What Volunteering has Taught Me

Happy Thursday everyone!

Today marks the last post I will make as a volunteer for Psalm 23 Transition Society. What a two-and-a-half years it’s been. There’s been plenty of ups and downs (both personally and professionally), but the lessons I have learnt through my time here came mostly through the struggles.

As many of the men who have gone through the program have said, “there’s not much to do here other than work on yourself.” I guess living remotely helps with that. Because of this, there are plenty of opportunities to work through past and present issues, as well as future fears. (And as a side note, there’s always something to do, no matter your location, if you search for it).

I figured the best way to bring my time here to a close would be to compile a list of the greatest lessons I have learnt through helping others, watching people grow in sobriety and personally moving through issues which inevitably come up.

What is the definition of failure?

Many who come through this program have this idea that they are a failure. Maybe it’s leftover junk from childhood. Maybe it’s constantly letting themselves down. Whatever the reason, the people who have changed the most in the program have changed their definition of failure.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” I wholeheartedly agree with this. As long as we are trying, we are not a failure. If life was about being perfect, we’d all be failures. Every one of us let ourselves down from time to time, and each of us wish we could improve in some way.

Take the example of a jump shot in basketball. The first time I ever shot a ball, I missed. In fact, to this day I’m not a very good basketball player (my height doesn’t help). Before, I took this to mean I failed at playing basketball. But really, who is ever “good” at shooting a ball on their first try? Is it not the process of missing and missing and missing and missing which leads to better results? You see, we improve through what we tend to label as failures; if one has the persistence to keep trying, they will improve eventually.

Churchill has a second quote regarding failure: “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Henry Ford, too, agrees that “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.”

The take home is this: The process matters much, much more than the result. It is those who keep trying in the face of failure who find success. Knowing that failing is not a hit on our self-esteem but simply a part of the process is an important lesson.

Delaying Gratification

This term is often thrown around Alcoholics Anonymous rooms - the idea of putting off something we want for a time.

Earlier this year, we had a guest speaker come in to speak about gambling addiction. In her presentation, she shared something profound: Most cravings go away after a minute. If you can wait one minute, chances are you can outlast cravings. Speaking from personal experience, these cravings will keep coming back minute after minute if we don’t do anything about them; white-knuckling rarely works. That’s why the ability to share what we are going through with our support team is important. When we voice our cravings, they lose their power.

Another AA-ism is “just for today.” No matter who you are or what your circumstances are, anyone can do something from 24 hours. While this example may not hold up with something like doing push-ups for an entire day, it does preach the idea of delaying gratification. Whether your cravings are drugs or alcohol, sexual or food, it is possible to persevere “just for today”. Many times, you will wake up the next day without cravings at all. Just last night, I REALLY wanted caramel-coated popcorn. I knew it was sitting in the cupboard, just waiting to be eaten. I simply told myself, if I still want this tomorrow, then I’ll have at it. Today, I stand before you with no popcorn shaving in my beard, and a happy tummy.

The ability to be a disciple to yourself - being dedicated to following the best version of you - involves saying “no” to your reckless cravings every once in a while. In fact, the more we can put off making decisions the easier it gets. Just ask anyone who has completed the Psalm 23 program. After a few months, the cravings for their drug of choice is almost non-existent after a time.

Expressing negative emotion

I wrote a blog on this a while back, but the lesson deserves repeating. Many who come into this program view painful or unwanted emotions as “weak” and will go to any length not to show others that they are hurting. They end up swallowing this emotion, which is bound to come out in an unwanted way down the road. I myself am guilty of this: rarely will I let others see my anger, sadness or shame. To this day, I have to actively try to feel and express this in a healthy way to keep myself open.

As it was for me and many others, this is a learned behaviour. As kids, we were faced with many negative events which we did not understand how to process. Thinking it was what we were “supposed to do”, we stuff these emotions down, never showing weakness. I remember one of my earliest examples of this: I came home from summer camp to hear that my mother was not home; she had gone to jail. Instead of crying or screaming or showing I was hurt, I remember actively chocking off these emotions, going numb, and saying “it’s okay, God’s got us”. While these words may be true, I was saying what I thought my father needed to hear. This one event created a pattern - feel negative emotions, try and put on a brave face, move on.

It wasn’t until later in life that I inevitably started to crack. Stuffing my feelings with food, womanizing and TV were no longer working. I had to make a choice, let these feelings out, or continue to see the light inside of me die. Thankfully, I chose the former. The archived blogs you see on this site were my first attempt at expressing what was going on inside.

Through volunteering, one of the hardest challenges I’ve seen others overcome is being brave enough to be vulnerable. Those who choose to stop running and fighting these emotions find success. Our emotions can be a guide and a compass in our lives, showing what needs attention and what doesn’t work anymore. Finding healthy ways to express emotions, like journalling and talking with someone, could be a major step in moving past whatever is plaguing you.

Taking ownership

While I could go on and on about what I have learned here at Psalm 23, I will end with this. The ability to own your decisions, emotions, thoughts and outcomes is so, so critical to positive outcomes.

When faced with adversity, what do you tend to do? Run? Point fingers and blame? Make excuses? Have self-pity and play the victim? If one (or more) of these describe you, then you are not taking ownership for your actions. I for one have done each and every one of these multiple times.

In life, we don’t control a whole lot. The only things we truly have control over is our thoughts, feeling, behaviours and attitudes. Yet, speaking personally, my first instinct is to put the responsibility of these things off of myself, offloading blame onto others or the situation. While this may help in the short-term, it has long-term consequences. The biggest repercussion is that we give up one of our most valuable assets: choice.

Every decision we make starts with a choice. Every choice we make has consequences, positive or negative. When we blame, make excuses, run, etc, we are saying we don’t have a choice, which only compounds negative outcomes. This, too, is a learned behaviour. Typically, in childhood, we are faced with circumstances which we truly have no choice. We develop a learned helplessness, which caries over to adulthood and is resistant to change. You see, many of the issues we face toady were survival techniques from childhood. While they helped us survive before, they not keep us from truly living today.

The more that we can take responsibility for our actions, understand the power of choice and know that we are no longer helpless to our circumstances, the more we can create the lives that we want. By taking responsibility for our choices, we are taking power back in our lives. Everything we do, from delaying gratification to expressing negative emotions and everything in-between, is a choice. When we take responsibility for our choices, there also tends to be a reduction in the amount of things we take personally, or a hit against our self-concept. When we realize it is our choices which lead us to struggles, and not that we are failures, our self-esteem and outcomes improve.

As always, this sounds simple in writing, but is so much harder in practice. I struggle with many of these things to this day. Anyone who tries to say that they never run into any issues and have all the answers are either a fraud, trying to get your money, or both. The Declaration Online is all about being real, as I will not sugarcoat my reality to make me seem like a saint. I firmly believe the more we can talk about our shared trouble, the more we can reduce stigmas and misunderstandings which drive so many conflicts and opinions today.

As my tenure at Psalm 23 comes to an end, I am thankful. I have learned many a lesson, not only about others, but also myself. These are the lessons I will continually share with all of you.

Have a wonderful week and thanks for reading!