In Active Addiction

8 April 2023

Last week we ended with this quote:

Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves.  They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense.  They are working at something which fate [or their own natures] has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears.

                    —Abraham Maslow, 1971, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Please re-read that quote, but with the belief that Maslow was talking about addiction.  Interesting, eh? 

People with active addictive behaviours are sometimes less involved in causes outside of themselves except when it comes to scoring. They are very much within their own skin and, too often, that skin is crawling.  What those with addictive behaviours are working at is supressing hurt and sorrow and disconnection.  That work is precious to them but not like a calling, more like a compulsion, an evil that they are at once aware of and avoiding.  They too may have been called to these behaviours by their natures or their (broken) nurturance but the love only lasts until the honeymoon is over.  The honeymoon ends when the user realizes that he is no longer using for joy—no, he’s now using because the pain that arises when sobriety returns is far too ugly to keep living without his drug of choice—his best friend and worst enemy.  That realization comes with shame, guilt, anxiety, and depression—refueling the addictive cycle.

This blog is mostly for the family and friends (F+F) of loved ones suffering addiction.  Those with addiction know all about this.  It is much more difficult for F+F to get this as there are so many other ways we look at addiction: a failure of will, a moral weakness, or selfish laziness.  I don’t think it’s any of those three things; I think addiction is a cure-all turned all-consuming monster.  And while addiction is a socio-economically equal opportunity employer, it is decidedly biased toward people with mental health challenges arising from biology, acculturation, attachment, or social awkwardness...it strikes at those already feeling like outsiders.

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 color...The patient suffering from mania...finds things full of color 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, 2012, p. 40)

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, in Finlay, 2012, p. 40)

Let’s examine these summations.  If the patient is ill, is her world ill?  I’m not sure.  In the few times I have suffered illness, my world is much more limited and somewhat less rosy but I still know the world is no more ill than when I headed into sickness.  But perhaps if my mental health were more compromised that would be the case?  Don’t know.

I think those using addictively still have lived bodies while I also accept that they do facilitate instrumental, technological interventions.  But a person experiencing addiction also experiences thirst, sunlight, and cold.  I agree that there can be an alienation from self, but is this a necessary condition of addiction?  Not sure.

What I do fully endorse are the introductory thoughts i.e., that experiencing a mental health disorder can collapse or unbalance one’s world.  The realization that you and your way of perceiving, thinking of, and experiencing the world are now considered “disordered” is disturbing in the extreme.  There is an implicit assumption of the world’s rightness and your wrongness which hurts, frightens, and alienates.  I don’t doubt any of that.

Nor do I doubt that people in the grip of addiction back away from normal social life and from accepted day-to-day meanings.  A good day in addiction is knowing you’ve already scored and that you have a warm place to crash.  These are winnowed down concerns centred on maintaining a way of life that becomes increasingly more threatening.  For those who doubt this let’s look at my own previous explanation of the opponent-process theory.

The salient neurochemical attribute of a SUD [Substance Use Disorder] is the activation of the reward circuit in the brain, colloquially known as “the high.”  Although it is often thought that the addictive cycle [grows] with users chasing the high, it works in the opposite fashion.  An accepted neurological interpretation is that a user returns to using, not to chase the high, but to lessen the low which is neurochemically lower than the datum level prior to using (Domjan 2015, p. 54).  This is the opponent-process theory.  The difficulty with this theory is that, if left to play out as predicted, there is only one trajectory for those suffering from addictive behaviours: increased dosage resulting in death.  As many people suffering from addictive behaviours do not end up dead, but in recovery, the opponent-process theory fails to account for acts of human agency fostering self-extrication from addiction. 

(Chalykoff, 2021, p. 2)

And while I stand by this explanation, what I hope this blog has done is to illuminate the abject misery of the addicted life.  No one starts drinking, drugging, gambling...with the goal of becoming addicted.  No one.  And like van Gogh’s fading flowers, there is still hope and beauty in those souls. 

Dan Chalykoff is near completion of an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his focus is addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

Chalykoff, D. R. (2021, 16 April).  A narrative analysis of agential movement from addiction to recovery in Erin Khar’s Strung Out (2020).   www.understandings.ca

Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world.  Wiley-Blackwell.