Addiction gets filed under pleasure. He is chasing a good time, the account goes. The account is wrong at the root. Nobody with a quiet mind goes looking for something to quiet it.
A person with no pain in him cannot become an addict
A person with no pain in his mind cannot become an addict. The purpose the thing serves is to settle him down, and a mind already at peace has nothing that needs settling. There is no work there for a drink to do.
So the question moves one step back: where does pain in a mind come from.
The root cause is that he is criticising himself
Look for it carefully enough, over years of consulting-room work, and this is what turns up. The root cause of pain in a human mind is that the person is criticising himself.
You are trash. What could you possibly do. You stupid thing. You fool. He passed that judgement on himself, set his identity there, and left it standing.
Some know they are doing it. Some cannot make it conscious at all.
Some people can bring it to consciousness — they know they are holding themselves as a fool. For others it never becomes conscious at all.
Conscious or not, ask what it feels like to hold yourself as a fool. It feels low. Some of the time it comes out as anger. And it is tense, permanently, because of the question underneath: what if people take me for a fool. These are the people swung around too easily by what others think of them.
You are a fool. You are a fool. Every hour of a life.
The thought that I am a fool does not go into a pocket and sit there quietly once it has been had. It runs again. He keeps planting the message in himself — and he is the one planting it.
You are a fool. You are a fool. You are a fool. That is what is going on in there. And he has no idea that it is going on. You are a fool, so of course you could not manage even that. You are a fool, so this is the only sort of life available to you. You are a fool, so why would anybody like you. Every hour of a life, every minute inside the hour, this keeps running. Think what it costs to carry that.
One drink, and you cannot hear it
And then. He has a drink. Puts a drug in. What happens in the mind at that moment? You fool. You idiot. He cannot hear it. The whole of his attention has gone elsewhere.
With the voice switched off like that, how is he supposed to stay out of addiction? For that moment the drink saved him. The voice that spends all day calling him a fool has stopped calling him a fool. How is he supposed to not choose that.
So he does it in order to live
He chooses it. He is doing it in order to live. In order to live. The pain got so bad that the drink turned into a place he could run to and be out of it for a while.
And the same wall stops “God loves you”
Some of the people carrying this are Christians, and the church hands them the message it hands everybody: “God loves you. He went to the cross for you; the son of God gave up his life for one particular person, you.” Taken at face value that says something enormous about the hearer: I must be worth a great deal. More than the whole world is worth.
And it is not believed. However many times it is said beside him, however central it is to the faith he belongs to, it does not go in. The belief he holds about himself is the truer of the two. God loves you — yes, understood. But that love has nothing to do with me. I am a fool. There is no chance God loves a fool like me.
So you tell him, and he says: I know. He does not know. He is saying words. He is a fool who has to keep the fool hidden, and you have put in front of him a thing everyone agrees is true and right — can he argue with that? Argue and it comes back as: you idiot, you do not even know that much. So he says I know, and there it ends. Nothing inside him moves, because he already knows God would not love somebody like him. Which is to say: he cannot love himself. What comes next when a person cannot do that, I have written about in Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.
Knowing that you are of worth
Christians tend to snag here. Surely we are not meant to love ourselves; we are meant to love other people. The two look as though they collide, but sitting inside self-centred thinking and holding yourself as worth something are not the same thing at all. To hold yourself as precious means knowing that you yourself are of worth — knowing it as a fact about you.
It was because we are of worth, because we were worth that much, that the death on the cross happened. God judged it worth doing, and out of that judgement came the situation meant to save us.
The verdict you passed on yourself carries more weight than anything said to you from outside. That is why the drink cannot be put down and why “God loves you” cannot get in — one place produces both.
Related
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land
- You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board