I
like to write about addictions and about how to live without them, but
if you don’t happen to have an addiction, you may be reading this for
the wrong reasons.
If you’re reading it when someone close to you should be reading
it, someone who does practice an addiction, I wish you good luck and
remind you that trying to change other people usually doesn’t work when
it involves addiction. It’s a repair job they have to do themselves.
That’s why the whole idea of treating addicts as if they were patients is so misleading and confusing. It would be better to think we are trying to teach students than to cure patients.
Perhaps
you’ve given up something that was—perhaps still is—very important in
your life. Your addiction is or was an object of love, maybe a
love-hate object. Perhaps you’re still just thinking about making that
great self-sacrifice. What is it? Booze, tobacco, gambling, overeating
or maybe sex in the wrong places with the wrong people? Are you sure
there was or is only one addiction? If you’ve finally given up X, now
may be the time to ask yourself what else —what Y— is still on your
back, still eating out of your wallet and still keeping your
self-respect in a dark shadow.
“Nothing,” you say? “I’m finished and I’m clean, sober and holy as hell.”
Perhaps so, but I’m just a writer. Don’t lie to me and don’t brag to me; it’s hardly necessary. Just don’t lie to yourself.
What have you done lately for your family, friends and co-workers?
An
old joke in Alcoholics Anonymous is about Henry who introduces himself
by saying, “Hi, I’m an alcoholic and Henry is my problem.”
Not was my problem, but is
my problem. Henry’s been sober for a long time and is still working on
his main problem, his personality. So, if all you want to do is quit
one life-eating addiction and still be the same old personality you’ve
always been, that’s your choice. It’s dumb, but a choice you have every
right to make.
Please
don’t think I’m picking on addicts about the need for life-long efforts
to improve personality. A good person is never finished growing up,
never finished working on self-improvement. I pick on lots of people
and include myself as one in need of constant maintenance and
development.
Good old Henry summarized the whole point of my writing, the point being, don’t blame the love-hate thing, what I call the addictive—it
cannot be changed. It doesn’t have a personality of its own; it’s just
an inanimate thing. Look instead to the attitude and reactions of the
one who has overused it, and let’s change them if we can. Example:
there’s nothing bad, evil or sinful about the alcohol people drink.
It’s just the result of yeast cells eating up sugars and pooping out
alcohol. Alcohol has many uses, some of them very important and helpful
in human life. It is widely and effectively used in industry, medicine
and research. It does good as well as harm, but alcohol itself makes no
judgments. It has no will of its own. It is what it is, but you’re
different, you don’t have to be what you were forever.
So,
why blame anything or anybody? Let’s fix the user who has the problem
with alcohol without becoming sanctimonious prohibitionists. Let’s get
rid of the appetite. More accurately, let’s get you to deal with the appetite.
Stay
with me as we explore the wonderful, amazing and horror-filled world of
addictions. Not just one addiction, all of them. Come with me now back
to the days when the State governments of Nevada and New Jersey took
over gambling, a move that forced the crime families out of the trade.
By the way, if you don’t think there’s much difference between crime
families and politicians you’re probably on to something important.
It
was windy, cold and raining late one evening as I walked the Boardwalk
in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I’d left one casino to visit another and
was hurrying to get out of the cold. I passed two men sharing an
umbrella and I caught just a fragment of their conversation. The taller
man, a fellow with a slightly pockmarked face, was telling his friend,
“That’s how it is, I have an addictive personality.”
I
assumed they were in Atlantic City to gamble, but both men were smoking
and a faint odor of alcohol reached me as we dodged around each other.
That
scene and that small fragment of conversation have stayed in my memory
for years. The idea of an addictive personality was not in fashion
among professional psychologists because we had no reliable measure of
such a personality, and if it could not be measured it must, therefore,
not exist. Psychologists sometimes have minds that work in strange
ways, and sometimes not at all. We always seem to be conscious of fads
and fashions in our own profession; when something is out of fashion we
simply say it is without scientific justification. When something is in
style, who needs science?
However,
that snippet of conversation had a ring of truth. Although many
professors and colleagues have taught me so much over the years,
ordinary people have been my real teachers, ordinary people with the
courage to change, ordinary people who feared the prospect of painful
change. The clients with whom it was my privilege to work were always
right; that is, their behavior was real and always reflected an
important life history that demanded understanding even if it did not
fit current theoretical fads. Often, of course, they didn’t know they
were only doing what nature and experience had led them to do, and
sometimes I had to read the truth about their lives and their problems
from odd bits of behavior, random remarks and even body language. But I
found again and again that if I simply took time to listen and
understand how a person got to some certain point in life I found
truth, I discovered the “rightness” and inevitability of the behavior
that they and others saw as personal failure.
That fellow is saying something very important about himself,
I thought. What he probably means is that he has more than one
addiction, that he’s tried unsuccessfully to stop one or more himself
and felt helpless, and that his life is dominated by appetites that
rage out of control.
At
the time it was the late 1970s and my home was in Cleveland, Ohio. My
job was running a program for problem gamblers at a Veterans
Administration hospital. At the time, it was still the only such
program in the world. I’d been up in the Catskill Mountains in New York
State to attend, by invitation, a conclave of Gamblers Anonymous as an
outside speaker. Since I was already in the east, I decided to drive
down to Atlantic City and see how it was going with all the new casinos.
Atlantic
City has a special place in my heart since I’d spent some of my
earliest years growing up there, and I’d gone back from time to time to
attend conventions and watch the city go from a well-to-do resort town
in the 1930s to a shabby, depressed ghost town in the 1950s and 60s.
Gambling and the big casinos were supposed to bring the town back.
In
spite of what professional mental health experts believe, “I have an
addictive personality,” contains the recognition of several important
facts: some people are far more prone to addiction than others;
addictions tend to appear either together or in sequence in the same
person, and, in the right person, almost any pleasurable activity can
become an addiction. I’d been seeing this in the people who came for
help with gambling. They defined gambling as their special problem, but
in almost every case they brought other addictive patterns with them.
From
time to time I also worked with people who defined themselves as
alcohol and drug abusers and they, too, almost always carried with them
other addictions that, at the moment, seemed less damaging to them than
their chief complaint. What a person complains about isn’t always the
basic problem; I learned that early in my clinical work.
Over
the years my addicted friends taught me to look underneath the big
problem to find a picture of a whole life, to find the universal
pattern of development that makes addictions possible. This universal
pattern is what I hope to share as we go along.
