“We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Here is what I would submit: what is actually being admitted, for those for whom this system works, is that the addiction cannot solve the actual problem, that no amount of alcohol is sufficient to heal the wound, that the behavior is intrinsically futile, and must lead to death if taken to the logical extreme.
I read an excerpt from the writing of William R. Burroughs perhaps six months ago, and saw something which resonated with me, but which I think I have not posted before now.
After traveling to Colombia to find and take a drug called Yage, which seems to have been a species of Ayahuasca, but with perhaps a slightly different recipe than used mostly now, he succeeds, and writes the following:
I sat there waiting for results and almost immediately had the impulse to say “that wasn’t enough. I need more.” I have noticed this inexplicable impulse on the two occasions when I got an overdose of junk. Both times before the shot took effect I said “This wasn’t enough. I need more.”
Roy told me about a man who came out of jail clean and nearly died in Roy’s room. “He took the shot and right away said, ‘that wasn’t enough’ and fell on his face out cold. I dragged him out into the hall and called an ambulance. He lived.”
As you might imagine, given the setup, what follows reads like it was profoundly unpleasant.
Why would someone not say “that wasn’t enough” when it is the right amount, but say “that wasn’t enough” when it is too much? My take is that some part of them wants to die. The only real solution with drugs is death. That is the end state where the pain actually stops permanently, at least in this reality. Everything else is a compromise. When they say “that wasn’t enough” some part of them is speaking a hidden truth. What they really want is all of it; they want five times what it would take to kill them.
Did you know Keith Moon committed suicide? I had always assumed it was a Janet or Jim or Jimmie style accident, but no, he took 36 or so pills, of which the first 6 killed him, and the rest were found in his system. That was enough for him.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman had enough drugs in his apartment to kill himself many times over. Looking it up, he was found with the syringe still in his arm, and a mixture of heroin, cocaine, benzodiazapenes (tranquilizers), and methamphetamine in his system. He had enough, by William R. Burroughs standard.
Dealing with addiction directly is recognizing that palliatives cannot heal you, and they cannot even really palliate you. They help you forget for a time: that is all. When you wake up, you are still you, and you still hurt in all the familiar ways, plus the contributions of the hangover, social alienation, and/or whatever else attends your particular method of avoiding dealing with your injury.
This is the cold truth. It is also the only way out. There are many, many tools which can help this journey, but this fact must be recognized.
For me, seeing this much has already required a lot of progress. Many if not most people like me never see that far, I don’t think. The pain makes clear sight impossible, not least because an important part of dealing with the pain is denying it even exists.
You know: I’m fine. It’s all good. I feel fine. I just like to have a drink or two here and there. I’m basically happy. Why wouldn’t I be? I have everything I need, a good job, a good wife, good kids. Everything is fine, perfectly OK. Just need a few here and there to calm me down.
It is like living in the rain, and denying you are wet. I get all this. It is all emotionally logical. And it is not the consequence of emotional weakness. It is being taken over by survival circuits which do everything they can to get you as long a life as possible, without having a fucking clue how to fix the underlying malfunction. Everything is autopilot, on some level, even when it feels like choice.
Becoming free–or as free as we can get in this world, in these bodies–is a very difficult task, one which is accomplished by very few people.