Drugs, Alcohol, And Other Addictions

Some cats get to live in a nice, comfortable home,

while others live outside in the cold, having to fend

off predators, and many are alone.  The outside cat

doesn't perceive his life as any different from any

other cat, he or she just lives.  We can take a lesson

from these smart, beautiful animals.

Childhood trauma is a very powerful thing.  With life being the hazardous journey that it is, none of us escape childhood trauma.  I mentioned before that most traumas occur before the age of five, but, occasionally, they do happen after that.  This is a fact that applies all across the board.  I say that randomly, because it can, but doesn’t necessarily apply to addictions – as with all mental disorders and conditions, there are no absolutes.

It’s fairly well known that our minds can play some very nasty tricks – almost as if the mind is a separate entity from the rest of our being.  If we had control over our subconscious, nobody would drink to excess, or put poison into our body – especially knowing the effects – the deterioration of the body and mind, the “coming down” process, the monetary consequences, among others.  Nothing good comes from overindulging in drugs and/or alcohol.  Drug and alcohol misuse is not a disease, it’s a choice, a choice based on, you guessed it, childhood trauma.  It’s uncanny the way some people seem to be ok with emotional pain, while others are deathly afraid of it.  Some are ok with physical pain, others are deathly afraid of it.  We’re not talking about physical pain here, drug and alcohol abuse is a symptom of emotional pain and fear.

The underlying reason for numbing the brain with toxins is fear of emotional pain.  I said fear of emotional pain – not the pain itself, as I said before, pain is part of life, and it’s mostly not as bad as we fear it is.  Somewhere in the addict’s early years, he or she was hurt.  When a child is hurt, the pain is perceived as much more severe than when our brain is more developed.  What happens is that when we become an adult, with the memory of the severe pain we felt as a child, we want to hide from it, run from it, deny it, pretend it doesn’t exist, and ultimately, numb our brain so the pain is perceived as “not so bad”.  Sorry I’ll have to be graphic here, but there’s no other way to make this point:  If you are stabbed with a 10 inch knife while you’re sober, the pain will be severe – no doubt, right?  If you are stabbed with the same knife while you are so drunk, or doped with whatever street drug you choose, the physical pain will not be any less severe, the only difference will be that your mind will think that it won’t feel the pain so much.  It works much the same with emotional pain – the only difference between being sober and being wasted is that your mind will tell you that the pain is not so bad.  So, if we go back to the early years of life, the child was hurt, he or she felt horrible, unbearable pain that they did not want to ever feel again.  It could be molestation, it could be verbal abuse, or, it could be physical abuse.  A large part of the pain is the humiliation and embarrassment of being violated.  We think that we should have been able to fight off the perpetrator, and/or, that it was somehow our own fault that the perpetrator did whatever he did.  There can also be resentments, even hatred, towards the person that you feel should have protected you – all painful stuff.  Many of these kinds of memories have been repressed – where your mind, in order to protect you, has stuffed those memories way down under layers of denial and fear, so that we don’t consciously remember the events.  Numbing your mind with drugs or alcohol is much the same mechanism – a subconscious effort to hide from the pain.  There is another “tool” that people will be fooled into using – things such as the 12 Step Program.  Such things are nothing more than another imaginary shield to hide behind.  Same goes for “Prayer” as defined by organized religious fanatics, and people who feel the need to control you (the church, their ownership and upper management).  Being addicted to the meetings and gatherings is no different from being addicted to the drug or the alcohol (or the gambling, the prostitutes, the binge shopping, etc.).  So, when you can honestly face the memory, realize that you were a little kid, with your mind not fully developed, perceived the pain worse than it would as an adult whose mind is much further developed, and who could, without too much discomfort, handle the pain.  Again, you were a little kid, you could no more protect yourself from an adult predator than you could fly.  Also, it was not your fault – it doesn’t make any sense that it could be your fault just for being alive – because predators see other humans as their prey, just for being there – nothing more – and they see them that way just because they (the ones being victimized) are in the perpetrator’s line of sight.  Many of you will have the ego kick in to high gear, saying, “I’m NOT a victim, I REFUSE to be a victim”.  Ok, fine and dandy, you’re an adult now, and you can face the memory, but when you were the child, you were the victim – and you have been paying for what the coward did to you – doesn’t matter how much you deny it, try to hide from it, bully it into submission, the fact remains, you were the victim, because you are the one who paid for the act of another person.  If you can get past the ego part – where you can admit that yes, I was a victim, that’s half the battle.  At that point, you can cease to be the victim, now that you’re an adult, you can stop paying for what that person did to you when you were too young to protect yourself.  You see, this is where I say that western society has damaged us, it has convinced us that we must never be the victim – this is the epitome of an overused statement that has lost its meaning.  You can cease to be a victim, big difference from never being the victim.  There are some people who will try to hide behind “being the victim” in order to cause grief for other people – again – same mechanism – trying to hide from the pain by inflicting the same pain on another person, so that you can feel better about yourself.  Thing is, when you do that, you’re still the victim, but adding injury to insult, you are also making another innocent person pay for your problem – and that’s not good, it’s not right, and it will never contribute to any healing – it will only cause you more grief.  Again, take the ego out of the equation, realize who the real victim was, see the situation for what it was, and that will be the beginning of the healing process.

