Carrie and Stephanie are addicted to misery. Do they enjoy being miserable? No.
Although some people do get an odd kind of happiness or satisfaction out of being unhappy, misery addicts are not usually seeking a state of misery. More likely, they fall into misery by default, as a result of a deeply engrained pattern of choices or behaviors, or blindness to choices.
They are defeated over and over by a fear of risking (translated as losing what little they have) based on an overwhelming feeling that nothing for them can improve or change. Regardless of how they might appear to others, on the inside what they are feeling is, What’s the use? Things can’t be different for me. This is all I get to have out of life. I’d better hold on to this because if I let go, I might have nothing at all.
Drenched in hopelessness, they see no point in using help offered to them. Frozen in fear, they miss deadlines and waste opportunities. On a very basic level, they have given up.
What are they addicted to? The simplest way to put it is this: misery addicts are addicted to the system they have devised to protect themselves from unbearable disappointment. To this end, they may have enlisted other addictions or compulsions. These other addictions serve the dual purpose of giving them a sort of comfort and helping them avoid their misery, fear, or hopelessness.
A typical misery addict is surrounded by a constellation of addictions she actively practices. Some of these parallel addictions include food addiction, compulsive shopping, frequent sickness, compulsive working, compulsive gambling, compulsive game playing, computer fantasy games, compulsive exercise, compulsive spending, codependence, excessive caretaking, self-abuse, compulsively depriving oneself of human needs, sleeping too much, sleeping too little, and, of course, the old standbys—addiction to alcohol and other drugs, including nicotine and caffeine.
I call these tool addictions. These are addictions used collectively as tools to sustain misery. They are used as levers to escape and soothe—and to cause more misery.
The misery addict may not feel addicted to any of these and may not look addicted to other people because he rotates among them. However, each serves the dual purpose of helping him check out and giving his life a focus.
Even if he is able to admit to an addiction, he typically has terrible trouble sustaining recovery from that addiction. One signal that misery is the true addiction is when someone’s efforts to recover from what he sees as his main addiction keep failing.
An example of this can be found in Walt’s story. While in recovery from alcoholism, Walt was clear that he was also a workaholic and a food addict. He tried setting schedules, making promises, joining a men’s group, and attending Overeaters Anonymous. He’d get some control over his work and his food, and then he’d forget his plan. This happened many times, with a corresponding loss of self-trust and increasing problems with his family.
Recovery from a tool addiction can’t work unless the larger, encompassing addiction to misery is also being treated. The tug to sabotage successful recovery and the joy that recovery brings will ultimately intervene.
As Walt’s past becomes littered with more and more failures at recovery from these linked addictions, he becomes ever more convinced that he is a failure, doomed to exist outside the stream of living, different and less worthy than others.
Any addiction creates a set of problems common to the other addictions—a tendency to isolate, a life reeling with difficulty (no matter how orderly it looks), secrecy around involvement with the addiction, protecting the addiction, and a mind that thinks it isn’t addicted.
With traditional addictions, the source is obvious and the centerpiece of attention—alcohol, pills, slot machines, sugar—stands as the icon for the problem. With an addiction to misery, the nucleus is more subtle. No icon covers it.
The centerpiece for misery addiction is a system.
Misery addicts have devised a system by which they’ve survived crushing disappointment, devastating abandonment, occasions of despair, ongoing separateness from others, overwhelming fear, and ordeals of being misunderstood and misread. Their system has even been powerful enough to withstand the seductive whisperings from their own minds, which tell them that they might as well give up entirely. Misery addicts are addicted to this system because it has saved them from annihilation.
They are also addicted to avoidance. To a certain degree, of course, every addiction promises to take its person away from full consciousness. But a misery addict needs avoidance. She craves avoidance the way an alcoholic craves alcohol. This is the service that the shifting addictions provide for a misery addict—a road out of too much consciousness.
This is the reason misery addicts are susceptible to multiple addictions and why they can pick up a new addiction in the blink of an eye. Anything that serves up avoidance may be added to their repertoire. They can go from ignorance of an activity to addictive use of it overnight.
Living in avoidance is one reason that misery addicts sabotage themselves. They take in the world only partially. While they are busily avoiding things, they miss the important announcement; they don’t act in time; they aren’t seeing the subtle signs that someone could be a friend; they wait too long to make the reservation.
In the absence of complete information, they are vulnerable to their own projections and anxieties and fears. Then they may act on their own thoughts as if those thoughts were reality.
They may not realize the part they’ve played in bringing about a negative outcome. They may not know they’ve sabotaged themselves. But the new disappointment gets added to the list. Now they have even more proof that they don’t get to be happy.
And this unhappiness must be avoided.
Thus, the cycle continues.
Your life has value, even if you can’t recognize it today. You were born for a reason.
A series of catastrophic events separated you from knowing your true self, and you are now walking around in a suit of armor that you are deeply accustomed to. You don’t even realize how heavy it is.
Here are some good reasons for facing and handling this addiction: