Virtually the book


A guide to all kinds of addiction from a star who has struggled with heroin, alcohol, sex activity, fame, food, and eBay, that will help addicts and their loved ones make the first steps into recovery.

"This manual for self-realization comes not from a mountain simply from the mud…. My qualification is not that I am better than you but I am worse." (Russell Brand)

With a rare mix of honesty, humor, and compassion, comedian and movie star Russell Make mines his own wild story and shares the advice and wisdom he has gained through his 14 years of recovery. Brand speaks to those suffering along the full spectrum of addiction – from drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar addictions to addictions to work, stress, bad relationships, digital media, and fame. Brand understands that addiction tin can take many shapes and sizes and how the process of staying make clean, sane, and unhooked is a daily activeness. He believes that the question is not "why are y'all addicted?" but "what hurting is your addiction masking? Why are you running – into the wrong chore, the wrong life, the wrong person's artillery?"

Russell has been in all the 12-step fellowships going, he's started his own men's group, he's a therapy regular and a skilful yogi – and while he's worked on this fabric every bit part of his comedy and previous best sellers, he's never before shared the tools that really took him out of it, that keep him clean and articulate. Here he provides not only a recovery plan but an try to make sense of the ailing world.

Purchase book:   Amazon

Twelvemonth published:  2017

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Quotes from the book

Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions (Russell Brand)

