In mental health by Tree House Recovery

The story of a death and rebirth is one that has been told hundreds, if not thousands of times throughout the various cultures in human history. This motif has emerged as a repetitive pattern in literature, movies, mythology, and religious texts; the reason its occurrence is so prevalent is because it is a stage transition that is necessary in order to minimize our suffering and maximize our well-being. In more practical language, our old ideas, behaviors, and perspectives that do not serve our personal evolution and growth need to die. There might not be a more obvious example of why this death is necessary than in the context of drug and alcohol addiction. Before discussing addiction, let’s use a silly example to illustrate the death of ideas that have lost their utility. At one point or another, most of us grew up believing in Santa Claus; at a certain point, however, we find that this story was fabricated and told to us for one reason or another. The point is, no person upon the realization that the Santa story was false would continue through their lives touting that he was in fact real. This would be obviously insane because of the fact that this belief not only has no usefulness, but even more importantly, this type of behavior would be viewed as insane by outsiders. Although a rather ridiculous example, we can see how we allow things to die that don’t serve us. We might be inconsolable for five minutes or so, but we are very quickly able to let go of an idea that, five minutes beforehand, we believed to be a fundamental truth.

Human beings are extremely resilient, and even more amazing is how adaptable we are. Even on a biological level, every cell in our body dies and is reborn about every 7 years or so. When we make the decision to get sober, we not only become willing to allow our addicted selves to die, but we begin to allow our immature selves to die in order to allow the emergence of our true self, which encapsulated in it lies limitless possibilities. Allowing ideas, perspectives, and behaviors die can be a scary prospect, however, the scarier alternative is disallowing the necessary death so that we remain zombies.

