We all already know that every one of us is sniffing something! Some simply breathe, others for all sorts of reasons, unsatisfied with what life offers by default, while hoping to spice up their daily experience with new sensations, end up snorting powders that promise to open the doors of perception to ecstasy.
As I said in the previous article, we are facing a global crisis regarding the increase in drug use, and the statistics show it very clearly [2]. In 2021 alone there were estimated to be around 296 million users [2.1] of banned substances and if we are to think concretely, that equates to the entire population of the United States. These statistics were made in 2021, but the drug problem has grown exponentially, like a malignant tumor, including here in sleepy Romania.
But where does the interest in such experiences, whose ultimate goal is destruction, come from? In my view, people’s inability to be in relationships in a healthy way inevitably leads to addiction.
In the previous article I managed to demonstrate the following: that the desire to forget who we are opens us up to the realm of addiction, because drugs instantly numb our recurring pains. Fundamentally, we want to forget the pain that comes from inauthenticity, which we experience in our dysfunctional relationships. Because only the ability to be authentic with others you love can lead to real life development. Lack of authenticity will lead to the inevitable internalization of shame and feelings of worthlessness, only to end up believing we are not worthy of love. The real tragedy is that only unconditional love has the power to heal this deep pain, but if we are stuck in shame it is almost impossible to open up to it, for the simple reason that we do not believe in the possibility of this love. This fixation on our own shame will compel you to long for a world of your own, a world where you cannot be hurt and rejected by anyone. Here you can feel completely in control and no longer need to be vulnerable to another for the fulfillment of your desires. At the same time, this self-centered world should provide you with a quick and very intense pleasure, one that will make up for all that you are missing out in the real world through the absence of genuine loving relationships. Obviously drugs can deliver this, and still very efficiently, so inevitably many fall into the trap of addiction.
Continuing the demonstrative process in the following article, I will seek to answer the following questions:
- How do we end up behaving in our relationships because we exclude healthy vulnerability from them?
- Why can’t this pain be overcome without outside help and why does it lead to such an unhealthy relationship to reality, resulting in addiction?
- What is the only possible solution to end up breathing only air through our nose and even being satisfied with just that?
- How do we then end up behaving in the relationships we have because of the exclusion of healthy vulnerability from our lives?
A relationship where vulnerability is not cultivated in a healthy way, a relationship where you can’t be told no, but all you seek is affirmation from the other person, is a relationship based strictly on control. And a relationship based strictly on control, meaning a one-way relationship, is a dysfunctional relationship par excellence. I say it’s dysfunctional because love necessarily involves yielding control. You choose the other in their wholeness when you truly love them, and otherwise you don’t dictate which parts of them to manifest in their relationship with you, so you don’t control their behavior on your strict terms, but you also give them personal space to manifest. Even a parent experiencing a child’s tantrum does not have the right to interfere abusively with the child’s behavior, because that again nullifies the child’s freedom. A normal approach involves both the gradual negotiation between child and parent for new forms of freedom allowed as the child develops self-awareness and autonomy, and the possibility of limiting the child’s will on the part of the parent, so that freedom of expression, together as well as its limiting, allows the child to acquire skills and behaviors that are necessary for healthy functioning in society. Without love, relationships become mere commercial transactions, as we are reduced to a trade between various forms of services, at prices we impose on each other. We therefore end up, in no way, depending on the freedom of the other for the fulfilment of our desires. As a result, without the inclusion of real vulnerability and intimacy in our relationships, without the chance for the other to freely refuse your desires, that is, to be free to love you without being constrained by your control, our relationships become meaningless and turn into a kind of social market where everyone takes turns playing the role of seller and the role of customer.
- Why can’t this pain be overcome on its own and why do we end up developing a totally unhealthy relationship to reality that results in various forms of addiction?
