Wednesday, February 10, 2016

A Word to the Addict

“We admitted that we were powerless over our addictions – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Anyone who has walked through the doors into an anonymous group has heard these or similar words. It is the first step of any traditional recovery program. Having had a Wesleyan theological background the language of powerlessness was rather strange and seemed to conflict with the doctrine of prevenient grace. In fact, people have probably felt that to admit powerlessness over anything was to simply abandon ourselves to the addiction with the continual justification that they cannot do otherwise, or worse that there is no hope of change. If by powerlessness one meant that self-reliance was not sufficient and that we needed the assistance of God and others in order to help pull us out of our destructive habits then it was certainly well received. After all the entire point of prevenient grace is to enable us to do that which could not be accomplished without the grace of God. In this sense as long as we abandoned Pelagianism then we were in conformity with the first step.

The actual meaning is that we do not have power over our addictions like we might think; meaning that we have lost control and can no longer manage ourselves in a reasonable manner. Promises that we can stop whenever we wanted kept us in delusion which could only be dispelled by honesty and vulnerability. To admit that we have lost control is a humbling experience. Essentially we have slipped into a habitual state whereby our reason is subjected to our passions and despite what we told ourselves we actually maintained that acting out was the greater good. Ask anyone who has ever experienced an addiction and they will tell you that they felt like they were on strings controlled by obsessions and compulsions. Yet at the same time we did exactly what we determined to do. In fact the preoccupations were so overwhelming that it was often difficult to perform simple tasks. The compulsiveness seemed irresistible, persistent, and insatiable. We were incapable of stopping no matter how badly it seemed that we desired for those experiences to end. Our desire to act out was stronger than any of our other desires, sometimes over basic needs such as food and sleep. Our willpower seemed completely insufficient. In fact our will was so bent towards acting out that we did not want to refrain as badly as we wanted to plunge into the abyss. While the Sirens were calling us to our doom our only hope was to be tied to the mast of the ship by others who had stabbed their ears with knives. The prospect of death by the Sirens was far less desirable than the actions they took to preserve their lives. Something must occur in our lives that lead us to take such drastic measures.

I find that this entire experience of addiction can be best explained through a Thomistic perspective. In my blog post on the nature of original sin I mention the following: 

As a result of our condition we tend to turn away from God and turn towards the creature.  Because of this we are perceiving lesser goods to be greater than they actually are and so move further and further from the supreme good, God, whom is our proper end. The greater discrepancy between what we perceive as the good and what actually is good, the greater we become depraved. In this our passions become directed towards less godly ends, and our affections grow towards those things which are more perverse.

The importance here lies in the fact that when we obtain that vision of God, which is properly called the Beatific Vision, then no other desire will be able to compete with it. I had often wondered why we would not choose to turn from God once we enter into his presence and see Him face to face in heaven. It is not as if we lose the capacity to choose or become less than human without the faculty of freewill. Rather in the Beatific Vision we will behold the supreme good and we will choose Him above all things simply because it is the greatest good.

What presents itself to our intellect is perceived as something more or less desirable and our will chooses that which is perceived as the greatest good, or apprehends as the greatest good prior to perception. When we were driven by compulsions we were perceiving the sin as a greater good. But yet we resisted to some extent because we also perceived sobriety as a good. In this experience these two perceptions came into conflict. What we choose is that which we perceived to be the greater good and became frustrated when the other desire was not also achieved. In other words, if we choose to act out then we felt that we violated the desire for sobriety and sanity. If we choose to refrain then we often experienced the sense of missing out on an opportunity. Whether we acted out or not we were never fully satisfied. But whether we acted out or not we did so because we choose one desire over the other. If we choose to act out, then this was perceived as the greater good between the two and so the desire for it was stronger.

The question then is how to lead the intellect to perceive acting out for what it actually is. First, the intellect must be presented with the good of sobriety in such a way that it appears more attractive than the sin. One of the best ways to do this is to make a list of all the positive aspects for why it is more desirable. Perhaps having a strong sense of self-mastery is important to us. Maybe we want to grow closer to God but are incapable of doing so as a result of the destructive habit. Or perhaps we will feel more confident and productive in our accomplishments. Whatever this list may contain you must continue to read and reinforce why life is worth fighting for. Second, the intellect must be presented with the true nature of the object of our desire. The best way to do this is to write a good-bye letter to your addiction. Write out all the negative effects that has resulted from the addiction. In this exercise you are dragging the empty fantasy into the light of reality and taking a good hard look at it. You must eliminate the potential for minimizing the seriousness of the problem. You must undercut every possible excuse.

Whatever it will take to get that object of our misguided affections to take a different shape within the mind will alter your perception of it. The less you perceive the good, the less desire you will have for it. While we may not be able to immediately alter our habits, we can begin the new journey from the Dark Wood of Error[1]. While we are sane we are very capable of orchestrating new experiences and educating ourselves concerning our condition. Over time we will find the result we are looking for. It will not come precisely as we first envisioned it. If what we did and thought as a matter of course was adequate then there would be no need for another method. Personal experience continues to testify to the fact that what we have been doing is not working and that while we are fearful for what will be required to change, the pain of remaining in the addiction cycle has come to a point that it is no longer as tolerable as it once was. We no longer wanted to survive day to day; we wanted to live out our potential to the fullest. The pain of our addiction, what it is doing to us and to others, is not worth holding onto whatever pain we are attempting to medicate. And this too requires a process in terms of our perception of that which is the greater good.



[1] A reference to Canto I of Dante’s Inferno in his The Divine Comedy.

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