Addiction. What IS addiction? Certain people love to debate words. But I like to think about what words are for. Words are concepts. Representations of ideas to convey thoughts from one person to another. They are TOOLS designed to help us. A word’s definition is our friend. It’s a helpful frame to share our experiences, whether internal or external, with others. People who enjoy fighting about word definitions crave the debate. Not resolving conflict.
I could look up the word and define it. But such action opens more debate. I could choose to create my unique innovative word. An idea to explain the nuances of my discussion. Such a contrived word would fail to find wide appeal and contain no history of understanding. So. For the record, Let’s say I’m wrong. Will THAT work? Okay. So, moving on, in my wrong way, how does my personal experience define addiction? Simple. Any behavior a person acts out, bringing on themselves negative consequence. A behavior which on their best day in their best moment would discard. Choosing to no longer engage in such a behavior.
What are examples of addictions? They could range from something benign like eating chocolate. Or they could swing toward serious choices like alcohol, drugs or sex. To keep this post light, I will refer to my “soda addiction” from when I was younger. I’m sure I also had a FOOD addiction. The first clear manifestation of a behavior I failed to control and will discuss here is less severe. It involved my addiction to drinking Dr. Pepper instead of water.
From the age of 13 years old until 30, I drank approximately
one hundred ounces of soda every day. Every day. This is NOT an exaggeration. I’m sure there are other people out there that have/had/are currently doing this, but don’t stop to do the math. That ounce estimate is conservative. I remember more days than not, drinking at least four 44-ounce fountain sodas within one day.
No bueno.
There’s no need to discuss all the mechanisms going on behind the scenes. How our brain wiring creates this addictive process. My cherished friends share not my obsessions. Psychology, brain science, and studies revealing chemical reactions sparking within our neurons.
I’m discussing with you the stuff you NEED. The good stuff to help you improve your life.
It’s the story we tell ourselves.
Slow down. Read it aloud to yourselves, even if you’re in a public library because this idea is EVERYTHING.
It’s the story we tell ourselves.
Through mindfulness and NLP, I have learned to SEE and pay attention to my own THOUGHTS. For decades of my life, these processes remained hidden. Bubbling below the surface. Aspects of my “personality” or “genetic makeup.” Now I know better. Society has failed to teach us how to master our own THOUGHTS. Mastering our THOUGHTS seems like an Eastern Religious pastime. Designed for people who don’t need to work. They sit on mats, stare at the trees, and mediate all day focused only on THOUGHTS.
Not us. We’re busy. We’ve got jobs. Kids. Mortgages. Which makes us exhausted so now we gotta PLAY. Watch Netflix. Drink Beer. Relax.
Nobody has time to pay attention to their own thoughts!
Let’s pretend all my addiction struggles included Dr. Pepper. Let’s say I filled up the bathtub with Dr. Pepper. I inserted needles into my veins. I pumped myself full of Dr. Pepper while sniffing Dr. Pepper. You get the point. My addictions bubbled and overflowed out of control.
Somehow, I felt convinced it wasn’t ME. Nope. Not me. For sure, someone else. Someone else inside of me. A force. A power. An evil entity overpowering me and wrestling with me until I lost. Defeat. Time to slip into my Dr. Pepper bath, lathering and lavishing in mindless pleasure.
I awoke the next morning with a residue of guilt and toxic shame. It weighed down on me like the world SMASHING down on Atlas. I would recover. I paid for the addiction transaction with a predictable amount of guilt and shame. Reset. Now, barrel down the same ol’ familiar path.
Dr. Pepper forever!
Dr. Richard Schwartz created his innovative IFS therapy technique. Using his technique, I learned a personality possesses “parts.” For me, I’ve identified at least three parts. It reminds me of the Hurting Child, the Controlling Child and the Natural Child. The splitting stemming from childhood trauma. This is a bit different, though. IFS teaches us to speak with the PARTS of us. I have a five-year-old “hurting, anxious, scared” child terrified of life. Everything. Every loud noise. A person’s scowl. A friend ignoring him. It erupts into a life-threatening event. All filtered through the eyes of my five-year-old self.
I also have my ten-year-old self. He’s angry. Dripping with vicious anger. I’m talking Hulk rage, ‘don’t make me angry,’ anger. For real. Last year I punched a wall and broke my little finger. My arm in a sling and stuck in a cast for two months. I’m not telling you to brag, far from it. The mere act of discussing my anger, makes my five-year-old tremble. Part of my psyche likes to “tell on myself.” When I do, I’m seeking forgiveness from others. The unhealed parts of me have FAILED to master extending self-forgiveness.