Love is the only cure for shame, because love accepts unconditionally. However, since we often enter relationships with a lot of shame, we inevitably develop relationships based on control, relationships where the vulnerability of our own desires is not expressed, and our shame remains intact, moreover, it even grows. The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt says: I did wrong, I am guilty, which is correctable; but shame says: I am wrong, which means that I am wrong as an identity, which is not correctable as long as you are in relationships where this feeling of invalidation and worthlessness is always reactivated. Yes, we can say that shame is a social feeling and this is because it implies experiencing a state of humiliation and inferiority, living in the horizon of your own uselessness, the impression that you are an expendable, damaged object. As a child, these states can be easily internalized, and this does not follow a critical thinking approach, which is assimilated through personal assumption, but rather through intuition and identification with the authority of belonging, more precisely, through a high emotional receptivity, a non-critical openness. Returning to our previous examples of the two extreme cases as approaches to child rearing, we can say that a child who will not be allowed to explore the world through curiosity and play, but will always be a mere extension of his parents’ needs, and thus he will feel deeply controlled, will internalize a deep shame in the face of his natural desires. So he will be forced to assume that he is the wrong one for wanting this, for the simple reason that a child will always consider his parent good, simply because he depends on the parent’s provision in order to survive. Such internalized emotions will constitute a substantial capital of pain which, if not dissolved in the unconditional love of another, will lead the adult to various forms of unhealthy pleasure in an addictive sense. In the other scenario, that of the spoiled child, he will be deprived of the chance to understand the consequences of his own choices, including the choice for addictive pleasure, and this is because he has learned from a young age that whatever he wants is possible for him, and others are obliged to fulfill his every whim, because he is special and privileged by default. He also experiences shame, but at a much deeper level and obviously in an unconscious way, because he is not allowed to develop as a human being, that is, to understand that his desires have a price and he has to pay a price for his desires. Therefore he easily falls into addiction, because he has not even managed to develop a minimum of responsibility for his actions, which makes him incomplete as a man, which is humiliating on a subliminal level. We will never be able to overcome our pain on our own, because our pain blocks us from loving ourselves, or more importantly from letting ourselves be loved as we are, in order to be truly healed. Whether we are co-dependent, meaning we need others to need us, or we are narcissistic and need to be adored all the time, and others only exist on the relationship horizon to make us happy, without unconditional love, we will always choose the path of vice, the path of addiction, and that’s because satisfaction is much quicker. Love will force us to face our own pain and we will be compelled to stay in the relationship as we are, weak and vulnerable, no longer feeling in control. Either we will let ourselves be crucified by the love of another, that is assuming we find someone willing to truly love, or we will run away horrified from the image of our own pain and weakness, because seeing our helplessness is too humiliating for most of us. Obviously, it’s easier to give than to receive…
- What is the only possible solution to end up breathing only air through our nose and even being satisfied with just that?
If the thesis of this article was that addiction is a relationship problem, that means that the solution to addiction is also in the same area. We need to learn to be in relationships in a healthy way to be truly free. The only healthy way to be in relationships is inter-dependence, otherwise we will inevitably fall into the trap of addiction, co-dependency, or counter-dependency. We need to surrender to the reality that there are things in our lives that hold us captive: be it drugs, alcohol, gambling, technology, shopping, pornography, uncontrolled sexuality, extreme thrills, work and achievement, social attention, unhealthy relationships, self-centered religiosity, mindless messianism, even the need for social justice is an addiction when it chooses the path of violence, etc. All these are forms of addictions that give us an intense dose of pleasure, but which, however, block the path to true fulfilment and joy in our lives. The first relational aspect that needs to be resolved is the relationship with the Absolute. People with assumed addictions use the expression: “God as I understand him,” and it is a very good expression, because although there is great beauty in the systematized and historically validated religious beliefs, they are too elaborate and complex to be easily assimilated, given primarily the gravity and urgency of your current addiction. What you really need is to dare to hope that there is Someone truly able to help you, Someone who is for you, even if you are against yourself, and thus find the strength to practice the faith necessary to be free from addiction. Because once you have recognized and accepted the challenge to come out of the place of addiction where you are, you will find that you are basically the same person, the one who through his wrong choices has become an addict. Thus, you need to be supported in the process of your self-transformation and you need huge resources to be able to overcome yourself. You need to assume the One who is truly powerful, the One who is for you, and this is an absolute necessity in the process of your liberation, because the lack of surrender of control has brought you to the place where you are right now, struggling with some form of addiction. Therefore, you depend on faith in God for your deliverance, and God, because He is not seeking to control you but to love you, depends in the fulfillment of His good intentions for you on your cooperation and humility regarding your powerlessness over your addiction. This is the only possible way for your deliverance, for only in this way the love that heals the shame that leads to drugs can manifest, only in this way a truly healthy, interdependent relationship can show itself. The second type of relationship is the relationship with yourself, and this is where we all have