Addiction is escapism. Grabbing on to a predilection enables us to escape from life, work, death, financial troubles, relationships and any and all afflictions that life brings into our existence. We feed our flesh as a safety blanket because it’s part of “fight or flight” that is built into our psyche, when things get to be too much, we take flight into distractions.
Some things we use to escape or hide are: gambling, going to the gym, drugs (prescribed or not and that includes alcohol), sex, work, music, video games, football, appearance and/or shopping. If we try peel back the layers and recognize why we feel the need to escape—to understand that our addictive tendencies are unhealthy no matter what the addiction is—we can potentially discover the root of our struggle and gain an understanding of what we need to address in our lives.
The most important step to discovering our core struggles with addiction is to ask ourselves what we are escaping from. When we go shopping, drink a rum and coke, eat a box of Oreos, shoot heroine, have an affair, or whatever our addiction of choice is, we are running from a some form of trauma that happened in our lives. Pain taught us to seek reprieve externally instead of looking inwardly.
What can we do to change it? Introspective searching is imperative. Ask, do we need a different job? To fix a defect in a friendship? To admit to a wrong, own up to it. We must take responsibility and try to make changes or amends so that we can forgive ourselves and gain renewal in our broken places. Until we face the fears we are running from, we will continue to run to the comforts of our addictions and unhealthy decisions.
We’ve been trained to believe we need to go drink, party and partake in happy hour at the end of the week (TGIF!) or on a random workday(“It’s Miller Time”). We’ve been conditioned to think that sex is the key to happiness as flings are infused into the public square. What makes us the most uncomfortable we tend to run from as we run to the easy way out. Most of the time, that easy road leads to addictions. Only by facing our deepest fears can we finally love, accept ourselves and not need the kind of escape we’ve come to seek as a society.
We cannot afford to run from our fears anymore. At the most crucial time in our human history, we need to face our fears in a hurry. Extinction is lurks around the corner; if we don’t act now to stop our collective addiction to materialism and consumption at all cost, we have no hope for a future. We cannot afford to run from this looming disaster. Our world is unraveling economically, socially, politically, and environmentally. Let us commit to overcoming our fears which are the root of our addictions—it will save you, it may save the world. #AddictionsSynonymous
- Addictions Synonymous: The Nexus Between Fears and Our Predilections - January 11, 2018
