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The condition in extreme is identifiable but the less obvious version of addiction is still painful, and arguably worse, because we simply adapt to living in pain and never countenance the beautiful truth: there is a solution.
Because the instinct that drives the compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation and tepid despair, because the problem is ultimately ‘being human’ in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. We are all on the addiction scale.
The very idea that you can somehow make your life alright by attaining primitive material goals – whether it’s getting the ideal relationship, the ideal job, a beautiful Berber rug or forty quids’ worth of smack – the underlying idea, ‘if I could just get X, Y, Z, I would be okay’, is consistent and it is quite wrong.
Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritized to the point of destructiveness.
What happens when you don’t follow the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need to eat and purge? The only way to find out is to not
do it, and that is a novel act of faith.
Here’s some good news for the fallen, for those of you that are reading this in despair, the junkies, the alkies, the crack-heads, anorexics, bulimics, dyspeptics, perverts, codependent, love-addicted, hopeless cases: I now believe addiction to be a calling. A blessing.
Most people in the West belong to a popular cult of individualism and materialism where the pursuit of our trivial, petty desires is a daily ritual.
Curiously, later examination of these principles revealed that self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition.
‘Who is the me that I am trying to protect?’, that’s a question that we’ll ponder over these chapters and possibly answer. Although, I’ll be honest, the riddle of understanding the true nature of Self has baffled the finest minds humanity has had to offer since time began. Still, I like a challenge.
Where I have found this program most rewarding and yet most challenging is in the way that it has unravelled my unquestioned faith that I was the centre of the universe and that the purpose of my life was to fulfil my drives, or if that wasn’t possible, be miserable about it in colourful and creative ways.
The reason I worked the 12 Steps was because I was desperate. The reason I continue to is because they have awakened me to the impossibility of happiness based on my previous world view: that I am the centre of the world and that what I want is important.
As Eckhart Tolle says, ‘addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.’
Step 1 invites us to admit that we are using some external thing, a relationship, a drug or a behaviour as the ‘power’ that makes our life liveable. It asks if this technique is making our life difficult. By admitting we are ‘powerless’ over whatever it is, we are saying we need a new power, that this current source of power is more trouble than it’s worth.
Where the ‘one day at a time’ homespun, thanks Nan, wisdom kicks in is with the rather Zen and incontrovertible truth that life is experienced in the present, beyond today your projections of life are conceptual.
This ‘one day at a time’ cliché when taken plainly is no less profound than any ‘be in the moment’ Eastern wisdom I’ve since encountered. Today is all I have.
The unmanageability though has a disturbing and, in my case, demonstrable clause: when I yield control to that part of myself, when I drink or use or say ‘fuck it’ around any destructive behaviour, I don’t know when I’ll get my life back or what state it will be in when I do.
The unmanageability at its heart means that there is a beast in me. It is in me still. I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to be respected. There is a wound. I believe that this is more than a characteristic of addiction. I think it is a part of being human, to carry a wound, a flaw and again, paradoxically, it is only by accepting it that we can progress.
If there is something in your life that is causing you a problem and you’re aware of it, I bet you’ve tried using will, crystals, hypnotism and pills to placate it. My suspicion is they haven’t worked and my experience is they never will. Oddly, counterintuitively, in our culture of individualism and self-centred valour, it is by surrendering that we can begin to succeed. It is by ‘admitting that we have no power’ that we can begin the process of accessing all the power we will ever need.
The 12 Steps along with the support of others who understand how I think and feel, whether that’s the trivial urge to use porn or suicidal thoughts are the only method I know of for disrupting detrimental habits.
For me, today, on this planet I thankfully aspire to more than brief interludes of numbness through food, sex and the acquisition of delightful tight trousers with unpronounceable names; particularly as I now know they are all ciphers, poor facsimiles of the thing I’m actually seeking.
My life is about preserving the conditions where it is less likely that I will quantum leap into the other guy.
We’ve just admitted we have a problem and that our lives have become unmanageable. It’s normal to expect that this kind of admission will come as a blow to the ego. It is our ego who up until now has been running the show, with a bit of help from whatever behaviour or substance we’ve just been forced to accept is a problem.
So we need hope: hope that we can change, hope that there is another way.
‘You’ve faced obstacles, inner and outer, that have prevented you from becoming the person you were “meant to be” and that is what we are going to recover.’
