Are Addictions Good?
NOTE: I am not an addiction counselor, expert, professional, or in any way trained in anything remotely connected to addiction, addiction-treatment, medical anything, psychological anything, whatsoever. So, feel free to absolutely and unequivocally reject every last word of this article.
I’ve counseled literally thousands of people over the past 30+ years, many of whom had addictions. In every case, I informed them of the above ahead of time, so that everyone was clear and that appropriate professionals should always be consulted when dealing with addiction. Despite that, people keep coming to me, some specifically to deal with their addictions. So, I play the ball as it lies.
As long as we’re all clear on that, here we go.
The largest ball of twine in the world, as rolled by one individual, not a community, is out on the open road west of the Twin Cities in Darwin, Minnesota, USA. A man started rolling it in 1950 and did so for four hours every day for 29 years. From 1979-1994, it held the Guinness record for the World’s Largest Ball of Twine Spun by An Individual.
Your life problems start getting spun in childhood, and either a lot of them get added over time, or only some, or just a small amount. The kid, of course, is not doing the spinning. The kid, is actually the ball of twine, or the ball is being spun inside the child by the powers that be – whomever is raising the child, with extra additions done by siblings, schoolmates, teachers, extended family, play friends, etc. But the bulk of the twine addition is being done by parents, or whomever is raising that child.
Presently, the largest ball of twine by a community is in Cawker City, Kansas, and is much larger than the one spun by the individual. Surprised?
The bigger that ball of twine gets inside the child, the more hacking the child does. (Here’s where I mix metaphors.) See, that ball of twine inside the child becomes a ball of hair inside a cat that it is forever trying to cough up. The cat’s natural instinct is to get the crap out of itself. It is the natural state of the human animal to try to get negative crap out. So, the child is trying to hack it out, whether through anger or crying or ‘acting out,’ generally, because the child has not been taught or developed tools yet for natural expression of feelings, wants and needs, particularly as it relates to emotional/soul pain. The kid is trying to hack out the accumulation of pain being inflicted on her or him. But, very often, it’s not being allowed, or they are simply not taught how to do so. So, the hair ball, or ball of twine, grows. With it (often though not always) anger, laughter, or tears grow too, as those are the most common human reflex responses to trying to release negative energy involuntarily.
Why?
It doesn’t feel good. The ball of twine/pain inside doesn’t feel good. It is uncomfortable. Eventually, as it grows, the discomfort grows and it gets downright painful inside, both in the body and in the mind. The hacking is the effort to alleviate the emotional/mental pain experienced by the child/teen/adult.
But, the damn emotional pain doesn’t get hacked up and out. This emotional impact can be so great that the physiological effect can become more than anger, laughter, and sadness. The body can start to be adversely affected, in terms of maladies. I’ve had adults report having ulcers as young as seven and eight with no medical cause found by doctors. But, as we dug deep we discovered the emotional/soul trauma building before that and peaking in that time.
So, eventually, the child, teen, or young adult tries to make the pain go away, even if temporarily. This is when eating disorders start, drinking, pot usage, excessive gaming, endless activity/motion, and other adaptations develop to try to make the internal pain go away – i.e., to escape the giant ball of twine-pain their life has become. For those hours the child or teen is drinking, absorbed in gaming, or bingeing and purging, they have sweet release from the internal misery that grips them all the other hours of the day.
Should that continue to be effective in helping the young person escape the inner pain for a few hours, or longer, that action will become patternized, repeated, again and again. Thus, the addiction begins, and it serves a very important role in that child/teen’s life – escape from pain. Without being taught the tools for and importance of releasing pain, it would become unbearable to live with internal pain, particularly if more twine is being added daily or weekly, even in small doses or in massive amounts on a less frequent basis. Thus, for the very survival of the animal that is this young person, some sort of mechanism of escape or distraction, is necessary.
