Addictions are not just sugar, food, alcohol, nicotine, drugs, gambling, technology, etc.
Addictions can be any substances and habitual ways of behaving that are unhelpful and destructive.
We can become addicted to work, exercise, sex, shopping, collecting, self-criticism, self-harming, abusive relationships, and even seemingly positive activities like writing, playing a musical instrument, cleaning and tidying.
This article focuses on my own addiction to responsibility, driven by guilt.
The next parts are easier for me to write in little sentences:
Looking back at my past self and beliefs.
After so much self-destructive trauma.
Especially since my partner’s suicide in 2015.
And now learning quite recently.
Teachings of world-leaders in addictions and recovery.
For example, particularly:
Bitten Jonsson. Dave Wolfe.
Kathryn Hansen. Jack Trimpey.
Gillian Riley.
Aligned with compassion, forgiveness, self-love:
Graham Williams. Barbara J Hunt.
Maria Hennings Hunt.
(There are very many others.)
And now enjoying my own increasing peace and health.
I can understand more of the seeds.
The seeds of my addictions.
That grew and self-seeded even more.
Guilt and responsibility.
Among many other self-destructions.
My life became uncontrollable weeds.
Strangling me.
Preventing my sharing any light with others.
Instead of the beautiful herb garden.
That my life is becoming now.
Abundant. Love and light.
Infinite for showing and sharing.
Quantum.
Guilty responsibility seeds
and parenting, and prevention is better than treatment…
Everyone is doing his or her best.
In how each of us senses our own self.
Our own self-image.
Which is rarely or probably never true.
And parents, grandparents, are the same.
Me definitely included.
Tend to spoil or otherwise plant unhelpful seeds in children.
Or much worse.
My grandmother used to give me white bread and butter with refined sugar sprinkled very generously on top when I was a little boy.
Sugar is the gateway drug to food addictions, and self-destructive addictions of all sorts.
I was the eldest son of three boys, and the eldest cousin too.
My Mum and Dad were each the eldest of their siblings.
They, like I was to be encouraged, IMHO were addicted to responsibility and guilt too.
They’d each been traumatised as children by wartime evacuation.
My grandparents were also the product of working class trauma.
My ancestral origins are via London’s slums and Eastern European Jewish refugees.
I have quite a lot of alcoholism and tobacco addiction in my ancestry.
As do most of us alive today.
There are very significant genetic and evolutionary components in addictions.
Addiction ‘triggers’ served us very well when many thousands of years ago we had to forage, hunt, and fish for food, and find water to survive.
Our deep unconscious lower brain evolved and ensured that our ancestors who responded best to nourishment triggers, would thrive and procreate more.
We are the result.
But now food and drink are much more plentiful, and we cannot get enough of the dopamine that drives addictions.
And so sugar has an open door in our hidden brains, to make dependencies and addictions.
Humans have unintentionally conspired and collaborated with global corporations and governments in the design of increasingly addictive foods and drinks, that are poisoning the billions who consume them.
Like any genocide, it’s partly systemic and partly intentional.
And one addiction leads to another, although we each vary in how responsive we are to different addictions, including the time of day and the stages of our lives, and how our responsiveness to the triggers of addictions are affected by our sleep patterns and quality, and our levels of stress, which is all much related to work and technology, and also to grief.
Grief is not just when some someone or a pet dies. It’s the letting go of anything that’s difficult for us, including who and what we believed we are and were.
My Mum unintentionally - I emphasise, she meant only to help me - used to cause me to feel very guilty for failing to keep the same meticulous calendar records of birthdays as she did, so to send cards and gifts (gifts was my natural extension anyway) to every member of our large family. My Mum was always very good at that, perhaps because she had the time and discipline and the money. My emotional and financial reserves for such responsibilities became diverted to my own survival since about 2007, ratcheting horrifically in 2015 and then more each year until September 2021, when I think I decided I’d rather live than die :)
This was all my problem not my Mum’s, and nobody’s fault.
I believe that addictions, and the suicidal disintegrations (self-destructions) that they can lead to very easily, are not diseases, but I respect the right of anyone to believe in the ‘disease’ approach, especially if that helps them.