Like a lot of people with addiction issues, I pick away at concepts, ruminating and nervously reflecting. Are we alone in the universe? What are the forces that drive nature? What initiated this process? Did anything initiate this process? Is time even real? What the hell is consciousness anyway?
In practical terms, power is the ability to effect change. On our own we didn’t have enough power to change so we need access to a power that exceeds that.
This power comprises the following: I surrendered. I applied these steps to my thinking and acting. I sought the help of others. I helped others. I developed a new perspective.
Either an artist makes friends with the emptiness of ‘success’, ‘fame’, ‘glamour’, or as we have seen, time and time again, they check out in drab splendour, candles at the end of long driveways, vigils held, questions asked.
I began commenting on social issues in The Trews, thinking, ‘I can be of use here. I can use my voice and humour to highlight hypocrisy and exploitation.’ But at some indiscernible point I became excited by the power. See, the power again! The power! The idea that something can make me feel good! The ego’s love of self-centred power.
‘Limitless consciousness, source of all light and love, please lay aside for me doubt and prejudice and give me willingness to believe that you can solve this problem, too, the way you have solved other problems.’
What is my conception of a personal Higher Power? Describe it here. I feel that when I meditate I connect to a creative and loving energy that is present in all life. They say all the energy that has ever been is still here now and will always be here. That means there is a totality and I am part of it.
All I must do is engage with this idea: I will become open to the idea that my conceptions, beliefs and experiences are limited. I will become open to new beliefs and new possibilities. I will become open to the idea that I can live a better, more loving and useful life, even if I don’t fully understand how I will do it or what it will be like.
Mantra (put this into your own words) ‘Divine Power, Supreme Truth, love within and without, guide me to a new way of being. Help me to put aside all previous thoughts and prejudices that I may be open to a “New Way”. I ask the creative power deep within me to guide me towards the person I was always meant to be, to seek out relationships and experiences that will move me closer to this Truth.’
It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change.
It has come from a change in consciousness induced by a new ideology.
This ideology will help anyone who is prepared to accept it. I found that quite hard. I don’t trust people and I don’t trust institutions. I don’t like being told what to do and I don’t like the idea that I’m not in charge of my own destiny. I came to see life differently because other people were kind to me, supportive to me and showed me another way.
Making a decision to ‘turn your life and your will over’ means you have acknowledged that your previous attempts to run your own life have failed. That you have had to resort to addictive behaviour to cope and now you cannot stop on your own steam.
Step 3 has profound and ongoing philosophical merit: I am now continually asking for help. Like most of these steps, their practice begins in crisis but continues in everyday living.
‘If you’re like me, you’ll begin to see that you have learned to live with dissatisfaction, always vaguely aggrieved, believing there is nothing better out there for you. There is.’
When I ‘came to believe’ there was another way to live, this gave me pause, a moment to consider. When I ‘made a decision to turn over my will’, that meant that when the impulse to use came I conceded that my mental processes were no longer to be trusted. I had to ask for help.
People are always telling you, ‘There’s no guide book to being human’, but there are loads. The problem, I think, is in translation. How do I make the complex King James, desert books and lurid and beautiful texts of India sing to me in my solitude?
No one said, let go of all this, look within, there is no real power in the world of things, only distraction and pleasure.
While I could admit my life was a mess, I wasn’t yet willing to yield all of my theories. ‘I’m still clever,’ I thought, ‘I’ve worked hard on some of these beliefs.’ What is a belief really? A thought, in your mind, that you like having. If you like having it, it must be of benefit, it either improves your life or helps you to rationalize how bad your life is. I can’t think of another reason to have a belief.
In Step 2 we ‘came to believe’ that things could be better, now we are confronted with how that is likely to be achieved, and here’s the knockout punch, it isn’t likely to be by repeating what we were already doing.
There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks down the hidden and destructive personal grammar that we have unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.
Basically we accept that the world is the way it is, but we ourselves can change.
Where was I Afraid? This is usually the most revealing question and the data we gather from this line of enquiry for me personally holds the key to freedom and change. Behind our damaged perceptions there is usually a fear that pertains to a core belief. This core belief is a key line in the code of our personal misery: if we expose, address and alter it, we can be free.
At the heart of so much activity and interaction is deep and unaddressed fear.
If you’re chugging through life in a job you kind of dislike, a relationship that you are detached from, eating to cope, staring at Facebook, smoking and fruitlessly fantasizing, you can sit glumly on that conveyor belt of unconscious discontent until it deposits you in your grave.
