My apologies but I will not be available for the Thursday night “Matching Calamity with Serenity” meeting on November 20th. I will be traveling for work internationally and the time difference is problematic for me to make the meeting.
The next Thursday night meeting will be on November 27th. I look forward to seeing you then!
My apologies but my travel day DID NOT unfold according to my plan. Storms in New York closed LaGuardia airport leaving me to travel home on Amtrak this evening – probably not the best idea to support a one hour meeting with spotty internet while seated in Business Class. My apologies for the inconvenience! Thanks so much for understanding!
I’ll see you next Thursday.
Hi, I’m just posting a reminder that there is no “Matching Calamity with Serenity” meeting this evening. My youngest daughter is visiting and we have a big family dinner planned for tonight – which I don’t wish to rush. My apologies for missing the meeting and appreciate you understanding me prioritizing time with my daughter that I don’t often get to see.
I will be celebrating my OA Anniversary on July 19, 2025 at 10:00 am EDT (NY) at the Saturday Morning Hauppauge meeting. This meeting is a hybrid meeting and everyone is welcome to attend.
To participate via zoom:
Meeting ID: 840-7062-3219
Password: Saturday
To participate in person:
Calvary Lutheran Church, 860 Townline Road, Hauppauge, NY 11788
Thank you all for being on this journey with me. I absolutely know that without you, there would be no me. Know you are loved!!
Here is the format that I employ when working the 7th Step.
When I started my journey of recovery, I understood two emotions: ANGER and FEAR. That was it. As I’ve progressed on my journey to emotional sobriety, my emotional literacy has expanded dramatically. I no longer live in a world of concrete, black or white thinking where there are two ends of the spectrum that I swing between. I live in a world now of nuance, of understanding that ANGER and RAGE are two different experiences, of recognizing the difference between SERENITY and PEACE.
Several weeks ago, I was working on the Sixth and Seventh Step on letting go some old coping behaviors from my childhood (the AA literature refers to them as character defects). I found myself searching on Google for words to describe what I was feeling – there was new depth to the experience and I felt the need to get as granular as I could. As I worked my way through that process building out the list of maladaptive coping strategies in my journal, I realized that such a list might be helpful to others. So, I am posting it here.
As I started to write this, I realized that I probably should be working on truly comprehensive list of the healthy coping skills I want to develop and all the feelings on the assets list. This will be my next endeavor as seeing myself and my life through a positive lens is significantly more challenging for me.
I hope this compilation helps you. Let me know if there are additional feelings or behaviors that I should be adding to this document!
I happen to appreciate butterflies. I am in awe of the idea that these fragile, ethereal, delicate creatures travel thousands and thousands of miles on their journey. They are, for me, a symbol of strength, determination, and faith.
So, I plant butterfly bushes in my yard where I can. They bloom all summer long and attract butterflies, other pollinators, and hummingbirds.
This past Friday, overnight, the butterfly bushes in the yard burst into bloom. I went outside to admire them and was thrilled to discover that a yellow swallowtail had discovered that dinner was available in my yard.
As I approached the bush to take a closer look at this beautiful creature, I was stunned by what I saw: nearly one quarter of one wing was missing! I moved around the bush to see if the angle of the light was creating an illusion. It was not – clearly this little creature had a story to tell.
And that thought stopped me. This little wounded warrior was fluttering around the bush, just like all the other butterflies. It moved from flower to flower with ease and grace, clearly having adapted to navigating with part of its wing gone. From its behavior and flight, you would never know it had a damaged wing.
I smiled when it registered that I was in the presence of “radical acceptance”. This little butterfly – for all the trauma it had survived – had clearly learned to transcend its wounds and live a seemingly successful butterfly life.
And my next thoughts was: “how grateful am I that the 12 step rooms brought me to that same place. Living life to the fullest, accepting the trauma of my past as trauma of my past, and investing in adapting however necessary to build a meaningful life in spite of what happened to me.”
