I work with a lot of addicts. In the 25 years since I began my own recovery process one point has become increasingly clear, albeit unpleasant: addicts have low self-esteem. We also have a tendency to flip from one extreme to another. We’re either too big for our britches or lower than toilet paper on a dirty shoe. We’re also “too smart for our own good” and “have a lot of potential.” Even with years of recovery, the shadow voice of self-loathing can still whisper not-so-sweet-somethings into our minds at crucial times – like right in the middle of a job interview or as we’re just about to connect with someone on a date. What does the voice of Self-loathing say and how can we heal from it?

If you’d like to participate in this practice, I suggest a few minutes of quiet breathing meditation first. Sit straight to put your mind straight. Bring your awareness deep into the body with each breath. Just notice. Afterward, you can speak aloud from these voices or write out your own voices. It’s always good to do work like this with a sponsor, therapist or spiritual adviser. As always if you feel uncomfortable, it may be best to take a break. Do what works for you. This is based on my own experience.

I am the voice of self-loathing.

Want more? I’ve got a million of ‘em. Thanks, I’ll be here all week.

In group we often go into depth about how long the voice of self-loathing has been present and, using a method from Genpo Roshi’s work, we examine when the decision was made for this voice to come into play. What happened around that time? How old were you? What color were the walls, what did the room smell like, what shoes were you wearing. This is powerful work. And we have to let the other shoe drop, so to speak. Otherwise the exercise might be depressing!

I am the voice of self-love.

• Look for me, self-love, in others. When you see self-loathing, give them my love. Offer the nurturing and soothing acceptance that they need and perhaps have never had. Help them find me, self-love in themselves.

What makes Aspects of Self dialogs so powerful with recovering addicts is the unconditional, positive regard each aspect gets from the sangha and the self. As facilitator, my job is to let these aspects know that it’s OK to exist. We all have this as part of our own makeup. Everyone can identify — some stronger than others. Some of us own some aspects more or less than others own their various aspects. But they all get air time and a chance to be. We didn’t go into it in this article, but in the groups we always acknowledge the positive side of the shadow voices too. What’s Zen about it is the effect of awareness on “the problem.” What’s 12-Step about this is that we’re uncovering truths about ourselves, sometimes for the first time. We practice principles of recovery and Dharma to heal suffering for ourselves and others. May it be so.

Special thanks to the sangha and Mary S. in particular for sharing her personal work on this topic. Some of her quotes were reworded for dialog purposes. For more information please see the 12-Step Buddhist book, podcast and website. If you’re an addict interested in Dharma, please join our discussion group on Google. To book a workshop or professional training contact the author directly through http://the12stepbuddhist.com.

I’m clean and sober for more than 12 years. But I still have what we call “drunk dreams.” Here’s a recent one. Although I’m not a follower of hip hop, I dreamed that I was hanging out with the famous rapper Snoop Dogg. I waited all day for him to pull out his stash of drugs. At the end of the day he put out some big fat lines of cocaine and offered me one. I took it in like a like a dirt dog lapping up a few licks of morning dew off the desert floor. The smell was so fresh and it made me feel more alive than I’d felt in years. My heart opened. I loved my life and everyone in it at that moment. In my mind I remembered that I was an addict in recovery. But I couldn’t reconcile the question that arose in my dreaming mind, “How could something that feels this good cause suffering?”

This wasn’t my first drinking/using dream and it won’t be the last. They’re quite common for people in recovery. Yet many of us feel shame, remorse when we have them. When I woke up from this one I felt the usual confusion. But thanks to deep work in the Dharma and in the 12 Steps, I have tools to understand that this is an expression of the addict brain and mind on different levels. One such tool is something I was taught many years ago: the notion of these being part of the process of recovery.

In the treatment center in Fall 1984, our counselor told us not to be alarmed if we had dreams of drinking and/or using drugs. He referred to this necessary part of recovery as a “flushing of the psychic toilet.” When I got my 30-day sobriety coin at a meeting I talked about my own drunk dreaming during the hospital stay. An old-timer shared that he’d been sober for decades and still had them too and that it was OK. What a relief! I’d worried it was because I wasn’t serious about my recovery, as if these dreams revealed some secret desire to get loaded. But I really did want to stay sober, which made the dreams very confusing.

