Addiction looks like pleasure-seeking. We assume the person who keeps drinking is chasing a good time. That is not what is going on. Nobody with a quiet mind goes looking for something to quiet it.
Without inner pain, nobody becomes an addict
A person with no inner pain cannot become an addict. Why? Because the point of an addiction is to calm yourself down, and a mind already at peace has nothing that needs calming. There is no work there for a drink to do.
So we have to go one step further back and ask: where does inner pain come from?
The root cause is that a person is criticising himself
I have looked carefully for the answer over years of counselling work, and this is what I found. The root cause of a person’s inner pain is that he is criticising himself.
Inside his head, it sounds like this: “You are trash. As if you could ever do anything. You stupid thing. You fool.” He says this to himself. He has passed that judgement on himself and decided that this is who he is.
Some know they are doing it. Some never notice at all.
Some people are aware that they do this: they know they think of themselves as a fool. Others never become aware of it at all.
Whether you are aware of it or not, think what it feels like to regard yourself as a fool. You feel low, and at times you feel angry. And you are always tense, because underneath runs the question: what if people see me as a fool? People who are forever checking how others see them, ruled far too much by what others think of them, carry exactly this belief inside: “I am a fool.”
“You are a fool. You are a fool.” Every hour of every day.
The thought “I am a fool” does not come once and then stay put, tucked away like something in a pocket. It keeps repeating. He keeps planting the message in himself; no one else is putting it there.
“You are a fool. You are a fool. You are a fool.” That is what goes on inside him. And he does not notice that it never stops. “You are a fool, so of course you can’t even get this right. You are a fool, so this is the only sort of life you will ever have. You are a fool, so why would anybody like you?” Every hour of his life, every minute of every hour, this keeps running. Imagine how painful it is to live with that.
One drink, and you cannot hear the voice
Then he has a drink. Or takes a drug. What happens in his mind at that moment? He can no longer hear the voice saying “You fool, you idiot,” because all his attention has gone to the drink or the drug.
Once the voice goes quiet like that, how could he not get hooked? For that moment the drink saved him. The voice that calls him a fool all day long has stopped. How could he not choose that?
So he drinks in order to survive
He chooses it. Not for a good time: he does it to survive. The pain has grown so bad that the drink has become a place he can run to, somewhere to escape it for a while.
And the same “I am a fool” keeps “God loves you” from sinking in
Some of the people living with this voice are Christians, and the church gives them the message it gives everyone: “God loves you. Jesus died on the cross for you. The Son of God gave his life for one person: you.” Taken seriously, that message should lead the hearer to think: “The Son of God died for me, so I must be worth a great deal. I must be worth more than the whole world.”
But a person like this cannot believe it. However often the people around him say it, however central it is to his own faith, it does not sink in. To him, what he believes about himself is truer than what the church tells him. Inside, it goes like this: “‘God loves you’ — yes, I understand that. But that love has nothing to do with me. I am a fool. God would never love a fool like me.”
So when you tell him, he says, “I know.” He does not really know it. He is just saying the words. He believes he is a fool, and he has to keep that hidden. If he answered, “God does not love me,” he would be contradicting you, and contradicting something everyone around him holds to be true and right. He would expect to hear: “You idiot, don’t you even know that much?” Then people could see him as the fool he believes he is. So he says, “I know,” and that is the end of it. Nothing changes inside him, because he is already sure God would not love someone like him. In his own eyes he is not worth loving. Which is to say: he cannot love himself. He dislikes himself, even loathes himself, and that is the pain the drink was quieting. Someone who loves himself cannot become an addict.
Knowing that you are precious
Many Christians get stuck on the idea of loving yourself. Surely, they think, we are not meant to love ourselves; we are meant to love other people. So loving yourself seems to clash with the faith. But when the Bible talks about self-love, it means being stuck in self-centred thinking, as a small child is, and that is not the same thing at all as valuing yourself. Valuing yourself means knowing that you yourself are precious, knowing it as the plain truth about you.
Christ died on the cross because we are precious, because we are worth dying for. God judged that we were worth it, and so he acted to save us.
The verdict a person has passed on himself carries more weight than anything anyone says to him from outside. That one verdict, “I am a fool,” is why he cannot put the drink down, and it is also why “God loves you” does not sink in.
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