I am grateful that Steps 4 through 9 illuminate where our lives are out of alignment with acceptance. How we fight to re-litigate old harms – as if carrying them forward in our lives will somehow change the past. How we coat ourselves in self-pity hoping someone will come and save us from ourselves. How we lose sight of the truth that life is about what we make of it, not just what happened to us.
The presence of that little Swallowtail in my yard was a powerful reminder for me. Watching the grace with which he was comporting himself – in spite of the journey he had survived – reminded me of where I need to be in my own life: radical acceptance of life on life’s terms.
In the decision sciences world, these two different pathways for decision making are referred to as System 1 and System 2. System 1 decision making is intuitive – it is fast, almost automatic. System 1 thinking seems effortless – it is that “aha” thought that just appears. This type of thinking often arises from association (whoa, I’ve seen this before…). It is frequently emotional – we hold our intuitive thoughts very dear – we are often quite certain about our intuitive thinking, we just know.
System 1 thinking may also be referred to as recognition-primed decision making, fixed pattern responses or stereotypes. You might also see this type of decision making referred to as implicit knowledge or behavior. Expertise is associated with System 1 thinking.
On the other hand, System 2 decision making is deliberate problem solving. It is a much slower process; this type of thinking requires effort. Doubt and uncertainty are part of System 2 processes which are linear – step 1, step 2, step 3 and is often associated with specific rules or boundaries.
While we may assert that the superior cognitive abilities of the human brain are at the heart of all of our decision-making, unconscious decision-rules – what are called judgment heuristics in the decision making sciences world – are a common part of our daily experience. Regardless of what label is applied to these unconscious decision rules, it is important to understand that these underlying decision processes govern the behavior of every human.
There is research that suggests that System 1, recognition-primed decision-making, or fixed pattern behaviors responding to trigger features (constellations (groups) of sensory data that compile into a pattern that has our brain scream OMG!), is responsible for as much as 90% of the decisions that are made in challenging settings. (Klein 2006) Complex decision-making settings, such as aeronautics or warfare, illustrate how highly adaptive and efficient these fixed pattern behaviors can be. A number of industries, including airlines, invest significantly in simulation training to develop the fluid decision making and responsiveness that arise from recognition-primed decision making. Pilots are repeatedly subjected to challenging decision making scenarios in simulation so that pilots respond accurately with split second reaction times. Many teaching hospitals have established simulation labs where they expose teams of staff members: nurses, physicians, physician assistants – to challenges encountered in the emergency room, operating suite or cardiac codes so that the teams learn how to respond instantly and seamlessly as a unit. Football players will run drill after drill in order to take the guesswork out of how a play will unfold during a game.
There are a number of books published about this idea that System 1 or recognition-primed decision making governs our behavior under stress. “Sources of Power” (Gary Klein), “How We Decide” (Jonah Lehner), “Thinking Fast and Slow” (Danial Kahneman), “Blink” (Malcolm Gladwell), “How Doctor’s Think” (Jerome Groopman) and others provide numerous examples and studies that support the idea that recognition-primed decision making plays a large role in how the human brain makes decisions – particularly when under stress or uncertainty.
Isn’t it comforting to know that chances are that when things get dicey, your brain will more likely than not flip into automatic pilot – System 1 or recognition primed decision making – and ignore all your “high level processing capacity?” But that is how our brains function – the first response is to – at the speed of light – reach back to identify what might have worked in similar situations before and to rely on that existing knowledge in times of danger or stress. We need to keep in mind that our brains reward us with a wash of dopamine when we repeat patterns that have yielded positive outcomes before.
Recognition-primed decision-making/System 1 thinking, while an efficient data processing strategy, does not always generate an accurate assessment of the situation, nor does it always provide the best response. We only know what we know. Our neural origami only stores what we have personally experienced. And that personal experience governs how we see the world until we are challenged by life to revise our thinking.
