Stories about addiction usually stop at the substance. The drink, the drug, the money — as if the thing a man reaches for were the whole of the matter. Something stands in front of the substance, though, and it is much older. It is the definition a person has already issued about himself: what he takes himself to be, settled long before the first glass. That definition is what I want to follow here — how it sets, and why it will not move.
You confirm what you are inside the house you were raised in
A person works out who he is from experience, and he starts early. Experience here means the environment he was raised in. Inside that environment he confirms his own identity. This holds for everyone; there is nobody it skips.
You have heard of the wolf girl. Carried off by wolves when she was small, raised among them. Is the wolf girl a human being or a wolf? She never once thinks of herself as human. We can stand outside her and say you are a person, you are human as often as we like, and it does not go in — she has never used a human word, she has run and played with wolves. So the identity she holds is wolf. And her existential identity — wolf, or human?
Which leaves an odd situation. People do not actually know their own identity. Not the existential one. The I that a person thinks of as himself was assembled inside an environment, so what he is holding is the assembly, not the thing itself.
Gold with muck on it
Put it this way. A lump of gold gets muck on it. Is the gold then not gold? The gold takes the muck for its own substance and concludes that it is muck. That is the way human beings think.
The way we think is not based on substance. And it feels exactly like substance. My parents did not respect me, handled me roughly, left me to myself, abused me, gave nothing I said any weight. Therefore I am a useless human being. Therefore I should never have been born. An identity gets built along those lines, and then the built thing is what the person calls himself.
Once the definition is issued, it is not revised
I am muck. I am garbage. I am pathetic. A definition of that kind, once a person has issued it, does not get changed.
Which is why the good news and the truth can arrive and nothing shifts. They are blocked at the door. He can hear perfectly well that it is a fine thing to be told. He would like it to be true of him. But he was not born the sort of being it is true of — so it does not go in. And what does not go in cannot treat anything. He stays inside something false and lives his whole life there.
Church does not break the belief. It suspends it
He is carrying that belief, and he takes it to church with him. At church the belief is not broken; it is put on hold. What grows in its place is religious activity. While the activity is running he feels faintly connected to God, and some comfort comes from that. His belief about himself, finally, is not changed. What sort of seat God occupies inside a mind in the first place is a separate question, and I have written about it in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God.
Jesus said that whoever drinks the water he gives will never be thirsty again. Read as a statement about belief, that describes something specific: when a message goes deep enough to break the belief system a person is already holding, he stops asking for more and stops going parched. Water sprinkled on the surface dries off. So a man who wants to be a person of some value, and who takes himself to be muck, goes and stands briefly somewhere holy. He goes, and there he can tell himself, at least I am a slightly decent person. On top of that he keeps a religious life, keeps relationships, keeps the whole thing running — with his real belief left intact.
He even deceives himself. But in attitude, in behaviour, in relationships, this is not something he can deceive. It comes out, all of it, in the relationships. Life begins to get hard. And what clears that unsolvable distress in one stroke is the addiction. Keeping a religious life, following the word, adding whatever else you like on top — none of it beats this. Not for anybody.
The drink is not the idol. The self is
Religious language has a name for the addiction: an idol. Drink is better than God. The drug is better than God. Money is better than God. That is what the word is pointing at. Dig further, though, and the drink is not the idol; the self is. Because the belief does not change. His own thinking is ranked above the truth. And so he goes on living his own way, by his own lights.
If I do it like that they will take me for an easy mark, so I will not do it like that. And then he gets angry. Why is the anger produced? He is worried they will see him as a fool. That is what he is producing it for.
Personality is not something you were born with
Personality is not inborn. It is the method a person found for surviving the environment he was raised in, set hard. An organism has to survive; the instinct sees to that. So it builds the strategy best fitted to the environment it happens to be standing in, and then tries the strategy out.
Like this. Mum, it hurts — and what comes back is be quiet. The child has plainly communicated what was going on inside him, and he has been told off for it instead. Children used to get told off 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 putting out what is in him gets him punished. He hides them. He tries hiding, and he is told off less often — fewer scoldings than the whining used to cost him. So hiding is the optimum, and it stays. Saying what I feel, saying what I want, only leaves me out of pocket and in trouble, so I had better carry it myself. People who have arrived there do not speak. They do not speak when speaking is called for either, which I wrote out at length in I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling. The personality set in that shape for the sake of protection.
The more you press down, the more breaking out you need
And that personality is holding the feelings down. Human beings are made happy by communicating with one another and sharing what they feel; here the man is blocking his own side of it, so he is stifled and in pain. Then one drink. The man who had nothing to say has a great deal to say. What he had been forbidding himself comes loose, because the alcohol numbs the senses. It comes loose, and for a moment there is a feeling of the throat opening, of being able to breathe. Every notion of going off the rails belongs in this category. Something in the mind gets aired out. Which is why the more a person represses, the more of this going off the rails he comes to need.
Look at it squarely and the addiction is this: someone living inside that much pain and distress found the one thing that would release him from it in a very short time.
The pain is still running and you take the painkiller away
So getting rid of an addiction is not a matter of telling the person not to be addicted. When the real source of the pain has been located — where it started — and that pain can be dealt with, the painkiller stops being taken. The painkiller here is the addiction. It stops on its own.
But if the pain is still running and you tell the man not to take the painkiller, there is a possibility that he dies. He makes the choice that is worse than the one he had. Addiction is bad, granted. The more extreme option is where he can go instead.
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