Addiction- It Works
Addiction is a classic example of the potential of the human motion in form. We are programmed to seek more, to fight for more and to make everything an extremity, but God forbid we fall out of sync with it and get addicted. What a challenge it can be for someone to successfully navigate their way through life with both balance and discipline with the availability of such destruction. Addiction can be seen as us rejecting how low we feel, searching for salvation as we channel our right to feel better. Something doesn’t make sense. We search for contentment until it comes and when it does, we attach. How could we not, why would we not? We want to depend on something reliable, predictable, something we can control. Here in this space, it is safe as there is no risk of being let down.
It provides an escape to an unsatisfactorily painful reality. In our Self-generated attempt to feel good we lose the communication with our pain as we become more and more wedded to the solution. If there is a way to stop the pain, we take it, creating layers and layers of disconnect from the route as we perpetuate the cycle of avoidance building mechanisms that yes, disconnect us from the feeling of pain but equally disguise the truth of what was initially ruptured.
Addiction- Now it doesn’t.
It’s okay to lean into something to try and feel better. It’s normal why would you not. It’s instinctual and natural. When I drink it goes away. When I eat I avoid. When I smoke it doesn’t hurt. But when I eat too much I feel rubbish. When I can’t go a day without drink I cripple in shame. When I smoke beyond my own pleasure, I know I am no longer responsibly or lovingly self-soothing. When it becomes a mental health difficulty or an addiction or another type of self-destructive behaviour, we have tipped too far into dependency and compromise. What may have convinced you was your salvation, the thing that you once used to regulate, cope and satisfy has accidentally become the source of the pain you acted to avoid.
Now here’s the choice; You sit with the pain and the uncomfortable choices you have made to be able to cope. Yes, this will inevitably be accompanied by some level of suffering but at the point of addiction, likely, so is the substance/behaviour itself. What the pain holds that the addiction cannot is the potential of resolution. Addiction and the choices you have made to cope do not have the capacity to offer you any authentic healing. Here you can only address superficial suffering, as your relationship with your chosen substance or method of destruction is a misplaced occupier of the pain. It acts only to mask the pain but does not have the power or ability to eradicate the problem. Temporarily it may appear to have done just this. It may temporarily suspend feelings of shame, doubt, fear or whatever it may be we are attempting to separate ourselves from. It feels good a solution has been found and it works; well it works until it doesn’t. Now those very same feeling that your chosen substance was used to protect are there again. But the source has changed. The source is now the superficial blaming ground of the addiction with no real substance. When you are in this place, this is when you really are being encouraged to journey back to your truth. The pain is there anyway. It cannot be avoided. This is when you may as well be addressing your truth rather than a fabricated version of the same pain skewed by your attempt to avoid it.
Tackling Addiction
Addiction can be understood as a safety seeking behaviour; what we do to regulate our feelings, what we may do to avoid discontent, and what we can do to experience pleasure and enjoyment. It can be possible to engage in a destructive behaviour to heighten pleasure or to amplify the joys that already govern us but equally we can use these very same behaviours as a way of avoiding, distracting, or suppressing what we are crying out for ourselves to notice. Anything we do in a single moment to help us regulate our feelings in response to what we are experiencing can be seen as an attempt to self sooth. On a righteous path to seek the equilibrium we so deserve, we often find ourselves turning to external means to help us regulate the invisibility of our internal world. This can be for external purposes perhaps, to help us play a role, to be viewed in a certain light or to simply make conditions tolerable. It can also be for internal purposes; to free us of guilt, to mask our shame or to temporarily suspend our internal dialogue of self-doubt. Either way the principles remain. A manifestation of beautifully and intricately woven beings innocently searching for something that makes sense consumed by a void that does not.
Sometimes we don’t know why we’re doing it, sometimes we do. As you’re reading this you may already understand why you reach for your safety blanket or you may not have noticed that that was what you were doing. Wherever you are in your journey, to approach change or understanding with kindness, a good starting point can be to imagine ourselves as the child that we once were. The child that has no resources and no skills, so beautifully blank, ready to be conditioned by a world that holds the rains on someone’s birth right to experience love or to be pulled from their truth inevitably leading them to a latter more complex path to attempt to return to it. Dependent on others ability to sooth us and regulate our emotions appropriately, we helplessly are born subservient, relying on others attunement to the needs we are not yet able to identify in a world we do not yet have the capacity to understand. What we feel, we internalise and we build upon. What we don’t feel, we search for; sometimes in love but sometimes in destruction. To stop an addiction would be effortless if it was possible to just not feel. As you reach for your safety blanket, bravely search for the message that lies beneath; What is it you are trying to seek, sooth, distract or disguise? Address yourself as the child that couldn’t explain or the child that was misunderstood, ignored or denied. Offer yourself the experience you never had that you chase so desperately to gain. Give yourself the voice to speak the words that were never spoken. Free of a need to blame another and without striving for any form of vindication, you relinquish your power as you commit to begin to discover the feelings that govern these choices. You notice how a destructive choice of relief can only serve to perpetuate the guilt, the shame, the pain and the confusion that motivates these choices in the first place.
Once you have addressed the child and given it the voice it needs you can then respond to it from the adult. The child may speak in a way that is disorganised, it might not even have words, it might be all-feeling. Trust the adult to figure it out guided by your advanced ability to be doing this. This is not stagnant nor is it a linear process. You can move between these states having a back-and-forth conversation with the unresolved conflict of the child and the adult who’s so willing and so prepared to give it anything it needs. With no limits, no boundaries and no parameters you can become the bottomless pit of resources available to give yourself whatever you need and whatever it takes.
Once you achieve your own coherence and sense of understanding over the patterns that led you to your addiction, the beauty here can be an ability to see yourself through to the end of your own process of healing without the need for others to mirror or replicate your form. If we feel the need to reprimand another and push for someone to take responsibility or ownership of our feelings, we hold ourselves locked in a position waiting to be freed by someone else’s ability to match what we have already discovered to be our truth. Surrendering your freedom to someone else’s judgment and acceptance of your pain serves only to perpetuate the cycle of the patterns of feelings you aim to resist. Here you may set yourself up for the possibility to feel invalidated, denied or ignored as you allow the quality of your experience to be dependent on the acceptance of another. I point this out as this Interestingly replicates the pattern of addiction and our return to dependency.
A Part of the challenge
A part of the problem that can keep people wedded to their addictions is that it can be difficult to identify yourself in your old surroundings and relationships with a new awareness of a habit that no longer serves you. As you settle into your new understanding of what you really need, it can be a test to develop this relationship with yourself as you are exposed to the world and to people that create and test the part of you compelled to reach for the comfort you seek to feel soothed by but are aiming to avoid. It can sometimes feel safer to withdraw from the world in this way as you are then protecting yourself from anything that may encourage you to behave in a way that triggers your need to retreat to your crutch. You may still feel you need it to make certain exposures tolerable or even possible and for you to perform in the ways you always have, to feel accepted, confident, wanted, or whatever it may be. However, once this awareness has landed – that those changes need to be made, you cannot enjoy the salvation of what you were previously doing in the same way you once did. This can be a real challenge when trying to negotiate where that leaves you in terms of your identity. Here is an example of another challenge of integrating the self from the version that once was and the self who is becoming (Please see The Integrating Self article)