There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?1
—RUMI
We all use the word “addiction” very casually. In casual conversation, it can apply to any self-indulgent habit. When we say we’re “addicted” to our favorite TV show or buying beautiful shoes, everyone knows what we mean. As a result, there are a lot of misconceptions about what an addiction is and what it isn’t.
From a medical standpoint, an addiction is characterized by compulsive engagement in a rewarding stimulus, despite adverse consequences. Psychologically, it is uncontrollably craving, seeking, and engaging in a certain behavior (including use of a substance) on which we have become dependent and which results in impairment or distress. In layman’s terms, it’s when we repeatedly seek out something that feels good despite it being bad for us. From a spiritual perspective, an addiction is one of the consequences of living a life out of sync with one’s soul.
In a letter exchange with Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung equated addiction with a spiritual thirst for wholeness.2 Living out of sync with your true nature makes life a constant struggle. When it becomes too hard to sustain the illusion, people turn to addictions to stay occupied and thereby escape what they are truly feeling deep inside their soul. Or sometimes they may feel numb, which occurs when we are feeling something so strongly (even if we don’t admit to ourselves) that our capacity to feel becomes overwhelmed and we therefore stop feeling anything altogether. Once a pattern of avoiding difficult feelings takes hold, it is a sure way to create a self-perpetuating cycle of frustration and pain.
For the purposes of this book, we are going to consider addiction to be anything outside of ourselves that we crave, seek out, and feel dependent on for happiness and a sense of wholeness, despite it being bad for us on some level. Often with an addiction, the more of it that you get, the emptier you feel. While sometimes an addiction is truly debilitating and life-wrecking, other times it can be harmful in the long term but not incapacitating in the short term, such as cigarette smoking. Some people may even wonder, how bad can this addiction really be if the substance or behavior is legal and doesn’t interfere with one’s ability to hold down a job, have a relationship, or pay off credit card bills?
Many of the patients I’ve seen lead me to believe that addictions to psychological or behavioral urges can be every bit as damaging and difficult to break as substance addictions. For this reason, I group addictions into three categories:
Substance Addictions: Nicotine, stimulants (cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamines, caffeine, tobacco, etc.), depressants (alcohol, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, opiates, heroin), cannabis, inhalants, sugar,3 chocolate.4
Behavioral Addictions: Gambling, eating, sex, pornography, video games, work, watching TV, Internet, shopping, sleep, exercise, hoarding, and/or high-risk behavior.
Psychological Addictions: Status, power, money, fame, achievement, attention, approval, chaos, drama, and/or falling in love.
Once addictions take hold, they can be all encompassing, will satiate you only temporarily, if at all, and will leave you feeling empty after the initial high wears off. Breaking the addiction only treats the symptom, not the root cause. Sometimes this is enough. Yet to free yourself completely, you have to dig deeper and uncover the implicit core beliefs about yourself and the world that led to the addiction in the first place.
One of the most common beliefs that drives addiction is the assumption that, since you feel so empty inside, happiness, peace, and fulfillment must come from the outside. This belief creates the illusion that you will finally be happy and at peace if you can smoke a joint, have great sex, lose weight, make more money, find your soulmate, achieve something important, or create another specific outcome.
All my life I looked for ways to fill my inner emptiness, to finally feel whole, complete, and happy. In my early thirties, I appeared on the surface to have everything going for me. Below the surface, I knew only too well that something was missing and I berated myself for being dissatisfied. What was wrong with me? Why did my easy smile not reflect what was going on inside? Faking my way through the day as a “happy person,” I felt like an imposter.
For a fleeting moment, now and then, I got a taste of the happiness I longed for in my parents’ pride when I became a doctor, the laughter I shared with good friends, or the discovery of new wonders as I studied neuroscience or traveled the world. In those moments, I sometimes let myself believe that I had found it—the life I deserved. And then it slipped away, evaporating as surely as the morning dew.
No matter how wonderful those interludes, I always returned to feeling empty and alone, looking for the next creative way to fill my inner void. Over time I began to wonder if the emptiness could ever be filled.
