Knowing vs believing vs doing

I don’t mean to imply these are opposed to one another. Rather, it’s a progression of recovery statuses and states.

When trying to quit drinking, or drugging if that’s your primary deal, or gambling, or sexual acting out, knowing why you do it — especially if it’s a psychological addiction like gambling, or even a psychophysiological one like sexually acting out — that has replaced a chemical addiction, knowledge can be important to helping us, or me, stay clean.

But, knowledge alone about why I do this won’t force me to believe I can do better. It can help, but ultimately I must take an emotional step and believe I can step beyond my addictive or compulsive behavior.

And, belief is not sufficient either, of course. Ultimately, I must act in a new way — I must do new behavior.

And that brings up one other point. I can’t just “not do old behavior.” I need to do something new instead.

Old behaviors have to be replaced by new ones, or else there’s a void.

That’s true of more normal people, but doubly true for myself, with an addictive history, and pains I have tried to cover, fears I have tried to hide, and an outside world I have tried to block out.

If I don’t replace old behaviors with new ones, I am in trouble. The addictive subself was probably “fed” long enough that it will never be 100 percent dead. Even after I quit drinking, I have fed it still with various forms of acting out behavior, usually Internet pornography or DVD based.