Addiction and Self Awareness

Addiction and self awareness are closely tied in treatment and recovery. During the process of addiction a person can lose self- awareness, forget what they believe, what they truly want in life, the meaning of life — they can also lose awareness of what’s happening in their various relationships with others. There’s a certain amount of delusional thinking that goes on in addiction. Because the person’s life is so out of control, the addicted person attempts to “fix” it all. When the person realizes they can’t control their drinking or drug use, they pretend to be in control — this is where the delusional thinking comes in, and it’s easier to blame people, places and things for our problems than to take a close, objective look at ourselves.

The alcoholic or drug addict pretends so often and for so long, the difference between truth and make-believe becomes blurred. Often, a person in recovery believes some of the fictional stories even while sober, until one day they realize that what they believed to be true is not true at all. The person had told themselves the same fiction over and over until it became the truth in the craziness of addiction. In AA’s Step 4 — Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves — the recovering alcoholic looks back over his/her life and identifies the areas where self-awareness has become the most damaged. Is the resentment the person holds toward an employer really based on facts or alcoholic delusion? Is her husband really the culprit or was it her drinking and unpredictable behavior?

Some people in 2016 might cringe at the terminology — moral inventory — but AA’s steps were written in 1935, and no one should let the differences in terminology from 1935 to 2016 throw them off. The recovering person could just as well call the process “getting to know oneself”, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc. The point is that a person in recovery will have a better chance at maintaining recovery and growing as a person if he/she re-evaluates their life, thoughts, emotions and relationships with others openly and fearlessly.