Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

by Gerald G. May

Then one day in the middle of this depression, I was casually introduced to a faith healer at a conference in a nearby town. I did not believe in faith healers. As we shook hands, she paused, holding my hand, and told me she thought I was meant to be a healer too, but “I wouldn’t take my dog to you, because you think you are the one that has to do the healing.”

Secretly, I wanted to learn how to “do it” to people as part of their therapy. Even more secretly, I wanted to have those kinds of experiences once again myself.

It is addiction that keeps our love for God and neighbor incomplete. It is addiction that creates other gods for us. Because of our addictions, we will always be storing up treasures somewhere other than heaven, and these treasures will kidnap our hearts and souls and strength. Because of our addictions, we simply cannot—on our own—keep the great commandments. Most of us have tried, again and again, and failed. Some of us have even recognized that these commandments are really our own deepest desires. We have tried to dedicate our lives to them, but still we fail. I think our failure is necessary, for it is in failure and helplessness that we can most honestly and completely turn to grace. Grace is our only hope for dealing with addiction, the only power that can truly vanquish its destructiveness. Grace is the invincible advocate of freedom and the absolute expression of perfect love.

It appears, then, that we are in a predicament. We are dependent upon grace for liberation from our addictions, but those very addictions impair our receptivity to grace. The message may not sound like good news. Yet God creates and cares for us in such a way that our addictions can never completely vanquish our freedom. Addiction may oppress our desire, erode our wills, confound our motivations, and contaminate our judgment, but its bondage is never absolute.

Martin Luther King spoke of the same thing when he said, “I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘is-ness’ of our present nature makes us morally incapable of reaching up for the ‘ought-ness’ that forever confronts us.”

To return to Augustine’s metaphor, we may not be able to make our hands completely empty in order to receive the gifts of grace, but we can choose whether to relax our hands a little or to keep clenching them ever more tightly. In the face of significant addiction, our degree of choice may seem small; simply relaxing one’s hands may seem too passive. As we shall see, however, this simple choice may be the greatest kind of struggle any human being can face, and it may call forth the greatest courage and dedication. There is nothing passive about it. In the long run, it may prove far more assertive and powerful than any other possible action we could take. It is, after all, the pure, naked aspiration of the human soul toward freedom and, through freedom, to love.

We will never really turn to God in loving openness as long as we are handling things well enough by ourselves.

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction. As I have indicated, attachment of desire is the underlying process that results in addictive behavior.

As soon as one tries to control any truly addictive behavior by making autonomous intentional resolutions, one begins to defeat oneself. For the most part, defeat is due to mixed motivations. One part of the will sincerely wants to be free. Another part wants to continue the addictive behavior. In any true addiction, the second part is stronger, and so the resolutions fail. A fundamental mind trick of addiction is focusing attention on willpower. In very complicated ways, the mind asserts that it in fact can control the behavior. At certain points, it even encourages making resolutions to stop. It knows such resolutions are likely to fail, and when they do, the addictive behavior will have a stronger foothold than ever. It may take many such defeats before one realizes how truly out of control one is.

no addiction is good; no attachment is beneficial. To be sure, some are more destructive than others; alcoholism cannot be compared with chocolate addiction in degrees of destructiveness, and fear of spiders pales in comparison to racial bigotry. But if we accept that there are differences in the degree of tragedy imposed upon us by our addictions, we must also recognize what they have in common: they impede human freedom and diminish the human spirit.

It is surely good for parents to care for their children and for people to be kind to one another and to seek God. It would be wonderful if we could make a habit of such activities. But there is a vast difference between doing these things because we freely choose and doing them because we are compelled. In the first case, the motivation is love; in the second, slavery.

What is the difference between obligation and addiction here? It cant only be desire

Total freedom, religion tells us, is paradise—the final salvation and the full reign of God. It is a goal that we must work toward, but it is also something we must hope and wait for.

Is the a libertarian ideal? No obligation to do good, only free choice? But what about systems ? Are systems and institutions for doing good only addiction here?

