And it hit me that there is a sort of perfectionism in my desire to get drunk. And that made no sense at all to me. But some part of me was saying that what I was doing was enough. Nothing more was needed. I will always fall short, some part said, and that is OK.
And I pondered this feeling–which I am rendering very incompletely here–and what I felt was that my brain is wired for shame, which in turn is the equivalent to social disconnection. Shame is exactly equal to the frontal cortex being off-line in some respect, which itself is a common outcome of trauma.
And I felt that all day long I feel like I don’t belong, like I am a stranger in the midst of an otherwise complete, coherent world. My very existence sometimes feels like a sin, like I have no natural right to be at all.
And within this context, drunkenness comes to be the equivalent of self imposed exile. It is a perfection, because I am not polluting anything or anyone. I am perfectly free of the anxiety of being. I am not asking anything of anyone. I am willing a sort of mini-death, a mini-suicide, which actually brings me freedom from feelings which are otherwise extremely tiring.
I can’t speak to the experience of all, of course, but I feel something like this dynamic is very, very common, particularly for the long term alcoholics/drug addicts who are suffering from undiagnosed developmental trauma.