Episode 27(Part:1): Selfishness in Recovery with Steven Crozier

Steven Crozier, an author with over 35 years in recovery, discusses the vital role of selfishness in overcoming addiction. In this episode, he explains how focusing on oneself in early recovery fosters personal growth and transformation, eventually leading to more excellent service and connection with others.

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Hello world, and welcome to Choices Books and Gifts, where you always have choices. Thank you for tuning in with us today. As usual, we have some pretty notable guests. Today, my guest is Steven Crozier, and I will read a little biography on him so you understand who we have here. I think you'll be as excited as I am once we start. Crozier is an insightful author and speaker with experience in recovery. He has dedicated much of his life to helping others navigate the challenging journey of addiction and recovery.

His work focuses on wisdom drawn from oral experience and engagement in 12-step. Steven authorizes a series of authorized experiences, Strength, titled the Experience Acts, which includes a selfish program. Amends apologies and the Myths of Forgiveness. The Gift of Addiction and Emotional Sobriety What is it, and how do I get myself?

Through his writing, Steve writes about the power of personal growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation and recovery, providing value for those seeking peace and purpose after addiction. So I was saying I am after addiction, Chris. Is it time we're addicted, and there's a time where, no long, you know, we've got it over? So I do like the longer.

Thank you, we'e. And I'm looking forward to this. Steven and I.

Going to doggies of four podcasts at least, covering each of his beautiful pamphlets. And today, the first one we're going to beautiful is it's a selfish program.

I mentioned before you can get these in the store at Choices Recovery Centers, LLC on 220 East 78th Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues), New York, NY 10075. You can go to choicestgifts.com and make a purchase. Steven also has a few stores around the country, and you can also purchase them on Amazon.

Well, you can get it. Prefer to purchase through Amazon. Just. Okay. Straight up through, you know, the way they order many books these days.

There are a couple of other 12-step stores that carry them. One is in Scottsdale, Arizona. It 12-Step Gifts Anonymous. One in Santa Monica called my 12-step store also carries it. And there is now a store called Visions, outsid12-stepover in New Westminster. That is also curious.

Believe it or not, I'm a wholesaler as well. And my store and those are all the customers that you just mentioned. So I know them all well. All right. So I like to jump into it and say good afternoon and welcome to the show. Good afternoon, Jay. It's nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you.

And I'd like to get into some of the questions. So, number one, what led you to the concept of selfishness as central to recovery? And how did that title come about?

So yeah, I'll start with the second half first. The title, It's a Selfish Program, was something that I heard over and over again when I first got into recovery. It's very it's kind of one of the aphorisms that I heard and, you know, how it came about as a topic, two approaches because I think selfishness tends to be misunderstood, or it gets a bad name. Indeed, it is an addiction, understandably. Yet, you know, the wisdom of the AA program is this is a selfish program.

So, I just talked about examining. Okay, how is that true? And how is that a good thing? That's why I wrote the book: to explain how I saw that and how I thought we could use selfishness to our advantage in whatever way.

Excellent, excellent. Number two, how do you redefine selfishness in a way that challenges the traditional negative view of that term?

So it's, you know, not so much a redefinition of selfishness. I think selfishness is selfishness.

I think how we view ourselves needs to be reframed and changed. You know, selfishness is a focus on oneself. And I think what gives selfishness a bad name is the fact that, in addition, we don't know who our true self is.

We have a lot of sense of who we indeed are. So we're not acting in our own best interests. Our idea of who we are is distorted. So, our attempts to act in the interests of that self are likewise distorted and doomed to failure. And, you know, ultimately brings us to our knees. So what we are looking for in recovery is to discover who we are and act in the best interest of that self. And that is, it is selfish. It absolutely is. And yet, it's a whole different world because when we act in the best interest of that self, we benefit, and everybody around us benefits. I hear you, and I understand. In early recovery, I have learned those things, too. Sometimes, I must stay away from people, places, and things.

And so many things needed to improve, and I had to look after myself first and foremost.

Can you explain the role of selfishness in early recovery and why it's critical for personal growth?

Its role is particularly critical. Well, I think an early recovery. Because we are.

Are you transitioning out of a lifestyle of disorder, chaos, lack of discipline, and unmanaged ability? Just like it says on the steps, you know, admitted that we were powerless in our lives and have become unmanageable.