Now, it must be stated that because twine gets spun onto the ball in different amounts and speeds in different lives by different families and influences, the point of needing to escape that pain can come much later in life, whether it is college years, late-20s, or later. But, if the ball of twine is growing with the additions of more soul pain, the day of needing an escape from that ball inside is inevitable. It’s just a matter of when.
But, of course, as with all patternized, habitualized behaviors, it comes with a downside, which eventually becomes a massive downside. Even seemingly good patterns, such as fitness/working out, can easily become destructive to the person, in so many different ways – time away from family/responsibilities, excessive running down of bodily energy, extreme mental fatigue, degrading of joints/tendons, over taxation of organs, etc. Similarly, this behavior the young person uses to escape the inner turmoil can begin to affect relationships, self-esteem, social standing, and bodily functioning, to name a few. Perpetuated over decades, these adverse effects can even become extreme or lead to death.
Countless adults do so and have been doing so for a very long time. This is nothing new. Is it that unreasonable to think it could be felt and done by a child or teen of far less mental power and far less accrued soul/emotional pain? Is it that unreasonable to think a young person would be less equipped and courageous enough to get out emotional/soul pain and thus be more susceptible to destructive behaviors, patterns, and addictions?
So, here’s the thing, as that patternized behavior continues, it can lose its power of escape. The human develops a tolerance for it; and it just wanes in power. So, new behaviors might get added to augment, or aid the escape from the ball of twine-pain inside. So, maybe pills gets added to the pot usage; gambling goes with the gaming; cheating (on a lover/spouse) tops off the cocaine; over-parenting becomes the outgrowth or next phase of over-working. And, always the price of the behavior/addiction increases, personally, professionally, physiologically, socially, spiritually.
As life falls apart, more and more, be it in the 20s, 40s, or 50s, and the pain and price grow higher, the individual begins to long for a high that lasts and doesn’t come with the downside of the crash, the hangover, the losses. This is where constructive mechanisms get employed to solve the problem, be it medications, rehab, AA/NA, counseling, different therapy modalities, self-help, religion, or just plain cold turkey.
Often, these mechanisms are just what was needed, and the escape that became destructive to the person’s life got wiped away. This can be manna from heaven for the person, as well as for those who love and care about this person.
Sadly, however, they often don’t work. At some point, old behaviors many times return, as if the root problem never got fixed. This is where I sometimes get brought into the equation of people’s lives, when they’ve tried everything else and nothing works, or nothing sticks. Maybe they don’t come to me for the addiction itself, but for all of the internal problems, relationship problems, and professional problems they’re having. However, woven into it all is the destructive behavior pattern/addiction that invariably gets addressed residually but directly.
Addiction as Best Friend
Many years ago, I was counseling a highly successful overseas surgeon. He had been top of class all of his life, after growing up working in the family business where he was doggedly worked by his father and abjectly neglected by his mother. Now, in his early-40s, he was by all metrics a colossal success with not just a thriving practice, but a string of clinics he owned and ran, an adjunct professorship at a prestigious university, two late-teen kids, and a newly minted divorce that he was struggling from but still powering through the effects of.
He came to me to address his large inner turmoil regarding feelings of inadequacy that had been exacerbated by his wife leaving him, the difficulties of his kids, and the interactions he’d been having with his new girlfriend. These feelings of inadequacy would seem tragically ironic to an outsider, given his apparent successes. However, they opened the door to us discussing his lifelong addiction to something that would also seem ironic, or at least odd, to an outsider. This trim runner/lifter was addicted to food and had been since he was 8 years old. This world class surgeon, whose writings and insights had been favorably peer-reviewed and was respected in his work and as a man, had lived and dealt with bulimia for 34 years. He knew damn well the effects of it, and had suffered most of the side effects of it. He had been to treatment for it, seen the best doctors, tried every manner of counseling possible for it. He had even employed the full power of his extraordinary superpower – his own self-discipline that had powered his entire career! – all to no avail. This damn beast pursued him like the hounds of hell, itself.
