Addiction is a way to escape from pain and suffering. It is commonly accepted that there are 3 requirements for addiction:
1. Product
2. A person susceptible to being addicted
3. Avoidance of something – a trauma, pain, suffering.
There are many things to be addicted to. We tend to focus on alcohol and drugs. But what about the silent addiction that lurks in the shadows and does so much harm to us all?
I would argue that most of us, in one way or another, are addicted to the avoidance of uncomfortable truths. You may not know this. You may not know this, because we live in a world designed to distract you from it. And because we have been distracted from them for so long, our resilience and our ability to face them has become eroded, and therefore our addiction to distraction grows.
Because if we cannot learn to face our uncomfortable truths, we cannot move through them, therefore they cannot be resolved. They just get ‘parked’ for another time. And that’s where we find addiction. The never-ending circle of doing something else to avoid facing our truth.
And of course, there is a twist in the story. Because it is in the act of facing all of the uncomfortable truths in our life, that we find our resilience and our freedom and we can start to understand who we really are and what really matters to us.
We think that by numbing, silencing, or trying and generally failing to avoid pain, we are somehow making the best of our lives. We are not. We are simply internalising trauma that grows over time. So, we invest more in our manic existence of distractions to try to numb the increasing traumas, which in turn creates more.
And those locked away, silenced traumas become toxic, slowly eating away at us and we become powerless to stop it, as they invade our minds, bodies, and souls, stealing our energy, peace, and joy, constantly leaving us needing a new and bigger distraction fix that can never be sated and all the while that inner yearning for something more peaceful, more simple and more true grows yet feels a million miles away.
But the answer to all of this is really not so terrible. We need to let those uncomfortable truths out, recognise them, say them, own them and feel them, allow ourselves to grieve, tend to those wounds, and then we can decide what you need to heal, how long you want to hold on to them and what you want to do with them.
And there it is, the truth really does set us free.
As Dr Edith Eger so poignantly says:
“Suffering is universal but victimhood is optional”
So, please do not run from the suffering, the despair, the hurt, for it is in the sea of grief that we finally learn to swim.
With love
Nik x