So we're transitioning from that lifestyle into a disciplined, routine, and surrender lifestyle. And these are all brand-new behaviours for many of us in recovery. And it is most of us who come into recovery, man. It's a life-and-death situation. You know, we have to get this thing right if we're going to survive, and so focusing on these new behaviours, giving them the time that they need to become part of our daily routine instead of just some foreign thing that we've just started doing, requires a lot of work and a lot of focus, and that focus is on us. We are the people who benefit from it.

First and foremost, eventually, that benefit, you know, spreads out to other people. But initially, the benefit is ours, and we must have it to survive.

Understood. Understood. How does selfishness shift from self-preservation to self-awareness as one progresses through recovery?

I think that process is why I wrote this booklet about that transition from survival mode, which is how most of us come into recovery, right?

Survival mode to service, you know, which is, I think, a critical function. A critical part of that work is service. From that, we can even better understand who we are. So the self-survival part we talked to was a little about, you know, where most of us come into recovery from the bottom.

And that bottom was a threat to, you know, our physical well-being, our financial well-being, and our spiritual well-being. Just, you know, every part of our existence is threatened by our addiction. And we need recovery in order to survive. And so, selfishness is initially just about survival. And that's fine. We need to focus on that in those early days as it goes along. As the program goes along and begins, we begin to grow in it.

We begin to get further along the steps. One of the functions of staying is being in recovery, which becomes a service. You know, service through, though, first of all, maybe just setting up chairs and making coffee, but then service through cheering meetings and service and being a sponsor, taking recovery calls from brothers and sisters in recovery—all of those things, you know, become part of our program.

And yet, at the end of the day, while we may be benefiting other people, the person who's getting the most benefit, at least my experience of that, was the person who was getting the most benefit of all that service work with me. You know, it helped ground my recovery. It helped me live my recovery. It helped me be of benefit to other people and see how I was a worthy person worthy of recovery.

In, you know, it's called selfless behaviour. It's called into service. Work is at work outside of myself. And yet, at the end of the day, it's selfish. It's the best business.

Yeah. I hear you. Hear you. And I think in those early years or at least a year or two, you know, it has to be very self-centred. Then, you know, I so agree with you, you, you, get more out of this program when you get, can't keep it if you get, if unless you give it away, at least I have found that. In the beginning, it's selfish, and then later on, it becomes selfless. So, I think there's a little bit of that going on as well, but definitely, in the beginning, it's selfish.

What challenges do people face when learning to prioritize themselves without guilt?

Wow. Yeah. That's a big one. So, I would divide this challenge into two categories. First is the internal challenge, Because. Frankly, regardless of how we showed up in addiction, you know, whether we were kind of whiny, grovelling people with a substance use disorder or we were grandiose, you know, larger-than-life addicts or whatever, then you scratch the surface of that man.

And we all suffered from crippling, low self-esteem that we didn't think that we were worth anything, you know, and all of our behaviour tended to reinforce that the reactions we got from other people tended to strengthen it. We just thought we were lower than a worm at Post Hole. You know, whether we would admit it or not.

And that was at the heart of a lot of our acting out. So, deciding that I am worth it, that I'm worth all of this work, all of this suffering, you know, all this withdrawal, all of this, you know, just all of this, the challenges we face in early recovery. Deciding that I'm worth it is a big step.

And it's challenging now. Fortunately, the program's genius is that if we step into these rooms and allow ourselves to be seen in them, we are surrounded by people who can give us that message until we can give it to ourselves. You know what we used to say in my home group was, let us love you until you learn to love yourself.

Love it, love it.

So what do we keep? So, still, ultimately, it's an internal journey. We must cross that threshold between I'm not worth and worthless. Unbroken, I am worth it. I may be imperfect; I may be flawed. But I'm a child of God and worth this recovery. So. And I think as you go, and I do believe that, I think as you go through the program and go to meetings and get a sponsor and things like that, that all those things, you know, come to you; you just, you know, you don't understand them in the beginning.

But it's so imperative to get help. I feel that attending meetings, getting help, and especially getting a sponsor are essential. I think that's so important. I agree. How can people in recovery navigate relationships with their newfound self-focus and be this? This focus is a misunderstanding.