It is not at all unusual to hear aged alcoholics, who have lost jobs, families, and homes, and who are now hospitalized with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, saying, “Hell, no. I’ve never had any trouble with booze. I can take it or leave it.”

The mind is infinitely ingenious at complicating the process of quitting. When what is needed is direct, clear-cut refusal to perform the addictive behavior, the mind invents such convoluted and entangled complications that the addicted person finds himself thrashing about helplessly in an ocean of details.

Psychotherapeutic help may prolong the addictive behavior while therapist and client spend months or years trying to uncover nonexistent childhood experiences to explain the addiction. It is as if the therapist teaches the addicted person to think, “I have become addicted because of some personality defect or old psychological trauma. I must spend months, perhaps years, trying to identify and solve my psychological problems (and while all this goes on, I have an excuse to keep on being addicted).” From the standpoint of the addicted person, all the mind tricks and self-deceptions have one dedicated purpose: to continue the addictive behavior. Likewise, there is only one dedicated action that really counteracts addiction, and that is to stop the addictive behavior. When the community surrounding an addicted person tries to help in any way that does not support ending the addiction, it will wind up supporting the addiction instead.

While tere can be false help, chilood issue or trauma and other issues can contribute to addiction. And while not all addiction i the result of trauma of some sort, many are. we cant only oppose addiction we also need the right desires that the addiction is trying to fulfil

authentic spiritual growth is accompanied by increasing awareness of one’s own need for God’s mercy rather than pride in one’s holiness.

To summarize, psychoanalytic psychology has contributed the following important insights toward our understanding addiction: attachments form through the investment (cathexis) of psychic energy in certain activities, things, or people that bring us pleasure or relief from distress; many of these cathexes are kept unconscious by means of self-deception, so our motivations are never completely pure and may be quite contradictory.

The most important behavioral insight into addiction, then, is that attachment takes place through a process of learning. The learning need not take place on a conscious, intentional level; it is not a matter of consciously noticing the effects of a behavior and then deciding to make a habit of it. Instead, the process takes place automatically at a deep physical level. In fact, most such learnings never do reach conscious awareness until they are already well entrenched, and many may never come into awareness at all. Because habits and attachments formed through this conditioning process are so deep and automatic, they can be extremely powerful and difficult to break.

Also the positive habits, from prayer to brushing teeth

aversive conditioning. Repeated aversive conditionings and associations with other aspects of life cause one to actively avoid the experience and its effects. This leads to intolerance, the opposite of tolerance, in which even the smallest taste of the experience is repulsive. A good example would be getting food poisoning from a particular food; for months or years afterwards even the smell of that food can be repugnant.7

Every man's battle

I find it difficult to walk the line between seeking to expand my knowledge and expecting that knowledge to save me. The truth, of course, is that the farther our knowledge of a thing expands, the more mysterious it becomes.

Ultimately, we cannot grasp everything in its entirety. Yet we would do ourselves and our Creator a great disservice if we did not explore the mysteries of life with every resource available to us.

Of special significance to our discussion, however, is what happens when the stress-addicted person tries to relax and slow down. If the person takes a vacation, goes on a retreat, or even tries to settle down to pray for a while, the removal of external stress causes less stress chemicals to be generated. This is precisely what the person wants and expects—a time of relaxation—but she does not expect the response of her brain cells to this reduction of stress chemicals. The neurons, having adapted to high levels of stress chemicals, now react as if something were wrong. They send signals, ironically, of stress to the rest of the body, trying to get things going again. Thus the person who is trying to settle down may find herself becoming increasingly anxious, looking around for something to do, and not at all experiencing the rest and relaxation she had hoped for.

It is in the realm of spiritual practice, however, that attachment to stress becomes most obvious. Spending time in quiet, receptive openness is an essential part of prayer, meditation, and most other spiritual practices. In such settings, even mild addiction to stress becomes rapidly and painfully evident. For many modern spiritual pilgrims, the simple matter of taking time for daily prayer can become a battle of will excruciatingly reminiscent of that encountered in chemical addiction. The mind can generate wondrous excuses to do something instead of just being open and present. The struggles that go on between being and doing can be awesome. Issues of control and willpower, surrender and defeat rage with all the drama of true spiritual warfare.

