Slogans helping with long term recovery? In my case, it’s a resounding, “YES!” So you can imagine the smile that spread across my face this morning when today – of all days – I randomly opened one of my daily Al-Anon “readers,” titled: Hope for Today, and landed on May 5.

Why the smile?

Today is the sixth anniversary of this blog, and time and again, it was a slogan or saying that gave me the moment to weather my emotional storm and continue my long-term secondhand drinking recovery journey. The smile, followed by a knowing chuckle, was another of the things I’ve found in my recovery journey – coincidence (or in my case, I believe, Higher Power) – finding just the right thing I need to read or hear for a particular moment in time.

Why this May 5 entry struck me so? Check out this excerpt:

“When I first heard the slogans at Al-Anon meetings, I considered them to be trite little cliches that couldn’t possibly help anybody. They were far too simple to work, and I was far to skeptical to even attempt them. Then it dawned on me that I had been using my own slogans all my life. Unfortunately, they were slogans of non-recovery. I’d said many of them daily, and I had grown up hearing most of them from alcoholic relatives. They included ‘you should know how I feel,’ ‘after all I’ve done for you,’ ‘if you really loved me,’ ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ and ‘I hope you’re happy now.’

“I’d like to think these slogans didn’t work, but they did just what they were supposed to do. They left me and everyone around me feeling hurt, guilt-ridden, and miserable. Soon I began to wonder. If these little phrases had such power to destroy, then maybe the Al-Anon slogans had the power to rebuild.”

Today is the Sixth Anniversary for this blog and 2014 celebrates six years since I founded BreakingTheCycles.com. What better way for me to celebrate than with a post on some of the slogans that have been such a big part of my own long term secondhand drinking recovery.

Whenever I read this passage (which has been many, many times over the past 11 years), it’s this line that often jumps out for me:

They included ‘you should know how I feel,’ ‘after all I’ve done for you,’ ‘if you really loved me,’ ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ and ‘I hope you’re happy now.’

…for it wasn’t just the alcoholics in my life who said these things, it was the others who were in the same boat I was – the others who also were experiencing their own secondhand drinking impacts – and it was ME. I was saying those same lines to my daughters and others whom I love, even though I wasn’t the alcoholic.

…which inspired me to re-share portions of a post I’d previously written March 8, 2009, Moving from Reacting to Responding – Slogans and Sayings to Help With Recovery.

For it is the slogans and sayings of Al-Anon and other groups and individuals that have been one of the keys to my longterm recovery from secondhand drinking – a term to describe the negative impacts of a person’s drinking (or drugging) behaviors on others (aka codependency). In my case, it was four decades of negative impacts that had compounded, morphed and consumed my life. One of the other keys to my longterm recovery was learning about the brain, the science of addiction and the science of the chronically activated fight-or-flight stress response system (which is what happens to the brain of a person like myself). [For more on the latter, check out two of my other posts, The Dance of the Family Disease of Addiction and The Shame of Addiction.]

How Slogans Can Help with Long Term Recovery

As you move through your own recovery — whether it’s from the drug or alcohol abuse or addiction or secondhand drinking | drugging —it is easy to feel overwhelmed. The chinks in the wall of denial finally expose “things” you are not proud of or wish you’d done differently or have let fall by the wayside as you’ve adapted and coped. For me, panic often set in as I peeked through those chinks in the wall. Constant refrains of “What if ______;” “But, I can’t stop _______;” “But I’ve got to do _________” would run through my mind. I felt like the little Dutch boy in the fairy tale (was it a fairy tale?) with his finger in the hole in the dike. Pull it out and the town would flood. That panicky feeling would (and still can) get me into all sorts of trouble — mostly jumping to do any kind of fix in order to make the feeling go away. But, I’ve learned in my own recovery, “reacting” is not good when trying to make a decision. It originates in the part of our brain responsible for pleasure, emotions and fight-or-flight. “Responding” is good. Responding comes from the “thinking” part of our brain — the part where we can decide if I do this, then this will happen, or if I don’t do anything about this in the next fifteen minutes, my world is not going to flood. [Check out Step Away From Conflict – Change Where You Think and Understand Brain Maps | Change a Habit | Change Your Life.

Al-Anon, Alateen, AA, NA, Nar-Anon and other recovery-type programs offer a wide array of slogans, phrases and sayings, as have many people throughout the centuries. I use these as thoughts to anchor my “thinking” when I feel myself losing control. I’ve written them on post-it notes and stuck them on my mirror or on a cupboard door or on the dash of my car to remind me there’s an alternative to my “crazy” thinking (the thinking that takes hold without thinking because it’s so ingrained).

Here are Some of My Favorites

HALT [and I’ve added an extra “A”]
It stands for Hungry, Angry, Anxious,Lonely, Tired. Any of these will send the brain into stress mode. [Check out Stress and Addiction | Stress and Secondhand Drinking (Drugging). So ask yourself, “Am I hungry. Have I eaten a nutrient-rich meal or snack, lately?” If not, do so – food provides glucose. And if the brain hasn’t had its supply of glucose, it looks for it – causing stress. And remember, the healthier the glucose source (meaning the more nutrient-rich, fresh, unprocessed the food source), the better for brain health.

Next, ask yourself, “Am I Angry or Anxious?” Both of these are stress triggering emotions. If you take stalk of what’s triggered either emotion before you react, you can THINK. Thinking moves you from the “reactionary” Limbic System to the “thinking” Cerebral Cortex.