As the years went by, I heard many patients ask the same question: “By societal standards, I have it all! So why am I not happy?” The reason is because they, like myself, felt inauthentic and disconnected from who they truly were. Feeling empty inside, they looked for the source of happiness on the outside—in one of myriad addictions so prevalent in our society.
We often seek out addictions to relieve our pain or to remain in denial about what is missing in our lives. But the very pain we seek to mask is often our soul’s clue to what’s missing. Unfortunately, addictions mask the true self even more. Even those that heighten experience or light the fuse of adrenaline only offer a temporary escape from emptiness.
If a diversion was the best we could do, then turning to addictions as a last resort would make sense. But we can do better than that. We can find fulfillment by living an authentic life. So an addiction is nothing but a lie that takes us farther and farther from the truth of who we are.
There are many theories of what causes addiction. Classical psychiatry argues that an addiction is an attempt to self-medicate psychological issues, such as unresolved conflicts, childhood traumas, social unease, and general dissatisfaction with life. From a biological point of view, people with a genetic predisposition become addicted far more easily than everyone else. Some believe that addictions are curable, while proponents of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) believe that once an addict, always an addict. Most would agree that addictions are influenced by complex physical, emotional, social, and genetic elements.5
Addictions can take many forms, and very often they start with a therapeutically prescribed medication. That was the case with my patient Luke. Luke came to me after having been prescribed Valium, a sedative and antianxiety medication, by his gastroenterologist to help him deal with very complex and long-standing stomach pains. Many medical tests had been run and many medications tried, but to no avail. The gastroenterologist then turned to Valium as a last resort to help Luke. Perhaps by reducing Luke’s anxiety, his stomach pain would improve as well. Amazingly, the Valium worked and Luke finally had some relief after literally years of pain and discomfort.
The problem is that Luke started to need more and more of the Valium to have the same effect. His doctor increased his dose. Luke then started having withdrawal symptoms every day when the medication wore off, which affected his work performance and necessitated an even higher dose of medication. The only way Luke knew to “medicate” his withdrawal was by taking more Valium. This continued until neither Luke nor his doctor knew what to do next. Luke had become addicted to his Valium in order to keep his stomach pain at bay.
I have seen similar presentations with patients becoming addicted to opiates, or pain pills. The opioid epidemic killed more than thirty-three thousand people in the United States in 2015, leading public health officials to call it the worst drug crisis in American history.6 One of my patients wrote the following poem when her older brother, Ethan, fell victim to opiate overdose:
Drugs aren’t cool,
Drugs aren’t fun,
I used to have two brothers,
Now I have one.
These simple words powerfully encapsulate the tragic effects of drug overdose on those left behind. Ethan had become addicted to a pain pill called oxycodone after taking it recreationally with his friends. He never anticipated the uncontrollable cravings and debilitating physical and psychological withdrawal. Ethan spiraled further into addiction, cycling in and out of multiple rehabs. Despite years of effort to break free from the hold opiates had over his life, Ethan sadly became one of the tragic statistics. The saddest day in my patient’s life was the day Ethan was found dead in their family home from an opiate overdose. My patient and her family continue to grieve Ethan’s death to this day.
Prolonged and repeated exposure to any addictive drug literally changes the brain’s pleasure pathway, the mesolimbic dopamine system (MDS). When that happens, the messages sent to the frontal lobes of the brain, where choices and decisions are made, change. They become abnormal. Instead of warning the person to stop doing something dangerous, they take away their impulse control, so the person feels like they can’t stop. The person is then dependent on the substance to diminish their cravings. The original pleasure brought on by the substance has been all but lost. Rather than bringing pleasure, now the substance only diminishes the pain and withdrawal. What once felt good evolves into despair punctuated by temporary relief from the pain.
Addictions can be compounded by the fact that in our society we are taught that we are inevitably alone. We believe that we are separate from everybody and everything, as opposed to part of the great interconnected web of life. As a result, the most common cause of addiction is a deep desire to love and be loved. Addiction psychologist Dr. Rosemary Brown considers addiction to be a form of emotional dependency. “Most of us never learn how to meet our own emotional needs,” she says. We are socialized to seek approval from parents and others rather than cultivate self-knowledge and self-fulfillment.7
In this way, addictions often replace our basic human needs for connection, attachment, and love. As soon as we are born, we become “addicted” to our caretaker. We need them. We crave them. We cry in their absence. We seek them out at all costs. All our lives thereafter, we seek to replace this primary attachment with other attachments. It is our nature.
