Addiction as a Spiritual Disease: We Are All Either in Recovery or in Denial
I approach addiction as a crisis of consciousness; a failure to meet the existential, emotional, and spiritual challenges of the human condition resulting in painful feelings of disconnection and despair.
Some of us soothe this pain with substances and/or destructive behaviors; the “normies” pursue the appearances of perfection through “money, property, and prestige”: if I look good, I am good… How others see me is who I am.
Both are false, extrinsic solutions to human broken-ness and the persistent yearning for wholeness. Our broken-ness is not pathological; it is the human condition. Whether you accept this as divine design or evolutionary accident, to be human is to be blended—part animal, part angel, endowed with free will to choose between our higher and lower selves. We are disconnected from self and others and long for connection; we are vulnerable and long for surety; mortal, yearning for immortality.
William Falkner described the duality as, “the human heart at war with itself.” Jung called the parts “persona and shadow” (the one we show to the world and the one we would rather not be). Christians name the battle God or Devil; in the Jewish tradition, they are names the yetzers-inclinations; the good inclination and the evil inclination and resolves the paradox by describing the evil inclination as very good.
Failure to integrate our contradictory pulls results in bi-furcated either/or thinking; emotional fluctuations between hope or despair, grandiosity or self-loathing, perfection or failure. Our human challenge is to integrate all of our parts, not alternate between extremes. It is a paradigm shift from either/or to both/and thinking.
Being human also presents us with existential and emotional/social challenges. We yearn to know the “why” of our existence. Why am I here? Does my life have meaning? Do I have a purpose and how do I find it? Is there meaning in adversity? We seek identity “who am I?” is there an authentic me or am I my conditioning? We question our value. Is my worth conditional or comparative? Is it intrinsic or extrinsic? Is it determined by my net worth? Is my value diminished by my flaws and imperfections?
Because we are aware of our mortality and the uncertainty of life, we feel vulnerable and afraid. How do I learn to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity? How do I integrate the desperate, contradictory parts of myself to connect with others and honor my commitments to myself and others? How do I balance role and soul? How do I shift my perception from either/or to both/and thinking? Own my shadow so it doesn’t own me? Rid myself of shame and blame? Unfortunately, we live in a world that is addicted to either/or answers to these complex questions and uncertainties. We scan the brain, medicate the broken parts. We worship measurements and evidence based “guarantees”. We confuse merit with metrics. We externalize the search for identity, value and meaning- I am how I look, I am how others see me.
In 1890, Andre Gide wrote, “[…] the hardest thing is to be sincere in a culture fixated on vacant external metrics.” That is our world today. We don’t want to struggle with ephemerals and ambiguities. We want a quick fix, measurable solutions to all of our questions.
There is no pill or quick fix for “Man’s Search for Meaning.” It’s a life long struggle, a wrestling match between the sacred and the profane, hope and despair, self-will and god’s will, confusion and direction.
Our culture has mistakenly diagnosed and pathologized our search for meaning. Eva Illouz, author of Why Love Hurts writes, “the rise of clinical psychology in the 20th century solidified and granted scientific legitimacy to the notion that our romantic misery (I would add all of our misery) is a function of our psychological failings with the promise that these failings can be deconditioned: she argues that this over emphasis on individual shortcomings gravely warps the broader reality- a reality in which the systems, institutions and social contracts that govern our existence seed the core ambivalence of life and love- what we really want.” We don’t know what we want. We are often strung out between what we want and what our families, institutions and social media tell us we are supposed to want. What all of us want, at our core is shalom/shalem- peace and wholeness within and authentic connections with family, friends and community. These needs are not congruent with our polarized bifurcated cultural norms that enforce either/or perception and feeds our fears of unworthiness with metrics of worth- how many likes we stock pile.
David Brooks, in a recent column summed up our cultural despair, “[…] the larger culture has become morally empty, and therefore marked by fragmentation, distrust and power mongering. The culture needs to be revived in four distinct ways: we need to be more communal in an age that’s overly individualistic; we need to be more morally minded in an age that’s overly utilitarian; we need to be more spiritually literate in an age that’s overly materialistic and we need to be more emotionally intelligent in an age that is overly cognitive.” The culture he is promoting is the culture of recovery. The identifiable addicts with labels, the ones we see as aberrant and are ashamed of, are the lucky ones. They wear their broken-ness on their sleeve, in a life and death struggle. They are forced to surrender to a program of recovery, a new cultural paradigm more supportive of wholeness within and authentic connection to community and purposeful living.
Years ago an alcoholic friend of mine that I had coaxed to join the fellowship of AA said to me, “God, too bad you are not a drunk, you could get help. You’re just miserable.” I was miserable, I romanticized it by calling it existential despair. I think we are all broken, addicted to our misery, in search of a program of recovery.