Addiction
If you are here, or if you need to be here, you’ve held pain so deeply you needed escape.
Trauma is what gets us here.
Compassion will get us out.
Compassion for ourselves as we learn that our behaviours were intended to help us “solve the problem” and relieve our pain, fears, suffering. We turned to alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, exercise, pornography to soothe the hurt within us. Dopamine or opiates flood the system (our brains have natural opiate receptors and produce endogenous opiates – these receptors snap together with chemical opiates) and over time more and more of the stimulus is needed.
The addiction serves us. It’s gives us an escape. Creates connection. Facilities a sense of calm. It does something helpful for us. But it hurts us at exactly the same time.
But the pain keeps growing. We become addicted to the feeling, not really the substance which is why so many “addicts” can be in recovery from one addiction only to land upon another. Pain is the root cause, not the drug or behaviour.
Addiction is not a disease. It is not a personal character fault. It’s a response to suffering.
We are a society saturated in shame and pain. We don’t all learn the skills of self regulation and if you grew up in a home with unavailable or disconnected care givers, full of chaos, neglect or abuse then you’ve likely lived in flight, fight or freeze and had a express train to addiction’s doorstep. But, guess what? Those who had happy childhoods, well they have pain too.
So think differently about your own addictions and those of others. Administer compassion in double servings and explore your life, the journey of how you got here, the beliefs that you learned about yourself (which likely need to change). Healing and recovery is absolutely possible. But it doesn’t come from detox.
#addiction #recovery #addictionrecovery #alcohol #grouptherapy #therapy #addictionisnotadisease #counselling #compassion