I am not an addict. I am a person.
I may drink alcohol, use drugs, or indulge myself in activities that give transient pleasure because they allow me to feel good or less bad. Every time I pursue one or more of these options I do it decisively. I want it. And my desire to participate even though I may know it is both transient and potentially destructive is driven by the need to feel good. This may mean that, at that time or as a pattern in my life, I do not feel good – about myself, within myself, or in my reality. These options provide a ready, easy, certain feeling of pleasure without effort. Yes I know that accomplishment, love, contentment can give pleasure but I do not know how to get them or they require more effort than I am able to give. So I keep going back to my easy option and thus my best friend.
Therefore, taking away these options does not really help me. It may give me the opportunity to learn how to get natural satisfaction from love, a feeling of accomplishment, or contentment. Yet an opportunity is not an achievement if I really do not know how to get these attributes. Then, I will slip back to what I know works. They say this is relapse, but it is not really. It is the need to get what every human person deserves – the escape from feeling bad, lost, unworthy, foolish, confused, or incapable. I just do it the way I know how. And they say that this is an insatiable appetite for drugs or alcohol, or sex, or whatever I have discovered that gives me respite. And they try to remove my access to these options leaving me gasping and heaving in my discomfort, not for the substance as is believed, but in the state that I do not know how to fix.
Therefore, if you are a person with a compelling attraction to drugs, alcohol, gaming, social media, sex, shopping or whatever is your diversion, there is real hope. If you are a parent or spouse who wants to really help your loved one escape the easy attraction to these options, there is hope. Hope is not in the power of control over the decisions of the person but in the opportunity to teach them how to build, restore, or expand the option of learning to feel good – about self, within self, and in their reality.
Read how this can be done effectively and permanently at no cost or little cost for extra assistance. If what you read jibes with you, just use the information and build yourself or help the person you love build themselves. Anyone, the user or the helper, can always request a single appointment or a short series of appointments to help you understand and apply the logic.
