No account

One of the biggest enemies of addiction, I've found, is accountability. When I was deep in my addiction I hated to account for anything. Interestingly, this didn't seem to affect my job. It seems my chosen profession was a magnet for addicts and addictive personalities. You might think I worked in the entertainment industry there were so many unhealthy people. But I actually spent most of my adult life in the Christian church. There are so many addicts in the church. It's really the perfect incubator for addiction. In my experience there is very little real accountability. There is a veneer of accountability, but those who hold you accountable are volunteers and they aren't around on a daily basis. That means you get to make your own schedule, determine your own priorities and do your own thing. If you're talented at getting a lot done in a little time, like I was, it can appear like you're doing an excellent job (an maybe you are), but you're doing it on your own terms. Those few times when someone with authority over me asked for greater accountability I became indignant. I claimed they didn't understand the intricacies of the job. There was no way to truly account for all the things I was doing.

Now, in my case, part of my addictive need was to please and impress people so I could feel good about myself. This lack of accountability allowed me to get involved in many projects not related to my work. I joined task forces, committees, teams and anything I could to demonstrate how talented and capable I was. In my profession I was highly respected and often people commented about how many things I could do so well. This fed my addict and kept me from realizing how sick I really was. It also nearly destroyed my marriage.

At home my lack of accountability didn't promote successful relationships. It hurts to remember how many times I bristled, and even lashed out, when my wife would ask a simple question like "when will you be home?" Internally my addict would sense this was a request to be accountable and would fight that. Not wanting to be accountable went so deep. I destroyed our family's financial stability convincing myself that I needed more than I could afford and using credit to get there. I could run numbers in my head well enough, or so my addiction adled brain thought, that there was no need to keep anything on paper. I would get credit cards and remortgage the house and play the "rob Peter to pay Paul" games it took to keep up appearances. My wife, on the other hand, thrives on accountability and order. She's not an addict. Confronted with my strong-willed confidence, seeming success in the outside world and lacking the ability to outlast me in debates she suffered incredibly in the wake of my addictive behavior. Part of my recovery process is beginning to realize just how deeply I've hurt the ones I love. All these years I thought we struggled over finances, but now I'm coming to realize that my addiction was destroying me and any chance for relational happiness.

I wonder if many of the marriages out there that are collapsing because of financial pressure aren't really succumbing to an addicts inability to be accountable. If an addict never has to tell you where they've been, what they're doing or how they're spending money the addiction has a wide open playground. My recovery has included getting a job where there are weekly, quarterly and annual goals that are reviewed every week with my supervisor. We now have a strict budget that, although I push against it sometimes, is incredibly freeing (who knew). Every day I have disciplines and routines. All of this creates a hostile environment for addiction. For those who really want to recover, I recommend you aggressively seek accountability in every area of your life.