Great question. Because that's the second. That's the second part of the challenge of this new selfishness in recovery. That's the external challenge.

You know, we come into recovery with relationships usually, you know, friendships, you know, partnerships, marriages, you know, all kinds of things that were forged in recovery or, excuse me, forging that addiction, you know, and with all of the sort of distorted self-concepts and understandings of relationships and all of the stuff that we had when we were active addicts, you know, we don't know how to do relationship more in addiction.

It's an intimacy disorder. You know, it's an and so often the people, you know, not it's not always the case that the people in our lives are coming along with us on this recovery journey. You know, they may still be using them, you know, or at the very least, they may still be carrying expectations of our relationship that we've created when we were addicts, you know, which don't really work for us in recovery anymore.

So it's a challenge. I mean, it's a legitimate challenge, genuine challenge for people to, to hold to this idea that I need to stay focused on myself and also kind of weather, whatever the reactions they get from the people that they are in relationship with who may not be understanding why this is so important, why you're developing so much time to it, and who may, at the end of the day, just be saying, hey man, we had a deal.

You know, the deal was, you know, you gave up yourself for me, you know, or you gave up yourself for our mutual partying or, you know, use or whatever, you know, and so we need to renegotiate those relationships. We absolutely do. And we need to be firm about it at a time when, you know, in relationships where we may not necessarily be firm in the first place, but now we need to get firm. It's challenging and can bring up feelings of guilt.

It can bring up feelings of disappointment from other people and so forth. And it's just one of those challenges that needs to be navigated if we're going to heal. Yeah. Yeah. Understanding what you said about growing and learning how to have a relationship is essential.

AA taught me everything because I was so broken when I came in. AA taught me to have relationship boundaries, live my life, pay my bills, and do everything. You know, you're just wonderfully covering all of it.

How does healthy selfishness avoid the trap of becoming self-centred or isolated?

You know that to me, it's just the program's genius. I personally believe that the 12 steps are divinely engineered. You understand this is a spiritually inspired, great set of steps to move us to healing and wholeness.

Suppose a person is working the steps with integrity and fully intending to receive their benefit. In that case, the movement is the opposite of self-centeredness and isolation. It moves us out. It moves us out into service work. It moves us out into connection with other people. It moves us into an awareness that we are essential, but we're not more important than that person or that person.

You know that we are part of a whole and that we definitely exist in, you know, in a system where there's a power greater than ourselves.

And so. That doesn't leave much room, for I'm the biggest, baddest thing on the planet. And, you know, everybody better get out of my way, you know? And it also, you know, if I'm going to meetings if I'm working with a sponsor, if I'm sponsoring, if I'm doing service work. And it's tough to be isolated in that kind of thing, but it's also, as I said before, still selfish behaviour.

I'm doing it because it keeps me sober. That's the primary, most important thing. And the fact that y'all are getting some benefit from it—that's a bonus. That's great. But really, at the end of the day, it's keeping me sober. But it's not keeping me isolated. And it's not; it's not leaving me with the illusion that I'm more important than anybody else.

Yeah, yeah. Agreed? Agreed.

Can you share some examples of how boundaries in relationships help maintain a healthy form of selfishness?

Yeah. Yeah, I can. Boundaries are an important part of valuing oneself. Because I have a right, I have a right to recover. First and foremost, you know, I have a right to heal.

And I have a right to devote the time and energy that I need in the way that I see best to do it to accomplish that. And that may well involve renegotiating some old understandings that I had with, you know, people in my life who may still be in my life. Still, it may, you know, be the nature of the relationship. It is going to change, and the boundaries—you know, the healthy boundaries—that I established early on were this is my program.

This is the most important thing to me right now. And to do this properly, I need to go to meetings. You know, I need to take phone calls from people. I need to call people, and I need to do my homework. You know, there are just certain things. And I need to make time for those.

And, you know, I will. I will also do my best to make time for the essential things in our relationship. But right now, this has to be first because unless I heal, I'm no good to me, and I won't be able to.

I'm listening to you and all that, and you're explaining it so well. It's such an important topic because so many people, I don't think, understand how valuable and essential it is that they just have to look after themselves with some direction.

