“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune...” --Seneca

We addicts would not be judged unfortunate by Seneca. Addiction makes us enemies unto ourselves. Take an honest inventory of the asskicking you’ve given yourself while you were active in your addiction. Who in your life had the ability to rob you of your happiness? Who in your life never rested in wearing you out? Who in your life caused you to let down your family, your friends, and yourself? As an addict, your worst enemy is with you at all times, conspiring to take you further down the spiral. Addiction pollutes your thoughts and causes you to abandon your plans, goals, and dreams.

Addiction is absolutely unique in the human condition because it’s the rare disease where a hallmark of affliction is denial of having it. It makes a liar of you. It makes you a thief. It steals your joy and annihilates your soul. Are you convinced yet, Dear Reader, that your battle with addiction is literally life or death? Because it is. You’re in Thunderdome. You’re in the steel-cage death match. It’s you or your addiction and there will only be one winner.

Is that enough bad news? Are you ready for the good news? Your addiction has only the strength you gave it. You can take it back, though. That’s recovery. It’s the process of taking back the strength you gave your addiction and putting it into your new life.

Seneca knew and taught that it was tough-won battles that honed character and helped people realize their strength to overcome challenges and persevere. Recovery is difficult. Check the statistics. A huge majority of us don’t make it. But, it’s not hopeless. I’ve known many people in recovery who have been hugely inspiring to me. I have several years of joyful sobriety and it is because I do that I know it is possible to live a life free from the shackles of addiction. This still puts me in awe.

When I first met addicts in recovery, I had a hard time believing people could overcome their addictions and seem so happy and so normal and so able to handle the challenges in their life without relapse. They had power over the difficulties in their life and I wanted that too. I committed myself to my sobriety and a big part of that was reading the works I am excerpting here because I found in them wisdom and advice applicable to my situation.

The more I learned about Stoicism and the more of the writings of the Stoics I read, the more I was convinced that successful sobriety absolutely relied on incorporation of Stoic philosophy into a person’s life. Central to the idea of Stoicism is the idea that we will all bear misfortune and it does us no good to complain about it and waste our energy directed at things other than improving our lives where we can and leaving the rest to Fate. The writings of Seneca, in particular were helpful to me in early sobriety because they helped me avoid the temptation to spend my sobriety coming up with the reasons I had become an alcoholic and placing blame and instead to simply assess where I was at and work toward improving my life. Complaining wasn’t going to get me sober. Blaming others for my alcoholism wasn’t going to get me sober. I would only be able to get and stay sober by looking at myself and acknowledging that I was an alcoholic and that only I had the power to start crawling out of the hole I was in.

This is not to say that I owe no thanks to people who helped me. I had plenty of help. I had my group. I had my sponsor. I had friends and family. I had a lot of support. That said, if I decided to go back to drinking, not a single one of them could have stopped me. That’s one of the incredible things about getting sober. If you are serious about wanting sobriety, you will find people willing to help you. With no expectation of recompense, help will be there. I truly believe that. I’ve lived it. But, people who aren’t serious about getting better will find the number of people willing to extend a helping hand will certainly diminish.

As an addict, you get to claim the life you want every day. It’s your choice, ultimately. If you choose sobriety, you will choose the tools you use to keep you sober. Good choices beget good choices. Those choices become habits and those habits become character. You will, over time, create in your life a fortress into which addiction has a more difficult path to infiltrate. That’s great. Create a life that is incompatible with addiction. Develop interests and hobbies and relationships that inoculate you from the poison of addiction. These things will strengthen your sobriety because in creating this new life, you will have joyful recovery. You will realize your strength. You will measure your resilience against one of the toughest opponents out there. Those who have watched the struggle will notice your hard work. You will develop self-respect and self-determination again. You can reclaim your life—take it back from the snapping jaws of addiction. It won’t be easy, but hardly anything worthwhile is. Dear Reader, you can do it and I hope you can draw strength from the wisdom of these philosophers. I did.