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Good morning, Path to Warren podcast. Matt Warren it is August 3, 2020, Monday morning. It is a beautiful Monday morning, and this is episode 24. Thanks so much for joining. The theme of this episode is: “It has nothing to do with me.” Okay? And I want to talk about this recently. I just got back from a week long trip in the Florida Keys, and there was a certain person on the trip that I could tell right away, just after a few hours in, it was going to be kind of a long trip. This person made comments throughout the course of this trip… that… I think that my sobriety and my recovery work that I was doing, basically trying my best to stay in top line behaviors throughout the course of this vacation. It’s amazing how this person would make little comments and you could just tell, like silently storming around the house or the condo with a little attitude. And I’ve realized that these comments have nothing to do with me. I remember being addicted to things, and when that other person at the table, if there was one person at a table of five that was not partaking, it pissed me off. I would get upset. If there was one person at the table that was not drinking or that was not going to eat the big chocolate cake, I would get upset and I would take it out on that person. But it had nothing to do with the person. It was clearly had to do with me not being happy with myself. And it just is tough because this person is a family member and this person is, you think, supposed to love you, and they’ll say, “Oh, I love you guys”, and you want to believe it so much, right? But it’s just tough when they want to dig their heels in on a few things that really have nothing to do with anything about you, just to prove a point and just to try to get one up on you. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was for me in my head just to stay the course and continue doing what I’m trying to do. I’m watching this person suffer from an eating disorder, from overeating, and this is the same person that called me out and had an intervention or tried to have an intervention a couple of times with me when I was drinking too much and on prescription drugs and other drugs. Of course, those are bad behaviors. The issue is it’s so easy to see when somebody’s drinking too much and somebody’s unhappy and ruining their lives and the world’s falling apart because of alcohol and drugs. It’s tough when you see that. But what’s even tougher is when you see somebody that’s suffering from overeating disorder and they are killing themselves too. I mean, they’re just as obviously unhappy, and sometimes they’re in denial. You know, like, for example, oh, this person says, I used to drink Diet Cokes all day, but I’ve just limited it down to just two in the morning. And as much as I want to call the person’s bluff on this, when I see Diet Coke number six, call them out on it, it’s like, no, they’re just in denial. And I learned in recovery that truth without compassion is brutality. So if I cannot be compassionate about what I’m trying to tell this person that I care about, if I can’t share it in a compassionate way, then my truth, no matter how true it is, my truth is just brutality. I’m just really being brutal. So as much as I want to tell them that you really don’t need that extra peach cobbler, yeah, you really probably should not do the fried fish platter at lunch. It’s crazy. I want to say it, “hey, why don’t you go with the broiled fish?” Hey, why don’t you eat a couple of strawberries for dessert instead of the big bowl of ice cream? But I can’t. I cannot do that because I’m not doing it in a compassionate way at this time. So all I’m doing is being brutal, and it’s just going to drive a wedge, and it’s just going to probably push that person further away from getting help and hitting their bottom. I don’t really want to cause more drama, but my accountability partner and I had a two hour meeting yesterday morning on a Saturday morning from 06:00 a.m. Until 08:00 a.m., after this week long vacation to discuss what went down this past week with a family member. There were so many little jabs and so many comments that I could take personally. And in the past, before I had help with my accountability partner, before I had a program, I would have taken these things so personally. I would have taken them to heart. I would have probably just had major resentments and spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. And I did I’m not going to tell you I did not spin about them. I mean, I’ve had serious resentments about the way that this person would try to stand her ground and prove her point. But I’ve come to realize and this is the theme of this podcast today it has nothing to do with me. I can see myself when I was doing those things, when I was actively using. I was so lost and I was so hurt and I didn’t like myself that how could I love another person if I don’t even love myself? I was unhappy with myself. And when you got somebody sitting at the table that’s doing good things, that’s following all of these top line behaviors every day, and you can’t even stay off a simple eating or drinking plan, how can you love yourself? How can you love yourself if you can’t even stay off a couple of Diet Cokes a day? But what I want my listeners to understand is there’s no difference in trying to stop Diet Cokes, trying to stop eating sugar, than there is trying to stop drinking alcohol or cutting back on marijuana or Adderall. There’s no difference. It’s the same thing. And it’s the same thing in that we can’t take other people’s inventory. You’re taking someone’s personal inventory and evaluating where they are spiritually, mentally and physically, that’s not healthy. And that’s just going to drive a wedge between me and them and keep them from