I’m triggered DAILY by life. Unrealized expectations, Moral Licensing, Unnecessary Conflict, Stress, Hunger, Frustration. Fill in the blank. Anything my mind perceives as “negative emotions” starts a familiar cycle. A cycle I created as a small child because no one taught me self-soothing or assure me I wouldn’t die.
Remember, all addiction comes from unresolved emotion. Quote: “What are we unwilling to feel?” My child-self received no instruction on how to cope with negative emotions. I discovered addictions for comfort. Had a difficult day? Bullies? Did life feel out of control? Did things not go MY way? Did I not get what I want?
Mmm. Dr. Pepper. You’re my friend. My comfort. So sweet! You taste AMAZING.
This is an important part. This is the part you need to pay attention to. This is the KEY. This is where you listen CLOSER. Did I mindlessly reach for Dr. Pepper? Kind of. The story I told myself became so automatic and so frequent and familiar. The story faded into white noise humming in the background. Flowing into unconsciousness. It repeated and repeated and repeated until I tuned the entire process out.
My adult-self gulped down knowledge and wisdom. I became exhausted by the “Dr. Pepper” cycle. It held me back. An ancient past paradigm. This addiction never served my natural child’s true desires. A makeshift retreat for my anxious five-year-old self triggered by stress or trauma. Tiny traumas. Somebody honked at me in traffic, somebody gave me a bad tip, somebody frowned at me.
My five-year-old self felt scared. Then my ten-year-old self jumps into action. Anger is a great motivator. For building or destroying. My ten-year-old Hulk likes to destroy. And he’s LOUD. He screams things like, “You’re not worthy! You’re a failure! You’re pathetic!” You get the point. And if I don’t MATTER, and nothing I do MATTERS, what does it matter if I fill up my tub with delicious and bubbly Dr. Pepper?
Still. It gets old. *sigh*
I mustered up fragile courage to begin Therapy yet once again. I directed the emotional power from guilt and toxic shame toward seeking help. A useful redirection of such a powerful emotional signal. It’s not a payment for sin, or perceived sin. It’s a message from your self-preservation mechanism. It shouts: DO something about the behavior causing you pain. The overwhelming guilt whispered: “You need therapy. Again.”
I held on to resentment toward my third therapist. She listened to me whine and tell the same ol’ Dr. Pepper story. She even nodded off during our sessions. Her all-important takeaways included, “Were you abused as a child? Sometimes we learn worthlessness in the womb. Okay, let’s focus on maintenance.” My mind tends to blame her for inadequacy although an alternative is more generous. She may have attempted to elevate my thinking. I had no frame of reference for solutions she suggested. I tuned out concepts my angry and resentful ten-year-old self failed to grasp. It feels easier to blame her than acknowledge the amount of WORK it requires to rewrite my story. I flipped my anger at myself toward her, again telling the ‘victim’ story. It’s HER fault I’m not getting better!
Hmm. Let’s assume her good intentions. Let’s dismiss my HARSH judgement of her efforts to help me. Regardless, my response reaped little progress. In my cracked and critical mind, she promoted Learned Helplessness. A thinly veiled scheme to keep her roster full. I found no interest in pouring my heart out to a therapist for them to pat me on the back and say, “Yay, you’re human too.” My resentful mind reasoned I could spend the money I spent on her and invest in more Dr. Pepper.
No. But. That was the past. In a different place. A different self. I’ve grown since then. Now, I needed to TRY again.
My first session with my fourth therapist broke my entire STORY. You see, for seven years I told myself all sorts of stories. They sounded like this: I have PTSD. I experienced trauma as a child and these stories have embedded permanent pain into my brain. When I get triggered, this pain resurfaces. I need to invest mountains of time and revisit every painful memory. Use mental tweezers for a meticulous extraction of pain. Like removing a THOUSAND porcupine quills from pin cushion. EMDR. A helpful technique. Pull up the painful memory along with light and cognitive therapy. I keep the memory but no longer FEEL the accompanying negative emotion. I also had a story about head injuries. One in four incarcerated people have frontal lobe damage. A traumatic brain injury to the self-control mechanism in their brain. That’s it. That’s my story. I’m broken, from a physical and psychological perspective. And until I get in there and “fix” everything, I’m gonna keep succumbing to my Dr. Pepper bath urges.