Rather than doing away with dependency completely, the basic strategy should be to choose good, healthy addictions/attachments (i.e., supportive, loving relationships) that enable you to grow, strive, and live authentically rather than destructive, unhealthy addictions/attachments that dominate your life and undermine your sense of your own power.
For this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, set your stopwatch to five minutes and write without stopping on the topic Identifying Your Addictions. Don’t censor or judge what emerges! Remember to practice self-compassion through this exercise.
1. When in life have you felt empty and alone? Try to be as concrete and descriptive as possible.
2. How do you fill that feeling of emptiness? Do you try to replace it with other feelings? Do you turn to a certain activity, such as eating, drinking, smoking, exercising, or seeking out a friend or family member?
3. Do you turn to addictions of any sort? If so, which ones?
4. In what parts of your life do you look outside yourself for happiness?
Tamar knew her deepest longing was for love. But when she couldn’t find it, she filled the void with heroin. No amount of heroin ever made her feel that blissful for long. The quick return to the emptiness of life was a misery.
According to Tamar’s mother, Rachel, she had been a very happy baby from the moment she was born. She loved being held and rarely cried. When either of her parents were around, her face lit up with joy.
Rachel had met Tamar’s father while volunteering on a kibbutz near Haifa, Israel, after she had graduated from college. The day she arrived on the kibbutz, she was greeted by one of the dynamic leaders, a man named Eli. Dark eyed and passionate, Eli had just returned from military service. He showed her around the kibbutz, telling her stories of skirmishes in the desert. It wasn’t long before the two of them fell in love and married.
When Rachel became pregnant with Tamar, the couple moved to New York to be near her parents. Eli liked many things about America and expected to make a life in the city, but he never really fit in. Back home he was a promising young leader. In New York he was a foreigner with a strange accent who didn’t understand the local ways of doing things. For her own part, Rachel found motherhood to be more of a strain than she expected.
With Eli and Rachel both feeling out of sync with themselves, the marriage suffered. Occasional disagreements became shouting matches. All the good will between them drained away. When Eli started going by the pub every night after work and coming home drunk, things got even worse. Rachel lived in fear of his temper. He would fly into a rage over nothing. Once he even threatened to hit her. At other times he would pick up and shake baby Tamar. Everybody encouraged Rachel to leave Eli. After a year of mayhem, Rachel finally summoned the courage, packed up her things, took baby Tamar, and moved into her parents’ house.
Eli was outraged. In his world, divorce was not an option. If the marriage had been stressful, the divorce proceedings were a nightmare. Ongoing trauma and instability came to define Tamar’s second year of life. Yelling threats, Eli would bang on the door of Rachel’s parents’ apartment, swearing he would break it down, or crying that he’d kill himself if they didn’t take him back. When she refused, he would punch holes in the wall and trash her apartment.
The turning point came just before Tamar’s second birthday. Despite a restraining order, Eli came to Rachel’s apartment and calmly asked to talk. He petted Tamar’s head and gave her a new stuffed animal. His manner seemed to be conciliatory.
Rachel almost dared to hope that he would ask for her forgiveness and go back to being the charming, passionate man she’d met at the kibbutz. But Eli was dreaming, too. For him, this moment of calm could only lead to his and Rachel’s ultimate reconciliation. He presented his proposal: Rachel and Tamar would move to Israel with him to start a new life. The past would be forgotten. He said he had forgiven Rachel for everything.
When Rachel said no, Eli was devastated. His hopes crushed, he flew into a rage. If she wouldn’t give him back his family, he would have to take it, he said. Eli picked Tamar up from her playpen and stormed out of the house, cursing Rachel as he left.
Rachel immediately called the police and her parents. All of them convened at Eli’s house. Eli barricaded himself inside with Tamar and refused to respond to the SWAT team at the door.
When they called out to him over speakers, Eli went onto the second-story balcony, holding Tamar in a soft pink baby blanket. From there, he shouted at the SWAT team, telling them to mind their own business, that this was a private matter.