hitting their own bottom. So what do we learn in recovery? We learn to stay in our lane, stay in our hula hoop. This program only works by the law of attraction. This is not a law of promotion. So I guess what I’m telling you is I’ve got to just deal with the low blows. I’ve got to just deal with this person saying a couple of things here and there that I know are not right. And it doesn’t mean I have to go along with them or I have to agree with them. It just means I can’t let them make me go out and drink or drug. Also, I can’t try to persuade this person either. They say if it’s between you and a person that’s drinking, you’re going to drink a lot quicker than you’re going to keep them from drinking. So all I can do is just stay in my lane, stay at my hula hoop, work on my recovery. At this point, I’m still in step nine and I’ve got maybe 20 more amends to make in my step nine. So I need to focus on that. I don’t have time to be worrying about them trying to convince my daughter that media like the news is a good thing. I don’t have time for that. We were sitting at dinner and this person says, oh, well, I haven’t watched the news all day. I got to watch the news, know what’s going on tonight. And my daughter, bless her heart, she says the news is bad. And she looks at her and instantly this person started to say, oh, no, the news is not bad. You need to know what’s going on in the world. How else are you going to know where to wear your mask? How else are you going to know what’s going on? You got to watch the news. And my little girl looked at me just a minute ago, she had said the news is bad because she had heard her mom and me, she had heard us talk about at home. When the news comes on, we change it. We simply change it or we cut it off. This social ignorance is bliss. It’s a blessing for me to not be stuck in this media cycle. I mean, I could talk a whole podcast about media addiction and what it does and how I’ve been able to work towards staying off of it. But during this dinner when my daughter says, media, the news is bad, looking at this person, the defenses went up because here she really likes watching the news because of course you get those little dopamine hits whenever something happens or whenever you hear something that you didn’t know was going on, you get these little dopamine hits. And it’s no different than getting a hit of Adderall or getting high off a weed or getting high off of bourbon. I mean, it’s all high as high, right? There’s no different eating that big old peach cobbler and getting a big high satisfaction after that. It’s all the same. So I sit there and I listen to this person defending the news to my daughter, and I said, well, because my daughter looks at me then, because she knows that I don’t agree with it and that I’ve done well over the past year and a half of cutting it out, and it’s done so well for me that I’ve seen great results. She looks at me like, dad, you’re going to help me here. And I said, well, there’s just so much junk. There’s just so much junk on the news. If there was a way that we could watch what was going on and there’d be a way of filtering it out, there’s just so much junk on the news that wouldn’t it be nice if we could just watch what we needed to hear without all the junk? And one of the examples that this person used to defend the news was, well, there’s a hurricane coming. There’s a hurricane coming. How are we going to know what to do with the hurricane? How are we going to know where to wear our mask or where we don’t have to wear our mask? And these are just like two little examples that, yeah, they’re pretty important, the weather and health issues. Of course those are major issues, but let’s don’t talk about all of the negative, right? Anybody stuck in the addiction is going to justify their thoughts by throwing out the open and obvious thing that you have to know about. Of course we don’t want to get hit by a hurricane. Of course we don’t want to get the coronavirus. But are you seriously defending the news because of these two little issues? It’s laughable today. And this went down on Thursday. Today is Monday. So I’ve come a long way in letting this go and even sharing about it to you guys helps me let it go. But I have to realize these comments have nothing to do with me. That’s what I have to not take personal. They have nothing to do with me. These are strictly an addict defending her drug. An addict defending her drug. And you might say, Oh, well, it’s just the news. You can’t call her an addict because of the news. Yeah, no, let’s just go a little further. So I said, well, you know, you don’t have to defend the news. And she said, Well, I like it. I like the news. And yeah, there’s no difference in the junk on Tik Tok than the junk on the news. This is life. This is life. You got to deal with life. There’s no difference in TikTok, and you got to filter TikTok just like you got to filter the news. This is life. And that’s what my wife said. That’s enough. And I love my wife for that, because she could stay on the ground and keep the party together. There’s a difference. There is a difference. And I’m not here defending Tik Tok. I’m not defending that at all. What I’m trying to say is the reason why media can be an addiction is because you cannot control the next thing that gets thrown in front of your face if you’ve ever been watching a news channel and you just can’t pull away. If you’ve ever been watching something on Fox News that’s talking about the latest outbreak or the latest shooting or whatever it is, or the latest about the elections, not a lot of times, just every time. Their job is to keep you hooked to it, and you become powerless over that stuff. Same with the social media, even including TikTok. And that’s the thing. I’m not defending TikTok. I would admit that it sometimes