/ in Quotes by book Personal well-being, Transcending our limits Needs curating /
  • There is no freedom without forgiveness.
  • In justifying our misery we recommit to information technology.
  • If we all feel that we are solitary, how alone are we?
  • You tin can never quench your spiritual craving through material ways.
  • You lot tin can't retrieve your way into interim better only you tin can act your way into thinking better.
  • A theist is a person who has seen through the textile and mechanical world and doesn't commit suicide'.
  • You build the pain into the story of who yous are until it isn't pain anymore, information technology's but another piece of who you are.
  • We have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty, piddling desires. Real liberty is liberty from our picayune, picayune desires.
  • I have no power at all over people, places and things, and if I always for a moment mistakenly believe that I do, and human activity as if I do, pain is on its way.
  • Yeah, people fabricated mistakes but that'south what humans do and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and permit them to clutter my perception of the present.
  • The condition in farthermost is identifiable but the less obvious version of addiction is notwithstanding painful and arguably worse because we but adapt to living in pain.
  • Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low price and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can't see it considering its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.
  • Office of that alter is forgiveness and the willingness to await at our lives and the world differently. Inquire yourself 'Practice I really desire to change or do I just desire to justify staying the manner that I am?
  • Me and the programme but need a bit more fourth dimension', I used to think, a fleck more time and a canteen of wine, a fleck more time and one more piping, a scrap more than time and a slice of block, a chip more than fourth dimension and a threesome, for luck.
  • Pain is a signal, it'southward some aspect of us that's beyond our somewhat narrow conception of 'self,' communicating. A hurting in the leg means 'don't put pressure on this leg'; a pain in the mind means 'modify the way you live.'
  • The feeling you have that 'there'due south something else' is real. What happens when yous don't follow the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need […]? The only way to observe out is to not do it, and that is a novel act of organized religion.
  • Our relationships with people become the instantiations of negative attitudes to ourselves: I believe myself to be ugly; I deport in an ugly way; I then have relationships with others that confirm my belief. A cocky-perpetuating doctrine.
  • We require connection, but so much of the fourth dimension we are not alive, neutralized. Who are you when you're listening to the radio in traffic? You lot are not you, yous are on standby. Generally nosotros are costless-floating and disengaged, lost in the spectacle.
  • There's an expression in the functioning world that nobody tin outperform his/her own self-image. Meaning, how a person thinks they'll stop up performing is how they'll well-nigh likely end up performing. Self-image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • Oddly, counterintuitively, in our culture of individualism and cocky-centered valour, it is by surrendering that we can brainstorm to succeed. It is by 'admitting that nosotros have no power' that we can begin the procedure of accessing all the ability we will ever need.
  • The instinct that drives compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation, tepid despair… the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an surround that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails.
  • None of us can adequately control the meteorology of other people: they're squeamish, they're nasty, they come, they go. We accept no choice but to address, alter and meliorate the inner coordinate if nosotros desire to accept a unlike model of reality, if we want to have more choices.
  • Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the demand for nutrient, sex, relaxation or condition, go prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as information technology's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.
  • There is no objective history, this nosotros know, but stories. Our character is the consequence of this story nosotros tell ourselves nigh ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks downwardly the subconscious and destructive personal grammar that we accept unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.
  • What I used to think of as happiness was but distraction from the pain. The pain of disconnection, of separateness from yous. All longing, all yearning, all thirst, flung on unworthy surrogates, false idols, unsated by unworthy objects, even so pulling us unwillingly back together.
  • In your life you've faced obstacles, inner and outer, that have prevented you from condign the person you were 'meant to be' or 'are capable of being' and that is what we are going to recover. That'southward why nosotros call this procedure Recovery; we recover the 'you' that yous were meant to be.
  • I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to exist respected. There is a wound. I believe that this is more than a characteristic of addiction. I recollect information technology is a office of beingness human, to comport a wound, a flaw and again, paradoxically, it is but by accepting it that we tin can progress.
  • Plus how much time accept I given over to watching TV or staring out of windows or pursuing pointless relationships or looking at my Twitter mentions? Those hours all add up and are sadly deducted from the overall life full. They are not a break from life, these 'harmless' distractions, they are life. They are life and they are expiry.
  • You need only allow gentle hope to enter your heart. Exhale and allow promise, and give yourself some time. This is a procedure of change that requires a skilful deal of self-compassion, which is neither stagnant nor permissive. Nosotros can just start by being a little kinder to ourselves and open to the possibility that life doesn't have to be encarmine awful.
  • It is commonly understood that the opposite of addiction is connectedness. That in our addictive behaviours we are trying to reach the connection. Retrieve of it: the bliss of a hit or a drink or of sex or of gambling or eating, all legitimate drives gone awry, all a reach across the abyss, the separateness of 'self,' all an attempt to redress this disconnect.
  • Information technology is ordinarily understood that the opposite of habit is connexion. That in our addictive behaviours nosotros are trying to attain the connexion. Think of information technology: the bliss of a hit or a drink or of sex or of gambling or eating, all legitimate drives gone awry, all a reach across the abyss, the separateness of 'self', all an effort to redress this disconnect.
  • My authorization comes not from a steep and certain mount height of po-faced righteousness. This manual for Self-Realization comes not from the mountain merely from the mud. Being human is a 'me too' business. We are all in the mud together. My qualification is that I am more addicted, more narcissistic, more driven by animalism and the need for ability and recognition.
  • In a sense nosotros re-write our past. Nosotros change our narrative. Nosotros reprogram ourselves. There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the consequence of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks downwardly the hidden and subversive personal grammar that nosotros take unwittingly immune to govern our behaviour.
  • I believe that what the 12 Steps and their encompassing philosophy, which I will lay out for you in these pages, will provide is nada less than a solution to the dissatisfaction of living, and dying, to anyone with the balls to practice the work. And information technology is work. Indeed it is a personal rebirth and the journey entails all manner of uncomfortable confrontations with who you truly are.
  • If we all feel that we are alone, how solitary are nosotros? If we all feel worthless then who is the currency of our worth existence measured against? Perchance this program is a personal and social tool that illuminates the truth that religious people take long known and physicists have proven: all the energy that has ever existed has ever existed and will always exist. Grade and separation are temporary. Nosotros are all one.
  • When you start to drink, wank, eat, spend, obsess [excessively] y'all have lost your connexion to the groovy power within yous, the keen power in others, the great ability around all things. There is something in you speaking to yous and you don't understand it because you've never learned its linguistic communication. So we try to palm it off with porn and consuming but it is your spirit calling and it craves connection. Spend time solitary, write, pray, meditate. This is where we learn the language.
