It's pure irony how many of us there are who are seeking release from prison, but who fail to realize that there's another, more restrictive prison from which we must first escape.

This other prison, the one many of us have been in for more of our adult lives, is the one without bars and razor wire, without cement walls and steel toilets. Yet it is equally confining. Without truly escaping from this personal prison, one can never have true freedom, even if release from the physical is granted to us.

One must "escape" from his "personal prison" before physically being released from the physical one, because failure to do so will result in forever circling through the Revolving Door.

My elevated personal awareness today is directly tied to my ability to see my own past for all that it is. What it is, is a lesson. My main life-lesson right now is recidivism and what I missed on my first trip through the prison experience.

I believed that once I got out -- that was it! I believed that once I was released I'd never, ever return through the revolving door. I believed that prison was a lesson that I'd only have to learn once.

Well, I was wrong. I obviously didn't learn everything that I needed to learn to stay out of prison. In hindsight, I never really left prison at all. I remained confined by my self-imposed prison of denial, over-confidence, and compulsiveness related to my addiction.

During my initial five years in prison I never really believed that I was an addict. I believed that I lost control over my drug use. I believed that drug use netatively affected my life, and caused me to make irrational decisions. I believed and accepted that my drug use was what put me into prison. I even understood that my drug use had become a prison in and of itself.

But what I didn't understand is that the drugs themselves were a prison from which I needed to escape!

When I was in prison the first time, I felt that the only confining prison from which I needed release was the physical one that I found myself living in. I didn't realize that I was in "prison" long before I was "imprisoned". I overlooked the very purpose of prison; that in addition to punishment and deterrence, it was designed to help me learn from my mistakes, and come out a better person with a new attitude and a changed way of thinking.

It was supposed to incarcerate my body while I learned how to free my mind. But while I was physically behind bars, my mind stayed incarcerated too. After my physical release, I still kept my level of thinking locked down.

It wasn't until I had relapsed that I realized I never really became free. It wasn't until after I began committing crimes to support my returned drug habit that I realized that addition was my real prison.

And it wasn't until after I was re-incarcerated that I realized the door to prison revolves for each and every person who doesn't first escape their psychological jail before getting released from their physical one.

Escaping the psychological prison is most important, but it's not as easy as leaving the physical one because the latter opens its doors when your time is up. The phychological prison only opens its doors when you put in the time and effort and achieve the understanding necessary to free yourself. There is no outside guard to open those doors. You have to open them yourself.

You have to understand that you've become imprisoned by self-defeating behaviors, and that your belief system has led you to a psychological prison of self-sabotage. You have to understand that the things you've done caused you to give up the control -- and possibly the destiny -- of your life to someone else: the Department of Corrections.

For me, it was my prison of addiction, the overconfidence engendered by earlier success, and the compulsiveness of my thought process. Addiction plus these two personality traits were not only relapse warning signs which led to high-risk situations, but were also the mental walls of my psychological prison.

Returning through the revolving door after relapse showed me that escaping from my psychological prison was the only way that I was going to truly become free.

B. Michael DeLeon
August 3, 2005