gets me drawn in, and I’m hooked to it. And that’s an issue. But I can tell you that I’ve gotten off of Twitter and I’ve gotten off of Instagram, and I’ve gotten off of Facebook because all of the junk in between those couple of good things, and I’ll give a prime example of Facebook. So in Facebook, I would justify it. And this is where it’s beautiful, because I’ve been in her position. I have been in that seat of defending something where I’ve thought about it so much to justify my drug. I had excuses for marijuana. I had excuses for Adderall, had excuses for alcohol. I had excuses for Xanaxes, for you name it, that I was on. I had a reason to justify the drug. You have to justify the drug. That’s what an addict does. An addict will defend it at all cost to keep the supply. When I was addicted to spending and debtting, I had a justification, right? I had a justification for the banker, had a justification for the credit cards, had a justification for I need to go spend this because it’s a business expense and I needed to have it for this. And if we’re going to sell this, I mean, really, I had an excuse for everything. I had an excuse for Facebook. And let me tell you what my excuse was. And by the way, the same person that’s defending the news is so addicted to Facebook, it’s not even funny. So the thing about the Facebook is you’ll see like two things per session of using this app. You’ll see like two things, like, So and so had a baby, and here’s the first picture of their baby. Or this guy posted something really politically correct, and it was the first access you had to it. Or it was a piece of news or content that you just hadn’t heard yet. And this was your first way of hearing it before other people. So now you are in the know, you’ll get like these two things that are wins their pluses, right? But then you have all of the negative. And that’s what I mean by the junk. You get the negative along with it. The negative are the political ads hearing what the latest trash talk about Donald Trump is. Whether you like him or not, he’s president. And I don’t care. I try to stay far, far from the political world because it’s just junk. It makes you spin. It makes me spin. Excuse me. It makes me spin. But all of the negatives that you have to go through to get the two positives of ten pieces of content, there maybe will be one. It’s more like 30 in one. You’ll scroll through 30 feeds and you’ll get like one good thing, but you had to go through 29 horrible things. They’ll be talking about Black Lives Matter. They’ll be talking about the racial riots. They’ll be talking about all of the others junk that will really bring down your entire day if you’re not careful. But when it comes to defending it, what are we going to talk about? We’re going to talk about those two things that are open and obvious great things. So I would encourage anybody who’s listening to just start taking an inventory of what you’re looking at. Part of my reboot in life the last two years, two and a half years, part of my reboot to my CPU of life is I had to look at all areas of input coming into my life. And one of the major areas of input of data and content into my head every day was Facebook, Twitter, Fox News, CNN, Instagram, Pinterest, and now there’s TikTok out there WIS News. How many people come home from work and the first thing they do is cut on the news to see what rape or murder or CEO that got caught up in the Me Too movement. How many people get home from work and the first thing they do is pour an alcoholic drink and turn on the news. You can’t tell me that’s not an addiction. And all they’re doing is just pouring all of this junk in their head. So once I realized that this person was not getting upset with me because of me, it had nothing to do with me. I was just being a mirror to this person that, oh, my gosh, he’s healthy looking, he’s skinny. He’s praying. He’s getting up early. He’s going to bed early. He’s happy with his wife. His daughter loves him. Daughter can’t get off of him. He has got a spiritual connection with a higher power. He’s working on his finances every day, even while at the beach. My wife and I had a situation where something went through the bank account, and if I wouldn’t have checked it that day, it caused us to overdraft. We needed to know to move money. If I wouldn’t have been in debtors anonymous and had a program where I checked my account every day or try to, we wouldn’t have been able to move the money. So this person is, like, watching all of this happen, and in close quarters, they can’t help but be ticked off. But it had nothing to do with me. You see, that’s the thing. It’s all with them. They’re seeing themselves overweight. They’re seeing themselves as we joke about in the pool. They’re sitting there bouncing up and down because of this person being overweight. It was a saltwater pool. And there was a joke that my daughter said, hey, look, you’re just floating. You’re just floating in the water. And when my daughter tried to float and she told me to try to float, I just sank. Why is that? Because I don’t have fat. I don’t have enough fat to keep me floating in the pool. So this person is, like, hearing all this stuff about people picking on this person. My daughter was making jokes about this person just floating in the pool. You know, this got to hurt her feelings. This got to hurt her feelings, but it has nothing to do with me. Yeah. I told my daughter we need to probably stop cutting out the second that this person gets the third diet coke when they say they only drink two, or the second that the person goes for fried something and Maddie will look at me and roll her eyes, or the second the person gets a ton of beans and non wholesome fruits and vegetables, puts it on their plate. I told my daughter that we need to probably work on not