Did addiction give you meaning, and now, without it, you’re lost?
Why do people drink, smoke, and take drugs?
Why do they desire to become inebriated, high, and spaced out in the first place?
According to the Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book), most of us drink, smoke, or take drugs as a release and break from everyday life.
Something to take the edge off or put the edge on in our lives.
“For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good.” ~ The Big Book, page 151
However, this may be alright for regular folks, but for addicts, pining after something that is literally destroying everything is not an option.
Their very lives are at stake!
Instead of escaping reality when reality is all any of us have, addicts have to first ask themselves what they’re avoiding and not dealing with in their own lives.
In other words, what are they using their addiction to escape from to begin with?
Excuses & Bullshit
“Make sure you aren’t running away from your problems — always move toward something.” ~ Daily Om
Unless you’re serving a life sentence in prison, using boredom as the reason to drink and do drugs is baseless.
In this technological marvel age, we can access almost everything and do nearly anything. So, how can you truly be bored?
Apart from pursuing our personal goals, there are countless other things we could and should be doing: friends and family we haven’t spoken to for a while, people we could be helping, places to visit, wardrobes to arrange, and old junk to clear out.
So it’s not boredom. No one is actually bored of life.
What we really have is anxiety about living, participating, and making something meaningful out of life.
Boredom, procrastination and lack of motivation are labels we put on ourselves to avoid facing something out of fear — fear of missing out, not being good enough, or not getting to our dream destination.
However, the journey of facing ourselves and working this out is the destination. This is life — going through the obstacles, challenges, and pain put right before us.
Every time we use drink and drugs to avoid reality, we push our dreams further away and fuel the very fears we’re trying to escape.
The Calling
“We are only as blind as we want to be.” ~ Maya Angelou
Even if we’re abstinent, it still takes courage to fully feel our feelings without numbing them with some kind of substance or process.
Letting go of our little fixes and hits shows a willingness to embrace discomfort in order to grow and not wallow in self-pity, desperately trying to satisfy our egotistical desires.
If you’re not feeling, you’re not healing.
Sadly, in the ocean of distractions that’s become our daily lives, taking the time to feel anything has become a luxury. Technology provides endless, addictive, novel ways to distract us from any restlessness and inadequacy.
But avoided feelings don’t disappear because you distracted yourself with something else. That emotional energy continually builds until, one day, nothing can numb you from its raging silent voice.
Curiously, we instinctively know that nothing external, whether technology, products, people, or substances, can ever fill the void or satisfy our hunger for something more.
Why?
Because it’s not a hunger for something outside of yourself. It’s a hunger for something inside of you, a spiritual substance, a spiritual connection within.
Within our DNA, there is a need to feel the rapture of being alive, an urge to bestow our greatest gift upon the world. This comes from the heart, not technology, people, drink, or drugs.
The happiness you seek is not in having or doing something but in being something. It’s in realizing your true calling and living it.
Nature Knows
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.” ~ Carl Gustav Jung
If we cut ourselves and sustain a wound, as long as we keep that wound clean, nature will heal it and restore everything to normal. However, nature’s healing will be hindered if we keep picking at the scab and interfering during this process.
Similarly, if we face and accept our experiences, we can allow nature to take its course. Once we let go of trying to change our experience with drink and drugs, we can shift our focus to something else more constructive, regardless of our feelings.
If we have patience, take action on what we can do, and trust in life, we will see that we are okay without any external fixes.
Yes, there is a withdrawal period, like an itchy sore phase, whilst a wound is healing, but the pain is evidence that you are healing. The pain is the process of restoring you to your natural state of equilibrium.
“There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.” ~ Carl Jung
In your natural state, your connection to the truth of your innate being begins to shine forth. With time, you can begin to access the same states of fulfillment and relief that drink and drugs gave you but without the enslavement and destruction.
Learning to live in this place is done through trust. Faith in action.
By showing up regardless of how you feel, taking responsibility, and leaning into your purpose, you can be at peace.
When You Know the Truth, It’s Easier to Say No
“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” ~ Wayne Dyer
It doesn’t matter whether drink and drugs were an issue for you or not. What matters is how you can grow in life and make a difference. Being abstinent will give you the energy and clarity to do this.
It will allow you to reassess your motives, values, and belief systems so that they align with who you genuinely want to be.
Partaking in something that will lower your consciousness, weaken your resolve, and enlarge your base desires is reckless and pointless.
Reckless because it’s taking you out of life, bringing you back to addiction, and, worse, powerlessness — using against your will.
Pointless because why go through all that mental anguish again of trying to control and resist temptation?
Desire’s Implacable Fire
Sometimes, people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Fighting desire is a lost battle, no matter what you believe. It leads to exhaustion, confusion, and seeking salvation in unconsciousness as a relief from all that mental turmoil and suffering you’re enduring.
Drink and drugs are deceptive illusions.
Once you’ve seen and experienced the truth, your dubious pleasures are spoiled anyway; you can’t hide from reality any longer. It’s like going three steps forward and twenty-five thousand back.
And besides, controlling anything isn’t fun or enjoyable — you’re not at peace.
Letting go of trying to control any drinking or drugging and accepting its futility is the gateway to freedom. It enables you to be in the flow of life and realize your true power and nature.
Final Word
“Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.” ~ Roy T. Bennett
Getting a second chance at life is a gift and not to be taken lightly. Life is a spiritual experience. Beauty is everywhere if you know how to look for it, and you don’t need to drink or take drugs to experience it. You just need to be conscious and present.
To stay in the flow of life, we have to slowly let go of our egotistical wants and desires, focus on something bigger than us, and let life lead the way. When you help others, life comes through you, and you’ll find that all your needs are met. Everybody wins.
When you’re restless, irritable, and conflicted and use people, drugs, and alcohol to escape, you create more pain and lose precious time. Everyone loses.
Simple but not easy, a choice must be made, and a sacrifice must be paid.
In the final analysis, escaping life through the intoxication of anything takes away your power and makes you buy into a weak version of yourself, a lie.
Yes, you’re addiction may give you temporary relief, and it may even make you feel momentarily alive, but it’s not real.
It’s a dark fantasy that eventually ends in a nightmare reality.
But don’t take my word for it. What’s your experience?
In your heart, you already know.
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Darren James 