Are you Buffering or Recovering? #addictionrecovery #recoveryjourney

Hey, Dr. Dallas Bragg here. I'm a sobriety coach and I help you break free from addictive patterns. Today we're talking about the difference between buffering and recovery. And basically what that really means is if you're feeling stuck in your sobriety, or if you feel like there's more to life, if you feel like you're missing out on your best and highest existence, Then this video is for you. Hey, before we get started, for more videos like this, go ahead and subscribe, like, share, comment, all the things that help My algorithm, click on the bell, all the stuff. There you go. There's my, there's my obligatory social media mention. After an addict, and maybe you can speak to this, has slammed into rock bottom, the definition of what makes a better life is a pretty low bar. So often we people in recovery tend to settle for mediocrity because, you know, at baseline, at least we aren't using, right? I would say wrong. Quitting the substance— and if you listen to me at all or read any of my content, you've seen me say this— quitting the substance does not immediately solve your problems and make you happy. Radical recovery calls for creating the absolute best and highest existence possible. Your rock bottom offers a clean slate and an opportunity for you to create from scratch a new life. And you know, a lot of people aren't offered such a privilege. The path of recovery is inviting you to not settle For a better life, but only accept your absolute best life. What are you waiting for? You know, a story from, from my early recovery is that I found myself nervously fidgeting in the basement of a church, and I was sitting around a group of addicts, drug addicts. And if you aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, I'm talking about an NA meeting. I was desperate though, not to— to avoid relapse. And Narcotics Anonymous, I had heard, was the miracle cure, the only thing that I could do to stop relapsing and get through this. So night after night, I found NA meetings in my area, and night after night, I felt more hopeless about my life in sobriety. I would ask myself, is this what I have to look forward to? Look around the room. Everyone seems so miserable. They're telling stories of being triggered all week, and they barely made it to a meeting. One evening, I listened to a lady's story. It's one of the share meetings, and she had been sober for 20 years. She described struggling daily against her disease, right? She painted a picture of her life. As one long road of hardship. But she said at the end, I'm grateful to not be drinking and drugging. I left. I sat in my car after that meeting and had my head against the steering wheel, and I just felt hopeless. I wondered if I would ever be happy because before this, you know, I had lived for decades with this silent agony. Of being a closeted man. I destroyed my life with crystal meth. And then after all of that, now I was doomed to carry addiction on my back like an incurable disease for the rest of my life. I really did want to die again. And if this sounds familiar to you, let me offer you some hope. You can be sober and free. Those 2 things can coexist. And in— when I say freedom, you may not know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not freedom from the substance or the behavior. You don't have to settle for anything less than the life of your dreams. I refer to this route in recovery as self-actualized recovery. So in this video, we'll talk about the 4 Ds of self-actualized recovery. Hopefully, if you listen to these 4 Ds, you will get started on, on this route to a better life. So the first D is direction. What I hear most when people reach out to me from addicts in recovery is that they feel stuck. Their life is in transition from one identity to another, and it's a state of being that I call buffering. The nervous system is in shock, and there's not enough internal bandwidth to generate momentum. So if you think about a computer when it's buffering, you got the wheels spinning there, um, on the screen. It doesn't have the internal bandwidth, the capacity to handle what it's facing, what it's been told to do, right? All a buffering person knows is how to avoid the substance or the behavior, but beyond that, life is unfamiliar and it's vague. How can you stop buffering? By expanding capacity through the power of your imagination. This is your opportunity to create reality and dream as big as possible. How can you move forward if you don't know where you're going? So here's an activity for that. It's what I call prophetic visioning. You take a pen and paper And get into a quiet place, go into nature. Now sit down for a second, meditate, create the picture of your best and highest life. Think about every detail. There are no dreams, there are no boundaries too big here. Be sure to write it in first person though, right? I am instead of I will be. Now each morning and each evening, read portions of your vision. With your eyes closed, imagine yourself being in that life and feel the emotion of it viscerally. Use all of your senses. This is the most powerful tool for moving your life to the next level. You are giving the subconscious specific direction to begin orchestrating the circumstances of the life that you want. The second D is detachment, the most impactful differentiator. of a successfully sober person, person in recovery, is their mindset. Growth of any kind— it can be personal, mental, physical, spiritual— it's driven by perspective shifts. My recovery journey transformed when I stopped saying, I am an addict. The words I am declare your identity and ask the ego to find proof. And I'm going to put a link here of last week's video where I talked about the ego and how it works. I was able to detach myself from the addiction by saying part of me is an addict. When you stop identifying with the addiction, then you become the