(If you’re new to Monkeytraps, Steve is a therapist who specializes in control issues, and Bert is his control-addicted inner monkey.

Bert speaking:)

For any recovering addict the first job is learning to see differently. 

For control addicts that means learning to see control issues, in their own lives and in the teeming life of the world around them.

I have to practice this every day. 

Some I catch.  Some I miss.

I invite you to practice with me. 

Below are three puzzle pieces that crossed my path this morning.   Once upon a time I would have seen no connection between them. 

There are no right or wrong answers here. 

Fit them together, or not, as you will.

Piece #1: 

Found in a pile of miscellaneous clutter in my kitchen, a joke, on a sheet of notepad paper from the satirical website Demotivators:

It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

Piece #2:

“Sad story,” my wife says as I stand at the kitchen counter, sipping my first cup of coffee.  “X’s friend’s daughter killed herself yesterday.”

“How old?” I ask.

“Seventeen.  Honor student.  Turned out the college she wanted to get into hadn’t responded yet.”

“But it’s only January,” I say.

“I know,” she nods.  “Sad story.”

Piece #3: 

I keep books on my desk to poke through when stuck for something to write about.  I open one* and find a passage I highlighted years ago in yellow marker:

Alcoholism is the disease of living elsewhere. 

In active addiction, the present moment is a terrible and threatening place.  The remorse for things done and the fear of what is to come crowd the eternal holy now into oblivion.  There is no rest or comfort in the contemplation of the reality of the life of ongoing addiction. 

By the end of my addiction, the only escape from the horror of everyday life lay in the fragile amnesia of fantasy or illusion.  Demons clawed at the windows in deep night….  I had become a “hungry ghost” — the mythic creature with an enormous belly and pinprick mouth, cursed with an insatiable thirst….

My mind was not sound, and by my thirties I was in a terrible world of random dependence.  My unvoiced cry was, in the words of Joko Beck, “I want, I want, I want…” with the deeper objective phrase “the world to be my parents.”    

So.  There are my three pieces.  

No wrong answers here. 

No right ones, either.

Fit them together, or not, as you will.

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Want more?

That is what ordinary recovery is.  Not complicated; not special.  Any addict, like so many of his brothers and sisters in the larger world, lives a life of rapture and illusion.  Ordinary recovery is about waking up to what is real.  When you see what is right before your eyes, you are healed.  the way to the healing moment is through paying attention. Pay attention: the medicine is right before you all the time.

~ *From Cool water: Alcoholism , mindfulness and ordinary recovery by William Alexander

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Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed.  They are beings who have uncovered a terrible emptiness within themselves, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting something that has already happened…. 

[To heal,] The Hungry Ghosts must come in contact with the ghostlike nature of their own longings. 

~ From Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective by Mark Epstein.