Enter our work.
We had done quite a bit of drilling down into the real sources of his life pain, before we got to the bulimia stuff. It had been cursorily discussed, but largely ignored. As we more and more fully filled out the picture of what his childhood really was and wasn’t (much of which he fought me on, tooth and nail, but could not deny, because I was simply arguing information that he, himself, had given me in his autobiography and hours of counseling in the first 2-3 long sessions), it became apparent that he had been a terribly lonely child who never felt safe. So, to protect himself when mom wasn’t protecting him from dad’s attacks and expectations, and to save himself from a mom who was negligent and the father wasn’t protecting him from her lack of accountability and denial of love to the boy, he adapted. He acquiesced to the demands of the father and became a high performer, who never missed his marks, because the price for doing so was too high. He knew by primary school that he would become a great doctor someday. Father had said. He knew he would fulfill it. It would please father.
And then, one day, on the side, he picked up a Twinkie, or whatever the 8-year-old equivalent was in his country. And the Twinkie, whether he realized it or not at the time, was different from every other Twinkie he’d ever had. It felt different. Then he picked up another. And, it felt different. It didn’t just light up his taste buds and glide down his throat into his waiting stomach. It registered somewhere else, too. Something else lit up.
Then the pastry his grandmother had left for him. Then, then, then.
And, it began. At eight. 8! Think about that.
That’s where it started. Zero nutritional value, not that 8 year-olds care about nutritional value, generally. The love for food – the experience of eating it – and what it lit up inside him.
But also, knowing he had to get it out of him, because the expectations of physical perfection were not lost on him, either. So, he tried to make himself throw up and couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He tried choking himself and hitting himself in the gut. He tried yelling at himself in the bathroom. Nothing worked.
That night and those days that followed he felt the guilt of what he had done in eating all of that food and worried he might get fat from it, while he thought about how to throw up. He began to hint around how animals throw up with his teacher, telling her about his dog and asking why his dog throws up. He asked the librarian for books on why dogs and animals throw up. As a recognized studious and gifted child, no adult thought anything of it, beyond the inner workings of a hungry mind, when he followed up this dog vomiting question with questions about the human vomit reflex and inducing vomiting. Completely flew under the radar, as the librarian handed him books she had ordered from the regional library, which then became his how-to. At age 8.
His eureka moment came when in his research he learned how to self-induce vomiting to disgorge the very food he was ingesting. He read that there were bad things that could happen. But it would still work. Learning about laxatives only further facilitated what had now been set in motion. The cycle of bingeing and purging began.
Now, here he was, 34 years later, dealing with it, absolutely confounded about why he could not shake this thing that had become a giant monkey on his back, eating away at his health in so many areas, while contributing significantly to his sense of shame, knowing his own dark secret and how ugly it made him feel for how stupid it was in light of his profession.
To all of this I interjected, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Bulimia. Addiction. It’s bad. You’re bad. It’s dumb. You’re dumb. You’re a piece of sh*t. Blah blah blah. Got it. The one thing I don’t understand is this; just this one question that doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand why you’re trying to stop being bulimic. I sincerely don’t understand.”
Dude looked at me like I was a Martian that landed in his backyard in a flying doghouse with spinning whirlybots on it. “Sven, I just explained it to you, which you don’t need me to do. You know damn well the long-term price of bulimia. Plus, I look like a damn fool – a surgeon, a physician, especially with this illness. I should be able to overcome this.”
“Yeah but,” I shot back, “it’s that ‘overcome’ thing that I don’t understand. Why are you trying to overcome it? Why are you trying to get rid of it? See, I see it differently. You grew up in a mountain of sh*t. Your mom not only didn’t give love, she just checked out of your life completely, while being fully physically present. Dad, on the other hand, was the consummate dick. You’ve been ridden hard and put away wet by him since you were three or four, to the point where your soul was so fatigued by age eight that you needed to escape, and to the point where he still owns you, to this day, his 80 year-old voice bellowing inside your head, never satisfied. You needed something – fricking SOMETHING! – in this lifetime to make you feel good, just for a brief moment, because every other damn minute was this driving, focused push, push, push. So, quite unbeknownst to you, you developed an eating disorder. You had found your drug, food. You amped up your addiction when you discovered a new word, laxative, and became a little thief to support your newfound drug habit, stealing laxatives from the neighborhood apothecary.”
