Have you been told that accountability is the key to your recovery, all the while watching hypocrisy rear its ugly head? Well, accountability is an extremely important step in recovery, but hypocrisy always runs rampant in the addictions industry and recovery community to a point where it can cripple a recovering drug addict’s growth in recovery.
So let’s begin with accountability and discuss why this is such an important step in recovery and then we will use an example of an extremely important person in the sports industry that preached accountability for four decades during his career but when it was time for him to take accountability he ran the other way. Accountability is basically owning the negative actions and consequences that go hand-in-hand with an active addiction. Taking accountability is looking inward for solutions to improving your lifestyle instead of looking outward to blame others for your misfortunes. When we are trying to get clean and sober and stay clean and sober we waste so much time blaming others instead of looking inward at the real person to blame and beginning a long tedious process towards sobriety and recovery.
The sooner we acknowledge that we are to blame for our path of destruction during our drug use, the sooner we can begin to dig ourselves out properly. We really have to watch out for hypocrisy when we are looking upward to those who have succeeded in getting clean and sober and staying clean and sober because if we are not careful, hypocrisy can lead us right back into an active addiction.
I want to use an example of a Major League Baseball coach who refused to take accountability for his actions. Coach Tony La Russa, who’s major league baseball career spanned over multiple decades, always preached accountability and was a bit of a hard nosed authoritarian when it came to following the rules and discipline. This is why the baseball community was completely shocked by the video that surfaced last week of a drunken Tony La Russa slurring while telling a local police officer that he should “know who he was” and that he was “one of those Hall of Famer guys”.
First of all, the officer did not appear to know who Tony La Russa was and was more concerned with how intoxicated this man was behind the steering wheel of an automobile. But more importantly, Tony La Russa, who was a strict authoritarian, was trying to convince the police officer to let him go and convince him that he did nothing wrong and to take his Hall of Fame status as reason to do so. Coach Tony La Russa was not in recovery and has never been in trouble with the law, however, his incident is a true example of not taking accountability for an issue that you caused that could have had a tragic ending for La Russa or an innocent driver on the roads that evening.
Had he had a sober coach, or a recovery coach or even a sober companion he would be working on accountability and staying sober. The drug and alcohol treatment industry would have held him accountable and taught him accountability.
Accountability is one of the most important pieces to getting clean and sober and staying clean and sober and we discuss accountability here at The Addictions Coach and the Addictions Academy. So whether you are a struggling drug addict or you are on the flipside and are wanting to help struggling drug addicts in recovery you can contact us here www.theaddictionsacademy.com or www.theaddictionscoach.com and we can assist you at 800 706 0318 ext 2
