Crossroads Recovery Centre

COGNATIVE DISSONANCE is justifying why I’ve made the choices I have. Explaining away any doubt, when I don’t even fully believe myself. This explanation is a radically over simplified and I got into much more detail in this podcast. I draw on parallels, using examples from the not too distant political past and doomsday cults. We are aware of many of our biases but we still fall into traps. I hope...

How to Win When We’re Losing Life is a zero-sum game – the harsh reality is that there are winners and losers in every walk of life. And if we accept that there are always going to be those that are better than others, we should do our utmost to hone our life skills so we have the best possible chance of success. But even in losing there are lessons to be learnt from being graceful in defeat. In f...

Control Freak Are you a control freak? I guess if your looking at this you are wondering how this podcast can serve you? We have so much going on in our lives, as South Africans and global citizen. There is so much happening in our lives and our world that we have absolutely no control over. How we face these challenges is the purpose of this discussion. Whether we are looking at the political sph...

What Are My Priorities? Do I know what my priorities are? How much time do we spend doing the things we love and how much time do we think about the things we want to get to but aren’t that high up the list. Perhaps we want to get that degree or get to the gym but its just not that import. Then we have the things we are passionate about. We spare no expense and will willingly sacrifice time to get...

#24 People Pleasing People pleasing is a behaviour that is as old as the hills, more recently described as Codependance. It is a really sticky problem and a behaviour that is incredibly difficult to change. I would say almost impossible to do anything about alone. Ultimately though, you have to do ALL the work to recover. The most famous point of recognition is being a victim. While Codependent pe...

# 23 Fear Of The Dark Fear of the dark. We have a long relationship with the dark any many people have used this fear to their advantage. It’s important because it can give us some perspective over how much control we have over our mind, versus how much of what we do is based on our genetic coding. There is a field of study that has looked at how much of our behaviour and actions are directly tied...

What does Undifferentiated Being even mean? Well we evaluate everything we look at and experience. This is influenced by a kind of Naïve Realism and a whole bunch of cognitive dissonance, it’s our responsibility to make as much sense out of as we can. Nothing does this better than being present in our lives. When we are recovering from our past decisions, whether its addiction or just the conseque...

You have to earn your serenity. It would seem that we can be as surrendered as we like and willing to accept our consequences, this doesn’t exempt us from the stress and anxiety though. The real deal is learning to live with our consequences and that is no easy task. Doesn’t matter who you are, you are going to face challenges that take you to your darkest fears, it seems unavoidable. When talking...

The connection between recovery and surrender is a very difficult concept to explain. What do we surrender to and how does this whole business work? Surrender is such an important concept when faced with getting clean, giving up alcohol and drugs. Everything depends on it & its not a new concept. Many different groups of people have really battled in trying to communicate this to people in crisis....

Our freedom depends on truth and truth is hard earned. Its rare that we find ourselves in a position, when making decisions, that we have all the information. This is intensified with the vast amount of variety was have at our disposal. When it comes to decisions that impact on our lives and we are facing the long game, how do we know we are headed in the right direction? I hope you enjoy this pod...

Faced with no options, where do we turn? If your life is going to pieces and you are doing everything right and what you are experiencing shouldn’t be happening, how do you survive? As a person who has experienced therapist or executive burnout, it can be a total nightmare. It feels like you might just loose it completely. No matter where I looked there where no answers and I felt total alone. I h...

3 Dimensional Shadow Do you have a 3 dimensional shadow? Has anybody ever tried to measure its thickness & what would the purpose would it serve? The idea behind todays podcast is to look a bit further at the universe we see. Really, to look at the spaces in between what is real and what is illusion. Are we capable of seeing true 2 dimensional space or are we bound to our 3 dimensional perspective...

In this episode of the podcast I discuss the idea of effective practice. Everybody loves and winner and we all like to think that people become talented because they are born that way. Sure there is an element of winning the genetic lottery. Research is showing though, that peak performance can be earned. Hard work in isolation is not enough. There needs to be more & science is showing us how. Whe...

