We Are All Addicts

We are all addicts. Everyone to a greater or lesser extent is addicted to

behavior or thinking despite the ongoing negative consequences.  

There is addiction everywhere in our society. Most people think of addiction as substance abuse disorders - alcohol, cocaine, meth, cannabis, benzos, etc.  Perhaps, they consider certain harmful behaviors addictive like cutting, over-eating, porn, or gambling - clinically referred to under the category: “substance-related and addictive disorders.” But I argue that addiction goes much, much further and deeper in our biology and psyche. We all know how quickly we can lose ourselves in social media black holes. Is that an addiction? Can it become an addiction? Most of us would without hesitation say, “Yes!” What about codependency and abusive relationships? What about sugar or caffeine? There are 12-step meetings focused on supporting individuals to overcome their food dependencies and codependent relationships. These issues undoubtedly divide clinical opinion on whether they are in fact “addictions,” but the addiction is clear to those suffering on the front lines seeking healing. But, what about even more subtle dimensions of human thought and behavior? What about anger? Is anger an addiction? What about self-pity? Can you become addicted to self-pity and the predictable neuro-chemical cocktail served up on demand? 

I have over 15 years of sobriety. My sobriety is co-extensive with my spiritual growth, sense of self, and my ability to serve society. My addiction was so strong it captured my entire attention, dictated my time, shaped interests, my literal address, organized my relationships and ability to earn. It shaped my entire life-world. The pain became so excruciatingly acute and demoralizing that my life depended on getting sober - complete abstinence from “all mood and mind altering substances” became a requirement for existence. And, sobriety (and the living fellowships within 12-step rooms) was the first introduction to a spiritual path that gripped me to my core, extending to the deepest areas of my lived experience. 

Addiction, and the suffering it afforded, paradoxically became the “jumping off point” I needed to experience transformative healing. The gravity of sobriety impressed its power on me so completely that my entire professional career has been drawn toward the business of helping others heal from addiction. The more I write, think, research, and work on the front lines of addiction the more convinced I am that addiction exists along a spectrum from gross to subtle - where “gross” on the continuum is physically measurable in both cause and consequence and “subtle” on the continuum is non-physical or psychically oriented and resists concrete scientific measurement. Alcoholism would be an example of gross addiction. Self-pity would be an example of an addiction more subtle and psychic in nature. I suffered from both, but there was an order of operations in the process of healing and sobriety. I started by quitting alcohol and drugs; upon that foundation my addiction to self-pity and the correlated consequences came into the light of my awareness, and I moved toward becoming emotionally sober. This process is well documented within 12-step worlds. Bill Wilson - the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous - authored an essay titled, “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety” in 1958 which led in turn to multiple publications by the same title discussing the expansion of healing and sobriety over our emotional existence. 

But, there’s another layer of depth here that I’d like to explore. It’s at the level of identity or as Carl Jung would call it, the “self.”

If we can agree that addiction can manifest more subtly and take hold at the level of emotional states, that we can become addicted to brain chemistry of anger, fear, victimization, etc; then I would like to argue that we can become addicted to our identity, to our sense of ‘self.’

Who I am is an aggregate of an entire ecology of selfhood - from the religio-cultural milieu within which I was born, to the genetics and dynamics of the family system that constituted my youth, to the peer and community influences, environmental context, and the powerful degree of my agency over my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Our entire lives we learn how to own our power to think, feel, and act which becomes our character. The habits of our character produce the same thinking, feeling, and behaving, that in-turn, produce the same neuro-chemical brain production which is the predictable "reward" and "payoff" we expect to receive. We can become hypnotized by our own character, addicted to the predictability and brain-chemical storehouse of drugs we crave day after day after day. At this point change becomes deeply frightening and as we age less and less probable because it threatens the addicted self.

Only through sustained practice of spiritual interventions (novel behavior, therapeutics, somatic and psychic discipline) can anyone interrupt and change the self we become addicted too. Often, just like gross addiction - individuals only change after a significant painful event in life - death, accident, divorce, trauma, loss - and even then many fail to grasp the opportunity for awakening, healing, and transformation life offers.

The mark of a healthy, spiritually mature adult is the ability to take 100% responsibility for our character, rather than blame the circumstantial dynamics of our life.

Just to the degree that we abdicate that responsibility do we suffer the weight and presence of addictive tendencies (subtle or gross) that resist and neglect transformation. As Scott Peck writes in "The Road Less Traveled" and before him, Eric Fromm writes in his “Art of Loving” - this neglect of responsibility is basis of all human suffering. 

The process of overcoming addiction has moved from gross to subtle in my life. With each stage of healing I unlock more agency to direct and transform my character in the world - to take 100% responsibility for my life unshackled by an addictive identity that no longer serves me. A friend recently reminded me that in truth, everything is impermanent. Addiction is just the resistance to truth, metabolized in our mind/body. You can be whoever you really want to be; but you have to let go, to end your addictions - addictions to substances and cycles of harm and even to your obsession with self.