MIND MOVES:Addiction hovers at the fringes of all our lives
AS I walked into the church to speak at a public meeting about addiction, I wondered if anyone would show up. I imagined many people might be concerned that their attendance would be interpreted to mean that they had some kind of personal problem.
The truth of course is that we all struggle with addiction. You don’t have to have been in rehab or part of a formal 12-step programme to know what it feels like to depend on something so badly that any threat to take it away arouses terror in you; or to have to
rely on strategically placed mood-altering substances to get you through the day.
Addiction hovers at the fringes of all our lives. Sometimes we flirt with it when we’re not sure who we are or what’s right for us. We are naturally drawn by the forbidden, enticed by the exotic, and easily seduced by experiences that promise to give us an energy charge – particularly when we find our own company hard going and need to experience some kind of relief.
My personal favourite when it came to addiction was fantasy. At some point in my life, I think reality must have let me down. So as a young boy, I cultivated a private world where everything was charged and everything was larger than life. My personal “Narnia” was a safe place where I could wield narratives that compensated for my failure to come to grips with the real world. I regularly saved humankind – or at least some damsel in distress; I was always strong, fearless and successful; and, in spite of all of that, surprisingly modest about my achievements.
Addiction can grow in any part of our lives where we invest our energies in trying to escape reality rather than consciously face it; where we use some everyday activity, substance or experience to avoid life and change the way we feel. This may solve problems in the short term, but it doesn’t solve anything in the long run.
Carl Jung described addicts as frustrated mystics; people who look for an experience that will lift them out of their humdrum existence and make them feel alive. For a brief moment, their addictive behaviour may “work”, but ultimately their efforts to achieve transcendence are doomed; they end up feeling increasingly alienated from the world and they find it more and more difficult to live inside their own skin.
I think of addiction as a stage in life that we can outgrow. The decision to move beyond our addiction requires a recognition that whatever we’re doing is damaging our lives and probably the lives of people we love. The problem, however, with addictive behaviour is that the more we become immersed in it, the less we are able to see this.
Moving beyond addiction means taking seriously the need to experience life in a more vital, real way. Generally, this can only happen when we admit that we are not being honest with ourselves or with others – that in lots of ways we’re “phoney”. And that even though our life may look perfectly “normal”, we know there is something missing. And that something is “me”.
This isn’t easy because our culture defines “being normal” as fitting in, and it constantly reminds us that if we want to fit in, we should pretend we’re fine. To find our own voice may mean we have to face the uncomfortable truth that a great deal of what we’ve been taught to regard as “normal” is actually seriously dysfunctional.
Waking up and being real, after years of hiding from others, is not easy. It takes guts and it takes time and it needs support, because we can’t do it alone. It can happen quite suddenly, but most of the time, it happens very gradually. It’s a very personal adventure with many twists. It means letting go of lots of things that we have depended on to feel safe and opening ourselves to life and see what happens next.
To live beyond addiction means seeing what’s real and living life at a deeper level. We will still have to wash dishes, take care of our physical health, take time to nurture bonds of friendship and honour our responsibilities to others. But when we get beyond addiction, the life we live feels like it is ours and not someone else’s.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)