In this episode I reference the book ‘Peak’ written by K. Anders Ericsson. A most remarkable book and one of the 7 books I believe has had the biggest impact on my life. Changing one’s life can be tough going at the best of times and Anders book proves that its not a fruitless attempt. All his work is backed up with research and data. I strongly recommend buying this book and reading it. From cogn...

Mental Recovery In general, we have a tendency to make a lot of assumptions about a variety of issues. We think we know all there is to know about using drugs or how our minds work. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We might know certain aspects of various subjects but unless we really apply ourselves to discovery, these can be very biased to reinforcing what we already believe. Using the e...

In the greater scheme of things, the stories we hear have the potential to hold a lot of meaning. Provided we are diligent and willing to look a little below the surface, the past holds information that is relevant to us today. In long gone era’s the ancients also battled with stress and anxiety. As true as it is today, past generations have also been looking for the best way to live with the extr...

Physical & Emotional Comfort The way we approach our physical comfort and the way we approach our emotional comfort are remarkably similar. When things get a bit uncomfortable, we try our very best to avoid them. This can be a surprisingly unhelpful idea. If we look at the physical side of thing, because emotions can be so hard to work with, we can see certain patterns. If its to cold we hurry out...

For thousands for years people have been misinterpreting what is in front of their eyes and then insisting that everyone believes what they do and should do things their way. With all the arrogance and misinformation prevalent in human interactions, it’s no surprise we have to deal with the massive amounts of stress and anxiety we do. Why are we not being taught the origins of stress and anxiety?...

Morphic Resonance vs The Empire Is it even possible to identify Morfic Resonance? Something that can or cannot be seen, depending on your perspective? Certainly something that is important to any person who wonders why they behave the way they do and do the things they do. We are all familiar with Empire’s and Dynasties. Whether it is a version we see in the movies or a dictatorship that is enforc...

Few of us are fooled by the smiley, false teeth brigade. Who like to lead us into believing things have just fallen into place for them? That if we just do it their way, we to can obtain Nirvana. Recovery requires our dedication. No one else, no matter how much they want to, can do it for us. Sounds a bit cliché, doesn’t it? Recovery is a fight for survival. We sometimes miss the point and want to...

Time as a Measurement of Sanity In 1972 two scientists set out to establish if time, measured at a stationary point, would have the same value as time measured in motion. They set up a Cesium Beam atomic clock on an airplane and measured it against a stationary clock. We as humans are constantly measuring everything. We should use the same measurements we make of time as a measurement of sanity. U...

Artificial Intelligence and Addictive Thinking Hi and thanks for downloading this podcast. In this episode I talk about Artificial Intellence and how much of an influence it has on our live already. There are stark comparisons with how we think and the way AI is designed. How useful is this to us as an illustration for addictive thinking? When drugs and alcohol start to impact on our minds we need...

The Iceman, Willpower and Addiction? What does the Iceman have to do with recovery or drug addiction & alcoholism? Hardly seems relevant that swimming around with the glaciers has anything to do with our lives and the challenges we face. What’s the connection between the 4-minute mile and willpower? Do we need willpower to survive or is it a myth? Can Willpower Work? Willpower is such a huge issue...

Addiction, Compliance and Business The connection between these 3 things, Addiction, Compliance and Business, might seem tenuous but I assure you they are not. Anybody who has gone up against any one of these will know how tough it can be to change. Any one of these aspects of life can be potentially overwhelming but at times we all face them. What do we do? How do we cope? Are these things a pote...

In this podcast I speak about the Milgram experiment and how the lessons of the experiment can be applied to our recovery. It might be a stretch to think that electrocuting people has anything to do with staying clean but it does. What really helps us with our recovery and our life, are the people we surround ourselves with. We all love a hero, someone who is able to stand against the odds. Overco...