TRANSCRIPT
When I think about the subject of addictions, I think about people who are blocked on their healing path. Meaning, some part of them really wants to heal, some part of them really wants to grow, some part of them really wants to make sense of the traumas in their life, the suffering that they are going through. But for whatever reason, that path is blocked, and they are using their addictions to bypass the healing process. They’re using their addictions to actually take their suffering away without actually doing any work to make sense of their suffering.
Where instead of taking their suffering and converting it into grieving, which would be growing on the healing path, they’re instead taking their suffering and they’re converting it back into dissociation. Dissociation being a prime consequence of trauma. And what does that mean, they’re converting their suffering into dissociation? Well, what they are doing, what people do, what I have done myself in various forms of addictions that I have had, is taking some external substance, some external thing. It could be so many different things that people are addicted to and using this external thing to make themselves feel good. But actually, really what they’re doing is making themselves feel less. They’re taking their feelings and they’re burying them into the unconscious.
For instance, taking alcohol as an example. Someone who is suffering, someone who is in a lot of pain, is taking alcohol, drinking it, and it’s giving them a feeling of euphoria. At least they say it’s euphoria, but really what it’s doing is it’s taking their feelings and making them go away. Taking all those painful feelings and splitting them off, pushing them down into the unconscious, below the surface. And the lack of those painful feelings, the lack of that suffering, often gets interpreted as feeling good, feeling euphoric, even being happy. And that can be a real relief in not having painful feelings of suffering.
But the interesting thing is suffering is actually healthier than dissociation. Feeling is actually healthier than feeling nothing. And so when people who have been traumatized experience dissociation, meaning they push their feelings down because their overwhelming reactions to trauma are too horrible to face, too horrible to feel, too horrible to deal with, or maybe simply unsafe to deal with—maybe people are still in that traumatized environment—well, when they start to heal, when they start to get into a safer place in their life, those feelings start to bubble up. And the first manifestation of that bubbling up is suffering, and it feels horrible.
People who suffer often are very depressed. They feel stuck in the suffering; they don’t know how to make it go away. So people often use addictions, whatever addictions they can come to, whatever they can find to make those feelings go down. Alcohol being one, a primary one. Drugs—people use all sorts of drugs to numb their feeling. And often people tailor their addictions to what is available to them and also tailor their addictions to how much pain they are in.
People can be addicted to their jobs, going to their job, totally losing themselves in their work, becoming workaholics, working so, so, so much that there is no room for their inner feelings, no room for their bubbling up trauma. I think video games also, in a kind of similar way, people using this outside form of kind of low-level interaction, interacting with the computer screen, or maybe interacting with distant people on the internet through a video game to obliterate themselves. And I think of back when I used to play a lot of video games in my most painful teen years. It was just to lose myself so I didn’t have to feel anything, so I didn’t have to think anything. All of my concentration, all of my energy, all of my emotional energy even went into this game. It really could be an addiction, a place where I needed more and more and more of it in order to feel good, but really to feel less.
And I have heard so many stories of people playing video games eight, nine, ten hours a day, sometimes after coming home from work, playing video games for half the night, losing their romantic relationships, sometimes even losing their jobs because of it, losing their relationship with other family members, even with their children, because they’re so focused on this game. Often because what’s going on really on the inside with them, the stuff that’s bubbling below the surface, is so painful that they’re just trying to make it go away.
And then when I say people can lose their relationships with their children because of their addictions, I think of two things with this. I think first of my mother, who had a terrible addiction to alcohol when I was a teenager, when I was a kid even. And it really horribly negatively affected her relationship with me, such that it put terrible, terrible walls between us and caused me a lot of pain. So her addiction actually spilled over into traumatizing me, and by traumatizing me in some ways, it set me up for addiction. It set me up to eventually have suffering that I wanted to blot out by some other means.
But then I think also of this idea of addiction harming children, and then I think of a flip thing that also parents can use their children as an addiction, or they can even outright have children as an addiction. People using their children to play out their feelings, people using their children to not have to deal with what’s going on on the inside as a way to dissociate. Sometimes people having more and more and more children as the children grow up and become more independent, less dependent on them, require less attention and less focus. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard parents panicking on the sort of inside emotional level, “Oh my god, if my children are growing up, my children are slowly breaking away from me and becoming independent. This addiction isn’t working. I need to have another child.” And people often do this also.
People having children because they see their marriages on the rocks. People actually can be using also their romantic relationships as addictions. Sex addicts, even love addicts. People who are constantly in relationships, relationships that are on how the relationships that are fostering dissociation. People being in so much pain on the inside that they always need to be in a relationship to externally focus their feelings so they don’t have to deal with what’s really going on on the inside. And when that relationship ruptures, the people can panic because their method for avoiding their inside pain is no longer working. So people can so quickly, at least people who have that addictive tendency in relationships, can quickly look and find often a brand new relationship to plug into in order to be able to quickly dissociate again.
And then I take a step back and I think, well, what could people do instead of having an addiction? What would be a healthier thing to do rather than to use an addiction to bury their feelings, to blot out their suffering? And I did mention it a little bit earlier. The idea that I have is to take that suffering and to make meaning out of it. And the way to make meaning out of suffering, the way to make meaning out of the bubbling up post-traumatic feelings that we have, that to some degree, from what I’ve seen, we all have, is to convert that suffering into grieving. To move forward on the healing process, to go from dissociation to suffering to grieving.
And the grieving process, that is not an addictive process at all. That’s a process by which those feelings are converted into purposeful consciousness, into awareness, into having perspective on one’s life, into taking those feelings and realizing that they lead us right into our history of loss. And then to make sense of that loss and to return to our true self, which was always beneath the suffering in the first place, even beneath the dissociation—the core of who we are. And that’s scary, and that’s hard. And also, when we grieve, when we begin the process of integrating and becoming whole people again, people who are not traumatized, there can be consequences in our lives. We can lose relationships with people who are less healthy. We can lose relationships with our families of origin, often the very people who set us up to be traumatized in the first place. And sometimes in family systems, from what I’ve seen, not only for little children but for adults too, in their relationship with their parents, with other members of their families of origin, healing is not okay. Integrating is not okay.
Realizing what traumas one has suffered is not okay, often from the perspective of families of origin. Troubled families, addictions are considered better, especially mild addictions. Now, often mild addictions, from what I’ve seen in our world, in our societies, are not even considered addictions. That’s considered normal. In fact, what I’ve seen is that mild addictions are often considered a healthy goal, an appropriate goal. If people can just find mild addictions, things that they can be so attached to that allow them to not have to feel their suffering, so they can stay dissociated, then the norm feels comfortable. The traumatized norm feels comfortable. The traumatized family system feels comfortable. It doesn’t rock the boat. Nobody criticizes people when they have mild addictions, and pretty much most people, from what I’ve seen, do have mild addictions—mild things that they are addicted to that they need in order to keep their pain buried. Things that if they didn’t have, their suffering would drive them crazy. Their suffering would be horrible. They wouldn’t know how to deal with it because they haven’t been putting energy in their life to figuring out how to grieve. Maybe their life, their relationships, the world that they have around them doesn’t give them any room or any liberty to be able to grieve, to really be able to cry out their feelings, to be able to really process their loss.
So for me, this is the goal. For me in my life, this has been the goal, and it continues to be the goal—to a world around me, a friendship circle around me, people around me, an internal life that I have with myself, a lifestyle that I have, the food that I eat, the bed that I sleep in, the things that I do during my day that allow me to be able to grieve, to not have to get lost in addictions. And addictions are everywhere. The world throws them at me, and it’s like, here’s a whole palette of addictions. Choose the addiction that you want. Will it be food? Will it be drugs? Will it be substances? Will it be sex? Oh, but then the world tells you, oh, if your addictions are too much, too horrible, intruding on other people, breaking the law even, we can replace your addiction with a new addiction.
I think of how some people use Alcoholics Anonymous for that, or even use religion for that, where they don’t have to feel their feelings, where they don’t have to grieve. But also, they’re addicted to it. If they don’t have this thing, their suffering is going to return. And I know, yes, there are people who use Alcoholics Anonymous in a way that might actually be a stepping stone toward grieving. But I also know a lot of people—people from my personal family even—who I’ve seen who have used Alcoholics Anonymous for decades, and they only became more dissociated as the result of using it. They never used it to take any step forward into grieving.
And I also was in Al-Anon, a 12-step program that I saw, yeah, it actually really helped me. But when I started moving forward and forward and forward into converting my suffering into grieving, I noticed I didn’t fit into that program anymore. And then I realized there were people who were in there for decades who were like gatekeepers against grieving. They were talking about how much Al-Anon had helped them, but I realized it helped them do what? They were actually using it as an addiction, and that was not something that I wanted. And it made me become aware also that things that people call healing, people call healthy, aren’t necessarily healthy just because it can make them feel less.
So for me, the key is to set my life up so that I can feel more, and yet I can use these feelings to propel me forward on the grieving process, on the healing process, so that ultimately my traumas get resolved, and then I’m no longer susceptible to addictions.
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