You know, you can't just, you know, you need direction on how to be selfish and what not to do. Can't go hanging out with the people you used to hang out with because you feel guilty or ashamed. But it's so important to learn. And people in the program teach us how to do that. How does the practice of selfishness help someone to embrace self-care and maintain sobriety in the long term?

So, it is a critical, positive part of my experience. My opinion of healthy selfishness, you know, is like if I'm worth investing all of this time in, if I'm worth recovering, if I'm worth healing, if I'm worth, you know, setting these boundaries, going to all these meetings, doing all this work, then I'm also worth taking care of, you know, and taking care of can look like working my program. Still, it can also look like eating healthy, exercising, and getting enough sleep.

And, you know, all the other things that make me a functioning human. You know, so that self-care isn't the critical part of selfishness.

And it's man, you know, the sort of fine print, the of, of the recovery contract, is when we get habituated to this, that we get addicted to being, well, you know, and if we develop routines of self-care and routines of, you know, of our stepwork and spirituality and things like that and things like that, we get habituated to that stuff. It becomes less and less appealing to do the sort of things that we were doing in active addiction, that we're precisely the opposite of this, that we're, you know, self-harm, and you, so, so the more that we work, those aspects of selfishness, of healthy selfishness, the further away we get, you know, I mean, we're only 24 hours away from, you know, when.

We get sobriety 24 hours a day, but we can groove in those habits far enough that it becomes less and less likely.

That we're going to forget, slip off into, you know, the door. Yeah. Yeah.

I totally agree. I know when I first came in, as you see, I was told to make doctor's appointments. I was very overweight. I just didn't take care of myself at all. And it was a sponsor. And people in the program are saying, You know, do this, do that, do this. And, you know, for the first year, I just listened to nothing that I thought of. I just listened to the people in 12-step recovery, and that was me.

Okay. What role does selflessness play in fasting, accountability, and self-honesty in recovery?

Again, it's all part of this recognition that I am self-worth, healing, and wholeness. All the things you're talking about—being accountable, honest, and honest with myself and others—are all part of a healthy, whole human being.

You know I lied to maintain a lifestyle. All that was meant to prop up my illusion that I wasn't worth it. You see, I had to lie and manipulate. I had to, you know, I had to do my little shuffle, you know, to prop up this fraudulent lifestyle, this fraudulent idea of who I was.

Now I'm living a whole life. I was a precious child of God. And I know from experience, from the wisdom that I've received from the people in the program, and from now, from my own experience, the way I do that is I do what I say I'm going to do. I tell the truth. I show up as honestly as possible, honest with myself and others.

I accept feedback from people who I care about and respect, and all of those things are just, you know, building blocks of my sobriety. So it's part of being selfish and what I must do to heal.

You know, you mentioned Higher Power earlier, and then you mentioned God. And I know that was a massive part of it because I didn't know what I believed beforehand. Still, when I came in, I understood it was of God, of my own understanding, because I grew up Christian as a child. It was a searing God that I had. And this is only strictly a loving and caring God that I believe in today.

Right there with you, man.

How does service to others reflect a more evolved form of selflessness and recovery?

I love this question. Because it just reflects my evolving sense of selfishness. You know, initially, when I was in active addiction, when I was in the limousine, you know, when I was trying to basically slowly kill myself, it's like any, anything, any time that I didn't spend, it was focused on me.

Anything I gave you was like taking something somehow from me. You know? It was like, somehow, I did it reluctantly, and I did it, you know? So I just put it that way.

But what I realized in recovery, as I did service work, was that I read separate phone calls, took phone calls as I worked with my sponsors, and chaired meetings as I did everything we do to work a program.

I began to realize, Oh, my gosh, this is good for me. It's not just this idea that I'm supposed to do something for others because that's what I do. You know, it's like, No, this is just a new higher form of selfishness. You know, all of this stuff I'm doing is keeping me sober, and it's keeping me connected to the program, connected to my healing process. And it's just a higher form of selfishness. Now, the beautiful form of selfishness. 

Yeah, I hear you, I listen to you, I hear you, I hear you. Okay. How does this idea of selfishness tie into spiritual growth and recovery?

This is my opinion, as I don't think this is like the 12-step doctrine or anything necessarily found in the literature. But you know, I'm not a Buddhist, but I think there's a great truth in the Buddhist tradition—some great spiritual truths. One of the truths that I often say is that we are here.