calling people out with what they eat, but it’s an eight year old little girl. She’s just speaking the truth. She doesn’t know any better because she hasn’t been through it. But nobody’s going to get upset with my daughter for speaking the truth about this kind of stuff. So what I learned was I learned that this person on this week long vacation, what was crazy is just like if I was on vacation back when I was actively using, if I was on vacation with five people, what they would be seeing would be me restraining. I would not be drinking as much as I normally drink. I would not be spending and eating and using painkillers or muscle relaxers or Adderalls or anything. I would not be using as much as I would normally be using. So I would be technically restraining my use while on vacation with others so that they don’t see how much I’m actually doing. So what my accountability partner helped me realize is that just remember, Matt, when you were that age or when you were going through that time in your life, think about how horrible it felt and how much you hated yourself. And maybe hate is too strong of a word, but if there’s two words and you had a gun to your head and there’s two words and you got to pick from either love or hate yourself, if you were in that situation, you probably choose hate because you’re not happy with yourself. I was in the hate position a long time, actively using porn and acting out, there’s no way I can love myself. So during this vacation when the person was making comments at me and making little left handed backhanded comments, little slaps, not knocking me out, but picking on me. And it’s not about like they’re picking on me like I’m a pansy. I’m talking about like there was a clear line this person was drawing in the sand, like saying, I don’t agree with this and I don’t agree with that. It has nothing to do with me. It’s this person looking in the mirror that I’m holding up to them and they’re sitting there saying to themselves, he’s obviously got a conscious contact with a higher power. I don’t have that. He’s working out every morning. I can’t do that because I drink a bottle and a half of white wine every night. And before that I have a couple of margaritas and before that I have a couple of beers. How can I get up early and go work out? Who wants to go work out? I would rather just sit here in front of the TV at 10:00 at night and watch the news with wine. No addiction. There no addiction there. But am I going to be the one to call her out on the addiction? No way. This person has to determine that they have a problem and that they have an addiction. Now, I could put the puzzles together, I could put the puzzle together and piece it together, but they have to be the one to put the final piece in and say, yeah, I think I’ve have a problem. But isn’t it amazing that when you are in that situation, if you’ve ever been that situation, you know what I’m talking about, where you’re restraining, you know, like there were a couple of nights where she chose not to have dessert. She chose not to have dessert. And that was a huge restraint for this person. I know it was. And I didn’t have cake, candy, or ice cream the whole time, so no wonder the person’s upset with me. I think that they despise me. I thought on the whole drive back, I was like, I think this person actually despises me. Looking at it now, piecing all these stories together, I think this person really despises me. And they’re supposed to love me. They’re supposed to love me. So I hope this helps somebody. I hope that you realize that if you’re following your top line behaviors, stay true to those top line behaviors. Rely heavily on your recovery network. Call your sponsor. Reach out to buddies in the program just to see how they’re doing. Get out of your head. Like I had to do. I had to go and call people that night. Thursday night, I was trying to go to bed, and I knew I helped clean up the dishes off of the table. And this person wanted to sit outside and sulk and talk about me. I know. And how my ways are so extreme. Oh, let me give you another justification about the media. The comment was made that we went to Cuba. The news wasn’t even allowed. And look at how far back those folks were. The news wasn’t even allowed in Cuba. And I’m like, Are you really going to go there? Do you really want me to try to argue and respond back that, Oh, yeah, cuba had no media, so we need to watch and consume all of the Fox News and all the CNN that we can get our hands on. That’s the best thing for us. What message are you giving to the eight year old child? That they should consume all the media and somehow filter it out themselves at that age? Yes, I agree. There probably is some work to be done to filter out and cut back on the amount of tick tock an eight year old can watch. But they can control what they’re seeing. You know, if they want to look at something and learn about something, they can go and dive into that subject. It’s different than sitting in front of the news and putting your daughter in front of the news and saying, we got to watch the news tonight while we eat dinner. It’s totally different. So if you get anything out of this podcast, I hope you see that it has nothing to do with you. It is important to tell yourself when your loved one and your family is struggling with addiction and somehow taking it out on you and picking on you or not openly loving on you like you think that they should, how are they going to love on you if they can’t love themselves because of their current state of their addiction? If this has helped you. If this has been positive, please send this to somebody that might be in need. Hit subscribe on my podcast. Subscribe up it would mean the world to me. Hope you have a wonderful day. Remember to make a contribution. Thanks so much. Have a great day.