But I had an extremely important insight, a critical insight, driving to work: all addiction is based on a self deception. It is based on the idea that whatever it is WORKS, that you can in fact avoid the pain, that you can in fact avoid the struggle, that it is an answer. It is a shelter from the storm, it is a place you can run to and get warm.
This is a lie. There will always be that brief moment where truth appears, and is then submerged in a web of deceit and oblivion. And the truth is that the addict wants to run, but they don’t know where to run to. It rests in a primal fear which cannot be resisted or avoided finally, but about which lies can be told; which can be redirected into rationalizations which can last a lifetime, particularly when supported by altered states which diminish consciousness. Sex, for the sex addict, is an altered state. Work, for the workaholic, is an altered state–one of focused and sustained attention on ANYTHING but what they are avoiding. Gambling is an altered state. And booze and drugs, of course, that is what they do.
So what is the solution? An alternative. What alternative? An endogenous positive state. The ability to generate feelings of pleasure and warmth and connection without feeling the need to run away.
People like me, we are constantly forced to choose from among many bad options. Alcohol does not particularly make me feel good, so much as stop me from feeling bad by muting all my emotions, when taken in sufficient quantity. It is a narcotizing agent. It dulls pain. It is a depressant, formally. Nothing in it is intended to induce feelings of euphoria. Those are different drugs, and even those drugs–I have in mind cocaine and Ecstacy–force most people into a crash landing when they are done. They wind up feeling worse than when they started.
Kum Nye numbers the exercises, and Kum Nye 5, which I am presently working on, has you find in your memory, or create in your imagination, or find in your body somewhere, a positive feeling. You then focus on this feeling, amplify it, and try to expand it. I call this sort of work “extending the thread”. You have this coil of compacted and largely useless energy, and you untangle it–or allow it to untangle and extend itself–and something becomes more free, more expansive, and more comfortable. Over time–shorter times for the non-traumatized, perhaps very long times for those with knots–this becomes a refuge of sorts.
The logic is obvious, even if not often stated: if you want positive states, why not PRACTICE them? If you want a better free throw, you shoot free throws, and/or imagine shooting perfect free throws. And from what we know of mental imagery, if you can’t visualize perfection, you will have a very hard time doing it for real. Logically, then, you develop stable sources of positive energy in the quiet of your home, then over time learn to bring it into the world.
Yesterday I went to a bar and had one beer. I wanted to see how I reacted to it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That drug won’t work for me any more. My addiction is done. I’m going to continue for the time being not drinking at all, since it is an expensive habit even recreationally, and I would like a bit more practice, but I think I am now the person who can regularly do one and done. The craving is gone. The self deception is gone.
And I was thinking too of Dean Martin’s line “I pity people who don’t drink: when they wake up in the morning that is as good as they are going to feel.” This made sense to me for a very long time. I thought the booze was making me feel better. I thought I was missing out. But all I have to do is picture Dean slurring his words, offering incoherent thoughts, tripping on his way to the bathroom, and the mirage disappears. No: my feeling good will be health, and a disciplined pursuit of endogenous pleasurable feelings.
One other thing: I was thinking about AA. They have a 95% failure rate, and I think I can now guess why. When people come to them they are usually in despair. They drink so much that their personal lives are suffering: their relationships, their health, their job. They get handed the Blue Book, and buddied up, and invited to future meetings. They get told they are helpless, and to let a higher power–as embodied in a concrete group of like-habited people–take over.
Put another way, they are given somewhere else to run to. Alcoholics are enthusiasts because there is an enormous well of emotional energy that underlies the need to run. They are not calm people. They are not dispassionate people. Quite the opposite: they are driven people. There is a devil at their heels and their life is spent trying to avoid and outrun it.
So they jump into AA, if they are going to, with both feet. They become AA enthusiasts. But at the end of the day, the devil never disappeared. He is still waiting in the darkness and they know it. The urge and need to run never disappeared. The fear never disappeared.
AA creates a sort of magical circle of light, where they feel relatively safe, if the thing is going to work. And even if only 5% make it, I suspect strongly that number is not evenly dispersed. There are probably groups where half or more of the people make it. And there are probably groups where virtually no one makes it. I know for a fact that there are groups where half the people are still alcoholics, who drink on the way to and from the meetings, but keep going because they like it, or it is court ordered, or it’s a good place to hook up and indulge a side sex addiction. My local group is like that. I’ve been twice, and felt no common bond at all. Everyone who had actually quit drinking lamented the loss of a friend, seemingly, and the fact that they were forced into giving up the friend because he was killing them.
There is even a word for people who give up drinking, but not their passion for it: dry drunks. Dry drunks are typically irritable, edgy, moody. They have not “done their work”, as they say.
But what I would say is the opposite of the first Step: you are NOT helpless. God is not going to save you. What you are is someone who has had the shit beat out of you by life, who has been chewed up and spit out alone. You are someone for whom drinking is a logical, if ultimately unhelpful, solution to a real problem. The problem does exist. People forget this, in acting like drinking is somehow something one is born with a genetic predisposition to, or some nonsense like that.
It is simply the case that we don’t have the diagnostic apparatus to recognize many traumas, particularly of the developmental variety. But really, how many people have the emotional wherewithal and strength to recognize narcissism in their parents? It is a subtle malady, but one with absolutely devastating consequences. I know, well, since both of mine are. We seem to have a sort of dysfunctional psychic connection, since our intervals of long silence are typically punctuated at the very moment when I undergo some major surge in personal growth. I accept it as emotional weight training. If I have to tow a car behind me everywhere I go, when I let that fucking thing loose, I will be the Hulk with reason.
But I would like to emphasize this phrase Endogenously generated positive emotion. In my view, this is the future of effective addiction treatment. You have to have a place to call home, and it has to be pleasant, desirable, and, to state the obvious, not terrifying, which is where most addicts live in some part of their consciousness. It is ideally complemented with social connection, but for those of us for whom trust comes slowly and is lost quickly, having something in us, which is controlled by us, is the most secure foundation from which to proceed outward. If it is in me, it cannot be lost. That is very important. If growth is seen as a series of circles, each larger than the last, the center one is the individual sitting alone, feeling good.
I feel I could call this my Sobriety Day, but alcohol was never the monster. Alcohol was my ally in hiding under the covers and pretending the monster couldn’t see me. Where I am now, I see the monster IS me, too. I see my own evil, my own violence. I feel like there are countless threads radiating from me, and I can see now that some of them are dark, and they are my own. They are no one elses.
And there is something beautiful in all this. Coming home is realizing I have always been my own enemy, but that I don’t need to be any more. I can embrace my evil. Our minds do so well creating inner/outer, here/there dichotomies, but our selves are never that simple. They are made of cloth with many different strings.
The word Tantra seems to be related to this concept. I am in that sense a Tantric. It is all connected. I will do my best to lie no more.