When they threatened to come up, Eli was alarmed. He dangled two-year-old Tamar out over the edge of the balcony. Her blanket fell free and tumbled all the way to the grass. “If you come any closer,” Eli warned them, “I swear to God, I’ll drop her.”
Tamar, of course, doesn’t remember any of this; she was two years old. She heard the story from her grandparents and her mother. But our early years are the most formative years of our lives. We form our impressions of the world without yet being able to speak, to ask questions, to clarify things.
How that one afternoon affected both Tamar and Rachel, Tamar can’t possibly know. Her mother can only relate that thereafter Tamar was no longer a happy child. When she cried, it was more like a howl or a scream than tears. She was hard to console.
When I met her twenty-one years later, Tamar was still looking for consolation. For more than a decade, she thought she’d found it in heroin. It helped her deal with difficult feelings about growing up with a violent, absent father and a terrified mother.
Tamar was one of the first patients I treated as a psychiatry resident. She presented with an addiction to heroin that she’d had since she was thirteen years old. She told me she had come to a turning point. It was time to change her life.
In treatment, Tamar stopped the heroin. To help with the physical withdrawal, I prescribed her a medication called buprenorphine, which acts similarly to heroin but in a more controlled and less addictive manner. Rather than taking a drug recreationally to get high, Tamar was taking this medication therapeutically, as prescribed by her doctor (me) in the context of weekly therapy. All the connotations had changed.
Without the heroin, Tamar had a deep void to fill. Her hunger for connection was palpable. The craving for love that had propelled her addiction was back, looking for new sources to meet its need. Understandably, she became “addicted” to the therapy. Replacing an unhealthy, destructive addiction with a healthy, constructive addiction (like therapy) is often an important and positive first step in treatment.
As I often say, love heals. In this case, a series of supportive and nurturing relationships—first with me, then with her family, then with a community of like-minded individuals at Narcotics Anonymous—enabled Tamar to let go of her illusory, unsatisfying relationship to heroin. In the next stage, she would learn to transfer that love back to herself, thereby taking back her own power.
I treated Tamar in the last two years of my psychiatry residency, during which she stopped using heroin and received her high school equivalency degree. Five years later, Tamar reached out to me again to restart treatment, this time to better understand the root of her long-standing anxiety. In those interceding five years, she had remained off heroin and had gradually weaned herself off buprenorphine, which she said was even more difficult than stopping heroin. She had never experienced more physical pain in her life. But she did it. She then pursued further training as an emergency medical technician (EMT), did exceptionally well at her job and eventually became a paramedic.
As a paramedic, she works in a New York City ambulance, responding to emergency calls all over the city. She tells me she finds the job fulfilling because every day she is able to help people with physical and psychological problems in a meaningful way. She proudly told me that she has saved the lives of two people who wanted to commit suicide but didn’t because she intervened. She has a particular empathy for individuals dependent on drugs—probably a quarter of the calls she gets.
It is now seven years since Tamar stopped heroin and four years since she stopped buprenorphine. While Tamar is doing so much better in all aspects of her life, she says she is still healing. Every year she feels healthier and stronger, as though a chronic disease process is still reversing itself. It was not until one year after she stopped buprenorphine that she finally felt like herself again. She still has dreams about using heroin. On rare occasions, she still has cravings. But she is in a different place now. Whenever she feels the void that drugs used to fill, she knows now how to fill it in constructive and healthy ways.
An effective first step in the treatment of addiction is replacing an unhealthy addiction (like heroin) with a healthy addiction (like therapy or a constructive relationship or meaningful work). Truth be told, even a healthy addiction can become unhealthy if it begins to control you, rather than the other way around. That being said, the most potent treatment for addiction is cultivating love inside yourself. When we look to anything other than our own hearts for love, we may find it only temporarily. Healing requires a concerted effort to stop searching for external happiness and let love fill your heart. The exercises that follow will help you to facilitate this process.
We could go to all sorts of places, including beautiful mountaintops, oceans, or spiritual retreats to find peace, happiness, fulfillment, and a sustained feeling of love. But what if these feelings were available to you simply by tapping into the intuitive intelligence of your heart? Rather than going away to a beautiful place, you can find that beautiful place within yourself and discover the sanctuary of peace and love awaiting within.