observer of it. Practicing the awareness in this way is a return to your true nature, your true nature, or you can say your consciousness. This allows you to create a relationship with the addiction. And why you want to create a relationship with it is that you want to study it. You want to figure out what it wants, what it needs, why it's there, and how to neutralize it. This puts you in the driver's seat. Then you're in charge. So to get you started with this process of detaching your identity, from your addiction, I did create a guided meditation. It's called Meet Your Addiction. I'm gonna also put a link here and in the description. The 3rd D is decision. So a springboard for creating the life of your dreams is in the questions that you ask. When you approach recovery with curiosity, it allows you to make decisions that lead to forward momentum. There will be days when your sobriety hinges on one decision at a time. One day at a time, one decision at a time. So the starting point is to notice when you are emotionally activated. Self-actualized recovery begins by questioning exaggerated responses to seemingly insignificant stimuli, right? So let's say a family member cuts you off in mid-sentence, your boss sends a curt email. Your friend cancels plans at the last minute. These are all moments that point you towards subconscious beliefs. This is where you can propel your healing. Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within. That's Dr. Gabor Maté. When you ask curious questions like, why did that bother me so much? And how could my anger be a gift from my subconscious? They allow you to decide whether you're going to be reacting or responding to the stimuli in your life. And I'm telling you, you're going to notice an immediate balance in your nervous system. There was one morning when I drove all the way to into the city here in rush hour, got to my destination. And I reflected, wait a minute, I was calm that whole drive. I was thinking about the way people were driving and pulling out in front of me. That's when I knew that my recovery had deepened by my reaction, my response to life. So let's look at this diagram. You'll see an illustration here, and it shows 2 people who are both abstaining from the substance. So they're both quote unquote Sober. One is buffering, stuck, and one is recovering or advancing. So as you can see, they both have triggers in their life. They both feel negative emotions, but one pauses and one reacts. One pauses, asks questions, and gets to the bottom of what this Trigger is all about, and one just remains stuck in the same behavior over and over and over. But they didn't drink or drug, right? That's the difference. So the fourth D is discernment. While in active addiction, we lose trust in our ability to sense right or wrong. So this disconnection with ourself can be manipulated sometimes. By people, sometimes in the recovery community. Newly sober people feel such an incredible amount of shame that they take the notion of life became unmanageable, which is step 1 in the 12 steps, to heart. They identify with it. They think, I cannot manage myself. I am helpless. And yes, you made a series of decisions that weren't for the best. But that does not mean that you're unable to hear your intuition. It only means that you need some space to attune back into it, to attune to your inner voice. I found that space during mindful meditation. The most impactful use of my time in early recovery was actually doing nothing. There is infinite value in silently observing your thoughts. My mind was a stormy sea of uncontrollable waves, but with some practice, I learned how to calm the waters. This is the key to connecting to your intuition. Calm those waters so you can hear. So when we talk about meditation, it scares a lot of people, right? And you may be saying to yourself, my mind is never going to slow down. It takes some practice, but you can take control of your thought activity. And the better you are at slowing down the mind, the better you are responding to life. So it— the better you are at pausing before following a craving, the better you are at hearing the voice of your intuition. So here's an activity that's worked for me, and that's when I sit down to meditate, I imagine that I'm lying on the bank of a river, and each time a thought pops into my head, I imagine that I put that in the river and allow it to float away. And again and again and again, I practiced this until eventually the thoughts slowed down to almost none. Suddenly your mind is still, and suddenly you're able to connect with yourself. So listen, the definition of recovery is the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost. What was stolen from you? Your perfect nature was stolen from you. The connection with your soul was stolen from you, and it was taken from you at a time when you were at your most defenseless. It was replaced by imprinted beliefs about who you are and what the quality of your life's going to be. But it is time to take it back. You can regain control by rewriting those imprints. By creating brand new imprints, it's a process. It's a process that will elevate your life into stages of being that you could never ever conceptualize. It's a state called self-actualized recovery. The possibilities are endless for you. So again, I want to ask: What are you waiting for? I really pray that these words have ignited new passion. Into your recovery journey incentivized you to go deeper, and it's only the beginning. And if you do want to go deeper with me, if you want to sign up for a free session, we can do it. Do some meditation. We can do some deep dive. We can look at your triggers. We can do all kinds of stuff, and it's all free. I have to do is comment in the comments session. You want, uh, you can send me an email at dallas@drdallasbragg.com or just go to my website. That being said, good luck to you. Thanks for being with me, and I love you.