Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions

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the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. Informative, honest, raw and it has the potential to be life-changing if you're willing to truly listen and do the work. We may slip from time to time, but we acknowledge this using the skills we’ve developed and keep moving forward. They know there are people with similar issues longing for forgiveness, restoration, and hope of a better tomorrow.

Some will still struggle with this, but amends help by allowing us to see our evolution in progress. We can just start by being a little kinder to ourselves and open to the possibility that life doesn’t have to be bloody awful. In the same way that Jekyll created Hyde through misguided ambition and bad science, our pre-addict selves were in fact the same people who sought escape. Even when ayahuasca seems to solve his problems with alienation and depression, he finds reason to worry: “A wound that needed status to avoid intimacy has been healed.Those of us who remember Brand’s last attempt to “help” the problem of engagement in politics by telling young people not to vote might well approach this latest attempt at intervention with wariness. Don't think that this book just applies to the well known "serious" addictions of alcohol, drugs, sex etc; Russell Brand argues that anyone who regularly feels anxious, not good enough, overwhelmed etc is on the addiction spectrum and can be helped by following this programme. Russell has famously coped with overcoming his own addictions — namely drugs, alcohol, porn, food, and social media — and has been free of crack and heroin for nearly fifteen years. Russell Brand here has put together a 12-step comprehensive and very detailed recovery program for addicts who suffer in their multiple or singular addictions.

He also published several collections of articles that he had written for The Guardian, entitled Articles of Faith and Irons in the Fire. So it comes as little surprise that he would eventually disseminate his understanding of recovery in the form of a self-help book. This book outlines the 12 Step Program from Russell's perspective with personal accounts from each step of his journey towards recovery. Rather than just educating myself, I came away with a desire to improve myself and be a little more at peace in my environment, and a little enlightenment.

The sad clown is a trope as old as drama; think of Shakespeare’s melancholy fools, with their discarded pearls of wisdom, or the likes of Tony Hancock and Robin Williams, spreading laughter on stage or screen while private pain corroded their lives until it became unbearable.