It’s not easy to pursue sobriety.

Sometimes, a good escape is just what we need, and when we succeed, it feels amazing. It feels like we are nourishing our mind, body, and soul, even when the result is a persistent cough, throwing up, or waking up next to strangers.

The human relationship with substances is not an accident. We evolved with a blood-brain barrier on a planet full of substances that are ready to cross it. We can easily and successfully abandon our pain, our families, ourselves, and everything we hate about who we are by picking up a device and sending our minds sailing across the universe.

We were built to escape from our conscious minds, as we do when we sleep or fall into a state of flow. Using substances can seem like the natural choice because our brains are wired for it. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have dopaminergic pathways capable of getting hijacked by the things we can’t make ourselves stop doing.

Returning from the escape can be a lifelong journey, and sobriety, the high spiritual kind, is an extremely difficult state to achieve. Like codependency, sobriety can be defined in many ways, but for the sake of this chapter we will settle for “the absence of influence.” When we react, we are always reacting under the influence of something outside ourselves. Because of the innumerable influences affecting us at any time, true sobriety is probably impossible, but it still should be pursued.

Codependent behavior is made up of reactions, sometimes to events that we don’t even remember. When we find ourselves engaged in codependent behavior, or compulsions of any kind (sex, drugs, alcohol), we owe it to the person we are trying to become to ask what exactly it is we are reacting to.

This line of inquiry is the only way to rise above the influence of our past, stop reacting to the world we were thrown into, and start creating the life we want. It is the only way to a truly clear, healthy mind.