Stories about addiction usually stop at the drink or the drug, as if what a man reaches for were the whole story. But something comes before it, and it is much older: what a person has already decided he is. He decided it long before the first glass. What I want to follow here is how that conclusion takes hold, and why it never changes.
You decide who you are in the home you grew up in
A person works out who he is from experience, and he starts early. By experience I mean how he was brought up: the home he grew up in. It is there that he decides what he is. This holds for everyone; nobody is an exception.
You may have heard the story of the wolf girl — a child carried off by wolves when she was small and raised among them. Is the wolf girl a human being or a wolf? She never once thinks of herself as human. Those of us looking at her from outside can tell her you are a person, you are human as often as we like, and it never sinks in: she has never spoken a human language, and she has only ever run and played with wolves. So she takes herself to be a wolf. But whatever she believes, what is she in fact — a wolf, or a human being?
Which leaves an odd situation. People do not actually know what they really are. The I that a person thinks of as himself was put together by where and how he grew up. So what he takes to be himself is what his upbringing made of him, not what he actually is.
Gold with muck on it
Put it this way. A lump of gold gets muck on it. Does that make it any less gold? Yet the gold, once muck is on it, thinks it is muck. That is the way human beings think.
What we think we are is not based on what we actually are. But it feels exactly as if it were. A person reasons like this: my parents did not respect me, handled me roughly, left me to myself, abused me, never took my opinions seriously. Therefore I am a useless human being. Therefore I should never have been born. This is how a person builds up his sense of who he is — and then he believes that this is simply what he is.
Once a person has decided what he is, he does not change it
I am muck. I am garbage. I am pathetic. Once a person has decided this about himself, he does not change it.
Which is why nothing shifts even when he is told the truth about himself. If he goes to church, for instance, he hears there that God loves him and that he is precious. He shuts it out. He knows perfectly well it is a good thing to hear. He would like it to be true of him. But he is sure he was not born precious, not the kind of person God could love, so it does not sink in. And a message that does not sink in cannot heal anything. He stays caught in a false belief about himself and lives his whole life by it.
Church does not shatter his belief about himself. It only puts it on hold
He takes that belief — I am muck — with him to church. At church the belief is not shattered; it is only put on hold for a while. What he does there is lose himself in religious activity. While he is at it, he feels faintly connected to God, and that gives him some comfort. But in the end his belief about himself does not change.
Jesus said that whoever drinks the water he gives will never be thirsty again. I take that to mean this: when the message goes deep enough to shatter what a person already believes about himself, one drink is enough, and he stops thirsting and begging for more. But water only sprinkled on the surface keeps drying off, and a message that stays on the surface leaves him thirsty again. So a man who wants to be worth something, but takes himself to be muck, keeps dropping into a holy place — a church — for a short while. There he can tell himself, at least I’m a halfway decent person. That is how he keeps up his faith, his relationships and the rest of his life, while what he really believes about himself — that he is muck — stays untouched.
The belief sits hidden in his mind, so other people rarely notice it. He even fools himself into believing it is gone. But in his attitude, his behaviour and his relationships, it cannot be hidden. In his relationships all of it comes out: he is always tense, quick to anger, forever worried about what other people think of him. So life starts to get hard. This is distress he cannot resolve, and a drink or a drug relieves it at a single stroke. That is how the addiction takes hold. Going to church, living by the Bible, doing whatever else you like — none of it can win against the addiction. Not for anybody.
The drink is not the idol. The self is
In religious language, an addiction can be called an idol: drink, drugs or money that a person has come to love more than God. Dig further, though, and the drink is not the idol; the self is — the person himself. Why? Because he will not change his belief about himself. He puts his own thinking above the truth. What he believes about himself feels truer to him than what God says about him. So he has put himself above God, and that makes him the idol. And he goes on living his own way, by his own lights.
Here is what living by his own lights looks like. He thinks: if I give in, they’ll take me for a pushover, so I won’t. He refuses, and he gets angry. Why the anger? Because he is afraid they will see him as a fool — as what he secretly believes he is. That is what the anger is for.
Personality is not something you were born with
Personality is not inborn. It is the way a person found, as a child, to survive the home he was raised in — a way that has since set hard. Every living thing is driven by instinct to survive. So a child tries out ways of behaving on his mother and father, again and again, and keeps the one that proves safest in the home he happens to be in.
For example: Mum, it hurts — and what comes back is be quiet. The child told his mother plainly what was going on inside him, and got told off for it. Parents used to scold children a great deal for crying: And what have you got to cry about? So the child concludes that feelings are not to be expressed — that showing what is inside him gets him punished. He hides them. And once he hides them, he gets told off less often than when he kept crying to her. Hiding works best, so it stays. He tells himself: if I say what I feel or what I want, I only lose out and get into trouble, so I had better handle it on my own. People who have learned this stop speaking up. They stay silent even when they need to speak. Their personality set in that shape to protect them.
The more you hold your feelings down, the more you need to break loose
But a personality like that keeps a person’s feelings held down. People need to talk with one another and share what they feel in order to be happy; someone like this is stopping himself from doing that, so he feels stifled and in pain. Then he has one drink, and the man who never had anything to say suddenly has a great deal to say. The alcohol numbs his senses, he loosens up, and what he had been forbidding himself comes out. As it comes out, for a moment he feels he can breathe again. Every way of breaking loose, from a drinking binge to a shopping spree, works like this: for a moment, the stifled feeling lifts. Which is why the more a person holds his feelings down, the more he needs to break loose.
Seen this way, a person with an addiction is someone living with this much pain and distress who has found something that frees him from it within moments.
Taking away the painkiller while the pain is still there
So getting rid of an addiction is not a matter of telling the person to stop. The addiction works like a painkiller for the pain inside him. When the real source of that pain is found — where it started — and the pain can be dealt with, he stops taking the painkiller. He stops on his own.
But if the pain is still there and you tell him not to take the painkiller, he may die. He may reach for something worse than what he had. Addiction is bad, granted. But what he turns to instead may be more extreme still — even taking his own life.
Related
- Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending
- Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding
- The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
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