The Layers of Healing Addiction

Art by Marianna Gartner

Dream Journal Excerpt: June 28, 2017 There was some discussion about morphine and how I had my own version in coffee. Like somehow the coffee reduced my pain and was my addiction.

After composing the previous blog post, I felt overwhelmed with the idea of trying to revise and update the 12 Steps to assist those of us with addictions of various kinds.

I kept thinking, "I know my guides want me to do this but how do I achieve what they are asking of me? I don't want to fuck it up."

I told myself that all I could do is write about my experience, my feelings and where I am currently.

I feel the burden of responsibility of having to come up with written out steps to help people overcome addiction, because I am still an addict myself. Sure, I have cut back on coffee but it is still my monkey on my back, my precious.

Addiction is multilayered like that tattered blanket from my dream. (See below). There are layers to what drives us there and layers to what keeps us there. Comfort is probably the number one gateway feeling that leads us down that path. Escapism is high on the list because we don't want to have to face the long buried trauma and/or the truth of the current state of our lives.

Dream Journal Excerpt: August 7, 2019 I dreamed that Thomas, the kid I helped raise, had my blanket. He had been carrying it with him and dragging it everywhere on the ground behind him. It was in bad shape now but I didn't care. I still wanted it back so I stopped him and asked for it back and he get gave it to me. It was like a big thick comforter and it was coming apart at the bottom where it was being dragged. There were layers to it and other blankets inside. 

The dream made me think of Charles Schultz's Linus character from the Peanuts comic series. How many of us are dragging around a comforter that has actually started to leave us tattered and falling apart?

When you mix addiction with those who have suicidal thoughts and tendencies, scare tactics of telling us our addictions will lead to death have the opposite effect.

They say, "Salt will kill you" and I start piling the salt on because I'm like, "Maybe this is a means of exit."

So, to tell someone who already wants out that it will kill them doesn't help. They just do it more. For me, death is just an end to the pointlessness of it all.

We have to help people find a reason to stay. If there is no reason to stay, why try?

Kids often aren't enough reason to stay when you are in the depths of deep depression. In depression you can believe they would be better off without you.

As a spiritual person, death doesn't scare me... it merely opens the door to home and my true self and that understanding makes it more difficult to want to stay. When you look around and go "This is all just a fucking virtual reality" and the reality you are sitting in is a pool full of shit, it is hard to want to suck it up and stay at all costs. It is a factor in why people aren't motivated to end their addiction.

My coffee is the only thing I look forward to each day.

So, to tell me to give that up, I am like, "Why?"

The million dollar question is, what can replace coffee as that thing I look forward to everyday to keep me in the game? What is something that is healthy and beneficial but won't take over and rule my life? What can give comfort but not end up a behavior I repeat over and over until it consumes my life?

I guess discovering what can replace coffee is part of the journey.

I haven't gotten there yet.

I have found in myself my reason for staying and trying, but that reason will look different to each of us. I think part of how we can find that reason is to take the journey back to self to finally take a magnifying glass and get to know who we are, who we have been and who we are meant to be. I had no fucking clue at the beginning of all of this who I was or what I liked doing. I was so lost and clueless. I just knew I didn't want to remain in that place and so I started searching for all of the parts of me I had forgotten and neglected.

It is my intention to be able to thoughtfully create a simple list of steps we can take to lead us off the cliff where the sand beneath our feet is crumbling away and everything feels uncertain. It is my intention to create an outline that will act as a lifeline to help bring us back to solid ground if we have come to a place where change is desired.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can ever do is admit openly to someone nearest to us that we need help.

To be continued....

Dream Journal Excerpt: October 8, 2016  There was something about my BFF and an addiction group and, as I walked through, I mentioned my addiction was coffee and they all laughed.