We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.

And this journey, this journey of growth and selfishness, is evolving. This evolving sense of who, of who myself is moved from this skinny, shrivelled, little scared, you know, thing that I was trying to protect that was also trying to kill me into this precious child of God, worthy of healing, into this precious child, God worthy of healing, who wanted to help other people heal as well, who wanted to give of my own time and my own energy and my own love to help other people the way that I was helped and all the way to this, this realization, this. A place where the similarities between all of us in the rooms are way more important to me today than the differences. And what I begin to see is that there is no separateness.

You know, we are all one. We are all children of God. We're all worthy of respect, compassion, love and healing. And that's that. That's my spiritual awakening. That's my understanding of why I'm here and what my higher power is.

Love it, love it. Absolutely love it. How does the shift from self-focus to recognizing the interconnectedness of all people happen in recovery?

Well, I think it's just what we were talking about. We just did what we said. Yeah, I agree, you know, and I'll tell you, I give a little example in the book I'll provide here. I brought a guy into a 12-step meeting for the first time, and he and I had a newcomers meeting where people tell their stories. You know what? What happened, what it was like, what it's like now, all of that. And at the end of the meeting, I said, well, how was it for you?

Now, what do you what do you see? And he goes, at first, I couldn't, like I couldn't relate to what people were saying. They acted out differently than I did. They didn't have the same background that I did. Their upbringing was different, but the other thing is different. But the more people shared, the more he began to hear little pieces of who he was and each and every story.

 

And by the time everybody had gotten done sharing, he had heard himself in this, in this whole room, in all of these stories. Just that awareness that we all have these commonalities, we all have these touchpoints. We really are all the same. At the end of the day, the details may differ, but the ultimate experience and solution are the same.

Yeah, I love that's the way they say in the beginning, you know, to a 90 and 93 and go to a lot of different meetings because, you know, this group may not particularly see you, but if you go to enough, you will hear your story; there is no doubt about that. And get involved with those people.

What are the most common misconceptions about recovery being a selfish journey?

I think it's I think it's this I, this confusion of what selfishness used to look like in people to people are it's subject to people kind of porting that that over into recovery, you know, and thinking that the way I was selfish in addiction is going to be the way I'm greedy in recovery.

And it's just that it's not true, and it gets difficult because it's the same person. Right? It's like you're it's like the people who you used to crap on in your selfish ways when you were inactive addiction. You're now saying, well, okay, I, you know, I need to be slow.

I need to be selfish here. And going, we've seen you be greedy, man. We don't want to stick around for that. But it's a new kind of selfishness, you know? And people just have to. They just have to wait around and see the transformation. Yeah. If you work the program, it's going to happen. And they're going to see that this selfishness is Now then. If? They also benefit you because they're getting somebody who's not a rolling train wreck, so they just think.

It's a loving and caring selfishness.

So it's not as if you're helping people; they always benefit, which benefits us. What advice would you give those struggling to embrace putting themselves first in recovery?

Because I bet you that happens with a lot of people. How can I put myself first? 

If I could look them straight, I would tell them you are worth it. You are worth it. That's at the heart of this selfishness: the awareness that I'm a precious child of God, and I'm worthy of healing, and I'm worthy of doing whatever it takes to get a sober lifestyle, to get a lifestyle that's that. That's free of addiction. I'm worth it. And that's just that's the truth. And I know it's true.

Fantastic, fantastic. Let me ask you this. So, we're coming to a close for this particular pamphlet. And is there anything I always ask my guests? Is there anything you want to leave us with? You know, maybe I don't know your last few, though I remember

Oh, you know, your questions are so great. I feel like I've really shared, you know, the essence of why I wrote the booklet and what's in it, and you know that, again, your last question was kind of the last thing I'd like to leave people with is that you are worth it. You are a precious love of a God worthy of healing. Do what it takes. Do whatever it takes to get to that beautiful.

I want to say this, Steven. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I look forward to moving forward and going through all of these different pamphlets. I want to thank you for being here. I appreciate you.

May God bless you and look after you. And to all out there, thank you for tuning in. God bless you, and I hope to see you soon. Namaste.