In our first session, she broke my story. No PTSD. No broken brain. All anxiety. Right up here, up top, on the surface. An accessible place in my mind. I didn’t need to spend years digging and fixing. I needed to pay attention to what I told myself NOW in this moment.
I realized an insight that dropped me to my knees. The story I told myself involved being a victim. As a child, I was a victim. I had limited control. But, as an ADULT, I do have control. There no longer existed a power above me forcing me to do anything. Every single choice I made was deliberate. There existed no hidden alien inside me. No broken neuron valve. I made the conscious choice every time to take a Dr. Pepper bath. I retold myself a false story. A lie. A lie contrived to conceal myself from the full weight of my actions.
This “victim” story had hung around so long, and I told it to myself so MANY times, I never questioned it. Well. I keep taking Dr. Pepper baths, with all its negative consequences and I don’t want to, so it must be someone ELSE. It’s not me. It’s someone else. Not me. Someone else. Someone else. Someone else….
But, when I said this story ALOUD, to my therapist, I couldn’t believe the lie anymore. The spell broke. The insubstantial weight of nothing melted into mist.
The lie collapsed. It was me. The darkness. The decadent desire. All me. I could no longer get away with pointing at someone else. There was no one else there. It was only ME. The five-year-old was me. The ten-year-old was me. All me.
My wonderful therapist calls this empowerment.
For three months, I was unshakeable. Feeling and channeling my HULK power. Pouring it into goodness. Creating the LIFE I had always wanted but felt too scared and too full of “Dr. Pepper” to make happen.
My familiar story failed to go down without a FIGHT.
Addictions are a message. A story created by the unconscious to signal you something is WRONG. A coping mechanism designed by a child’s brain to cope with stress and trauma. It “speaks” in a foreign language. A different language from how we to speak to ourselves or one another. I used to HATE my addictions. That’s because no one explained to me WHAT they were signaling.
Addictions are your mind’s way of telling you something is WRONG. At least, experiencing the urge. The actual addiction is your mind and body begging for the relief of distraction. Self-destructive behavior to avoid the PAIN. An old coping mechanism from the past. You must understand something important. This story involving my urge to drink Dr. Pepper is incomplete. Believing I had only TWO choices. Either drink the Dr. Pepper or suffer an unbearable agony. I fabricated a FALSE dichotomy.
There exists a THIRD option. Resolve the emotion. Sometimes, resolution means allowing yourself to FEEL the negative emotion. Our society has promoted an unhelpful and FALSE story. Feeling sadness, anger, frustration, fear, equals “failed” somehow. NOT TRUE. We live in a painful world. Pain is our mind’s tool for reminding us about what is WRONG. That’s it. It’s not “Feel pain and fail” or drink Dr. Pepper.
The third option involves feeling the pain and experiencing LIFE and be HUMAN. Avoiding pain solves NOTHING. Lean into the pain. Feel it. Cry. Hug the signal your brain is initiating from a place of LOVE. Feel simultaneous joy. Our mind retains the capacity to recognize life revealing its cracks and sharp edges.
Trying to resolve my addictions has opened wide my mind to the extraordinary beauty of pain. I have a new little mantra I tell myself: Lean into the Pain.
For decades I believed lies. I believed when I experienced emotional or physical pain, I had failed hardcore. The only purpose of life is to experience happiness. If I’m anything but, then I’ve failed. I spent years and years PUSHING myself toward “only happiness.”
And I spent years and years bathing in Dr. Pepper when I failed.
Now. Now I see I believed a FALSE dichotomy. It’s not experience happiness or fail.
It’s bathe in all your emotions and LIVE.
Now, when my urge to take a Dr. Pepper bath emerges, I tell myself a new story. I ask myself: What am I REALLY feeling? WHY am I feeling that way? Not imagining what I SHOULD be feeling. My little five-year-old self shakes at his own shadow. My adult-self creates instant harsh judgement. Ah, you’re too old to still be afraid of your own shadow so it MUST be something else.
Now, I tell myself the truth. Yes. I AM scared of my own shadow. And when I look up, I notice everyone else is too. And then I wish we could all be KIDS again. When a five-year-old sees another five-year-old crying and afraid, what does he DO? He runs up and hugs her. Without question. Without judgement. Not asking if she has VALID reason to be afraid. He hugs her and tells her he’s here for her.
Why did we ever stop doing that?
I love my addictions. An odd map to understanding why we hurt. I choose to hug my inner child. I no longer loathe myself. I’m on a mission to heal my pain, one loving hug at a time.