 12. this book was pretty helpful.

check it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Living-Sober-AA-Services/dp/0916856046

Letting go has certainly been a large part of my recovery. And very often I find I need to let go again of what I thought I had fully let go of before, nearly every day in fact.

I enjoy leaving the house in the morning and stopping before I get to the car, and just let it all go before it even gets to me.

This book helped a lot in seeing how much I had to let go.

Best of luck in your recovery, I hope you find many balmy breezes to let your cares go on.

I'll have to look up Dan Carlin as I've not heard of him. I did find out today that I can bring three books with me to detox. Yay! I'm currently reading Che (I try to stay clear of politics but love the history of it) and am glad that I can bring this along to distract me. The book is long and I'll probably takes notes as usual so this will give me something to do in my free time.

Hello!

It sounds like you're taking the first step of recognizing that you have a problem, and congratulations on that. It may not feel like a 'victory,' but insight, awareness, and willingness to change are the first steps. I can empathize with you on the shallowness of our subculture (also a gay man here) although it sounds like you have the polar opposite response of myself on 'the apps.' I'm crippled by an intense lack of self-confidence and definitely don't have the 'pick of the buffet' that you mention. It's rejection and silence for me, and has been for years. Either way, the apps are a quick way towards dehumanization of people, and porn (esp gay porn) can also be an unrealistic, equally dehumanizing contributor. Truly we get some kind of rush or dopamine from feeling attractive, but once the pursuit of the 'changing factor / drug / behavior' starts to truly impact our function that becomes a more harmful addiction.

If I could offer a book that was offered to me in rehab? I read it, it was interesting and in the end I don't think I suffered from a 'cruising' addiction - but you may demonstrate more day to day impact from your cruising. It's by Robert Weiss and here's a link to Amazon (US). It did have some resources available to call or contact that may be more specific to sex addiction. You're also not alone - gay culture can be super weird and dehumanizing, and the messages we're sent can really hurt us. I spent (spend) most of my life feeling invisible and irrelevant because I'm an Asian American gay man, and feel totally passed over because of our socialization of what's attractive and what's not usually.

https://www.amazon.com/Cruise-Control-Understanding-Sex-Addiction-ebook/dp/B00BAEK96A

Another book that was an interesting look into the potentially dangerous ways we grow up and phases of gay development, which can help us recognize why we may have more dangerous patterns, or desires to acculturate in a specific way that can be harmful, is The Velvet Rage.

https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Downs-Overcoming-Straight-5-6-2012/dp/B00HTKAL76/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1510950126&sr=1-1

And if you're going into healthcare, welcome! It's stressful, and rewarding, but can also add a lot of anxiety and stress. I'm a healthcare pro who made some very unfortunate gay/sex/social decisions based on not addressing issues in a healthy way when I was younger and getting way too tangled up with a dangerous party scene and hookup scene later in life when I had a ways to fall. I will hope that you can make the steps, find some help, and find some balance and serenity now rather than later.

A book I just received last week but haven't started was The Zen of Recovery. It came highly recommended to me, and I'm looking forward to starting it :)

A guy in AA told me this: when you quit you are breaking up with a loved one (alcohol) as real as any deep relationship, it was there for you, it understood you, you could count on it. Now you're alone, betrayed and scared that you don't have it. I drank for over 20 years, I went into a deep depression and raging anger for the first 6 months of sobriety. It subsides, and even better, you begin to get to the root of the anger when you work the steps with a sponsor.

Someone mentioned Al-Anon for the wife, that sounds like a good idea to me. You keep going to meetings and don't drink. There is a wonderful book by Dr. Paul - long time AA and self-confessed anger-junkie - called You Can't Make Me Angry that I highly recommend.

Good luck to you - don't leave before the miracle happens.

https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Walks-Out-Bar-Memoir/dp/1590793218 this one is great "girl walks out of a bar"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00BY5QYA0/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500472282&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=dry+a+memoir
Dry by Augustine Burroughs

Well I know for me, full on abstinence from drugs and alcohol is the only way to go. But I know some people who are addicts that don't have issues with cannabis. We just watched this film in IOP which I think is the best film I've seen about the science of addiction (even though it can get a little cheesy at times). I recommend you watch it sometime. I tried to find a place to watch it online for you, but couldn't find a legit place.

I just came across this and thought of this thread: https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Coming-Back-Recovery-Personal/dp/1099550092/ref=sr_1_39?keywords=alcoholism&qid=1569645314&rnid=1000&s=books&sr=1-39 - It's a journal to fill in of your first five years of recovery. Looks like it's for 12 step folk, though.

It's not what you say, it's what you do. He's going through hell - a hell you can't really understand if you're not an addict. Just be there for him. Go to some meetings with him. check in on him. Give him a hug. Go to a movie or something with him- show him that he can still have a good time in sobriety. If you want to gain a bit of understanding into what he's going through, watch or read Pleasure Unwoven, a good documentary explaining addiction