When Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997 it gave the British nation a sudden and unexpected shock. The public awoke one Sunday morning to be told the terrible news that the princess had been killed in tragic circumstances overnight. Diana was young and glamorous, and millions of people adored her – so it was understandable that the tragedy caused a great degree of sadness.
In fact, the resulting outpouring of emotion went way beyond our normal reaction to a news event. It had a profound effect that has rarely been seen in times of peace. Suddenly, it seemed as if the whole country was united in grief.
I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of her death. I was in my car on the way to a shop when I switched on the radio. I felt devastated, because like a lot of people, I’d followed Diana’s trials and tribulations through the eyes of the media, and as a result I felt as if I had strong empathy with her.
What happened next was quite extraordinary.
I remember going to visit Diana’s former home, Kensington Palace, with a friend and seeing a great sea of flowers in the building’s grounds and in the surrounding streets. Everywhere you looked people were grieving, and a wave of raw emotion seemed to ripple through much of the population. Like everybody else I found myself getting caught up in the moment, despite the fact that I’d never met Diana and her death had no direct impact on my own life.
So, why did the death of one person have such a universal effect? I believe that what we experienced as a nation was a kind of limbic bonding. We were literally united by our common emotions. There was a shared feeling of sadness that transcended our normal reaction to current events. We sensed the feelings of sadness in others, and we felt compelled to experience similar emotions.
A similar thing happened in the USA after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A sudden and shocking series of events united the nation in grief and it led to some amazing stories of courage and compassion. Suddenly, the country’s petty internal differences were forgotten while people struggled to comprehend the enormity of what had happened.
The American people responded by rallying around their flag in a similar way to how the British public came together after the death of Diana. I believe the way that people reacted to both events can teach us a lot about human nature.
It tells us that in times of adversity we have a natural urge to connect with others and to share our experiences. Humans are very social beings and we find comfort together when we’re in a flock.
The urge to bond and connect with others has been with us since the dawn of time. I believe that this is a natural urge that exists within us in order to help ensure our survival as a species. If you strip things down to the most basic level, it’s obvious that no primitive man or woman could have survived on their own in the wild without the help and cooperation of others. It would have been impossible to hunt, build shelter, raise children and defend ourselves from predators if we were operating as lone individuals.
By coming together in groups, humankind dramatically increased its odds of survival. This is why early mankind formed into tribes in order to learn to hunt and gather food together. These bonds are extremely powerful and have existed throughout history.
We still see the tribal urge manifesting itself all around us today. It’s apparent throughout so many walks of life. It’s the reason why people experience so much shared passion at things like huge sporting events, religious gatherings and military parades.
If you’ve ever been part of a large crowd at a football game you’ll know how easy it is to get caught up in the emotion of the event. I believe what happens here is that we feel a limbic connection with our fellow fans. You can hear the crowd gasp and cheer in unison, and grown men and women are capable of displaying great passion.
People feel great loyalty towards their team and their fellow fans, which is a modern manifestation of the tribal instinct. When our team does well, we feel good. When they play poorly, we feel down.
I read an interesting debate on a message board recently during which football fans tried to explain why it meant so much to them to support a particular team. When they analyzed it, most people agreed that they had very little in common with any of the players whom they cheered.
After all, it wasn’t as if they knew any of them personally. Nor was there much affinity with the management of the club itself. In the end, most of the fans on the blog seemed to agree that what really mattered to them was an emotional sense of belonging to a common group with a shared sporting history.
It’s not just at sporting events that this phenomenon is on display. When an audience sways in unison at a huge rock concert, there’s something far more fundamental going on than people merely listening to music. The crowd is actually getting a huge buzz from the emotion of the occasion, and it operates on a limbic level.
In the UK, the 2012 Olympics had a similar unifying effect on the nation. The country came together to support the success of its athletes and the glow that the public experienced for several weeks as a result. Meanwhile, people form themselves into groups at almost every opportunity, whether they’re built around work, hobbies or other interests. It’s a natural urge to seek out the company of our fellow beings.
This goes some way towards explaining the reasons behind the modern explosion in social media platforms. If you think about it, the upsurge in things like Facebook and Twitter are no surprise at all because they promise to fulfill a very natural urge (although, as I’ve previously stated, Facebook can also be an instrument of disconnection).
Religion is perhaps the greatest example of people coming together to share a common set of beliefs and social bonds. As I said earlier, even though I’m not a religious person, I understand and recognize the benefit that many millions of people experience from it. I believe this is derived from the comfort they feel from the understanding that they’re not alone in life. They have a higher power to guide them.
