For me, being still creates anxiety, and moving creates anxiety. I can mask it with a false confidence. I can mask it with strong, obsessive, almost manic movement, but it does not make it go away.
All my life, I have gone in circles, and not known why. It is because I am trying to escape a pain in my own head, and I carry that with me everywhere. So what people like me learn to do is play games. Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, we assume over and over and over and over, that the NEXT time will be the one. The NEXT thing will be the one. And it never is. And we sedate ourselves with our poison of choice, which builds the faith and confidence to try again.
And they call this addiction. Here is the thing: for someone like me, drinking is a mistake. It makes me less productive, less reliable. To some unknown extent it dulls my senses (although in my particular case, I can remember details of drunken conversations years later, even while sober, so it is not state dependent), and of course it’s not good for me. As evidenced by the raging hard-ons I still get in my sleep if I go too long without taking care of business, my aorta is quite clear, as it is with most alcoholics, but my liver and other internal organs cannot be happy with me.
But NOT drinking is a mistake too. It opens me to profound emotional upset, with no good means of dispelling it. I’ve tried everything.
Well, nearly everything. I will reveal my little secret here: I have purchased a Neurofeedback device, and am doing it daily, and as far as I can recall, I did not shake last night or the night before. This is a new feeling. This is THE solution for people like me. I have not found anything else, and am not aware of anything else.
And what I am seeing clearly is that where drinking is concerned, there is operant conditioning involved. When I get drunk, there has always been the reward of reduced anxiety and emotional pain. Alternatively, there is the punishment by body delivers when I don’t give it that.
Physiological addiction, as I have commented before–and which is a commonplace among writers like Johan Hari and Gabor Mate–is a non-issue. We have known how to deal with that for a long time.
But in the same way more healthy people are soothed by seeing an old friend, people like me greet our own “soothers” with a physiological bump, with happiness, with the sense of a long conditioned reward which cannot be removed by simply getting unaddicted physically.
People who do not heal their underlying wounds who stay sober have simply, in my view, taught their nervous system to regard substance use as an abuse, as a negative reinforcement, as perhaps even a crime, and they have surrounded themselves with similar people who say the same things, and perhaps help them believe it. They come to view the punishment of not drinking as less than that of continuing. This is a solution for some, but they are still miserable. As I have said, I have been to AA meetings, and as a group, they are mostly miserable. They miss their Rosebud, their lost friend. They miss the hope of a happy childhood, which was taken from them so very long ago.
In my own work, I have three simultaneous challenges: healing my own wounds, figuring out what the fuck I am going to do with the rest of my life, both how and why, and–because I seem to be enmeshed at an emotional level with the world as a whole–how all of us survive this time, and build a society equal to the talents all of us as individuals possess.
It’s scary. It’s confusing. I have no help at all. I don’t anyone who is remotely equal to the challenge of understanding me and feeding back new and helpful ideas.
But according to my own metaphysics, I must have asked for this. This was the battle I wanted, long before I was actually fighting it. I feel confused. I feel deep pain. But I don’t feel self pity. A good battle is a gift.