a hard time, because to have a peaceful relationship with ourselves is to love who we are in our whole self. This concerns both our beautiful parts and our broken parts, the ones that cause us pain every time we become aware of them. But if our relationship with God is one of peace, through the peace of His good desires that He has for us, we will begin little by little, through humility and assumption, to learn to let ourselves be loved unconditionally. First through those who already know how to love and accept beyond the fact that we will disappoint them intensely, especially at first, so that later, we can do this by ourselves towards us and towards others through God’s love, which is accessible to anyone who is genuinely humble. So that eventually we can give up cultivating the appearance of being in control, and find that resting place that comes with the humility of one who knows he is loved unconditionally. For though we have areas of weakness in our lives, true love always finds a way not to reject us, to include us in it beyond performance, and to envelop us in an intrinsic value that is nothing less than the joy of simply existing. You to truly be you, you need you as you are in this moment, even if you don’t currently like yourself. You do not exist outside of this you, the one who holds your behaviors and choices. And when you understand the need to embrace your whole self and choose to love your whole self in your beauty and brokenness, through God’s love for you, you will gradually enter into a relationship of peace and acceptance with yourself, a relationship of interdependence with your authentic self, a relationship that will lead you to freedom from addiction. The last kind of relationship you have, being here in the world, is the relationship with others, those whom you have probably already hurt enormously as a result of your compulsive need to satisfy the form of pleasure you are addicted to. This relationship cannot be healed and restored into a relationship of interdependence unless the other two have already been transformed so that you can come to peace with God and yourself. Peace with God also involves accepting that He brings different people around you. People who will love and accept you as you are, and you will have to let them love you as you are, but also people who will force you to adapt to them through their rigidity, which is not always wrong, but often will be. And when another’s rigidity clashes with your rigidity, just as two swords clash in battle and the clanging sound accompanies the clash, so too here, you will feel the need to show that you are in control and you cannot be told what to do, the collision between you will be inevitable, and the conflict will surely explode. In order to be able to accept the other as he is in his differences, you will have to learn to take on those parts of your neighbor that may make you want to control him, you will have to let go of the desire to make him uniform with you in order to feel safe, so that you can become truly at one with him. Therefore it will be necessary for the cycle of serenity, detachment, peace to be intentionally walked through by you and repeatedly assumed. And this cycle of freedom from the addiction of being in control begins with peace with the Absolute, God as I understand Him who is for me and not against me and who rewards those who seek Him. That peace then enters the realm of the relationship I have with myself and so I begin to integrate into my conscious psychic life, through self-acceptance, both what is beautiful and what is broken in me. To be able to further detach myself from the performance of self-affirmation and the shame that feeds it, culminating finally in the loving embrace of who I am beyond the worldly success of the moment thought of as problem-solving efficiency, but also beyond my capacity for constructive effort, that which is absolutely necessary for my validation by others, when the logic of valuing the human being, is conceived strictly through its contribution to the need for social productivity. So that in the end, from the peace of the relationship I have with God, a peace that leads me to true self-acceptance, I can realize that others need to hear the same message of peace. That they too need to feel accepted as they are, even if their weaknesses are so different from mine, and that they in turn need to be reminded that God is for them and not against them, even if there are so many areas in their lives that feed their shame and sense of inadequacy to the Absolute. Through such an approach we will succeed in living in interdependence with God, with ourselves and ultimately with our neighbor. All we need is to let ourselves be humbled in a healthy way in the face of our weaknesses, so that we can then release ourselves from our own hands, learn to receive grace first from God, then from others, that is, those who already know what grace is, so that finally we can give ourselves grace through God’s grace when we fail, and give others grace when they in turn need it in the face of their failures. From this position of humility and mercy, we will also be able to do justice to the wronged, otherwise based on our innate self-centeredness, that inner drive that makes us want to control the world on our own terms, we will find that our justice will be nothing more than a form of self-righteousness, an act of justifying our desires at the cost of trampling on the desires of others.
Conclusion
Addictions are the result of dysfunctional relationships. Without understanding the areas of dependency, co-dependency and counter-dependency in our relationships, we will not be able to live a free and fulfilling life. Every type of relationship we can experience in this life, namely: relationship with the Absolute, relationship with ourselves and relationship with others, will be contaminated by our inner shame and pain when these are not acknowledged, processed and then healed. But it is worth fighting for freedom and for a life lived to the full, because if we choose the battles that are worth fighting and that need to be fought, we will find that oasis of peace in every sphere of our relationships. I believe that security is a need inferior to man’s need for freedom, a need that also makes him receptive to the true Absolute. So, if we choose to give up those forms of security, of comfort, which feed our addictions, then surely God, who is for us and not against us, will accompany us in the process of acquiring true rest. Our relationship with ourselves and with others will be one of peace, and that life which is abundant, the only life worth living, will manifest itself naturally in the time given to us on this earth.