This exercise is designed to help you connect with your heart. Many of the exercises in this book focus on your thoughts, but this one is not about asking questions. Instead, it is about connecting to feelings of love, appreciation, care, and compassion—and maintaining these states. Connecting to these feelings is one of the most powerful ways of filling the inner emptiness that often leads to addiction.
As you tap into your heart, you renew yourself on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level. This sense of renewal creates a deep feeling of fulfillment, especially if it is sustained. Your life begins to take on a new energy. Quieting the mind and sustaining a solid connection with your heart for at least five minutes per day activates the heart’s power to heal. This is not a process that you can force but rather an easy-does-it approach that you can relax into and cultivate over time. When you are ready, sit in a comfortable position and begin.
1. Find a quiet place, close your eyes and begin to relax by slowly focusing on your breath. Close your eyes and take several slow deep breaths:
• Inhale through your nose for the count of two.
• Hold your breath for the count of four.
• Exhale through your nose for the count of eight.
• Repeat for five breath cycles.
2. Now pretend that you are breathing slowly through your heart. With each inhalation, imagine your heart expanding as it fills with love and white light. As you hold your breath, focus on the love, kindness, and compassion as it spreads from your heart to the rest of your body. With each exhalation, imagine your heart contracting as it releases negative energy and dark light. Repeat this for at least ten breaths. Do this at least three times per day for one week. I encourage you to journal about your experience with this exercise.
Drugs were not Marcella’s addiction. She had never taken an illegal substance in her life. As the high-powered owner of a successful chain of coffee shops across Italy, Marcella had a widespread reputation as a dragon slayer. The week that I met her, she had sliced-and-diced three unwitting sales representatives trying to sell her products she didn’t want or need. Her temper was legendary. When things didn’t go her way, she often lost her objectivity in a torrent of words and emotions. Rage had taken control of Marcella’s life and gone from being a maladaptive, impulsive behavior to an addiction over which she felt powerless.
Similar to any other addiction, Marcella’s rage provided her with a temporary “high” followed by a feeling of remorse and emptiness. Impulsive explosions became a way of life for Marcella. Emotional tension would build up inside her if she had not “exploded” in a while (like the feeling of withdrawal in a drug addict), leading her to crave, seek out, and even provoke opportunities for her next rage attack. Her impulsive aggression was almost always disproportionate to the provocation. Employees did not last long under her tutelage. She had few friends who could tolerate her outbursts. Her devoted husband of many years was seen as either a saint or a fool, depending on whom you asked.
Marcella sought treatment for anger management, and she soon began to realize that the person most harmed by her rage addiction was herself. Her work suffered. Her relationships suffered. People called her “toxic.” This was more than merely a maladaptive behavior—Marcella had become a slave to her impulses, constantly discharging her anger at everybody around her. Each rage attack gave Marcella a natural high that temporarily filled her inner void and made her feel powerful. But the feeling of emptiness would soon return, sinking Marcella into a mix of shame, regret, and depression.
The work of therapy involved helping Marcella channel her frustrations in more constructive ways, such as writing, putting her feelings into words, and communicating small frustrations daily in order to prevent larger explosions. At the same time, we worked to help Marcella build her frustration tolerance with relaxation exercises, stress management, and eventually, a daily meditation practice. With these tools, Marcella learned to communicate frustrations to others without losing control and was finally able to kick her rage addiction. As she healed, what surprised Marcella most was how much more energy she began to have during the day. She had not realized how much her daily rage attacks drained and exhausted her and how much more productive she could be once her rage was under control.
Like Marcella, Jay was a business dynamo. A thirty-five-year-old Afro-Caribbean man, Jay was an expert at developing new companies and then selling them to larger companies. He was fantastic at what he did, with four prior successes under his belt and many millions of dollars in the bank to show for it. Jay came to see me because his wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t stop working ninety hours a week.
As a busy CEO herself, Amy had been supportive of Jay at first. She knew that start-ups required arduous work hours. But five years later, she felt estranged from her husband, whom she saw for a few hours per week if she was lucky. When they did spend time together, Amy felt like she was competing with Jay’s cell phone for his attention. Somebody always needed Jay at work, and Jay felt compelled to respond to every text message immediately. Work had become Jay’s life. Jay was a workaholic.
