30 March 2022
The aim of this blog is to convey to readers the experience of being in addiction. I will offer a self-disclosure, stating that my experience of nicotine addiction (another psychoactive drug) ran roughly 10 years ending in 1984, when I stopped smoking cigarettes. The reason I mention this is that there is a sense of writing about something that—experientially—I have less firsthand knowledge of than many people reading this blog. If you are one of them, and if you see misunderstandings, or whole absent aspects, please let me know. I do seek to understand.
There are two reasons this subject matters. First, in the SMART Family + Friends meeting, parents, spouses, children, and siblings are surprised and moved when someone with addictive behaviours attends and shares their experience of addiction. As we all know, it is easy to judge from afar and difficult not to empathize when we feel the up-close reality of pain, fear, and shame.
The second reason understanding the experience of addiction matters, is to reflect back to those with addictive behaviours that some of us do understand and empathize with the extraordinary life challenges this phenomenon presents. It’s another way of saying, you are not alone. I was moved to write this by a passage from Linda Finlay.
Now consider the last time you were ill. What changes occurred in you bodily way of being? Phenomenologists highlight how when we are ill there is both an altered experience of one’s whole body and an altered experience of the world—and that these are one and the same.
Describing the experience of mental health disorder, van den Berg (1972) talks of how a person’s world can ‘collapse’, how they can feel ‘unbalanced’ or ‘lose their footing’.
The depressed patient speaks of a world gone gloomy and dark. The flowers have lost their colour... The patient suffering from mania...finds things full of colour and beauty... The schizophrenic patient sees, hears, and smells indications of a world disaster... The patient is ill; this means that his world is ill. (van den Berg, 1972, pp. 45-46 in Finlay, 2011 Bold emphasis added)
Kemp (2009) explains the drug addict’s [sic] existential withdrawal is a withdrawal from the lived body, as well as withdrawal from relations with others and from a meaningful world:
The addict [sic] no longer has a lived-body, only a site for instrumental, technological intervention...the body cannot be lived any other way. But equally the world is robbed of meaning, now filled with things that are used only to perpetuate the addictive process...there is a progressive and painful alienation from self. (Kemp, 2009, p. 130 Bold emphasis added)
I have not yet seen an accepted set of stages of the addictive cycle, but I will use a word I read recently to describe the above passages as emanating from the duress stage of addiction. It is the last call of one’s deepest instincts alerting a person with addictive behaviours that the end is near while change may still be possible. Yet that change, any change, feels out of reach.
My limited knowledge of this state, gathered from twenty years within the addictive community, is that despair, alienation, self-loathing, self-mocking laughter, and tears reign over this phase of existence. At this very minute, millions of individual human beings are feeling this.
Among the hooks that Finlay’s passage (quoted above) sunk into me, was the unbreakable connection between self view and world view. I described an understanding of the self earlier this year (Embodied, Active, Situated Intelligence: Assumptions III, 9.ii.22). As that ungainly title conveys, the self is the whole of us. At no point in our lives are we not situated. But what I see in the passages (above) is the contraction of self and world onto one point of focus, one place or situation; a point that once promised salvation now offers evaporation and erasure unto death.
More logically inclined readers will have grasped an implicit ontological antithesis in that statement: if contraction leads to death, expansion of self and world leads to life. This is my first awareness of that premise so I will address it tentatively.
The expansion of self and world risks dispersion and adulteration. I believe for some souls, dispersion and adulteration can mutate into self-cleansing cycles but for others (myself amongst these), the need to remain true to self involves a felt necessity to control that dispersion and expansion in aid of being me. What a luxury when compared to being in addiction feeling diminished, ignored, unloved, self-hated and focused exclusively on the next hit—a hit you already know will leave you disappointed, deeper in self-hate, and more alone—being in addiction.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for Therapists. Printer Name: Yet to Come.
What a meaningful Blog, Dan! It speaks volumes. Love the contraction an expansion theory…rings true as we seek to be in the mind of an individual in addiction. Thanks, as always, for broadening my perspective and understanding!
We’re all learning here, Trish! Glad it resonated. Thanks for reading & commenting.
Your comment about nicotine addiction strike me as I always heard that quitting smoking was more difficult than quitting smoking.
I quit smoking easily and was never tempted again; unlike alcohol. But I think that both require a paradigm shift in thinking from ‘I miss that’ to ‘I’m so glad I don’t have to do that anymore.’
And I do suspect that having achieved a sense of relief from the chains that bound me.
I still find it fascinating that most people also have nicotine as a lasting DOC despite having quit their OTHER DOC.
Fascinating to me.
Sorry Dan
I’m a bit CoVid-ish.
I meant to say smoking harder to quit than heroin
AND
I HAVE achieved a sense of relief….
No apology required, Nancy. You got there. I didn’t find quitting cigarette smoking easy. Failed at least twice and then succeeded the morning I awoke, with my first martial arts class scheduled that night, and thought, “Let’s just try today.” That was September 1984 and I’ve not had a puff since but I remember the first three weeks as hell. After that, it became more natural and yes, I agree, nice to know I’m no longer wrestling that monkey! Thanks for reading and commenting.