Post #5 ~The Lies Addiction Told Me

Today, I want to dive into a real, raw conversation about the lies addiction told me over the years.

Let’s start with the most common one, “I’m not like other addicts.”If this thought sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

This one still makes me laugh, not the polite, quiet laugh, but the full-on belly laugh. For years, I truly believed my experience was different. Think about that for a second. I thought going to jail at a young age somehow made me unique, as if my story didn’t follow the very same path addiction has laid out for countless others.

There is a saying in recovery that active addiction leads to jails, institutions, or death, and yet I was convinced none of that applied to me. I believed no one could relate to what I was going through, and because of that, no one could help me. That lie kept me isolated for a very long time.

Another favorite was, “I still have control.”If this thought sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

After my relapse following my first marriage, I told everyone, often, that I had no problem stopping. I believed it too. My disease reminded me that I quit so easily when I was eighteen and that I could do it anytime. What I did not know then was how wrong that voice was.

I remember telling my older sister, right before I relapsed again, “I don’t think I was an addict because it was so easy for me to give it up when I was a teenager.” That conversation eventually led me to one of the most painful realizations of my life. I am a drug addict, and I could not get clean on my own. I needed help. I needed a twelve-step program. But that understanding did not come until years later.

One of my deepest and most damaging lies was, “I don’t deserve a good life.”If this thought sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

Like many addicts, I was my own harshest critic. I felt this way not only during active addiction, but also throughout my twenties, even when I was not using. I told myself I had chosen this life and that I did not deserve what other people had, the marriage, the kids, the stability, the life I thought everyone else was entitled to.

In 2012, I entered the Clare Foundation, a treatment center that would change my life. It was my first real exposure to a twelve-step program and to a woman who would later become my first sponsor, even though I did not know it at the time.

She asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks. Who is your higher power?

A higher power does not have to mean religion or God. In a twelve step program, it simply means recognizing that we need something outside of ourselves to stay clean, because we cannot do it alone. This is where addiction fed me one of its most convincing lies.

I struggled deeply with the idea of God. How could there be a God who allowed me to walk the path of addiction, who allowed me to make choices that led me into dangerous situations, abusive relationships, domestic violence, and multiple sexual assaults. How could any higher power allow that much pain in one person’s life.

Years later, I came to understand something I could not see back then. My higher power did not abandon me. It allowed me the freedom to make my own decisions and walked alongside me the entire time, and when I look back now and ask myself how I made it out alive while others I loved and ran with were dying or being killed, I cannot chalk that up to luck alone.

Addiction thrives in lies, and those lies sound convincing when you are living inside them. They sound like protection. They sound like logic. Sometimes they even sound like hope. But recovery, at least for me, began the moment I was finally willing to look at those lies honestly and tell the truth, even when that truth hurt.

If any of these thoughts showed up in your own head while you were reading, whether you are still using, newly clean, or years into recovery, I want you to know you are not weak and you are not broken. You are human, and you are responding to something that was trying to keep you alive the only way it knew how.

I would really love to hear from you. Which lie kept you stuck the longest, or which one are you still untangling today? And if you love someone who struggles with addiction, which of these lies have you heard them repeat out loud or watched them live out in real time?

If you feel comfortable, share in the comments. Your words matter more than you realize. Sometimes it is not the post that changes someone’s life, it is the comment underneath it that finally makes them feel seen.

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