Stories of Secular Recovery from Addiction
Through Narcotics Anonymous | Episode: Eric K | February 14, 2025
Michael E. (Host) 0:13
Greetings. Welcome and thank you for tuning in to our podcast, Stories of Secular Recovery from Addiction through Narcotics Anonymous. I am Michael E., coordinator and producer of the podcast.
Each episode features a story of addiction recovery from a member of Narcotics Anonymous who became clean in a secular, non-religious way. For more information about Secular NA, check out our website: secularna.org.
Our speaker for this episode is Eric. Eric is well known in secular NA circles for his intelligence, insight, and honesty. In this chair, Eric goes back 30 years and reflects on the thoughts and feelings of his nonlinear journey of recovery.
Eric K. 1:12
So uh, you know, I'm really good at forgetting things, and I'd forgotten this was going to be recorded, so now I think I'm not gonna share about no, just because in some ways this is going to be the face of NA for — you know — worked in a secular way. And so I think I'll change a little bit.
But I'll go back in time a little bit. Over 30 years ago, my family did an intervention on me, and I was unemployed — I was 35 years old, unemployed and unemployable, living in my mother's basement. And you know, everyone wondered what had happened to this wonderful graduate of an Ivy League university. And I had become an addict, I think, a little later than most, but not all. When I share my story, I'm mindful of the fact that it might seem a little different, and I don't mean to portray it as different.
That said, I remember during my first week of going to meetings, there was a person taking a one-year cake who had graduated from the same Ivy League university in the same year as I had. So this disease does not respect any socioeconomic or any group.
I began using in college, and it's amazing how quickly I became a fall-down drunk. I had started off as a pre-med student, and basically partying had made it impossible to keep my grades up. So I fished around for something I could do, you know, something I felt I could do the night before. And so I switched to studying Greek and Latin literature.
I switched drugs too — I stopped drinking. I understood that I couldn't drink. At least I was not insane enough at that point to keep it up. But I didn't understand, of course, that that's a disease. And so I switched to pot. I liked it. I began using it during vacations, and then on weekends, and then — by the end of my tenure in college — I had to smoke pot before exams because it was my belief that you remembered things better under the influence of the same drug you studied under. I, you know, and that could just be a rationalization. I just wanted to get high.
I graduated and because of my uneven academic performance, I really had no job prospects. Couldn't get any recommendations to go to graduate school or anything. My whole trajectory had derailed. But you know, the nice thing is I lived in this sort of blissful state of not caring. I basically bummed around the college town, got minimum wage jobs, took a few courses on the side, and thought I was living life.
So finally one fine morning in the middle of February, I decided that the New England weather was just way, way too cold. And within a week I was on a plane back to Miami where my family was. Now, what I just did there was actually give you a reason, which is not true at all. One of the things you can do in the steps is work through the step working guide. There's a question in there — "Have you ever given plausible but untrue reasons for your behavior?" — and this is a hard one for a lot of people in early recovery, because we believe all the things our heads tell us.
The even the reason I gave you was not the same one I had at the time. I would have told you it was some bad romantic relationships. But the truth is, my best friend had become a cocaine dealer in Miami. That was where I was going. And my ability to kid myself, even sometimes in retrospect, always amazes me.
And that's actually the theme, if there's going to be a theme to what I say — and it bears on the use of religion in the 12-step programs — which is that I'm a big fan of reason, but I don't always use it. My mind is very fallible. I'm not always aware of the motivations that I have. And I'm keenly aware of the fact that I need checking on — I need some system of accountability so that my autopilot doesn't take me all kinds of places. You might call that a higher power. It's actually a number of different resources that I use that have some sort of hook that gets into my unconscious mental processes and also motivates me.
So I went to Miami, and I had a job I thought lined up. I was just going to party for a couple of weeks. Eight months later — oh well. And then another couple of years went by. Eventually I realized I had to stop and I didn't know how. I kept on relapsing. I had no notion of the disease. I just thought I could do it on willpower. It was pretty evident to me that this was messing up my life, and yet I would still keep on going.
During that time, a woman that I used to call the love of my life — we had gotten back together occasionally. She was also an alcoholic and an addict, and she had found AA. She gave me her Big Book. I took a look at it, and it looked interesting. I could already make the transposition between alcoholism and cocaine use. And then it got to that chapter for the agnostic, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I realized that in essence it was saying it wasn't for me.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist, and I still don't on some level, because — it's like saying I don't believe in Zeus. Greek mythology is very pretty, but I don't believe the stories in it. I understand the way they've influenced the culture and they can have literary value, but it wouldn't occur to me to take them literally. I didn't grow up in this country — I came back when my father died when I was 13, and I met people who were Christians and I was astonished. It was like — people who believed in Zeus? I had lived in Islamic countries, Catholic countries, Eastern Orthodox countries, and secular countries, and it always just seemed to be part of the culture more than anything else.
I also took a course in college on the psychology of religion. I thought it was going to explain the weakness that led people to believe in religion, but actually it was a very interesting course on how basically religious practices — fasting, self-mortification, drugs even — induced altered states and allowed people to reintegrate their conscious minds. These were all ways of influencing that borderline between the dream world and the unconscious mind. And I could see that. I've always throughout NA, until the secular came along, just seen religion as one of those tools — a tool to influence the unconscious. You can call it self-hypnosis if you want. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in the early stages of recovery.