During my first decade of sobriety I always woke up from drunk dreams with a feeling of gratitude that it was just a dream. But the feelings seemed so real. From the cold droplets on the brown beer bottle fresh out of the freezer where I used to chill them up, to the life giving rush of a blast of cocaine, the experiences were totally convincing. I always feel a little doubt about the commitment to recovery when this happens. But I’m normally relieved to wake up and realize I’m really still sober.

But in 1995 I relapsed for real with almost 10 years of sobriety. But I couldn’t wake up from that reality. It wasn’t just a dream. It’s quite shocking to dream that you’ve woken from a drunk dream but then discovered that it was not a dream at all.

When my Huff Po editors asked me to write about something related to sleep and recovery, I wondered how my fellow recovering people experienced dreams about using. I asked them to send me some dream descriptions by email. Here’s a sample of what came through. Gender and length of sobriety precede the descriptions.

• Female, eight years: In all my drinking dreams my initial thought is to lie about it and see if I can get away with it.

• Female, 10 years: I do actually now have dreams where I have really been drinking all along. Like going to AA, but secretly drinking….for almost 10 years. They kind of mess me up in the morning.

• Male, four years: I still frequently have using dreams. They are not limited to drugs — sex, money, and prestige are frequent motifs.

• Female, length unknown: I was riding a cart into a little small town haunted house. Upon entering the haunted house, I realized I was accompanied by others on the ride, all in AA-some I knew, some I did not. I was shunned by the ones I knew, and the ones I didn’t might as well have been a part of the attractions, they seemed like ghouls. [sic] … Maybe that is why I haven’t been intertwining myself into AA? Or maybe I feel alienation because of my lack of (participation).

• Male, three years: I have a recurring dream that I smoke weed every so often and keep sweeping it under the rug as “not relapsing.” In the dream I’ll do it once every month or so, and keep saying I have the same sobriety date, and I’m full of guilt.

For those in recovery a familiar “dream theme” is that of our old friends trying to convince us to get loaded. I’ve had these for 25 years! Somehow we project the blame for relapsing onto old friends who convince us to use with them. For those with serious childhood trauma, we dream of flying, being someone else, having power or victory over our perpetrators or floating above the scene. The latter is common not only in dreams but in waking life with victims of serious childhood trauma. Yet others dream of aspects of addiction not related to substances, such as sex and co-dependency behaviors.

In the dreams we often have a sudden realization that we’ve just altered our sobriety date! This is a source of anxiety, which for me leads to nightmares with a sense of panic and disturbing imagery. Many dream that they have to keep the “relapse” a secret as they plan to continue attending meetings. Some dream that they’ve been using all along and that they’ve been “sober frauds” for years, as noted above.

Not everyone in recovery reports ongoing drunk dreams however. Several people with over 20 years failed to respond to my inquiry at all or reported that they no longer remember any dreams. In my psychology training I recall being taught that everyone dreams even if we don’t remember. The REM studies are fairly definitive in this regard. But nearly everyone I’ve discussed this topic with has reported having drunk dreams at some point in their recovery. For some they go away and for some they don’t.

Why do we have drunk dreams if we really want to stay clean and sober?

My guess is that the answer is three fold: Neurology, psychology and spirituality.

Neurology
I’m not a neurologist and would welcome any professional insight into this. But I think part of it is due to the trauma that we create in our using. Our brains learn to be addicted. On an emotional level we deepen our early childhood traumas by creating situations through addiction that recycle the trauma. New neural pathways burned in to our brains during addiction won’t disappear even after decades of abstinence.

In the 12-Step Buddhist Podcast Episode 11, I talk with Don Goewey, author of Mystic Cool and an expert on neuroplasticity, the brains’ ability to re-grow itself. We discuss the background of “mirror neurons.” Don offers some suggestions for how these play a role in the “social brain” and how new research might be beneficial in the study of addiction and recovery. He also gives a three-step method that he devised based on his work with long time friend, the famous psychologist Carl Rogers. The podcast is free and available on the12stepbuddhist.com as well as in iTunes.