Lonely is also a feeling. It can also cause stress, and we can often feel lonely in a relationship or crowd of friends. Not that you can necessarily do anything about feeling lonely at that moment, but you can recognize that lonely is the cause of how you’re feeling – not whatever else you think it may be. This buys you time to think and take appropriate action vs reacting and perhaps making a bigger mistake that will further cause you stress.

And lastly, tired. Tired is a feeling that is telling the brain it needs sleep. If you’re tired, try take a nap, if you can, or go to bed early that night. More importantly, know being tired is the cause of how you are feeling.

One Day at a Time
And for me, this has boiled down to the next 5 minutes at a time. It’s the idea that no matter how bad it may be, you just have to get through one day (or 5 minutes) and somehow that makes it seem achievable.

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” – Mark Twain
This one speaks to the futility of worrying about what may or may not happen.

Anger is one letter away from danger.
I’ve had a heck of a lot of anger [and it got worse as my inability to control my loved ones’ drinking branched out to include my trying to control just about everything else in my and my daughters’ lives] and now use this slogan to help pull me back from the insanity that overwhelms me when I give in to being angry. [Caution: this does not mean I don’t have and experience angry feelings; I just try not to react in anger.]

Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed.
I use this to keep me from giving into the panic caused by the unknown. I used to have intense fear of the unknown and could not take action because I didn’t have all the answers or know all of the possible outcomes – “what if . . .” was my common refrain. Now I don’t let fear dictate what I do or don’t do.

If you don’t like what you feel, change what you think.
Yes, we really do have absolute power over what we think. We can think whatever we want to think, thus we can feel however we want to feel. One of the things I do when I keep getting the same negative thought(s) over and over [especially when I’m dealing with a problem that takes time to correct, for example] is to literally say, “Stop.” And when the thought pops in again (and again), I jar my thinking with “Stop,” and replace the problem-related thoughts with ones about something good in my life, or I’ll force myself to notice my surroundings and focus on those. This only works, of course, if I’ve taken time to think through the problem and know I’m doing what I can do about it at that particular time. If I’m really wound up, I set aside time to look at my “worry list” (which is now my calendar), decide if I’ve done what I can do for that day about those worries, and then choose to think of something else, instead. I can miss the entire day, otherwise. [Some of the linked articles above can help with this, as can these two: Make Time to Worry (and Not) and Help for Recovery – Give Lists a Try.]

Patience
Just as it likely took you a long time to get to this point, it will take time to change your behaviors. Be patient with yourself and count every time you do it differently as a success — even if you slip again tomorrow. We are re-training | re-wiring brains – brains that have long been wired to do things in unhealthy ways for a long, long time.

Second Half of the Serenity Prayer
The first half of the prayer is most familiar, but I really like the second half, as well:
Grant me Patience for the things that take time,
Appreciation for all that I have,
Tolerance for others with different struggles, and the
Strength to get up and try again, one day at a time.

“Every accomplishment begins with a decision to try.” — Edward T. Kelly
In other words, don’t wait until you have all the answers or an assured outcome before you start.

Along these lines, you may wish to read this post, Courage to Change the Things I Can.

Let It Go
I had no idea how to do this in the beginning. I would talk about something that was really upsetting and do what I needed to do to come to terms with it, but then it was like a kite on a string. I’d let it go, but it’d be still be up “there” — floating — not as much on my mind as before, but it was still there. Finally I started to think of “letting go” as using a scissors to cut the string and watch the kite fly away. [Check out Let It Go – Nice Saying, But How?]

Fear is the darkened hallway. Faith is the lighted door.
I clung to this idea that if I just moved towards the lighted door and focused on that, I could make it through the darkened hallway (my metaphor for whatever I was grappling with at the time).

Detach
You hear this often, often followed by, “detach with love.” And if you’re like me, you follow up with, “You’ve Got to be Kidding! After all they’ve done to me? You are off your rocker. That’s asking way too much!” To explain how I use(d) this slogan, please check out Detach. Detach With Love. You’ve Got to be Kidding!

Forgive
This one takes a while and for some, a long, long while. But it’s not the idea of forgetting or saying what happened was OK somehow as much as it is the idea of accepting your loved one had (has) an untreated brain disease that often results in horrific drinking or drugging behaviors. I think of forgiveness the way I heard others use it as letting go of the hope for a different outcome. There could/can be no different outcome as long as your loved one drank or used any amount of the drug or alcohol to which they were addicted. Check out Choosing to Forgive an Alcoholic. This quote helps, too: “Forgiving is not forgetting, its letting go of the hurt.” —Mary McLeod Bethune

And, lastly “BREATHE” when you find yourself holding your breathe, take a moment and breathe in and out, in and out — deeply. This allows you enough time to move from the emotional center of your brain to the thinking part of your brain. As for the science of why? Oxygen is one of the two key things the brain needs to survive and thrive. The other is glucose, for which the best source for the brain is nutrient-rich foods.

To My Readers…

Thank you. Thank you for following BreakingTheCycles.com, for your guest posts, for your comments – for it is all of us sharing our own experiences, expertise, wisdom, courage, strength and hope that ultimately Changes the Conversations and helps shatter the stigma, misinformation and shame that have kept so many millions from finding and living thriving lives in long term recovery.

© 2014 Lisa Frederiksen

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Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com

Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.

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