Breaking the Circuit
How to Rewire Your Mind for Hope, Resilience, and Joy in the Face of Trauma
The following is an excerpt from Breaking the Circuit, by Dr. Samantha Harte, available now from Greenleaf Book Group.
INTRODUCTION
Once upon a time, just after her acceptance to a prestigious doctoral program, a young woman overdosed on cocaine. She survived, waking up to a look of horror in her friend’s eyes, a clear indicator that something awful had happened. Vowing never to do cocaine again, she kept up pretenses, studying hard during the day and playing harder in the New York City club scene at night. To the outside world, she had her shit together — the job, the body, the boyfriend — but somewhere deep inside, she knew this would all come crashing down sooner or later. That woman was me.
But that’s not even the interesting part of the story. This near-death experience didn’t hold a candle to the spiritual bottom I would hit years later as my marriage unraveled and I lost many people I loved. The real story is the one about the gift of desperation — that sacred place where seemingly all has been lost, where every wiring pattern I relied on as a kid and exhausted into adulthood stopped working. In this place, desperation meets willingness and creates a holy space where “God” becomes an idea born from you, not imposed on you. The real story begins at the emotional and physical edge, where the nervous system and the soul are primed for a new experience. This is the place where the foundation cracks — a place where the light seeps in.
I’m not sure about you, but I have an iron will. For me, as a hardwired perfectionist, the difficulty in “letting go” or “trusting the process” is twofold. First, my real drug of choice is control. I have an insatiable appetite for a neat and orderly world. Second, the neurological patterns for maintaining control at all costs have been deeply ingrained in me since childhood because I relied on them to stay alive.
Growing up around addiction, enablement, infidelity, and mental illness meant that I got extremely good at taking the emotional temperature of the room and changing my insides to match the outside. The motto I operated from boils down to this: If I love you hard enough, maybe you won’t leave me. One neural pathway at a time, my nervous system became trained in how to please others and abandon myself, distrust my inner knowing, and give my love away until there was nothing left of me.
When you couple this with the deeply conditioned messaging of Western culture where control and perfectionism generate high praise, you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. I wholeheartedly bought into ideas like, The more you do and the more you have, the better. The more degrees, promotions, properties, prestige, and praise you accumulate, the happier you will be. All you have to do is follow some basic guidelines, and the life of your dreams is right over there.
But what my childhood and culture didn’t teach is that perfectionism collapses in matters of the heart. There is no such thing as a clear path through betrayal, forgiveness, or grief. And even when you survive them and rediscover joy, you will always be holding hands with two opposing dichotomies at once — love and loss, forgiveness and resentment, hope and despair. Whether we like it or not, that’s what it means to be fully alive. Not once have I been able to follow a linear path through disappointment, heartbreak, betrayal, or addiction — and boy, did I try.
I am fifteen years sober from drugs and alcohol, which is the best, hardest, and most courageous thing I have ever done. That said, the more time I accumulate sober, the more I realize that the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous — yes, the ones found in addiction recovery rooms — are universally applicable to personal transformation no matter who you are.
When I first heard the Twelve Steps, I hated them on a visceral level. They sounded religious, archaic, and utterly irrelevant to my drinking and drugging problem. So I tried to live the way I had always lived — obsessively controlling the people, places, and things around me to feel safe. Things kept falling apart. No matter how intelligent or adamant I was, I found that the tighter I held on to my old ideas, the more quickly things fell through my hands.
Eventually, my emotional despair became so great that I turned to the Steps, but I reimagined them so that they worked for me and not against me. The Twelve Steps are the same in every program about addiction — whether the dependency involves food, money, sex, drugs, or relationships. “Addiction, which has been viewed historically as a ‘moral deficiency,’ is being increasingly regarded as a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by an urge to consume drugs and by the progressive loss of control over, and escalation in, drug intake despite repeated (unsuccessful) attempts to resist doing it.” I started to wonder what would happen if we understood the why behind it all; if we stopped focusing on the symptoms of the addict — compulsive behavior, erratic decisions, self-sabotaging thoughts — and got down to the root causes. If I learned to become highly vigilant as a child to feel safe, and now as an adult I numb my feelings when I feel unstable, can I learn how to feel secure in a healthy way? Can I practice new behaviors that rewire my old coping patterns? Can the Twelve Steps give me a blueprint for living a spiritual life in a way that resonates with me?
I reconstructed what it meant to be powerless, accountable, and faithful in the face of perfectionism, martyrdom, and self-reliance. Over many months, my old wiring patterns weakened as I practiced new ones. Instead of manhandling my life, I learned to live in the unknown spaces and cultivate trust around outcomes I couldn’t see.
At first, I did this because I had to. But eventually, I realized that I was operating from a place of survival, a nervous system that was highly overactive and ready to protect me at all costs — even at the expense of my sanity. With some time in recovery, the Twelve Steps gave me access to a new peace and a new freedom. I discovered that if I sat through the unknown, faith would trickle in. If I held hands with my suffering, joy would find me. If I interrogated my anger, forgiveness would appear.