  • Across today your projections of life are conceptual. You don't have to not drink for twenty years today. You don't have to give up white bread for all eternity, right at present. And if you exercise get in through today, and wake up tomorrow, what does information technology really matter that yous didn't act out yesterday? I mean, you're not accumulating tokens for punitive pleasance. This '1 day at a time' cliché when taken manifestly is no less profound than whatever 'be in the moment' Eastern wisdom I've since encountered. Today is all I have.
  • By forgiving the perpetrator, I release myself. I tin revise the event. I can see it as something that gives me more compassion and agreement. I tin let go of it. There is no benefit to establishing an imaginary judicial arrangement in my own heed where I carry out punishments to people who accept wronged me. By letting go of this long-held inner drama I become a piddling more liberated and useful. In essence it's bad that it happened but it'south worse that I allow myself to be affected by information technology now. I cannot control the past simply I can control the present through forgiveness.
  • The fact is that it doesn't thing if yous are gambling to the bespeak where it harms you, if you are drinking too much, if yous are lost in your life and afraid to articulate even to yourself how unhappy yous are, how fearful of the future, of death, of other people, of being poor, of non being practiced enough, sexy enough, thin enough, tough enough, famous enough, if y'all feel that you are not enough and that if you could merely 'X, Y, Z, and then everything would be fine,' I believe you lot are on the spectrum of addiction. Past this definition: 'Trying to solve an inner problem by outer ways, in spite of negative consequences.'
  • Forgiveness is a powerful spiritual tool, without information technology nosotros are damned every bit individuals and every bit a people. Forgiveness means letting get. It means being willing to accept that we are all mortals flawed and suffering, imperfectly made and trying our best. That sometimes there is a collision of instinct. Am I determined that the earth must be equally I decree. Practice I meet a future in that fashion of thinking, particularly when information technology's done zippo only bring me pain so far? What am I holding on to? What is gained past withholding forgiveness, for ruminating on a concluded event, past holding on to bygone hurting and wishing sick upon a man only like me? Nix.
  • Are at that place things virtually yourself which you have never told anyone? Fashion dorsum upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your individual heed, the things you lot've washed and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you've inflicted on people yous love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear every bit they looked into your eyes and told y'all 'you lot are null'. And for a moment you stand in that location adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to yous, and what that must mean about who yous are.
  • I believe that the mystery of creation and the laws of the universe hold great ability in them. I believe that the innate beloved that human being beings have for one another is a power. I believe people's willingness to suffer for a cause is a ability. I believe the healing of an injury is a power. Muhammad Ali'southward sacrifice for what he believed in is a power. The music of Mozart (or Moz), the Sistine Chapel ceiling, George Best—all these allude to some Ability that is greater than me. The chances that I have had in life, the people that have loved me and been there for me. There are many examples of a Power greater than myself, alone, with my addiction and my thoughts.
  • A counsellor at the handling eye where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, 'How clever of yous to find drugs. Well done, yous found a manner to keep yourself live.' This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn't estimate me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that 'drugs kill'. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that fabricated being me bearable… To exist acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-upwards and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an instance of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change.
  • We adapt to the misery of an unloving home, of unfulfilling work. Of empty friendships and lacquered alienation. The 12 Step program, which has saved my life, will alter the life of anyone who embraces it. I have seen it piece of work many times with people with addiction issues of every hue: drugs, sex, relationships, food, work, smoking, alcohol, technology, pornography, hoarding, gambling, everything. Because the instinct that drives the compulsion is universal. It is an endeavour to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation and tepid despair, because the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an surroundings that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. We are all on the habit scale.
  • 'Sought' is from the verb to seek; I have ever been looking for something. I meet that at present, for as long every bit I can think I harboured fantasies of how some object or feel would heal me, would make me whole. Sometimes before Christmas I would be so euphoric at the prospect of the post-obit day's gifts that I'd vibrate until it felt like I might shape-shift. What was I imagining the millennium Falcon or whatsoever it was would bring? What was the inherent drive that was and so fiercely engaged? I always felt these artefacts would bring completion. It was like I was born with the yearning to be whole and continually felt that each new object or meet, peculiarly if enthusiastically heralded, would bring redemption.
  • A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical globe and doesn't commit suicide'. I like this quote. To see that it is all bullshit and not to clock off, that requires organized religion. Only faith will do. Only religion. Fifty-fifty if you're double sure that in that location is nix but space and dumb molecules out there, clattering nearly into symphonic and faraway futures, if you lot believe that's all there is and don't cheque out, you are hardcore. You must really love football or fucking or coin or something and be okay with those things being just what they explicitly are, without implicit power, with no unravelling flag blowing backside them in limitless wind, back to earlier some unknowable moment of creation when this universe's middle first began to beat.
  • They say all the energy that has always been is still hither at present and volition always be here. That ways at that place is a totality and I am part of it. When I accept an opinion on suffering, information technology is only that, an opinion. I do not and cannot understand the full context of events that occur in an infinite and eternal universe. It's equally if within my finite lifetime I glimpse a second of a three-hour pic and try to understand the entire plot. All I must do is engage with this idea: I will get open up to the idea that my conceptions, behavior and experiences are limited. I will become open to new behavior and new possibilities. I volition become open to the idea that I tin live a better, more than loving and useful life, even if I don't fully understand how I will do it or what information technology will be like.
  • My best efforts, my best intentions will exist sucked into the quagmire if I am not vigilant. You too, you lot may recall, 'yes, I am an addict, I will change the mode I drink or eat or retrieve or relate to sexual partners,' but surely the craving volition find a new expression, similar a magnetic field ordering fe filing. You lot can supervene upon the filings merely the pull stays the same. Information technology is only past finding a more than powerful magnetic pull that yous can change the patterns completely. This can be the program itself, sedulously applied. Information technology can be a back up grouping, made upwards of like-minded people. It tin can be an orthodox or traditional idea of God. It can be nature. It can be a unified field of consciousness that supports all phenomena. Information technology frankly doesn't thing and it is entirely for you to choose, as long as it is loving, caring and more than powerful than you.
  • I don't wake up in the morning and retrieve, 'Wow, I'thousand on a planet in the Galaxy, in infinite space, bestowed with the souvenir of consciousness, which I did not requite myself, with the gift of language, with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, none of which I gave myself, with no physical understanding of the Great Mysteries, knowing only that I was born and will die and nothing of what's on either side of this brief material and individualized glitch in the limitless expanse of eternity and, I feel, I experience love and pain and I accept senses, what a glorious gift! I can relate, and create and serve others or I can lose myself in sensuality and pleasure. What a astounding mystery!' Most days I simply wake up feeling a bit anxious and plod a solemn, narrow path of survival, coping. 'I'll have a coffee', 'I'll try not to accomplish for my phone as soon equally I stir, simpering and begging like a bad dog at a tabular array for some digital tidbit, some morsel of approval, a text, that'll do