I began this book with the statement that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. In Thomas Merton’s words, “There is a natural desire for heaven, for the fruition of God, in us.”2

From a more specifically spiritual viewpoint, we naturally seek the least threatening ways of trying to satisfy our longing for God, ways that protect our sense of personal power and require the least sacrifice. Even when we know that our hunger is for God alone, we will still be looking for loopholes—ways of having our cake and eating it too, ways of maintaining our attachments to things and people while simultaneously trying to deepen our intimacy with God. We seek compromise not because we are evil or conniving, but because of the way we are made; we naturally look for the least painful ways of living.

Throughout this section he would benefit from how sin dksforts our seeking God.

If I am a heroin addict in withdrawal, I will not be consoled by knowing that heroin will still exist in the world after I withdraw from it. What I want, and what I am losing, is the use of it. Similarly, if I am withdrawing from addiction to a relationship or possession, it will not ease my sense of loss to know that the person or thing will continue to be present in my life or in my heart. I will not even want to hear that my love will be stronger if I let it go. What I cling to most is my use, my idolization of that person or thing.

addiction to a religious system, like addiction to anything else, brings slavery, not freedom. The structures of religion are meant to mediate God’s self-revelation through community; they are not meant to be substitute gods. Doctrines of belief, rules of life, standards of conduct, and reliance on Scripture are all essential aspects of an authentic spiritual life. Sacraments are special means of grace; God acts through them with great power. All these things are vehicles for God’s love, but addiction to them makes them obstacles to the freedom of our own hearts.

There is a strange sadness in this growing freedom. Our souls may have been scarred by the chains with which our addictions have bound us, but at least they were familiar chains. We were used to them. And as they loosen, we are likely to feel a vague sense of loss. The things to which we were addicted may still be with us, but we no longer give them the ultimate importance we once did. We are like caged animals beginning to experience freedom, and there is something we miss about the cage.

Think about this in gard to ideology, for instance leaving white superiority or the ex-evangelical movement. Ideological replacement will often be slow just as physical addiction reckovery is slow.

the crucifixion itself demonstrated the extent to which God would go to liberate people from their attachments. Jesus proclaimed that there was no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, and then he proceeded to do just that. Finally, and most important of all to the Christian faith, Christ’s resurrection proclaimed absolute and unquestioned victory over attachment itself, over its consequences, and over its causes.

To put it bluntly, God became incarnate to save the addicted, and that includes all of us.

But even when our choices are destructive and their consequences hurtful, God’s love remains unwavering. Thus, regardless of our own insulation and defensiveness, God is constantly open and vulnerable to us. God is joyful when we are joyful and when we bring joy to others. God hurts when we are hurting and when we hurt others. Such is the constancy of God’s love.

Many other reasons exist for our lack of appreciation of God’s constant love. Sometimes the activity of grace so transcends our understanding that it becomes essentially invisible to us. We cannot notice God’s loving presence because it is too numinous, too elusively mystical to be perceived. There are also occasions when we cannot appreciate grace because we really do not want to. If God has not lived up to our expectations of how a true lover should act, for example, we may stifle our awareness because of anger or because we want to protect ourselves from being hurt again. And sometimes, as I have indicated, God actively hides grace from us. But of all the possible explanations for our lack of awareness of grace, there is no possibility of God being indifferent, or falling in love with someone else instead of us, or pouting because of some insult, or being otherwise elsewhere attached.

Living into the mystery of grace requires encountering grace as a real gift. Grace is not earned. It is not accomplished or achieved. It is not extracted through manipulation or seduction. It is just given. Nothing in our conditioning prepares us for this radical reality. Some would say that early childhood experience with our parents is important in determining how we come to accept grace in later life. If we had loving, trustworthy parents rather than rejecting or unreliable ones, we would grow up more willing to accept God’s grace as a gift. I do not think this is so. We all have trouble accepting the radical giftedness of God’s grace, no matter what our childhood experience.