“Right, Sven. So, what’s your point?” he asked.
“So, you weren’t safe. You clearly weren’t loved, unless you hit your numbers for success and perfection. Even then, when you did, you didn’t actually get affection or a trip to the zoo. You were treated like that was expected. You just avoided dad’s disappointment. You were the most lonely kid in the world. And food became your best friend, the only thing on God’s green earth that had the power to shut off your pain, even if only for the three hours you were bingeing and the three hours you were purging. The only thing in college that enabled you to turn off the endless responsibilities and expectations and give you sweet release. While other boys were getting hammered at parties and girls were spreading their legs, often all of them together, you were holed up in a room doing what you had always done, because the booze and girls never gave you the pure valium release from it all that your highly ritualized best friend gave you. F*ck the price! The payoff was so high! You were the brightest kid on campus. You KNEW the price, backward and forward. That’s a living testament to how great the high and sweet release were that your best friend and ONLY your best friend could give you. That is how extraordinarily powerful that craven bitch is. Sure, she takes, but, man oh man, can she put out. She gives and gives, and always has. She can be controlled. And she is the ONLY friend your miserable life has ever truly had.”
I had his attention now.
“And, you want to ‘overcome’ it? That’s just dumb. For as smart as that big frickin’ brain of yours is, that’s just dumb! Bulimia is your best friend, the only thing that has the power, that has EVER had the power, to make you feel good and take away your problems in a real way. You treat it like it’s a pariah, a disease. That makes no sense. It’s not the disease any more than the sore throat or runny nose is the disease. No, they’re symptoms of a virus or infection. Bulimia isn’t the illness. It’s a symptom, at most. Hell, it’s the (self-) medication when no one in the world gave two sh*ts about curing the actual disease. The actual illness was the freaking horrible parenting that child had to endure that has also been living inside of him for 42 years, rife with destructive messages. You think something is wrong with YOU? That’s garbage. That little boy thought there was something wrong with him, too. How could there possibly be anything wrong with a 5 year-old or 8 year-old that could possibly justify him or her believing he’s unlovable? There was never anything wrong with you, and there still isn’t. What a load of sh*t! But, because of their horrible parenting, they taught you to believe you were the problem; it’s your fault; you’re not good enough, ever, even when you’re a world class surgeon and successful businessman and father.”
“So, what if rather than trying to get rid of the bulimia, at all, you kept it? What if you treated it with the respect it deserves – as the only thing in your terrible, miserable life that brought you joy and peace in the valley, and just kept it, for as long as you chose. Then, what if we devoted ourselves to solving the life you’ve been trying to escape from, since age eight? See, if we change the life you’ve been trying to escape from, all these millions of times, then you’ll have no desire to escape, no need to escape. The life itself will be a place of joy, true laughter, and peace. And, the bingeing and purging will no longer be necessary. They’ll just float away. You can still play with your best friend anytime you want to. But, you won’t need your best friend anymore. Her purpose will have been served. The friendship – this glorious, loving, yet painful friendship – will have simply run its course. But you can still talk or hang out together, if you ever want to. She won’t be this evil witch that everyone has so made her out to be. What if we treated her with respect, kindness, and love, and invited her to stay, while we change the life, ‘til you no longer need her? Then it’s a want, not a need.”
You’ve never seen a grown man sob like Arthur sobbed for me, in that moment. A lifetime of hurt, pain, sorrow, shame and more shame came flushing out of him. “No one has ever said that to me before. I’ve never seen that before. I – I – I’ve never even thought that was possible. I’ve never even thought that way. How does that..? I mean, of course. That makes total sense. God!” he stammered amid a lifetime of tears and heaving of his chest and soul.
