An Answer to Human Suffering

Do you have crutches you lean on, compulsive activities or substances you use to dull the anxiety, the sadness, the rage?

In this way, we are all addicts, and the dominant narrative around addiction is that addicts need to stop, and that the addict is in control over whether they stop.

And if we broaden the definition of addiction to include not only drugs and alcohol, but all the ways we escape…

Food, technology, shopping, blaming, planning… the list goes on and on.

Do you have control over stopping any of that? If you did, wouldn’t you just stop?

We use our compulsions to get away from ourselves, from our difficult emotions, from our pain. Our substances and maladaptive behaviors are part of a strategy. Our strategies differ on the surface, but at their core, they are all the same:

“Ignore the problem.”

For some, that strategy may look like getting heroin. That’s the bulk of the strategy, to get high at any cost. Your strategy may be less obvious, but all the same, that strategy is laden with addictions: to being right, to working as much as possible, to anything other than being with yourself.

So really, our addictions and behaviors are solutions to the real problem, which is that we don’t know how to be with our difficult inner experiences. Unfortunately, these solutions are short-lived and, like most “magic pills,” have side effects.

Our inner experience calls for our attention, our compassion, our love. But we don’t know how to do that. We were never taught. Instead, we were taught to hide, to deny, to push away.

And that’s not our fault.