There are several things at the heart of addiction. Anxiety over anything can trigger a deep discomfort, a feeling of dread. It is hard to explain to a child who feels it and carries that low vibration of fear everywhere, day after day. It builds like a snowball, and then one day we are old enough to pick up a substance or a behavior pattern that brings us temporary relief.
But let us look back a little earlier, before the anxiety, at the experiences at the center of it all. As infants, we are entirely reliant on the grown-up world to keep us alive and to bring us relief from the natural anxieties we would feel under the best of circumstances. We rely on physical touch from our caretakers, in most cases our parents. We rely on their patience to guide us through our temper tantrums. We are not even aware of how complex this relationship is. We rely on them to compliment us, to be proud of us, to spend time with us and play with us, to feed us, clean us, and explain the world. If the consistent message coming from the grown-ups is anger, frustration, and their own anxieties, we can see how the pressure builds.
It is a normal mechanism for a young child, who does not understand philosophy or the ways of the human mind, to take every shortcoming of their caretakers personally. Why don't they love me? Why don't they give me what I need? Why don't they hold me? Why aren't they gentle? There must be something wrong with me. We do not understand their character defects at two and three years old. We do not understand them at ten. We simply do not have the mental capacity yet, and because we depend on the grown-ups, it seems natural to idealize them and put the blame on ourselves. Maybe I'm too loud. Maybe I'm not clean enough. Something must be wrong with me. It is natural to reach this conclusion when we are young.
In many people's childhoods, the circumstances are far worse than neglect, worse than a failure to hold us, caress our skin, or look deep into our eyes with love. Many of us experienced horrific trauma at the hands of grown-ups. This should be obvious to the world, but there is a great deal of denial about it. Many people, even those with psychological problems and addictions, cannot remember the subtleties and sources of their emotional pain. For others it is obvious, and they carry resentments that eat away at the fabric of a regulated nervous system.
At some point, it is common to create a negative thought loop. Why doesn't Mommy love me? Why is Daddy never home? Why did my parents separate? Why are the grown-ups always angry with me? In some cases, why do they hit me? What is wrong with me? Or we turn it outward and say, what is wrong with them? I hate them. What a terribly confusing thing for a young person, to feel hatred toward the people they are meant to love. Confusing and conflicting feelings can become mental obsessions. We try to work them out in our minds, but we do not have the tools, and the thought loops keep popping up. Somewhere along the line, they wreck our self-esteem.
What we physically and psychologically need is not being met, and the mind has to resolve that somehow, yet it cannot, especially in childhood, when we cannot walk away from bad parenting and say, you know what, I don't need you, I'll take care of myself, I'll find other people who love me. We are trapped in our childhood circumstances. By the time we are old enough to be free, the patterns are in place: patterns of obsession, of self-esteem imploding or never developing, of self-hatred, of an inflated self that protects us from the real feeling of having no stable sense of self. These patterns loop and cause great discomfort.
One of the first questions I asked myself when I got sober in my teens was how evolution could allow a creature to be so vulnerable to thought and feeling. We are so fragile. The system breaks down so easily. I don't think evolution is finished with the human mind. It is still perfecting it over time, the way it shapes the physical form of a creature, but because of our intelligence and our ability to make choices, it takes nature much longer to perfect the system that regulates our nervous system. How do you relax an intelligent beast like a human once it is under pressure? How do you bring humanity back to a sense of peace? I don't have a complete answer for that. I am just one mind thinking about a global problem. The fact is that a great many humans, perhaps the majority, are unaware of all this. They grow up functioning just well enough to stay unaware, even though there are clear signs of mental health crises everywhere. We become doctors, business people, politicians, schoolteachers, and so on, and on the surface it seems to be working. But is it? How many children in the world will go to bed tonight with a feeling of dread, without a sense of safety or self-love?
The way human beings evolve now is through self-awakenings and breakthroughs across the species. When you clean up your life and step outside the anxiety loop that exists in the collective consciousness, you become a rare creature among billions, one who is now helping to change humanity, one day, one action, and one thought at a time. One thing is certain: when you get out of that loop and end your addictive cycles, you are no longer feeding the loop of despair in the collective. Once you find your way out of an anxious nervous system, you are no longer a perpetrator or an abuser. In regulated states, we no longer walk this earth spreading negativity, perpetuating ignorance, or sharing our mental disorders. That is another great reason to end addiction, to become part of the solution for all of humanity, which in turn affects every other creature on this planet that humans come in contact with.