Psychology
From a psychological perspective, we work in recovery to understand the nature of our addiction but often split off Aspects of Self that are still with us. What is unresolved comes up in dreams. Sometimes we can’t get over the guilt or low self-esteem. We can have difficulty feeling good about ourselves even with years of sobriety and may experience symptoms related to the original causes of addiction. As I outlined thoroughly in the 12-Step Buddhist, the problems leading up to active addiction are complex and varied. For this reason I always recommend therapy, 12-Step work and deep meditation practices to facilitate healing. One technique that I use in my workshops and weekly groups (gleaned from Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind work) where we speak to and as these aspects. See the 12-Step Buddhist and my previous Huff Po posts for details on how this works for addicts.

Spirituality
On a spiritual level the process of deep meditation practice has, in my case, churned up some pretty ugly emotions. The 12 Steps, which are spiritual in nature, can also evoke feelings that the brain and unconscious mind need to soothe. We access old feelings such as rage during our meetings, therapy, meditation. Then when our cognitive guard is down at night our lower centers or traumatized brain tissue may be triggered into a drunk dream as a self-protection mechanism. After all, to the brain and body the dream is real. The physiological responses to dreams are almost identical to those of actual events.

There’s much to say about techniques and practices in Buddhism that could be useful in exploring the issue of dreaming in recovery. Perhaps in a future article we’ll discuss it. In the meantime, it’s useful to be aware that:

• Drunk dreams are very common.
• Drunk dreams don’t mean that we aren’t committed to recovery.
• These dreams are a natural part of the process of processing.
• We can explore methods of meditation and therapy to use the dreams as tools for self-discovery and spiritual progress.

If you’d like to try a dream practice, I offer this from one of my teachers. Before going to sleep each night say to yourself, “I will awaken in my dream and I will know that I am dreaming.” Keep a dream journal next to your bed and no matter what time you wake up, especially if it’s in the middle of the night, write down all the details of your dream. If you’re like me your hand might not be so steady at 0-dark-thirty, so as an alternative, use your iPhone or other voice recorder to verbally describe the dream. These recordings could be transcribed later and discussed in therapy or considered in meditation.

Words to live by? I used to love this philosophy. Maybe in some sense I still do. But the view and application have changed considerably since I first heard it on a Bob E. speaker tape some 25 years go. Back then, as a fan of Alice Cooper (one of the first shock rockers) and Frank Zappa (the late social commentarian extraordinaire), the notion of shocking people out of their comfort zones was appealing. This is still a popular philosophy among some 12-Steppers.

For example, a 40-something man at a young people’s meeting recently told the famous “chicken-fucker” story to illustrate how sharing one’s defects can foster a sense of community. “As soon as I heard you were chicken-fucker too, I knew I wasn’t alone!” Sure, that kind of “honesty” can be interesting if you enjoy blank, nauseated looks from listeners. In a way this is a service in that we can ease the pain or at least the sense of isolation of those who are disturbed. But as someone who’d never learned to temper my emotions or have proper social boundaries, it was often hard to use such tactics without sometimes being a bit malicious. When we act like that, it’s more of an attitude of pre-recovery wherein we just want to disturb everybody!

That was easy for me, as my childhood behavior was as that class clown always on the lookout for ways to disrupt the teacher as a coping method for boredom and anxiety. Do you remember that kid? What can I say, we didn’t have computers or video games back then.

Later through the 12 Steps, I enjoyed a new acceptance of idiosyncrasies, weird humor and jaded views. In the course of working the steps I uncovered aspects of myself that I’d always been ashamed or unaware of. Step work helped me enjoy being openly not-ashamed. Moreover, I was part of a group where many other young people also admitted to being strange and quirky, yet were intelligent, sensitive and funny too. This made me feel like it was OK to be me for the first time in my life. Little did I know that it was the beginning of a lifelong process wrought with consistent and painful “chunks of truth” that didn’t always want to stay down.