Anyway, back to where I am. I decided to leave Miami and moved to what turned out to be San Diego — which turned out to be the meth capital of the United States. At least that's what they built themselves as. I've noticed that wherever an addict goes, that's the capital of that drug, when all is said and done. And the same pattern reasserted itself — losing career prospects, losing friends, eventually almost losing my family. And so they did an intervention on me.
It was very simple. They just asked me to define addiction and what an addict was. I had a cousin who was a doctor — I'd gone to visit him, and he saw me walking off the plane, and he was already discussing with his wife, who was a drug treatment counselor, how they were going to get me into treatment. I thought about it for a while, and I just couldn't come up with anything that wasn't me. Pretty that simple. I didn't have to define addiction or anything. It was like — oh fuck, I'm an addict.
They sent me to a 10-day spin dry in Oceanside, California, which just introduced me to meetings, and they said, work this program. I had some pretty high hopes for the 12 steps because I'd done a little therapy, I'd done some inner child work. And the sad thing was, I was reading about schizophrenia — I thought, well, let me pretend to be schizophrenic, and I realized, my God, I think I am. And it turns out there is such a thing as amphetamine-induced schizophrenia or psychosis. I managed to get that too. Anyway, it wore off with time. That's the beauty of this program.
So I got a sponsor who said he was an atheist, and I breezed through several years of recovery — finding a career, getting married to a wonderful woman I'm still married to — relapsing, because that's part of my story — but getting clean again. And one of the wonderful things about this program is that you can get back loved ones. If you haven't really screwed things up too much, you can mend relationships. That's the amends process.
Which brings me now — I'm celebrating nine years clean. It's a long journey from 31 years ago. But I have to say I'm in a really, really good place now. When I celebrated One Year Clean, I expected everyone to say what a wonderful person I was. And everyone who talked about me said, "This is Eric, he's really crazy." Because I was. It takes a little while for the insanity to wear off. It also takes a while — apparently, according to my wife — for being an asshole to wear off too. She's unfortunately been exposed to this process twice.
So let's talk a little bit about the steps. How do you work the steps without God? I did it. And I have to say — as a postscript — everyone works the steps without God. If you don't believe God exists, then people find sources of motivation, people find sources of strength, people find sources of realism and a path towards sanity. That's what they got.
The first step should be a real bummer, I think. For me, I just tried to find the meaning that NA had and look at different dictionary definitions, and I came up with: suffering the truth to enter my conscious awareness. Because I think there's a bit of suffering to it. It's like — if I understood how much I was hurting myself, if I understood how much I was ruining my life, I would stop. I blissfully forget about it on a regular basis. This process can restore you to sanity. Not permanent sanity — it's sort of intermittent. That's the best I can claim now. Sometimes I feel sane, sometimes not. But I can bounce back.
The third step for me is about making decisions. It doesn't matter really what the decision is — I had never made a decision in my life. I just let things happen to me. Actually making a decision and sticking to it is the principal lesson of the third step.
The inventory process is really important. The fourth and fifth steps are a really detailed inventory. But I want to say that no matter where you are in your recovery, you can always work Step 10 and you can always work Step 11. I think these are the steps that people don't talk about enough — steps you can do out of order. The first time I worked the steps, I really got nowhere with six and seven. They're not written in a way that makes sense to someone who's not religious. I had to find sources of things I valued and a system of implementing those values that was rational. I got it out of Aristotle, actually. It actually took me four times through the steps before I got some headway on my character defects. But the amends process went really, really well.
I'll close with this. When I made amends to my mother — I'd been paying her mortgage already for several years, so the fact that I had sponged off her was not much of an issue anymore. Plus it was easy, because working the steps for a while had changed me. By the time I got to my ninth step, I was a person who wasn't promising to do things better — I was a person who actually was doing it better.
My mother passed away about 15 years ago. She had been in a terrible relationship with my brother-in-law, and she was — I didn't know it — she was close to death, only two days away. And she started asking me about the steps. She wanted to know about the amends step — the eighth and ninth step — and she wanted to make amends to my brother-in-law. She did. The next day my brother-in-law came down from LA and they mended fences. They'd had a terrible relationship for a decade.
My brother-in-law said, "I've got closure with your mother, but I don't have closure with my own parents." This program can give so much — it can influence you, it can give you a better life, it can make other people's lives. The consequences of my having worked a ninth step, radiating outward, is influencing many people now.
So work the steps. There's a thing we say at the end of a meeting: keep coming back. It works if you work it. So work it. You're worth it. That's all I got. Thanks.
Michael E. (Host) 21:00
Thank you, Eric, for telling how the program and the steps were so important in your journey. We appreciate your words of hope and encouragement.
A reminder to everyone: for more information on recovery from addiction through the Narcotics Anonymous 12-step program from a secular, non-religious approach, please check out our website secularna.org — that's S-E-C-U-L-A-R-N-A dot O-R-G.
This is Michael E. for the Stories of Secular Recovery from Addiction Through Narcotics Anonymous podcast — one speaker at a time.