Here are a few scientific papers that speak to this same issue:
Vandermeeren R, Hebbrecht M. Het duale procesmodel van verslaving; op weg naar een integratieve visie? [The dual process model of addiction. Towards an integrated model?]. Tijdschr Psychiatr. 2012;54(8):731-40. Dutch. PMID: 22893538.
McClure SM, Bickel WK. A dual-systems perspective on addiction: contributions from neuroimaging and cognitive training. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2014 Oct;1327:62-78. doi: 10.1111/nyas.12561. Erratum in: Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2014 Nov;1328:35. PMID: 25336389; PMCID: PMC4285342.
Hongxia Li, Yafei Guo, Quanlei Yu, Self-control makes the difference: The psychological mechanism of dual processing model on internet addicts’ unusual behavior in intertemporal choice, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 101, 2019, Pages 95-103,
Addicts are really good at lying to themselves. So, a really good question right now would be, “why do we [addicts] lie to ourselves?”
The answer is really quite simple – everyone’s brain experiences cognitive bias (in other words, distortion of the truth or reality). Read that statement again: everyone’s brain experiences cognitive bias – it is part of the human experience. (There are a number of reasons for why the human brain can be so inaccurate. Books like Predictably Irrational, Stumbling on Happiness, etc. provide much more depth).
We – humans in general – have brains that are predisposed to distorting the truth. Even the healthiest brain among us experiences cognitive bias – ways of thinking that arise from our brains taking short cuts. These short cuts result in our telling ourselves stories about what is happening that may not be reflective of what is really happening. Cognitive bias arises from processing too much information, not having enough context or meaning, the need to act quickly, the limits of human memory and other reasons. While not always adaptive, it is a very common human issue that I believe plays strongly in the disease of addiction.
A recent article in Psychology Today, 20 Ways You Are Lying to Yourself (citation: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-second-n,,,.oble-truth/201805/top-20-ways-you-are-lying-yourself), summarized how cognitive bias skews our perceptions. My favorites included:
My favorite bias listed here is confabulation – the ability of the human mind to believe the story it is telling itself – which just happens to serve its self-interest. If you’ve ever engaged with an addict while they are active in their addiction, you will find confabulation and many of these biases in every sentence they utter.
So, beyond the obvious issue that our brains might be distorting the interpretation of what is really happening – what does this really mean in the context of addiction? How about, everything? If you think about the Kolb Cycle, learning begins when our brains encounter a prediction error and comes to understand that the solution that it just used isn’t as effective as it might be. Our brains are primed to learn when concrete experience is compared to reality and a big “uh-oh!” results. If our brains are looking at concrete experience through the eyes of cognitive bias – that’s not my fault, look what they are doing to me, etc. – that teachable moment is lost. There is no reflection on what we need to change in ourselves, and, in the case of people with addiction we cast blame elsewhere and begin to build resentments toward others just so we don’t have to look more closely at ourselves.
So, the comparing concrete experience to reality piece of the learning process gets derailed because someone driven by ego or self-serving or confabulation cannot possibly embrace and objectively compare concrete experience to reality, identify gaps and thereby learn. Our brains may confabulate for years telling ourselves the story we want to hear. We’re not choosing to do this – we often can’t see the truth because our brains are so busy trying to hold on to the story it wants to maintain to avoid the pain of accountability or growth.
We ignore or discount countering evidence presented to us, we deflect and distract so we don’t have to address the issues we fear, we cast blame onto others so we can explain away the situation and not have to look too closely at ourselves. This may continue until we can no longer ignore concrete evidence: that moment when the unmanageability and the wreckage in our lives becomes too painful to discount and we wake up.
We are living in extraordinary times. At this writing, over 100 million Americans are living under “stay-at-home” orders to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and the American (realistically, the world) economy is at a standstill unlike anything experienced in recent history. Our healthcare system is being overwhelmed with little relief in sight and the American government’s response to this crisis has not inspired any sense of confidence in its ability to effectively respond to the challenges we are facing.