In my case, my higher power is the benefit that I experience from my limbic connection when I come together with fellow human beings in groups. When I walk into a meeting of a self-help group, I immediately feel at ease because I know that I’m not alone.
It’s natural for human beings to seek out comfort through connections with others. It gives us a sense of belonging, and the cooperation that results has ensured our survival as a species.
This urge to interact also helps to explain why family bonds are so powerful. I think it’s self-evident that the love and affection that can be generated by family links can have a huge positive effect on our mental wellbeing. Of course, the flipside of this is that both religion and family can be a massive source of distress if we come into conflict with the bonds that they create.
Ironically, religious ties have often resulted in wars and conflict – the very opposite of what the great theological belief systems set out to achieve. In my view, it doesn’t matter which faith you follow, as long as you believe in a power greater than yourself.
What we’re really talking about here is human nature. I believe that it’s a human need to feel loved. I believe it’s a human need to connect and interact with others. I believe it’s a human need to feel valued and cherished as a person (both by our own selves and by others). By understanding these needs we can achieve true spirituality, which is a state of serenity.
Everybody has a need for love and belonging. The opposites of these things that we depend on are loneliness and isolation, which are perhaps the enemies we fear the most on a visceral level.
Addiction is an illness that has solitude at its heart, even though we may not realize it. We become cut off from the real world and divorced from others. Some of the toughest-looking alcoholics that I’ve ever encountered have been reduced to tears in therapy sessions when they finally acknowledge this. In these situations, I simply ask for permission to hold their hand, which is a very tactile thing to do.
I then tell them: ‘If you don’t want to, you need never be alone again.’
The effect that this piece of advice has on people can be very profound. We all want to feel that the people around us care about us and that we care about them. In other words, we’re inter-dependent on others for our need for love and affection.
We therefore place a high regard on what other people think of us, even if we don’t consciously acknowledge it. In the distant past, our survival as a species depended on these things, and as a result they’ve become ingrained within our limbic system. Indeed, our emotional welfare is still dependent on them. It’s therefore only natural and logical that we should be on guard against anything that affects our emotional welfare.
The human condition is to be sensitive towards anything that threatens our basic needs as human beings, or which has the potential to harm our emotional health. This includes worrying about what other people think of us.
I believe this is a universal phenomenon that affects everybody, not just addicts. This means that to a degree we’re all codependent on others for our needs. However, if you’re born with an addictive nature then, as we discovered earlier – you become super-sensitive to anything that might harm your emotional wellbeing.
In other words, you develop full-blown codependency. In primeval times, being super-sensitive would have been a highly prized skill, hence the emergence of a section of the population that I refer to as ‘The Watchers’.
The problem is that it cannot easily be turned off. Modern descendants of The Watchers are therefore left in a constant state of anxiety, which operates on a largely subconscious level through their limbic brain. If this is aggravated through childhood trauma, the feelings it creates can be unbearable, both in childhood and during later life. The result is that we seek to ease our distress by dulling down our pain through addictive behaviour.
The fact that the human condition is a universal state means that we all have the potential to be influenced by addictive traits, regardless of whether or not we’re a Watcher. It explains why even non-addicts occasionally have one drink too many, or are susceptible to addictive urges. However, in these people the addictive behaviour does not become a life-dominating compulsion.
I believe that it’s only through a greater understanding of the human condition that addicts can learn to rebuild their lives. Society must also accept that addiction is a widespread affliction that’s grounded in human nature.
The way I think of it, it’s normal human nature to be codependent with a small ‘c’. This is because we all rely on others to help with our needs, and for a proportion of our self-esteem. We feel good when other people like us, but healthy individuals also have their own inherent sense of inner self-worth (which is where they differ from addicts, who suffer from low self-esteem). We must all learn to accept that we’re all special by virtue of being human, regardless of our creed or culture.
Addicts are people who are Codependent with a capital ‘c’. We’re often totally reliant on others for our sense of self-worth – and if the affirmation we seek isn’t forthcoming we can go off into a very dark place. This might mean that we must learn to live with unresolved issues, because life isn’t always perfect. There will be ups and downs along the way, some of which we will find distressing, others exhilarating.
At the beginning of this book I stated that addiction is both a curse and a gift. It’s a curse because it can ruin our lives and it allows our destructive demons to feed on us. But at the heart of addiction lies sensitivity. If we learn to accept and embrace this sensitivity then I’m convinced we can turn our addictive nature into a very special gift.
In order to do this we must do two very important things:
We need to learn how to love and respect other people. And we must learn how to love and respect ourselves.