Letting go of who you’ve been, for who you can become, is a process of letting go. It’s a process of eliminating the current solution you’re using to try and soothe yourself.
As my friend Dr. Gabor Maté says, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.”
When we see addictions, we are seeing someone in pain… someone in fear… someone feeling loneliness, depression, anger, isolation, and more. The addiction happens to be the way they are scratching the itch.
Think of the pain metaphorically as the itch. There’s nothing wrong with wanting pain to go away; it’s the method you use to scratch the itch.
It’s also worth pointing out that when I look at people who have addictions, many have a lot of physical pain. It’s possible that the same manifestations that cause addiction… (or cause someone to self-destruct… or to try and get the dopamine hits they are looking for through behaviors or chemicals… or cause repressed emotions and a feeling of not being okay in the world…) are the same things that manifest as physical pain.
In this way, the pain is a way for our bodies to try and protect itself from feeling feelings it does not want to feel.
People who look at addicts as moral degenerates need to understand something…
There’s not a person on the planet that has some unmanageable, out of control behavior who WANTS that.
Some people may say, “They DO want it, because they are obviously doing it.” But the truth is, the pain serves them to the degree that it helps them scratches the itch.
In this way, addiction IS a solution for people; it’s just not a good one.
It’s one that could kill them.
That’s why I want to find better solutions that have efficacy and share those with the world. That’s why I created Genius Recovery.
