More on Seneca's "Well-Ordered Mind"

In the previous post, I referenced Seneca’s oft-repeated maxim that in his opinion, the ability of a person to simply drop what he or she is doing and spend some time in his or her own company is the hallmark of a well-ordered mind. What does that mean in terms of recovery from alcoholism?

When I was active in addiction, my thoughts were always fragmented between the things I was supposed to be doing and thoughts of drinking and the preparations needed for drinking.  I might be thinking about an impending work deadline while also planning how I would “reward” myself for completing it.  That would turn to thoughts of what booze I’d drink and where, how much I’d take home to keep the party going, where I’d hide receipts, bottles, etc. Because I did a lot of my drinking in secret, a lot of planning went around how to keep it that way and those thoughts would infiltrate and conquer the thoughts of how I would go about the legitimate business of my day.  

For me, all those thoughts about booze would create deep anxiety and it made it harder for me to accomplish the things I needed to get done so that I could start the planned drinking.  The longer it took to get to the drinking, the more intrusive the thoughts of drinking became, creating an anxiety spiral that would sometimes cause me to abandon the work altogether and start the drinking early.  It wasn’t a reward at that point. It was just something I convinced myself I needed to even be.

If that cycle were arrested, in the way Seneca describes, to where I was neither drinking nor doing the things that had me convinced I’d earned a drink, I would have been a total mess. While active in my addiction, I had no ability to sit calmly and just explore my thoughts, to work through my troubles, to come up with ideas and plans to improve my life.  

I think this is a big reason why so many people in addiction fail to recover past the detoxification stage.  Once a person has safely withdrawn from his or her drug of choice, they are still often left with diseased thought processes and need help to develop strategies for overcoming the obstacles life will throw at them.  I found that kind of help in several places, among them the works of philosophers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

Seneca and Marcus Aurelius wrote about common troubles and how to train one’s mind to overcome them. This is what I wanted more than anything:  to be able to deal with disappointments, setbacks, and grief without returning to alcohol.  The Stoics taught strategies for living tranquilly and accepting misfortune and I knew I’d need that to work out not only the universal problems in my life, but also those tied uniquely to alcoholism.

That’s one of the big challenges of recovery from addiction is that once you get sober, you still have a lot of issues to work through in terms of repairing personal relationships, work relationships, finances, legal issues, etc.  Getting detoxed and past the acute withdrawal phase is an extraordinary achievement, but after that comes life and the alcoholic brain may need some assistance to work through those challenges.  Many find that in AA and that’s great.  Many find that through working with counselors and social workers and that’s great too. I certainly don’t mean to denigrate what works for people in terms of other helpful resources.

For me, though, studying the wisdom of the Stoics and other philosophers was a helpful exercise to train my brain into right thinking that would allow me to continue to heal.  The drawback to this is the writings are old and a lot of it can be difficult to read as a consequence. Some of it just is not applicable to addiction recovery either.  As such, I thought trying to curate those writings to discuss the passages most helpful to recovery from addiction would be a worthy exercise and that’s what this site is meant to do.  I want to bring the recovering addict the most applicable wisdom of the Ancients.  To put it all in once place with some commentary of mine explaining how these lessons helped me in sobriety.  I hope you too, Dear Reader, will find it useful.