Personal inertia works for recovery as well as addiction

My outlook, my habits, my way of life developed over many years. This did not happen over night. In the case of my addiction, years of selfish and destructive behavior. That is the way I lived. And living like that, that's how I expected to live. The habits became ingrained.

Habitual behavior establishes personal inertia. The definition of inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. We usually understand inertia as staying still, but in physics, it means that something in motion will stay in motion. This is true in space more than here on earth, so it takes a thought experiment to understand it. If you were driving your car in space (where there's no gravity or friction) and you took your hands off the wheel and foot off the accelerator, you would continue to go in the same direction forever at the same speed. You'd travel on and on because of inertia until some other force intervened.

So, as an addict, I built up a personal inertia to keep doing addictive things. There was a momentum that continually suggested options that would reinforce my addictive behaviors. The cycle. There were other forces working against the addiction, of course: my wife's feelings, my basic need to make money, my shrinking self-respect, etc. But these forces were weaker than the personal inertia of my addiction.

So then I hit bottom, right? Unfortunately, everything didn't stop for me when I hit bottom. My personal inertia kept me going, and keeps a lot of addicts going. Maybe we don't feel the same way about our addictive behaviors, but we keep doing them. We've taken our foot off the accelerator, as it were, but the car keeps moving.

So, how do we get moving in the right direction? The first way is to take our foot off the accelerator. Gratefully, there is a lot of anti-addict friction in our universe. But the brakes will only stop us, they won't get us going in the right direction.

What can get us going in the right direction is recovery work, of course. Recovery work can turn us around.

The problem is, you start your recovery work while you still have a lot of addiction momentum. And it takes a long, long time to turn it around. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reverse our trajectory. One dilemma is we tend not to notice how much our little effort is working against our large inertia. It does not seem to make much of a difference. I'm personally sure, though, that it does make a difference. Every little bit helps, so it's important to do recovery work every day. It adds up.

Amazingly, it's also been my experience that when I do my small part, my higher power will do the rest. There is a multiplier effect to working in the direction of God's will for me. I am truly powerless over my addiction, the inertia is too great, but with God's help I can get better. God's will for me, as best as I can understand it, is for me to be healthy, happy and free for my own sake and so that I can be of service to God.

Thankfully, recovery work started working for me long before I recognized the connection to God's will. The same can be true for anyone, no matter their belief or lack thereof.

The upside of this is if you get going in the right direction -- building momentum towards living in harmony with God's will --you will have positive personal inertia that will make it easier and easier to make the right choices and live free, happy and healthy. What a blessing it is to know this after years of despair. What a blessing it is to share this.