What Addiction Taught Me About Freedom

I don’t talk about addiction as much as I used to.

Partly because it’s no longer the defining feature of my life, and partly because I don’t work in the addiction space necessarily. But it is an important part of my story, and probably one of the experiences that most profoundly shaped the way I think about freedom, discipline, desire, spirituality and what it means to actually change yourself.

At one point, the way I was living almost got me killed. Looking back now, I can also see that what came afterwards became one of the most powerful sources of transformation in my life.

My addictive behaviours weren’t limited to one particular thing aside from finding ways to alter how I felt. The specific behaviour mattered, of course, but underneath much of it was the same pattern: I had become extremely good at finding ways to escape discomfort and extremely bad at simply being with myself.

What Recovery Forced Me to Confront

I have immense respect for people who have overcome serious addictions; it is by far the most impressive thing I believe one can achieve.

One of the things I found so powerful about going through a 12-step program was that it required a fairly cataclysmic change in behaviour, attitude, mindset and identity. There wasn't much room for tinkering around the edges.

You had to look at yourself. Properly.

And, perhaps more painfully, other people were looking too. Fellows and sponsors became objective bullshit detectors who were considerably less impressed by my rationalizations than I was.

There’s something both powerful and terrifying about having your beliefs shattered, not only about who you are, but about the world you exist in.

When you start responding to situations differently and occasionally don't recognize your own reactions anymore, that's when you know something deeper has begun to change.

I Had Confused Stimulation With Feeling Alive

This was one of the biggest realizations for me.

I used to think “feeling alive” meant being intoxicated with some kind of substance, going on some kind of adventure, ideally breaking some sort of rule along the way, and often doing some combination of the above with an attractive woman.

Without intensity, life didn't feel particularly satisfying.

I was born with an adventurous spirit, and I still have it. I don't think that part of me was ever the problem.

The problem was that adventure, substances, women, sex, novelty and stimulation had become intertwined with my ability to feel alive. Ordinary life struggled to compete.

After a few years of living very differently, alongside a lot of spiritual and personal transformation, I discovered something I genuinely didn't expect.

I could feel incredibly alive without any of it.

I learned to enjoy my own company. I developed a much healthier relationship with myself. My reactions became less impulsive. I became more capable of experiencing an uncomfortable thought or feeling without immediately needing to do something about it.

Basically, I started becoming someone I barely recognized.

And I was fucking proud of myself.

I still am.

It was by far one of the hardest things I've ever done and one of the accomplishments I'm most proud of.

Addiction Changed My Definition of Freedom

For a long time, I thought freedom meant being able to do whatever I wanted.

Nobody telling me what to do. No rules. No restrictions. If I wanted something and had the ability to experience it, why shouldn't I?

Eventually I encountered the obvious problem with that philosophy:

What happens when you lose the ability to not do what you want?

Are you still free?

That question has stayed with me far beyond addiction.

If you can't tolerate discomfort without reaching for something to change how you feel, how free are you?

If you can't experience desire without obeying it, how free are you?

If you need attention, stimulation, sex, substances, achievement, validation, food, your phone, or anything else in order to regulate your internal world, how much choice do you actually have?

This is one of the biggest paradoxes I've encountered in my life.

The younger version of me thought discipline and restriction were the enemies of freedom. The older version of me understands that without some degree of self-command, freedom becomes almost impossible.

Freedom isn't having unrestricted access to everything you desire.

It's having the ability to choose what you do with that desire.

The Problem Was Bigger Than the Thing

There is an enormous amount of research and debate about why people develop addictions, and I’m wary now of reducing something so complicated to a single explanation.

In my own experience, though, I came to understand many of my addictive behaviours as ways of changing an internal state I didn't know how to tolerate.

Sometimes that meant escaping pain.

Sometimes boredom.

Sometimes loneliness.

Sometimes restlessness.

Sometimes it wasn't about feeling bad at all. Celebration could create exactly the same desire for intensity.

That realization was initially quite crushing.

I had assumed that if I could become happier and deal with the painful parts of myself, the desire to escape would disappear.

Then you achieve something and another voice appears:

You deserve it.

Different emotion. Same pattern.

What eventually mattered was developing other ways of experiencing pain, celebration, excitement, connection and aliveness.

People became an important part of that. Friendship, community and having people around me who genuinely cared about what happened to me gave me somewhere to take both the difficult moments and the good ones.

I also had to learn that asking for support wasn't weakness.