Jay was just coming home at 6:00 a.m., after working at the office all night, as Amy was leaving for work. He gave her a bleary-eyed kiss on the cheek, and she realized it was the first physical contact they’d had all month! “Okay, that’s enough,” she said. “I love you, but this isn’t working.”
When Amy reached that breaking point, it sent pangs of fear through Jay. In his last relationship, he’d spent so much time at work that his girlfriend found somebody else. The experience had been deeply wounding, but Jay loved Amy even more. Losing her would have devastated him.
The truth was, as much as he was absent from Amy’s life, he was also absent from his own. Work was important to him, but love was also a part of his implicit core values. By continuing to run on the business treadmill year after year, it was as if he were living someone else’s life—someone who valued work more than love.
As Jay and I sought to understand the underlying motivations for Jay’s addiction to work, we discovered an important thing. His father had been a workaholic, too. As a child, Jay had sworn he would never fall into that trap. What he didn’t count on was the constant gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach that no matter what he accomplished, it was never enough. In essence, he was never enough.
Paradoxically, the more successful Jay became and the more money he made, the emptier and more depressed he felt inside. He mistakenly thought that success, money, achievement, and the beautiful woman he married would make him feel whole, loved, and complete. His plan had failed, and now the woman he loved was threatening to leave him.
In order to move past this addiction, it was essential that Jay acknowledge the self-sabotaging implicit core beliefs that were running his life without him knowing it. Together we identified the following:
• If I get more money, I will be happier.
• If I am more successful, I will be more worthy as a human being.
• I am lovable only if I am super-successful; anything less is a failure.
• If I get approval from the CEO, I will know that I am worthy.
I often asked Jay the question “What do you most deeply want?” He was very lucky, as he had earned the financial means to be able to ask such a question and live accordingly. After working together with me for a year, Jay ultimately decided to leave the job at his start-up company in order to save his marriage and reclaim his life.
Shortly thereafter, he and Amy took their first vacation in five years. Jay then grew a long beard and entered “pre-retirement,” which he told me was a period of not working. He was going to study interesting things, take up meditation, and think about his next life project, which he hinted may be starting a family with Amy. He no longer felt driven by the fear that once defined his every day. This, Jay told me, was his most authentic self.
When you can barely cope with faking your life, exploring who you really are can seem like a luxury. Steve found it particularly hard to spend time with himself. He had devoted a lot of time to creating a false front to protect himself, yet he still felt vulnerable.
At the slightest sign of stress, Steve poured himself another scotch. It was always going to be the last, but somehow it never was. It was just the first of many. When he got out of rehab for the fourth time, Steve swore he would make it stick. A counselor at the rehab clinic had given him my name, so he called to set up an appointment.
Months in rehab had left his used car business in tatters. His cousin had been managing it so poorly while Steve was away that the business was barely making enough to function. The day we met, Steve discovered that his cousin had used ten thousand dollars of the operating capital they had left to pay off a gambling debt.
“This kind of thing always happens!” Steve exclaimed. “I need a partner to run this business, but every time I find one, I get ripped off, one way or another. You just can’t find honest people out there.”
As we began to explore his predicament in therapy, we found that Steve was not only drawing in dishonest business partners, but also dishonest friends and romantic partners as well. Steve’s life was illustrating the spiritual principle we discussed earlier: you don’t draw into your life who you want; you draw in who you are. As you grow and change, the people you draw into your life will change as well.
As Steve progressed in therapy, he gradually realized that he had not been honest with himself or others. In the darkest depths of his alcoholism, Steve would resort to lying, cheating, and stealing. He lied about why he didn’t show up to work in the mornings. He cheated on girlfriends left and right. He even stole from family members when his booze money ran low. In the intimate and nonthreatening environment that we created together in the therapy room, Steve was able to look at himself honestly in a way he never had before. As this occurred, Steve began to take small but tangible steps toward becoming more honest with himself and the other people in his life. As he began to live more authentically and honestly, he started drawing more stable, honest, and trustworthy people into his life as well.
