Addiction Is The Path

Addiction is killing our world. Addiction has become hypnotic, unmarked, and unnoticed. Addictions are ubiquitously consuming our relationships and time, robbing us from a fulfilled state of being. Addiction isn’t just the alcohol dependent or the marijuana dependent or the sex dependent or even our addiction to social medias…

ADDICTION IS THE EVERYDAY. 

The grosser forms of addiction are obvious, strong sign posts that something is wrong. My addictions were an attempt to manage my pain and my failures. And for so, so long these methods of negotiating my pain worked. The amount of relief I would get from the process and ritual of drinking and drugging was itself medicine. And after each new consequence - another failed relationship, another plea for money from my family, another excuse for my landlord, another job I quit, another accident - the moments of self-betrayal got worse and worse as I would decide to use again. We say that our bottom was the place where we could no longer lower our standards to excuse our behavior. We descend to our own bottoms blindly. I didn’t know my bottom had a basement until I finally lived in the space those of us in recovery call, “incomprehensible demoralization” - a place of spiritual darkness.

My bottom was a hard truth to accept, and it was only the beginning of the path. The healing process is always preceded by some form of physical, emotional, mental or spiritual bottom.   My bottom meant I had to let go of an entire vision I had for my life. It meant that I had to embrace grief, and I had to build new practices with new people in new places. But it clarified what I’ve witnessed over and over, what those of us in recovery have finally come to understand - it is through our greatest weakness that we discover our greatest power; our addictions and the pain they induce in us provide the needed ingredient to profoundly change our lives. This is what I mean when I say that addiction is the path. 

I’ve worked in recovery for years, have practiced sobriety in my own life for years; I have loved 12-step life - the rooms, the path, the fellowship - and I have healed and grown.  What a beautiful thing to heal and grow beyond an addiction consuming your life. Healing from these grosser forms of addiction helped clarify a spiritual path for my life. But here’s the thing about addiction and the healing journey. The grosser forms of addiction are just the beginning. Addiction is a subtle foe; its forms innumerable. As I heal and move into new forms of clarity and empowerment I see more. I see how I am addicted to emotional states that seek to replicate experiences of past addiction - a sense of anger, of self-justification, a sense of victimization transferring, disassociating from responsibility - all flood my mind and body with hormonal narratives that induce addictive feelings and states of being. These forms of subtle addiction are less destructive in the short-term, they are more excusable, the compromises of character they demand seem inconsequential when we easily look around and see everyone else excusing the same behaviors or worse. These subtle forms of addiction are hard to address, they live behind the curtain of our awareness, but they have become the everyday, and they are killing our world.

WE LIVE IN AN ADDICTED SOCIETY.

Just as those of us in recovery have lived the path of healing by overcoming our addiction it has become plain to see that this need for healing from addiction is writ large upon our entire world. Perhaps, just like the individual whose bottom provides the necessary catalyst for transformation, our addicted world might find a path of healing to overcome the mounting threat of our collective addiction. Our collective addiction is now written into the fabric of our civic life, our religious life, and our institutional life; it is everyday and just like the individual’s path of recovery requires a fundamental transformation.

I could spend a great deal more time unearthing the subtle ways social addiction manifests to produce dysfunctional policies, environmental and economic consequences, unbelievable consumption and unending waste, institutional and corporate abuse and dishonesty, but these are largely known, yet persist because we have yet to find the place where we can no longer lower our standards to excuse our collective behavior. 

It is such a blessing to know that the solutions remain the same. The solutions are steadfast and perennial. They are spiritual in nature and only require one thing: our entire life, a surrender of our entire life to love, to forgiveness, to healing and a profoundly empowered responsibility. So in the short-term we do what we can. I do what I can. It is very small, just a life. But, if each of us commit to living a path of healing, what a wonderful world that would make.