Standing Up to Addiction: Connection and Relation

Broken brains

Have you ever been at a point in an addiction in which you thought something along the lines of, “If someone had a gun to my head and swore to pull the trigger if I act on this compulsion, I’d get shot“?

I had that thought once.

Maybe it was even true…

Though I imagine that if the situation had been literal rather than hypothetical, I may have tapped into deeper reservoirs of motivation and urgency.

A challenge of recovery is tapping into consistent motivation and urgency without a gun to our heads.

At some perilous point, addiction does put a proverbial gun to our heads, with losses and pain so enormous that the only choice left is to recover or die.

Until that point, addiction is often more like a subtle poison that gradually erodes the ground beneath us numbing us into a false sense of safety even as our world goes increasingly haywire.

When the ground finally dissipates we fall to the brink of death, and there it may be easier to find the motivation to change our perspective and behaviors enough to find stability, sanity, and reconciliation. To find recovery.

But what happens if we fall back into that pattern after escaping it? What happens if we relapse?

If so, we still remember what happened last time around, but we don’t necessarily feel the urgency anymore. We’ve reactivated those deep neural pathways and our brain’s desperate demand for numbness and escapism is revived.

The deepest part of our brains perceive the fulfillment of our need for relief as being necessary for survival. We logically know that is bullshit, but our instincts drive us to act against the will of our logic centers, our frontal lobes.

This is a major flaw in our evolution, but one that we are stuck with at this current juncture in space and time.

Knowledge is power, on one hand. On the other, I’ve known this shit for over fifteen years and I often feel helpless to do a single thing about it. To know, is only a start.

To do, is to begin to change. Then, to do again.

And to keep doing until that neural energy that influences our habitual tendencies flows down newer, more productive pathways.

Knowing what to do is half the battle, but actually doing it in spite of our glitching brains and suicidal survival instincts, is another story.

The antidote is connection

It has wisely been said that the opposite of addiction is connection.

When we’re alienated and cannot identify with others, nor relate at all to our society and its systems and the world around us, we become unaligned with the natural emotional needs of human beings.

This non-alignment causes one of the most restless states possible.

Restlessness is uncomfortable, and some of us get wired into dealing with discomfort in ways that make us feel OK for a moment at the expense of our long-term stability, livelihood, relationships, and even our own self-respect.

It’s a fucking trap, and changing the tides of it before getting to that point of life-of-death urgency, can feel like a swim against the flow of a fierce river, and our muscles are atrophied and our inner judgment is poisoned, and we barely know which way is up.

But we compile our accumulated knowledge.

We sit down and write.

Some of us pray, just in case a God is listening (and if there isn’t, our willingness to try anyway is indicative of a mind that can still open to help and hope).

We put as much energy as we can into ideas, solutions, and action plans.

And if it makes sense that the opposite of addiction is connection, we now have a conceptual framework for our antidote.

What is connection?

So what is connection, and how to achieve it?

Connection is the act of identifying with the world we’re in, and the people, objects, and concepts within it.

Connection is a sense of relation.

When we focus on similarities between ourselves and others, rather then just the differences, connection has a chance to prevail.

When our breath is taken away by a sunrise and we’re aware that our humble existence plays a small part in the beautiful tapestry of existence, connection has a chance to prevail.

When we realize that serving others is self-serving too, and that self-care is mandatory for us to be able to properly serve others, connection has a massive chance at prevailing.

When we accept help from others, we find connection. We may even realize that by letting people who care about us help us, we’re doing them a service as well.

When we truly listen to others, we find ourselves in their stories. Connection, right there.

When we’re vulnerable enough to share the truth about ourselves, others find themselves in our stories, and they often tell us so. Then we all feel a little more connected.

When we find an authentic way to function as responsible adults in a society of contradictions, inequity, and broken, unjust systems, we no longer play the role of the alienated victim to that society. Acceptance of our own flaws and limitations, as well as society’s, is to have respect and patience for the process of both.

This is another path to connection. Besides, if we want to make society better than we found it, our health and sanity will increase our chances of being taken seriously and succeeding.

In my case, when I pick up the goddamn phone and call someone who cares about my recovery and knows what to say to diffuse my overwhelming compulsions to obliterate myself off the map of existence, connection fucking wins and just for right now anyway, addiction gets neutered.

In the spirit of Bob Barker:

Please spay and neuter your addictions, folks.