These are troubling times. How does a human brain deal with troubling times? It grieves.
That may be a confusing statement for some people. You may be thinking to yourself, “okay, yeah, that sounds great, but I’m not seeing a lot of people crying right now.., what I’m seeing doesn’t look like grief to me.” And that is my point. Sadness is only one piece of the grief process.
Yes, grief is a process. According to experts, there are five discreet “phases” of grief. Those phases are:
Think about what you are seeing around you in this moment. Parents under “stay-at-home” orders allowing their children to play with other kids at the park. Pastors in churches conducting in-person church services for hundreds of people while the government has restricted meetings of 10 or more people. Television “pundits” espousing the views that the Covid-19 television coverage is all a hoax designed to undermine the current administration. These are all examples of denial at work.
Denial is not a manifestation of someone being stupid, wrong, uniformed, or bad. In most cases, denial is the security blanket that the human brain wraps around itself because it lacks the skills and information necessary to deal with the crisis directly. Those of us who have survived the ravages of addiction understand this concept well. Think about the extent to which our brains went to avoid the truths that life was trying to tell us.
And what happened when we couldn’t stay in denial any longer? We got angry and struck out at everything and everybody. Railing at the government, cursing out our employers for closing offices, blaming other people or geographies for what is happening to us. Getting royally pissed at other people’s behavior when they’re not doing what we want them to do. Anger presents itself when our brains are pushed out of denial and the scale and scope or our powerlessness is presented to us. Had any moments of anger or rage recently? Had something simple push you into a full-blown fury? Seen it happen among other people? Been noticing how critical and judgmental others are being? These are all manifestations of anger – of people reacting to the fact that they are not getting what they want.
And then the bargaining starts which sounds something like this: “Okay, I’ve been told that I am at elevated risk for Covid-19. I know there is a “stay-at-home” order issued by my state and the federal government is limiting meetings of 10 or more people. I’m going to go to an in-person AA meeting tonight because the responsibility pledges says that I am responsible.” Or, “The restrictions are there but my friends and I are going to go to a local restaurant for dinner, it’s just the six of us and the restaurant should be empty.” These are examples of bargaining. Our brains will do anything to not fully embrace the loss we are facing so it tries to negotiate around it. When we’re in the bargaining process, our brains flip in and out of denial trying to rationalize a way to avoid the sadness and full acceptance of where we are.
So what’s my point here?
It’s really easy to get angry. It’s really easy to point fingers. It’s really easy to blame and shame and minimize the crazy, irrational behaviors we’re seeing around us in the world today. That’s the easy path. It is not the path of a compassionate warrior.
A compassionate warrior understands that most people do not have a program for living that keeps them on the path of enlightenment. Most people are not as lucky as we are to have a process that we can work every day to lead us to acceptance. Most people live lives of grief avoidance – which is true for everyone living any manifestation of the disease of addiction. Not everyone is as blessed as people in recovery who have a 12-step grief management process that they can work every day.
These are extraordinary times. Everyone is struggling and that struggle manifests itself in unfortunate but predictable ways. A compassionate warrior recognizes the place where people are and brings mercy.
In the (lightly edited) words of Emmet Fox:
“When another’s delinquency comes to your notice, remember that the God in him is calling out for help to you who are enlightened — so be merciful.”
Every single moment that we are present for the pain that others are experiencing that they lack the tools necessary to confront and rise above is an opportunity for compassionate warriors to rise above. It is an opportunity for each of us to see God in this mess and to bring our best game.
We’ve all been mired in the process of grief. That’s where we all were before we started our recovery journeys. Looking at the events around us through that lens – that those people that we see acting out are the “still sick and suffering” that we pray for at meetings. In these chaotic, challenging times, practice the principles in all your affairs: be merciful in every thought and deed.
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Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth., and David Kessler. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York ; Toronto: Scribner, 2005.
Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount, The Key to Success in Life, Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, NY, 1934
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