When you are wounded emotionally, physically, or sexually during childhood, you are defenseless to take care of yourself. The hurt done towrd you is like having an emotional wound on your heart. It's as if the hurts in your heart fester and form emotional puss wounds. Yet, we are often unaware of the root issues in our hearts. We are only aware that we are in tremendous pain. This pain can manifest itself through codependent relationships, addictive behaviors, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Symptoms like these often motivate people to seek counseling.
I've had twelve root canals and two oral surgeries in my life-time. (That means if you've nver had a root canal, you owe me a thank-you note for having one for you!) (Can you imagine how excited I get about going to the dentist?) I could have gone to the dentist with each abscessed tooth and simply asked him to shoot it full of Novocain. The Novacain would stop the pain but the reprieve would only be temporary.
While I would have felt relief from the pain, the abscess would still be in there, and the infection would grow worse as I ignored it. Getting rid of the pain permanently -- bet it in your mouth or your heart-- requires going through the uncomforable process of removing the wound and the years of infection. Yet, we often treat our emotional pain with any anesthesia we can find.
Self-medicationg painful thoughts and feelings is the main purpose of addictions. When emotional pain becomes unbearable, we often seek to find an instant mood alteration to ease it. Most associate drug and alcohol abuse with addiction because they create the most obvious life damaging consequences.
But addictive behavior also includes emotional and process addictions. In other words, hurting people have "drugs jof choice" to ease their pain. One person may use work in the same way that another uses food to escape and ignore feelings. However vairous the addictions; all are used to change current reality to make it bearable if only for a while.
Ultimately, addictions are self-defeating froms of abuse that make the addict do things she doesn't really want to do. Recall the words of apostle Paul in Romans 7:14-24: "I do not understand my own behavior: I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing that I do I want to do, I never do: the evelil thing which I do not want--that is what I do."
People may be addicted to alcohol, narcotics, power, work, relationships, money, shopping, perfectionism, spiritualism, exercise, eating, throwing up, starving, fantasies, masterbation, sex, and an endless variety of things. At one point, I was actually addicted to negative emotions.
It seems strange that I became addicted to something painful instead of something that brings pleasure. Even though my saddness was negative, it was easier for me to manage it than to deal with the more painful emotions of anger and rage. I knew I could tolerate depression becasue it seemed safe and well known to me, but I feared anger because I had no idea how to express it.
I later learned that many women have been taught not to be angry. We are told that sweet girls don't get angry, or that anger isn't ladylike. We fear losing our parents' love and experiencing the great shame of being unacceptable if we express our anger. Howerver, by repressing the healthy emmotion of anger, we grow up into adults who are uable to protect ourselves from abusive relationships or to set boundaries with others. Without anger, we don't know how to say "no." Women with no voice of anger are often set up to become victims of violence at the hand of abusers.
The Cycle Continues
When a person is excessively devoted to something or surrenders compulsively and habitually to something, that pathological devotion becomes an addiction. The presence of a psychological and physiological dependency results in addiction. When a person would sacrifice family, job, economic security, and sanity for the sake of a substance, relationship, or behavior, addiction exist.
Addictions are usually multi-generational. A common scenario involves a sexually addicted father who molests his daughter. The daughter then tries to deal with the pain of incest through an eating disorder. She may rear a son who works to prove he is loveable through perfectionism and workaholism. That son will neglect his children. As a result, his son may turn to alcohol for comfort and his daughter--who is starved for male attention--may become co-dependent on male relationships. She will tolerate abuse instead of being alone.
The addiction may look different in every generation, but the reason is the same. People in pian seek ways to alter their mood instead of dealing with the painful issues.
Picture yourself standing at the top of a a hill on a snowy witer day with nothing but open pasture in sight. You make a snowball, then give it a swift push downhill. It immediately starts to grown in size as it gathers more and more snow. By the time it reaches the bottom of the long hill, it's out of control and larger than you ever could have imagined. Addiction has a snowball effect. It cycles around, gathers speed, and is soon more destrutive than we ever could have envisioned.
The first step in the cycle of addiction involves suffering pain. It may be due to guilt and shame, loneliness, low self esteem, perceived failure, or the painful damge of childhood abuse or neglect. To escape the pain , we search from some form of anesthesia. Once the effect of the "drug of choice" wears off, we are left in pain again. Only this time, the volume is turned up even louder on our pain because we have added to it the guilt and shame of our addictve behavior. As our pin increases; we are drawn back to the anesthesia to try to numb the pain again. Only each time we come down from the anesthesia, the lows get lower and lower, but the high's don't get any higher.
For instance, a single woman sitting alone in her apartment may feel overwhelmed with loneiness. In her self-talk she thinks, "Of course no one is ever going to ask me out. I am overweight. If I wern't so fat, maybe some guy would pay attention to me. I am never ging to get married. I will be alone for the rest of my life."
Eventually, these thoughts become so painful tat she searches for an anesthesia to calmher pain. She orders an extra large pizza and eats it alone. The she eats a bag of cookies for dessert. As she eats, her anxiet lowers, and she feels comforted. But after she has eaten it all she feels panicked, and her stomach hurts. She knows that now she will gain even more weight!
When food is used as anestesia, either obesity or bulimia becomes the consequence. The hateful self-talks leads to more shame and guilt as she tells herself that she should never have been born, that no one will ever love her, or that God must be sick of her and her struggles. She feels like a worthless mess,. Soon, the pain builds and the cycle starts again as she returnes to binge on food for comfort.
In 1987, I bought my first house in Plano, Texas. I was so excited to be a new hommowner. Unfortuantely the yard had been neglected and was full of weeds. One Saturday, I spent the entire day pulling dandelions. It was a sweaty, backbreaking job. yet, I was so proud of how clean it looked when I was finished.
About two weeks later, after a rainstorm, I noticed the yard was full of dandilions again. I had not knowno that a danelion has a long undrground root. So, I wasted my efforts by breaking the plant off at the surface and leaving the root system entrenched.
We often do that with our addictions. We may stop drinking cold turkey or limit our exercise to tree times a week or cut up all our credit cards, but if we do not deal with the root issues that are causing the pain, the addiction will pop right back up like the weeds in my yard.
Furthermore, we can swap addictions and then somehow convince ourselves that we have changed. Some alcoholics stop drinking and start smoking. Some bulimics sto purging only to start workingout obsessively or abusing laxatives. A woman may break up with an abusive boyfriend and find herself spending her way into bankruptcy.
All addiction result from a lack of healthy esteem for oneself. You cannot love yourself the way and abuse yourself at the same time. For example, if an alcoholic loved herself, she wouldn't get drunk and feel sick with a hangover for days at a time. If the bulimic loved herself., she wouldn't gorge on large amounts of food and then force herself to throw up. If the workahic loved herself, she wouldn't work eighty-hour weeks and drive herself towards burnout.
Our repeated addiction are also based on ego and pride. We want control. We don't like the way God is handling this problem, or maybe we won't even wait to give Him a chance to handle it. We just know that we don't like it, or that it hurts too much. So, we try desperately to be god in our own life. But, whenever we try to be God, someone always gets hurt.
Cynthia Spell Humbert.
I needed to be reminded of all of this...Thank You
