Sometimes early recovery can be easier than keeping your sobriety in real life. In early recovery you might be in a controlled environment, have some prescription pad help, massive supervision, and reduced access to your drug. You are provided space and time to practice getting through the day sober with lesser stressors from life’s left hooks.

But one might wonder, what do I do when the shit hits the fan? Will the shrink sessions work when I’m having a rough couple of months? Will the pills work if the entire year is all jacked up? How many meetings will keep me clean when my life remains unmanageable?

In the past five years alone, I have been through some real struggles, some long term “situations”. Not just a bad season or two. A season or two means the scenario goes away in a few months. No, I’m talking about crap-storms that keep going for years. I’m talking about the kind of stuff that even most of the supporters of my sobriety would understand why if I decided to fall off the wagon.

Keep in mind, what I am about to explain is only the top of the wave, the big themes,  but there’s an undercurrent as well that I’m not going to talk about. Those little daily stressors that one with no major problems still needs to deal with, sober.

After I explain what I was going through I will explain how I got through it clean.

In about a six-year span, in chronological order: On my wife’s birthday, the day we got home from the hospital after our daughter was born, I received a call about a false accusation. I shouldn’t have even been charged with a crime but for the next year and a half I had to watch as the police department and courts defiled all their own rules of law and procedure to get a false conviction to appease a new quota at the time. Tack on another year for the appeal where they literally did the same thing. If you ever want to see what the seventh pit of hell looks like, get caught up in something like that.

Soon after that was done, our second child was about to be born, and a very disruptive spell was cast upon the world in the form of a widespread illness. We needed to move to my wife’s mom’s house, the mother-in-law, who is a complete covert narcissist. Our little boy barely slept for the first few years. And at that time, daycare could send your child home for weeks on a whim. Try running a business through that, you can’t.

We finally found a center that wouldn’t send him home if another child received a certain “test positive”, but he kept getting fevers from ear infections and sent home anyways, only for us to figure out years later it was a dairy allergy. But until then, imagine taking two or three days off work every other week for an allergy, besides all the regular holidays, vacations, and snow days. Then imagine the bills.

Around the same time we had a house fire, a total-loss house fire, lost everything. And a scenario where the homeowner, the mother-in-law, was in complete control of everything going on for that. But her intent wasn’t to rebuild the house and get back to normal. No, she saw it as a money-making opportunity, and with every decision she made during the scenario we were in became more ridiculous, inconvenient, and downright dangerous for the whole family. That scene is a whole ‘nother story.

Keep in mind this is a workaholic grandmother, we had zero help with watching these kids for all the days they were home. Unless, we happened to find a sitter, then she somehow had time to stay home and sit there and stare at them.

But on top of that, as we stayed in a tiny, falling apart, microscopic kitchen and no garage, rental she swindled with a family member to get a cut of her insurance expense rental payments, she decides we need to take on her brother’s daughter fresh out of the mental ward for self-harm—for my wife and I to take care of. She was dropped off with nothing, not even a briefing on what had been going on with her.

Now, for me, healing mental illness with a willing person is quite easy. This girl was actually great, but the people who did it to her would not relinquish their control and kept popping in unannounced and calling her, gas lighting, berating, and triggering her. So, we had to deal with them too.

Like I said, instead of focusing on rebuilding the burned down house, the mother-in-law decided she was some sort of big-time investor business-woman and that it would be a great idea to buy an investment house, a total rehab investment house that should had probably been bulldozed down. Then hired someone who had little experience in home renovations and would agree do it for half. And we all know what that means. I needed to work on it, and get the home functional and livable when he was done—and expected to do it for free.

I can stop there. You get the point.

That’s a taste of my past six years, and don’t get me wrong, a lot of good happened during that time as well. As one gets older and gains wisdom you realize most of the beautiful flowers in life sprout from horse shit, and even most of those have thorns.

In the beginning, white knuckling it sufficed. By white knuckling it I mean, going to meetings, going through the steps with a sponsor, trying to take general care of health, and when the psychological torment became overwhelming, asking myself, “is having a drink going to make the situation better or worse?” I know, that sounds like I was doing a lot. But, to me, that’s still white knuckling it.

It got me through the first season, but I could see real-quick it wouldn’t hold my house of cards up for much longer. Then I distracted myself. I started writing. It helped me keep my mind off of some things and helped me process others in a healthy way. But life has a way of just stacking one pile of crap on top of another, and writing only got me so far, and it’s simply not practical to stay in the writing mindset all day. I’ve got other stuff to do.

I was stuck in the “one-thing after another” cycle for a very long time. “Is it ever going to end?” I picked up my old spiritual practices of Wiccan, paganism, spells, tarot. That’s what you do when you feel like you need to control stuff. But in essence you are asking spirits to do it for you—no control. Not only did nothing get better, it got worse. I got worse because when you are using these spiritual tools, you are actually making deals, signing ethereal contracts with entities you have no business dealing with.

The other aspect of it is, no matter how well intentioned you are when practicing these types of spiritual arts, it always leads back to trying to run on your own will power, instead of one greater than yourself. Practitioners generally are NOT casting spells for the benefit of others; they want something in their own life to change, to benefit themselves. My own Will gives bad guidance, and those “wants” are probably not of my own anyways–a life’s worth of programming for what I think is right and good, or how it should be.

The thing is it was through all that stuff I realized how the devil fights. That the war between good and evil is fought on the battlefield of the mind, and I needed some heavy artillery for that arena.

All the people in recovery couldn’t fight this battle for me, the doctors and therapist couldn’t, and I couldn’t either. The opposition was far too strong and had me on my knees with my hands tied behind my back.

My own intellect, my old pagan ways, my new age beliefs, the spiritual contracts I had made, my own strategies, cleverness, my own plans: none if it mattered when I was knee-deep in the shit.

 All I will say is, when I turned from relying on my own power, trying to use my own energy that my enemy was actually feeding on, my day turned from waking up fearful of the day, and saying, “what’s next”, to knowing that I have a legion of good I can be a part of and follow directions from, and the trade-off was the capacity to wake up in the morning and say, “bring it on, we got this, me and God.”

Life doesn’t get less rocky when you shed your identity and become reborn. It just gets far more bearable knowing that it’s all process of refinement, the heating and pounding of metal into a blade, it will all unravel and become transformed if you choose to give more of your spiritual currency, you attention to a good God rather than all the devils work around you.

It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with alignment with a force of Goodness and the realization that, if I want a better life, I need to let the past version of myself die.

That’s how I fight now. And, quite frankly, the only reason I’m still here.