the cycle of addiction

 Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. ~Romans 7:9

I am often asked by addicts "why" they struggle with addiction. (A better question might be "how did I get here?" which helps point to the solution: "how can I get out?")

This is an attempt to answer that question.

Addiction is the insidious pattern of seeking to infuse ourselves with our drug of choice (sex, substance, gambling, food, etc.). At the root of this pattern is not attachment to the drug per se, powerful though it may be, rather it is the unbearable feelings of want driving the search for their obliteration. Current research indicates that dopamine release actually begins prior to administration of the "fix", in anticipation, reaching its peak in the moments just prior to satisfaction of the want. 

An addict does not suffer from weakness of will or unbridled lust (a belief often held by addicts themselves). An addictive personality is usually driven by just the opposite: a strong will that uses excessive self-restraint to hold themselves together in accordance with high standards of acheivement and/or perfection. It is the forcible restriction of natural desires that ultimately causes them to snap or break, triggering behaviours going in the equal and opposite direction of what they think they should do.

Though excessive self-restraint occasionally has its source in unmanageable post-traumatic symptoms like anxiety/depression or flashbacks, more often it arises from an internalized model of self-control based on legalist and authoritarian parents or other role models who held and/or modeled unrealistic expectations of how we should behave. These expectations shape the ideals of performance and perfection against which we measure ourselves and, when they are excessive while we remain human and fallible, cause us to feel that we are constantly falling short and leading to chronic stress due to feelings of self-loathing, shame and unworthiness. 

Another tendency that can negatively influence a child's self-concept is the compartmentalization of reality into neat divisions of black and white, good and evil, victim and perpetrator, etc. This is the tendency of personality disordered individuals who, unable to integrate their own good and bad sides, blame their children when they arouse bad feelings in them. The child, not being allowed to separate and differentiate from the parent's reality, grows up to internalize self-blame and guilt whenever their behavoiurs cause friction in relationship and becomes avoidant of conflict, striving desperately to satisfy even tyrannical expectations at great cost to self.

This is what drives human beings to burn out... or burn up. Like St. Paul (quoted above) who recognizes that the law is responsible for sin and death yet still blames sin for causing him to do what he does not want to do*. 

The way out of addiction is not so much by quitting the drug or fix (although blocking access will surely accelerate the process of finding an alternate way out) but by quitting the constraints suffocating the person with an unrealistic version of himself and allowing all of his parts to become integrrated into a more spacious identity with broader and more reasonable expectations of himself.  This is a process which begins in the mind, by noticing impracticable ideals and allowing for personal objectives to become more congruent with reality; and in the body, by breathing around the tension wanting to clamp down on faults and imperfections, creating space for a whole self through gentle stretching.

* Paul's writing reveal the painful split of an addict, between the "bad" fire which he attributes to passion and the "good" fire which he attributes to testing and self-sacrifice. As a Jew, he came to believe, through a violent revelation, that Jesus was the Passover lamb who fulfilled the law by paying the sacrifice for our sins. Yet his ambivalence would indicate that his conversion was incomplete. He remained unable to free himself from the tyrannical hold of the law on his natural desires, still haunted by the internalized persecutor exacting payment for the debt of sin and guilt through personal sacrifice (Acts 9:4). Sadly this ambivalent relationship to legalism has continued to affect the church until this day.