Often, at the root of an addiction is the implicit core belief that we are alone in a cruel, punishing world. We try to fill the void by looking outside ourselves, desperately hoping to latch on to somebody or something that will make us whole. While addictions may fill this emptiness temporarily, complete healing and fulfillment entail removing the blocks inside ourselves that are cutting us off from love. Loneliness is the plaintive cry of addiction. Freeing oneself from addiction takes more than quitting drugs or letting go of rage or giving up scotch for good. It involves finding a way to love yourself.
Addiction is one of the few areas of medicine where one of the most effective treatment modalities is spiritually based and involves invoking the assistance of a Higher Power. There are the twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, among other such programs. In the following exercise, I have adapted the first three steps of a twelve-step program. You’re invited to use this exercise for any addiction that you may be ready to work toward releasing today.
For this exercise, identify an addiction you would like to release. This can be a substance addiction, behavioral addiction, or psychological addiction. Think about why you would like to release this particular addiction and how your life would change if it were no longer in your life. How did this addiction begin and what adaptive value did it serve in your life? What damage has this addiction caused you? Are you ready to part with it now?
If your answer is no, I invite you to journal about your resistance to letting go of this addiction. Releasing an addiction is a huge step, and one must be personally and emotionally ready before taking such a step. It is important to identify and explore your resistance if you are not yet ready. Give yourself the time and space to become ready, or enlist the help of a friend, family member, or professional to help you get there.
In this step, you admit to yourself and at least one person close to you that you have a problem. In AA, this is the step that goes something like “Hi. My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic.” For the sake of this exercise, you can use any language that resonates with you to communicate the following:
I,_____________, admit on this date of _____________ that I have an addiction to _____________ that I would like to release, once and for all.
Sharing your desire to release your addiction with somebody you trust serves many purposes. First, it breaks the silence and solidifies your honesty. Oftentimes, our addictions are our “dirty little secrets.” As long as nobody knows, we can remain in denial. Telling somebody you trust takes courage and strengthens your resolve to truly release this self-destructive habit. Second, it makes you accountable to somebody other than yourself, thereby creating a supportive partnership with somebody with whom you will have to be honest. Third, it ensures you have support in this process and that you do not have to do this alone. For individuals who would prefer not tell somebody they personally know, I recommend finding a twelve-step group near you for the specific addiction you are working to release.
Depending on where you are in the process of overcoming your addiction, you may or may not feel that we have limited control over this addiction. For some people, willpower and insight may indeed be enough to stop smoking, stop using alcohol or drugs, or stop a destructive habit or behavior. If you are such a person, then executing step one above may be all you need.
However, if the addiction returns or if you find yourself relapsing despite maximizing your willpower, you are probably at the point where you recognize your limited control over your addiction. When it comes to addiction, willpower is often not enough.
To execute step two, you can use any language that resonates with you to communicate the following:
I, _____________, having identified my addiction to _____________ that I would like to release once and for all, admit my limited control over this addiction. My willpower alone is not enough to overcome this addiction. This addiction is greater than me, and I no longer want to overcome it alone.
If you have gotten to the point where you feel powerless to overcome this addiction alone, you may be ready to welcome in some help from above. You do not need to be religious or believe in God for this step to work. Your Higher Power may be God, the Universe, Mother Nature, love itself, or whatever ineffable guiding force may exist in this world that helps people overcome life challenges. Since twelve-step programs are consistently found to be among the most widespread and effective treatments for addiction around the world (in the United States, there are approximately 1.3 million active members of AA alone, meeting in around fifty-seven thousand weekly meetings)9 there’s obviously Someone or Something somewhere helping all the souls who surrender their addictions to Him, Her, or It. If faith does not appeal to you, do this step because the science supports it.
To execute step three, use any language that resonates with you to communicate the following:
Given that I, _____________, have admitted my powerlessness over my addiction to _____________, I now open myself up to the possibility that Something greater than myself can restore me to a state of balance, peace, love, and/or sobriety. On this date of _____________, I surrender my addiction over to this Higher Power and ask for His, Her, or Its help in ridding me of this addiction, once and for all.
Having requested assistance from a Higher Power, be open to how help and guidance may manifest in your life to help you overcome this addiction.