In the preliminary stages of self-acceptance, depending on the individual and their path, it may be easy to think that some superficial levels of insight are profound. And in the early phase of recovery, where our sober community is popping with daily revelations, it can appear that non-addicts don’t have a clue. In the rooms, we call it “comparing their outsides with our insides.” They look comfortable and we feel uncomfortable, so why not shake things up a little? The attitude might be expressed by, “Hey look at me, at least I can admit that I’m an ass. Can’t you?” But to use shallow insight as a tool to gain the upper hand on uncomfortable social interactions is sophomoric 12-Step arrogance. But it’s not limited to 12-Steppers.

For me, it got worse with years of psychology and Zen untempered by real compassion. Combine a smart ass 12-stepper with a holier-than-now Zen-tillectual and you’ve got a reason for Prozac whether you’re the subject or the object. On one hand we’re superior because we’ve overcome addiction and on the other because we’ve found The Way. Add the ability to quote some Freud and you get an insufferable jerk who really knows how to get under people’s skins.

But what happens over time? The 12 steps work deeper, like a spiritual tapeworm burrowing into the core of our self-centeredness. Zen practice eventually (or suddenly) grinds away the sense of intellectually knowing anything at all, let alone everything, possibly leaving a level of doubt that can drive one back to drink, as it did in my case. Pithy Zen-quotes and 12-Step folk wisdom don’t help much when, in a drunken stupor the former sober hero passes out in his puke, trying to watch his breath as the room spins. Luckily, I was able to survive that stage and live to tell about it. Many do not.

These days, back in sober-mode with 12 years clean and another decade of Buddhist practice, I find that my view has changed again. What was often missing back then and what I’ve been trying to develop is the ability to be mindful of the piece from the St. Francis prayer that says, “Comfort rather than be comforted.” It sounds good in theory, but as with any afflictive emotion, it’s easier to take action that relieves our own anxiety than it is to consider the feelings of others, hence the desire to disturb the comfortable. But the more I practice, the more in touch with subtler levels of my own suffering and anxiety I become. Instead of reacting to that, I try to connect with how we’re all suffering, whether it manifests in addiction or something else.

We’re all disturbed on some level. Most addicts have indeed been through some serious trauma and we all need to be soothed, as Dr. Gabor Mate says in his new book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. But those of us who’ve suffered deeply aren’t better than those who suffer in quieter ways on subtler levels. This attitude might come easily for some, but for me it took time to learn it in my guts. Additionally, if we gain some insight from meditation and/or other practice, we can also develop sensitivity and the responsibility to use that insight to foster kindness and compassion. Note: I don’t mean pseudo-compassion where we pretend to be above it all with airy-fairy ideals that we barely understand and have even less ability to apply, but real compassion. This is exemplified not in our words or intentions, but our actions.

For example, when people attack or otherwise harm us, instead of taking actions to relieve our own suffering at their expense, we may opt to practice Tonglen, where we meditate on taking on their suffering and offering them the comforts that we normally covet for ourselves. See His Holiness Dalai Lama for over 50 years of examples. One such story of compassion from Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion, is of a Tibetan monk who, after escaping from Chinese prison, was asked about his experience. The monk said that the worst thing for him was that at one point during his torture he feared he might lose compassion for his captors.

Could most of us even consider such a notion? Come on. But these <em>are</em> the teachings of the Buddha. When logically integrated with the 12 Steps and other work, we have the opportunity to understand and experience a glimpse or two of how this level of compassion can be. I’ve felt it myself, so I have confidence in the methods. From this foundation I have gained some measure of understanding into practical ways to comfort, rather than be comforted as opposed to disturbing because I am disturbed. The trick is to remember to do it!

The nice thing about facilitating Dharma groups with addicts in recovery is that they never hesitate to throw the teachings or the steps right back at me if I forget. I’d like to thank the people who attend my groups for reminding me to practice what I teach. They really make me think and work hard. There’s no pedestal in this group! I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be on this path.

May we all find a path out of suffering.