We affect everything. We are that powerful. We pollute the oceans, wage war, and rip trees out of the ground. We pollute the air and contaminate food. We affect the climate, for God's sake. When you see humans who don't care, who keep moving forward with destructive behavior toward everything, understand that the source is what happened in the crib, what happened in our teenage years, what is happening in our nervous systems. Self-obsession and looping negative thoughts drag us back into anxiety states. We are unconscious of them throughout our lives, yet they are the emotional states that lead us to behave addictively. We have to be passionate about ending them, or we will not have the momentum to overcome the inertia that drags us into the mud.
When you feel the obsessive loops coming on, you must practice becoming aware. Say, there it is, there is that loop again. Don't just let it play in the background and forget it. Don't engage with it. Don't feed it. Just notice it and ask, how am I back in this again? I'm not good enough. I'm not tall enough. I'm not handsome enough. I'm not rich enough. I'm a nerd. Whatever the faulty loop is, notice it.
There are a few ways to interrupt it. One approach is psychological work, where we begin to understand the root cause. It is slow, but it works. Awareness, over time, does help. Another approach is to divert the mind, and we get better at this with time. It is an acquired skill. First notice the loop, then say, loop, you're not invited, and direct your mind to something else. That is not an easy skill to access. It takes time, repetition, and willingness. A third approach is to keep feeding positivity into the mind through our routines and behavior patterns. Start the day with gratitude, even before you open your eyes, to counterbalance the negative thoughts, and in time the positive thoughts will outweigh the negative ones. Write the negative thoughts down. Put them on paper, look at them, and find a rational way to help them lose their power. These things are easier said than done, especially when we are young, but they are part of the solution, and they are available to anyone who is willing.
I wrote this forty years sober, one morning in October. I woke up and forgot to do my breathing exercises, and the anxiety mind was active. In my dream world that morning, my mind had been working through my relationships, the business, problems with my children, my aging father. All my obligations were turning over in my dream while I observed them. When I woke up, I didn't take a moment to find my breath and my center. I just got moving, and in the bathroom the obsessive loop started.
I saw it happening, and I stopped it. I said, hey, brain, you're safe. Stop it. You're digging yourself into a hole and the day hasn't even begun. Why are you obsessing? Then I looked at it and saw that my self-esteem had been pancaked over the last few days. The business is doing great. I fixed the sink at work yesterday. The business got a negative review on Google. I was left with the feeling that I need to do more. There are signs I have to make. We have to hire more front of house staff. I need to be out in nature. I haven't seen a sunset. I need more attention from the world. I want to be great. I haven't done enough.
Does it make a difference how long I've been sober or how smart I think I am? These patterns emerge out of nowhere, and usually it is because I am pulling back on certain kinds of self-help work. I hadn't done enough writing. I had resisted prayer when the obsessions came up. Maybe I needed to go back to basics and be of service, and I hadn't. The dam holding all of this back was starting to show cracks, and the negative thoughts, like water, were leaking back in.
So I went back to basics and started to write, and I found so much relief in writing this and explaining it to myself. Marcus, you can never change the fact that your nervous system developed the way it did in your family of origin. You can never change how you felt from thirteen to eighteen, the low self-esteem, looking in the mirror and thinking you were ugly. You had no accomplishments for the first twenty years of your life. You weren't an athlete. You struggled to make friends. You were shy. You were bullied. That is all still in there, pounding on the door of your mind. Look at it again, and then go into the mantras.
Self-parent. Be kind to yourself. Let the Observer Self rise up and talk to that little inner child who is saying, I'm not safe, I'm not okay, I'm not perfect, I'm powerless over so many things. Then start your routines. Exercise. Clean your space. Write, meditate, pray, and plan the day. Listen to a lecture or some comedy. Go make those signs at work, because they are part of the business and they need to be right. Make a round of phone calls and say nice things to people. Support them. Encourage them.
Self-help is all of this. It is tedious, manual work. It doesn't happen because we wish it so, and I'm afraid we cannot pray our way out of all of it. Prayer does help relax the anxious mind and bring it back down, but it will not eliminate the fluctuations. That comes when we finally take the deep dive into our lives and discover who we are and how our minds work. Most importantly, we cannot let the obsessions run free like a bull in a china shop. We have to notice them, rein them in, and lead them back to the stable. Pat the bull on the back, tell it it's okay, give it some hay, feed it, and pay attention to it, especially when self-obsession and self-hatred rise up and our self-esteem feels weak.