Emotions versus Values

4 August 2021

Often, in recovery meetings, questions will arise repeatedly.  Are you being led by your emotions or your values? is one such question.  It is also a question which ought to be asked from about age four and throughout school years, but that’s another blog!  The usefulness of the question concerns understanding epistemic primacy.

Primacy is the state of being of first importance.  Episteme is the Greek word for scientific knowledge or knowledge that can be demonstrated to be true.  So epistemic primacy is about what rightly comes first, in the creation of demonstrable knowledge.  In many ways, the more I understand addiction, the more I see it as a knowledge-avoidant, emotions-first coping mechanism. 

Accepting Maté’s tenet, that the essential question is not Why the addiction? but Why the pain? addiction is about anything but unpacking pain.  Addiction is one means of feeling better in the short term, so the pain goes away.  Until it returns.  Which it always does.  Yet nobody chooses addiction.  It is eased into or embraced for its pain-relieving character.  In a savagely cruel way, there is no better metaphor than addiction for an emotions-first mode of living.  Substance use hides pain that one is unready to face and unpack.  And that—the facing and unpacking—is the essence of a successful recovery. 

To summarize: using psychoactive drugs is a refusal to acknowledge or open the boxes of pain.  Recovery is about facing, unpacking, and understanding the contents of those boxes.  One way to lead a life based on emotions, is employing substance use as a barrier.  But what happens is that the barrier itself becomes the destination.   That which first protected you now enslaves and imprisons you.  Can this also work without psychoactive drugs?

Imagine a boy too afraid of his terrible home life to face it.  He uses humour to deflect attention from that home life.  As he develops a network of relationships from boyhood on, those relationships are built on two things.  First, his friends and lovers know he’s always good for a laugh.  Second, his friends and lovers may be attracted to him because, at a preconscious level, they know he’s not one to dig deep toward painful truth—he’s avoiding it—and others, who avoid their own truths, probably recognize this.  My sense is, the further that man escapes into humour, the sadder he becomes, not unlike the sad clown.  In fact, it doesn’t take a terrific leap of imagination to envision our sad clown reaching for drugs to keep that pain embedded within.  That’s why I believe a life led by emotions is dangerous and unsustainable. 

So how would that same boy live a values-first life?  To begin, he would need the intellectual confidence to face what was happening at home.  This returns us to epistemic primacy: Face squarely what you know and see before you.  (Bruises don’t lie.)  Second, deal with it.  If the boy had a single teacher he trusted, he could go to that person to ask about options.  Let’s say the options are foster care, leaving the house when the violence begins, or calling the police the next time it happens.  Even if none of these works, the boy is not lying to himself or hiding in a haze of intoxication.  As such, he can plan an exit.

Gabor Maté (2018, p. 109) asks “...who’s in charge, the individual or their behaviour?”  Nearly two-thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius asked a parallel question, “What am I doing with my soul?” (Hays, 2003, Meditations, 5.11).  The intentional pursuit of constructive values is a first and necessary step in soul-respect.  Soul-respect requires that we look as clearly and fearlessly as possible at our inner and outer lives, seeking to bring them into harmony.  As such, epistemic primacy = first, what I believe to be true.

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.