In 2010, I was barely two years sober and graduated with a doctorate in physical therapy. I knew only a few things for sure. First, I wanted to help people. Second, if I drank again, I would die. My career began like many others. I took a job in a typical outpatient setting and hoped to help people recover. I quickly realized the health-care landscape set patients up to fail, covering a handful of visits and then discharging them well before they were recovered. I decided to open my own practice in Santa Monica, California, with the goal to bridge the gap between patient dismissal and the level of recovery they longed for. I am proud to say I helped a lot of people because I valued becoming a good clinician above money and prestige. I treated whole people and became a practitioner who listened, learned, and cared. I pieced together the symptom presentation until I got to the source. Clients who found me were the ones who had tried everything and failed. They showed up at my doorstep with willingness and a healthy dose of despair.
However, after many years of thoroughly assessing bodies and carefully designing programs, I realized there was still a gaping hole between what I was offering and my patients’ ability to get well. Yes, they made a mental commitment to stop doing the things that led to pain, but their head and heart were not yet integrated.
Emotionally, they were still stuck in a pattern that would inhibit their full recovery.
“Did you practice the exercises?” I’d ask. “Well, I was going to, but I got stuck on a damn call with the lawyer again and it was time for bed before I knew it,” they’d say. Or “I was all ready to work out and then my kid got upset. My husband didn’t know how to deal with him, so I had to.” One after another I listened as people described what I have come to call “soul sickness,” which has a consistent pattern despite differing circumstances — we repeat patterns and behaviors we once needed (often subconsciously) that are now harmful to us, and they stand in the way of the bodies, relationships, and lives we really want.
I realized that no matter how good of a practitioner I was or how sophisticated a program I designed, I couldn’t cure people’s addiction to productivity, martyrdom, or quick fixes. I couldn’t fix the deep core belief that success means grind until you collapse or love means abandon yourself until you disappear. I realized these ordinary people, much like the addicts I had come to know and love in recovery, were suffering from something much greater than knee pain. They were in a cycle of spiritual dysfunction, and their recovery was contingent on a level of readiness that was not just physical. I could spend days and weeks rewiring their nervous system through scientific and progressive exercise, but they had to simultaneously be ready and willing to rewire their emotional nervous system. Otherwise, the house of cards would eventually crumble.
Most of my patients were not addicts. But our journeys, struggles, and desires were not so different. Mind-body connection is, at its deepest level, the integration of our intellect and spirit so we can live in a way that is aligned with our values and integrity. It is excavating our secrets, triggers, and unhealthy behaviors and meeting them with compassion and consistency. Making micro-changes that lead to macro-results. This is the kind of work that shifts pain into power.
I’ve navigated betrayal and grief in enormous quantities throughout my life. In most cases, my reaction to crisis begins with a fierce reaction to control, fix, change, or numb the situation. Then, when that inevitably fails, I hit a spiritual bottom and become willing to try something new. From that place, I practice new behaviors, sometimes ones that challenge every coping mechanism I know, and eventually I have a new experience. Slowly, over time, my nervous system creates new feedback loops for how to handle things like heartbreak, infidelity, insanity, and death. What I find again and again is that hope, joy, laughter, and play are always there waiting. Sometimes it feels impossible, I know. But we are either walking through life half dead or fully alive. What’s your choice?
This book takes you on a journey. Through the stories of my life, I explain how, against all odds, I turned trauma into triumph. I describe the science behind the lengths that the body will go to hold on to what it knows, as well as its ability to be reprogrammed no matter what it has been through. As you learn about my life, you will see the odds were stacked pretty high against me. I easily could have ended up on skid row with a needle in my arm; I easily could have ended up dead.
Was some luck involved in getting me where I am today? Absolutely. Mostly, though, I worked very hard at changing the trajectory of my life. At each emotional bottom, I discovered a willingness to try something new. I held myself. I asked for help. I apologized. I told the truth. I slowed down. I did things that at one point seemed unimaginable until they became intrinsic, woven into the fabric of who I am today. My emotional well-being became contingent at any given time on how often I was using the Twelve Steps to navigate the precise life situation I was in. It has been my experience again and again that the Steps can be used for anything, big or small, to access more clarity, compassion, freedom, and joy. And if I do nothing else right on this earth, I at least want to share it with you.
I’ve found the more I use the Twelve Steps to navigate the business of everyday living, whether it’s the condescending boss, the toxic relationship, or the goddamn traffic, the more passionately I believe they can work for everyone. Addict or not, all of us suffer from some degree of soul sickness. We humans navigate love and loss throughout the lifespan with little to no guidance, often fumbling our way through with self-sabotaging behaviors we adopted in childhood or numbing practices our culture spoon-feeds us.
Breaking the Circuit is a book for the people who have tried everything and failed, on a soul level, to navigate life’s hardest things. My goal for this book is to make the language of the Twelve Steps current so their underlying messages are accessible for as many people as possible. After fifteen years sober, I have found that they are less about physical sobriety and more about emotional sobriety; they are a guide for how to stay open, honest, and hopeful through some of life’s toughest situations. Each chapter correlates with one of the Twelve Steps and extracts the universal message to help you, the reader, see how transformative the work can be when we practice a little bit at a time.
I’ve watched so many people I love, including myself, emotionally shut down in the face of pain. And when they armor up, one of two things happens. They either die a slow, spiritual death, spending their lives walking among the living lonely, disconnected, angry, and afraid; or they die a tragic physical death because the pain of living was too great. I am here to tell you there is a way out of this dichotomy, and it is available to everyone — to you — regardless of where you come from or what you’ve been through.
Welcome, and I hope you stay.
