#Amygdala; FreeWill

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Choice in Recovery: My thoughts on the Minnesota Model

I have faith in God but I don’t believe you can pray away addiction and mental health problems. I also am not willing to admit I am powerless over any action that I willfully engage in. Throughout my addiction I had only heard of the 12 step Minnesota Model in recovery. I started the process of 12 step work many times. I got a month or two or three under my belt but was always on the edge of relapse, and alway eventually fell off the edge. No matter how many times I handed my will over to God he was never able to absolve me of my defects or save me from myself, from my own brain. I used the fact that I was failing at surrendering to yet another personal defect. I shamed myself from not surrendering faithfully enough. That if I was able to surrender more faithfully I could find a cure for this diseased brain. I would white knuckle my way through days, weeks, sometimes months but eventually would give in. I told myself I couldn’t help but relapse. I have a disease that makes me do it. In this thought process I could pass them blame and push past the shame of yet another failure. Sometimes I would have years between attempts to get clean and surrendering my will to God never taught me skills of how to enjoy life without substances. It instead told me to pray, hand over my will, examine my shortcomings and wait for some devine intervention. Oh yeah and this was also a lifetime commitment. If I was going to be in recovery I was expected to go to meetings forever and rely on these meetings as my rock.

During one of these years in between tries at sobriety I also had a questioning of faith. Not that I no longer believed in God or something bigger then myself but I began to question what traditions were truth and what God does or does not do in peoples day to day life. I am not devaluing the person who claims miraculous devine intervention in their lives. I am saying neither I, nor anyone I know, has had a chat with a snake or a burning bush. In my experience God seems to work in more descrete ways. One of these ways is that he gives each person free will. He gives you the choice to learn, to take another path and replace destructive behavior with constructive behavior. This is a choice not given to someone given the diagnosis of the disease of brain cancer.

At this point I will say that my intention is not to shit on the disease model of addiction, as I think this label is important to supply funding and research to addiction in this capitalistic society. I will argue the term disorder would fill the same slot.

My God gave me the freewill to take steps in a quest to find alternitive ways to living. And because I was making the right choices he afforded things to come across my path to further my knowledge and my journey toward recovery. See that is how God works for me. I have the power of choice and he gently opens and closes doors to guide me. Many times I have ignored an open door and some sort of misfortune ensued but again that is my free will. I choose to learn about the brain, about the way the brain learns from reward systems and repeated behavioral patterns. That drugs are a quick win to get my brain to release neurotransmitters like dopimine, glutamate, norepinephrine. I learned that I had bypassed other forms of coping because I had forged a clear path to my reward system through drugs and sex.

Here I will give a quick bit on how the brain learns…anything. Not just drugs but how to ride a bike or speak a new language or get your baby to sleep. At first you do it purposefully. You concentrate on it. You have to think it through. You get frusterated doing it one way and find out more efficient ways to do it. When you successfully accomplish it you feel good about it. Your brain rewards you with feel good neurotransmitters. So now your frontal lobe has thought it through, your amygdala has associated it with a positive emotional response, and your accumbens has made you actually get up and put the plan into action. Essentially creating a feedback loop. This feedback loop gets stronger and the task gets easier everytime you do it successfully. (With drugs this feedback loop is further strengthened by the extra artificial stimulation of those neurotransmitters.) Something weird happens once you’ve done the thing many, many times. Your frontal lobe stops thinking about it. You do it compulsively, on auto pilot, leaving your cognitive fuctions open to learning NEW things. So to unlearn something that has been put on autopilot takes alot of cognitive reasoning and hard work.

I had the choice to continue to go down this drug path or I could begin to lay down the framework to find other paths toward the reward centers in my brain. No disease forced me down one path or the other. One thing that can guide the choice to stay on the old path is that forging a new path is hard. There is two sayings that I will bring up at this point. 1. When someone says I can’t what they usually mean is it’s hard. 2. Uncomfortable does not equal intolerable. If I surrender at this point I feel I am surrendering only to my self serving nature. Day by day God may help me stay strong to renew my commitment, but it is still my choice, my free will.

With hard work your brain will learn new ways to release those feel good neurotransmitters. Exercise, art, music, meditation, nature, social interaction are all new paths to the reward center but each takes practice, effort and learning. Just as you learned to associate drugs with fun, with stress relief, with relaxation, your brain will make new connections for these alternative paths. Once these new things are on autopilot you are no longer white knuckling sobriety. You are living a healthy, productive life, by your own choice and actions. I don’t have to be involved in meetings and be labled an addict indefinitely.

This is my experience. The Minnesota model had worked for millions of people and I can’t deny that. It didn’t work for me and I see alot of people working the 12 steps that seem 2 steps away from relapse. So my purpose in writing this is to give those people another way to look at things. By all means take what works for you and leave what doesn’t. By keeping my power of choice I was able to have sucess.

4-20-17 (Please don’t point out my misspelling or punctuation errors. This is a blog not an essay in APA format)

[lindamayburdick]

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