I mentioned before, the different methods of learning need to be applied.  Meditation, eastern philosophies such as chanting, yoga, third eye, and whatever other ways of clearing your mind – and again, you can come up with your own, find what works for you so you can allow the new thoughts to enter.  When you are in the state of the clear mind (this takes practice, the more you do it, the better you’ll be at it), that’s when you can think about pain, that the child who was hurt is no longer a child, that the adult can survive the hurt, and come out a better person for it.  You remember how muscle tissue works, right?  You push it to certain limits, it breaks down, you’re sore for a couple of days while it rebuilds itself to be stronger, and well, now that muscle is stronger – works precisely the same way with all parts of the human body – including the brain.  You watch TV, you see the guy suffering horribly because the girlfriend dumped him, or because little brother died.  Nobody is saying you need to minimize these things, only that you accept them as part of life.  When you can arrive that accepting that all of this is part of life, that pain is something that has been part of us since the beginning of time, that you will survive it, and that numbing your brain doesn’t help one tiny bit.  Neither does being jealous or envious of another person, or hiding behind clever cliches or making up stories to give the appearance that you’re something you’re not, or pretending something doesn’t exist.  Pain is an inborn mechanism, it’s not something to obsess about.  And yes, of course there are different kinds of pain, and different degrees of it.  As we all know, we didn’t come here with an instruction manual, so we will not handle every situation perfectly, the best we can do is zoom out of the situation, look at it realistically and honestly, and make the best decision we can.  Keep in mind, you’re gonna screw up, that’s also part of life, but again, don’t obsess, learn.  Also, never mind what you hear constantly about not having the body parts to do this or that – that stuff is all perverted nonsense, not worth paying one spec of attention to.  Here is a very important part of all this:  Western society has perverted the word “Coward”.  Acting on your self preservation mechanism does not make you a coward, what makes a person a coward is finding or discovering a weapon to hide behind while he causes grief and loss for other people- THAT is a coward.  Yeah, I know, everything you see and hear demonstrates the contrary – but well, bullshit.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll say again, the way to truly learn something is to clear your mind by any method that works for you, and allow the new thoughts, the thoughts of the reality of the situation to enter.  At some point, those new thoughts will move over to the permanent memory banks in your brain, and voila, healing begins.

So, the objective is to understand and learn that a child who has been violated is a victim, but can cease to be a victim when he learns to handle the pain as an adult.  When you arrive at that, you will no longer feel the need to hide from the pain, or from the fear of pain, the pain will be part of you, and you’ll be stronger for it.  You can stay where you’re at, hiding behind whatever you can find so that you don’t have to deal with it – but you already know how that has worked so well for you up until now, right?