We all have trouble accepting grace is not the same as dismissing environmental, familial, or other historical reasons that contribute to making it hard to accept grace

Because grace is a pure gift, the most meaningful of our encounters with it will probably come at unintended times, when we are caught off-guard, when our manipulative systems are at rest or otherwise occupied. But still we can pray for grace, actively seek it, and try to relax our hands to receive it.

Similarly, we cannot pin down where true faith comes from. We can truthfully say it comes from God, for God empowers our faith. But we can just as truthfully say it comes from ourselves, for it represents absolute human freedom. Or we can say, as I have tried to do, that it comes from a mysterious coinherence of grace and will. This may be closer to the truth, but it is just as far away from any possibility of justification.

The desert is where battle with attachment takes place. The saga of the desert tells of a journey out of slavery, through the desert, toward the garden that is home. But it is much more than a journey; it is the discovery of the depths of weakness, the power of grace, and the price of both. Moreover, what takes place in the desert is not simply difficult travel and adventurous learning; it is repentance and conversion, the transformation of mixed motivations into purified desire, the greening of desert into garden through the living water of grace. There is no geographic journey here; it all takes place within our hearts. And what happens is not only purgation and purification, but also a loving courtship, a homemaking between the human soul and its Creator.

Addiction cannot be defeated by the human will acting on its own, nor by the human will opting out and turning everything over to divine will. Instead, the power of grace flows most fully when human will chooses to act in harmony with divine will. In practical terms, this means staying in a situation, being willing to confront it as it is, remaining responsible for the choices one makes in response to it, but at the same time turning to God’s grace, protection, and guidance as the ground for one’s choices and behavior. It is the difference between testing God by avoiding one’s own responsibilities and trusting God as one acts responsibly. Responsible human freedom thus becomes authentic spiritual surrender, and authentic spiritual surrender is nothing other than responsible human freedom. Here, in the condition of humble dignity, the power of addiction can be overcome.

the only way to break an addiction’s power is to stop engaging in the behavior. Anything more complicated is likely to turn into a mind trick.

Examples like this make it clear that we should be very careful in choosing substitute addictions.

These are anecdotal examples nott researched ones. There seems too be some fear based Writing here

Those of us with greater intellectual abilities have the capacity for more precise understanding, but our mind tricks are also more inventive, and we more readily fill the holy spaces of our lives with thoughts. There is need for care in how we use our intellects.

Honesty means acceptance. We must begin by accepting the fact of our addictedness. To accept this is not to affirm it, but to admit it, to acknowledge that it really exists. In religious language, this kind of acceptance is confession. In the context of a specific addiction, acceptance means acknowledging that a problem exists. In the context of consecration, it means recognizing that our attachments are our idols, that they eclipse God.

It is not easy to bring others into one’s struggle with attachment. The thing that makes it most difficult is the very thing that makes it most helpful: it destroys the interior secrecy upon which our mind tricks thrive. Attachment makes us fool ourselves, and it makes us feel like fools in the eyes of others. Yet others’ eyes are essential, for our own eyes see only what they want. We might wish it were easier, but being seen by others is part of the desert experience.

The implications of accepting pain are significant in dealing with specific addictions, but they become massive in terms of our basic attitude toward life. In our society, we have come to believe that discomfort always means something is wrong. We are conditioned to believe that feelings of distress, pain, deprivation, yearning, and longing mean something is wrong with the way we are living our lives. Conversely, we are convinced that a rightly lived life must give us serenity, completion, and fulfillment. Comfort means “right” and distress means “wrong.” The influence of such convictions is stifling to the human spirit. Individually and collectively, we must somehow recover the truth. The truth is, we were never meant to be completely satisfied. If God indeed creates us in love, of love, and for love, then we are meant for a life of joy and freedom, not endless suffering and pain. But if God also creates us with an inborn longing for God, then human life is also meant to contain yearning, incompleteness, and lack of fulfillment. To live as a child of God is to live with love and hope and growth, but it is also to live with longing, with aching for a fullness of love that is never quite within our grasp. As attachments lighten and idols fall, we will enjoy increasing freedom. But at the same time our hearts will feel an even greater, purer, deeper ache. This particular pain is one that never leaves us.