Learning to face addictions

Try intentionally to become aware of your own addictions.  Seek them out.  This piece of health advice is thanks to my great friend Jason. 

This is a difficult one because most of us just do not want to face the fact that we come from an addictive culture and that we have many many addictions.  I could list ALL of mine, but it would take a few pages, so I won’t bother listing them all.  In fact, for most of us they lump into categories, so for me these I list here are some of the major areas I face as challenges.  Here we go:

1)    The sweet stuff.  Sugar.  I’ve already mentioned this.  Perhaps if I keep admitting it out loud I will deal with it.  Yes, I actually believe that voicing it out loud makes a difference.

2)    The Internet.  It is always with me and I cannot stop.  Look at me writing this blog about total health!  In the past year, it’s definitely not improved.  How to describe this?  This is actually an to being tied in all the time…coming from a fear of loneliness and disconnection.

3)    Worrying.  I fret and get anxious about all kinds of things from financial to relational and global too. 

4)    Being RIGHT.  I love to be right and I like to tell other people that they’re wrong.  This is not good… I know.  I need to stop it.  Being a know-it-all is not a good thing.  In fact, I can’t stand know-it-all’s myself and so that’s how I know I am one because we usually cannot stand things in other people that we overlook in ourselves.  Log in the eye sort of thing.

5)    Euphoria -- just plain feeling great.  I’ve used all kinds of things to get to this point in the past, to try to get away from the pain of life that I deal with when I worry.  Compulsive behaviors feel great in the moment, but they don't work in the end.  For example--  I run and over-exercise in order to stop worrying and feel euphoric.  The runner’s high or any kind of exercise high is something I crave.  Exercise and compulsive behaviors are not the answers to forgetting my worries and feeling great.  I am working to find the seeds of joy within myself.

These are the addictions that I have sought out in myself and will face this year.  So, the question is why should we do this?  Why should we seek out our addictions?

Healing only comes with confession first and from that point of confession we become free to explore.  Sometimes we can find a replacement for the addiction.  Sometimes we just have to walk away from it and find a new way.  When I quit smoking it was finding a replacement.  I actually replaced it with running.  With sugar, I believe that I will just need to walk away and there will be nothing to replace it.  Substances just might be easier to deal with than these other “feeling” addictions that I have.  

And it is true that many addictions are rooted in fears – loneliness, boredom, anxiety for all sorts of things, even a fear of being disrespected which is where my addiction to being right comes from.

Here are three quotes about confession and addiction that I love and that have led me to this place where I feel like I can admit my addictions openly:

1)    Probably the one that really began to change me comes from Richard Rohr’s book “Falling Upward”:  “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” 

We can actually re-write our brains by changing the way we live.  We’ve seen it happen over and over again with the worst kind of addictions, but it can happen on every single scale.  We must choose to live differently.

2)    From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Living Together:  “Confess your faults one to another” (James 5:16) He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break through to fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everyone must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.”

You could replace the word sin here with addiction, which is most of what sin stems from, if you look at it carefully and seek out its sources.  We do not live in community well.  We isolate from one another, even in our church communities where we should be openly confessing in fellowship so that we can be better servants in our world.  Addictions drive us downward into isolative practices, but we do really need communities where we can open up.  AA works this way, of course.  As does Overeaters Anonymous and so on.  Open up.  Tell your community who you are. We need safe spaces to do this.

3)    From Henri Nouwen’s Out of Solitude:  “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” 

This is the true meaning of confession.  When we have someone that we can just be with and tell ourselves to.  Some people find this in a spouse.  Some in a pastor.  Some in a friend.  Some in a stranger. 

Whatever your addictions are that are pulling you down, confess them openly to someone or to some people if you have a community you can do that with and then slowly, carefully, work on yourself.  I’m doing it.  It feels great.  Maybe confession is what will replace my addictions!