To surrender? What does that mean? It means you know you´ve been defeated and you
accept it. You´ve been knocked out. You don´t have it in you to fight anymore
and you give up. You fly a white flag.
Addicts in recovery have surrendered. The heroin
addict who cannot stop injecting heroin realizes he has been defeated when he
surrenders to the reality of his addiction. He needs the drug. He will suffer almost
unbearable pangs of withdrawal unless he gets it into his blood stream. By a
surrender to this fact of the matter, the addict makes possible a shift to the
entirety of his position in the world.
But what addiction does do is render people, no matter
how talented or famous, enslaved to their addictions.
I have an example of the power of surrender I want to
share from my personal life, although it´s not about addiction.
The Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay, September, 1945 |
It´s about a condition that developed over a ten year period when I worked graveyard shifts as a security guard. My body acclimated itself to being awake at night. It became accustomed to sleeping during the day. Ten years after having stopped working in security, still, I get tired and sleep during the day. I perk up ready to greet the world during the dark hours of the night. My sleep and wake hours were completely turned upside down by the decade of years I worked security at night.
I fought the condition with ferocity for a long time.
I did everything I could to reverse it so I could sleep at night. Nothing
worked--- except the effective sleeping medication called trazadone, not
available where I now live---Ecuador. My nights turned into anger fueled and
frustrating episodes of insomnia punctuated by bouts of intense binge
eating.
I surrendered to the reality of my insomnia about a
month ago. I accepted that I have a condition I can´t change. I elected to go
with the flow. I gave up worrying about when to sleep and instructed myself to
sleep when I´m sleepy and tired---ordinarily about five o´clock in the morning.
I go about my pursuits calmly and without rancor or agitation at night. The
capitulation to my insomnia erased the emotions which had been driving me to
binge eat at night.
A connection exists between the troubles I had with insomnia
and the troubles of addiction. Nothing about either of these two maladjustments
can or could be remedied unless first a surrender occurs---the hoisting of a
white flag indicating the profound realization change needs to enter into the
picture.
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