And there it was. The golden key unlocking the whole equation of his life.
He knew the pound of flesh that friend had taken from him, over the decades; far more, actually. This friend idea was no delusion. It was the most sensible thing he had ever heard on the subject, and he flat out said so.
Two weeks later, he reported that since his last session he had thought about bingeing and purging three times, two of which he was conscious, in the moment, of not even wanting to do it. It was more just out of habit, or ritual. Only one of the times did he actually do it, and that was because he actually wanted to, “not because I needed to,” he said.
And, that right there is the shift I hear about, again and again, after this conversation with folks who’ve struggled with addiction, “The need to do it has dramatically decreased. Now, I can do it if I want to, but I don’t neeeed to, because I’m not running from my life anymore. I’m not bad or ‘not good enough’ anymore. And, I don’t see my ‘addiction’ as the enemy anymore.”
Call to Review: Diamonds and Raw Sewage
The real shift in my work with the person, as with all of my clients, and the shift that needs to happen in your life is two-fold:
Beginning to name and extract the voices inside you that name you as the #1 villain or disappointment in your life, as if you are innately problematic and unlovable; and
Beginning to create a life that you have no desire to escape.
The biggest mistake people make when trying to fix their lives is they focus near completely on #2 to the near full omission of #1. And, that just ain’t how it works. In fact, as I discuss in my book , which you need to go back and re-read certain sections of, that is the grand mistake nearly everyone makes: trying to get happier by doing more things that make them happy. You can do all the happy sh*t in the world, but if you still have those soul-sucking messages in you from your past, you’ll forever be fighting those messages inside you. You’ll be driving the car of your life with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake.
In that regard, I’m going to encourage you to go back to There’s a Hole in My Love Cup and read the chapters about the 3 Binary Gates, Diamonds and Raw Sewage, and Messages. I’m not going to get into it here.
The ugly work is the naming and extraction of those old messages. That’s the real reason people hate therapy, real therapy. It requires going into the very stuff they’re trying to self-medicate themselves from. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to touch. But, that’s the difference between real healing and skimming the surface, coasting. Going into that stuff is the price of real happiness.
That is the price of life’s most precious commodity: peace.
No amount of highs, escapes, medications, happy things, or addictions exceeds peace. Nothing. That is what age teaches. No, that is what the chaos, losses, pain and disappointments of youth are trying to teach those who will listen and reflect on them, but too often we just want to run from and distract from the very thing with the most power to teach and grow us. Why? Too painful. So, we escape, distract, and run.
That is the choice of life: Face the pain to heal and grow or run. But eventually the pain that all that running inflicts on your life exceeds the pain of going in and healing. Nonetheless, it’s the choice we all face, year in and year out.
Questions for your journaling and growth
1. Begin to ponder and bullet point list the sources of the giant ball of twine inside you. What are the messages you received about you? From whom? What are those old sources of pain that are still not healed and are simply sitting inside of you, growing?
2. What are the addictions or habits you’ve developed to make the pain, anxiety, anger, and sadness from those original twine sources go away, even if only for a few hours? Are you so focused on the addictions and habits that you’re able to conveniently keep your eye off the real sources of pain?
3. Isn’t it just easier (read ‘far less painful’) to not think about the real ball of twine and just think about the addictions? Journal about how you’re feeling right now and what you need to really dive into here.
Please feel free to check out my free online moderated community, Badass Counseling Group, on Facebook. But, if you long for a closer community that’s more committed to next-level growth, direct access to me — Sven, and more excellent resources for transformation to greater ALIVENESS, go to www.badasscounseling.com and click on CMTY-PLUS! It’s what you’ve been waiting for!
Thanks for reading.
HAVE A KICKASS DAY!
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