For a man who valued independence as much as I did, that was a lesson in itself.

Learning to Enjoy Ordinary Life Again

When you've spent a long time seeking intense external stimulation, ordinary life can initially feel pretty fucking boring.

The analogy I used to make was that it felt like driving a Ferrari for years and suddenly being told that, for the foreseeable future, you're driving a Toyota Tazz.

No offence to Tazz owners.

The Ferrari was fast, exciting and occasionally dangerous. The Tazz gets you to the supermarket.

At first, that's a difficult trade.

What I didn't understand was that my experience of the Tazz could change.

As my life slowed down, so did I.

Prayer helped. Meditation helped. Exercise helped. Spirituality helped enormously. Community helped. Learning to sit with discomfort rather than immediately changing it helped.

And slowly, the world started becoming interesting again.

Not in the way it had been before.

In a quieter way.

The Things I Couldn't Feel Before

I started noticing things I had barely experienced before.

A light breeze.

Birds in the morning.

Music became much more intense. Sometimes I could genuinely feel it in my body.

I became more capable of appreciating small things instead of constantly needing to manufacture big ones.

Writing gratitude lists every day helped with this. I had a rule that I couldn't repeat the same points throughout the week, which forced me to actually look for things I would normally ignore.

The lessons.

The realizations.

Tiny moments of creativity.

Small interactions.

Things that were always there but that I had been moving too quickly to notice.

One day I sat staring at a fire for about fifteen minutes.

That's it.

There was no revelation. No psychedelic experience. No breakthrough.

Just me and a fire.

And I remember being struck by the fact that I didn't need to do anything else. I didn't need to chase something, change something or intensify the experience.

It was just beautiful.

That sounds ridiculously simple.

For the person I had been, it wasn't.

Desire Isn't the Enemy

This is probably one of the most important things I've learned, and it has become increasingly relevant to the work I now do with men.

The lesson I took from addiction wasn't that desire is bad.

I still desire plenty.

I want adventure. I want success. I want love. I'm attracted to women. I want to experience beautiful things. I want to build things, travel, create, explore and squeeze an enormous amount out of this strange experience of being alive.

I don't want to become a man without appetite.

The change has been in my relationship with appetite.

For much of my earlier life, desire felt remarkably similar to instruction. If I strongly wanted something, the natural next step was to pursue it.

I don't believe that anymore.

You can experience desire without immediately acting on it. You can be attracted to someone without needing to possess or pursue them. You can want stimulation without giving yourself stimulation. You can experience discomfort without immediately escaping it.

There is space between wanting and doing.

Learning to live inside that space changed my life.

And I think that space is where a lot of our freedom lives.

From Consumption to Connection

Looking back, one of the biggest changes was that I slowly stopped needing to consume life in order to experience it.

More intensity. More novelty. More experiences. More women. More stimulation. More ways to get outside myself.

There was always something else to chase.

What replaced that wasn't abstinence from life.

It was connection to it.

Connection with myself. Connection with other people. Connection with women that wasn't purely based around attraction or what I could get from them. Connection with nature. Connection with my body. And, increasingly, connection with God.

The strange irony is that consuming less allowed me to experience more.

Not necessarily more excitement.

More depth.

Building a Life You Don't Constantly Need to Escape From

I used to believe that stopping the destructive behaviour was the goal.

I don't anymore.

Removing something from your life creates a vacuum. The much harder question is what you're going to put in its place.

For me, purpose became incredibly important.

Not purpose in the grandiose sense that you need to discover your one divine mission and dedicate every waking moment to it. I mean building a life that contains enough meaning, connection, responsibility, love, creativity, service and challenge that you actually want to be present for it.

A life you don't constantly need to escape from.

That doesn't mean you never want to escape.

I still get restless. I still want novelty. I still have impulses. I still sometimes want to run away from uncomfortable feelings rather than sit there and experience them like some enlightened spiritual master.

The difference is that I have considerably more choice about what happens next.

And ultimately, that's what addiction taught me about freedom.

I thought freedom meant removing restrictions.

I discovered that real freedom required developing the capacity to govern myself.

Not perfectly. Not through suppression. And certainly not by becoming a man without desire.

By becoming a man who can experience desire, discomfort, attraction, excitement, pain and pleasure without automatically being controlled by them.

That lesson started in addiction.

But it ended up changing almost everything about the man I became.

With gratitude to God, my sponsor, the boys in LA, and the friends who stood beside me through some very dark years. You changed my life for the better. 💙