Placebo is more powerful than we can imagine, literally. Placebo seems to work for many people, as does learning how our brains operate.
The disease approach tends commonly to lead to pharmaceutical interventions, which commonly means that people who visit doctors about being in grief, are diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ and prescribed antidepressants and sleeping tablets. Similarly many gifted sensitive children, including savants (exceptionally gifted children), are diagnosed to be ‘mentally ill’ - diseased - and prescribed pharmaceutical medications for ‘diseases’ such as ADHD and Asperger’s Syndrome.
For many years I was very deeply suicidally ideated and self-destructive, after my partner’s suicide compounded some other causes of significant stress in my life, and then I experienced several more lifeshocks and traumas. This was not a disease. It was my reactions to traumas, which I see as part of my life and growth to much greater emotional and physical resilience, and also to much greater work and knowledge.
My Mum was an exceptionally loving and generous kind woman, with a very deep emotional and physical resilience.
But my relationship with her was rather different; I think because I was the eldest son, and as I grew older, I disliked the way that I was being judged by her, and told by my Mum how to behave, even at the age of 64, several years after I’d become a grandfather.
I did not achieve things in life in the ways my Mum respected or approved; not that she was able to acknowledge anyway. She worried that I worked in suicide so that I eventually pretended that I did not. Nor did she understand websites and education and writing and musical creativity in the ways I did.
Also I made lots of huge mistakes. That’s how I learn. Making mistakes was not my Mum’s idea of how to be successful and grow.
My Mum did not like to have existential discussions. Nor did I have existential discussions with my my Dad, who died in 2016 in a very traumatic but ultimately peaceful way. It was a suicide of sorts, which I understood and respected. He did not want to talk about it.
I understood suicide quite well by then. Choice is paramount.
Intervention or even ‘sectioning’ is mostly justifiable for someone otherwise healthy of much younger years - although I disagree with pharmaceutical interventions and believe dietary educational collaborative approaches are best - but my Dad was 86, diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s. He firmly believed that he knew what was coming, and decided to stop eating and drinking.
A life of 86 years is to be celebrated not to be forcibly prolonged.
Peace is crucial.
If we threaten or limit or remove a person’s choice, then we undermine the relationship and ruin their peace. And the mutual peace too.
I never resolved my relationship with my Mum, who died in April 2022, over many years, because I did not want to upset her. I believe my life choices upset her greatly over many decades. I really never knew what she thought about me, because we never had the discussions. She wasn’t open to them, and in many ways I was very distant from her, working on my life, work, and my own survival.
Parents tend eventually become the children, and vice versa, although this won’t happen to me. That’s another story, although very easy to summarise:
Addictions, unless resolved and healed, eventually lead to pharmaceutical and other dependencies (being new addictions and side-effects), and this tends to lead to more illnesses, frailty and a desperate 20-30 year decline into bed-ridden care and/or care in a chair, often with wheels. Mental and physical independence goes into reverse. The final years, months, or days for the more fortunate, are spent being fed by carers or via tubes, unable to visit a toilet. A carer wipes and changes soiled nappies/diapers, as if caring for a baby.
The alternative - a long well fit healthy life until a sudden pain-free death - is available to nearly all of us.
‘Alternative healthcare’ or holistic health and lifestyle was once the universal way. Nowadays and for the past 50 years or so, what began as alternative (big pharma, etc) has become the norm, and anyone who believes in and practises natural holistic ancient ways of maintaining health is called ‘alternative’ or much worse.
There is a difference between acute lifesaving healthcare (saving someone from a heart attack for example) which often works very well, and chronic healthcare (treatment of addictions, obesity, inflammation, depression, etc), which IMHO tends to make people more ill.
It’s about education and prevention. Then we don’t need so much acute healthcare.
But, ‘follow the money’ as ever.
Back to responsibility…
My Mum and Dad throughout my childhood made me responsible for my younger brothers, and responsible also for behaving acceptably well in many other situations.
I was being conditioned to conform, and that’s a stressful adaptation for me.
They rewarded me, as did teachers and cub-scout leaders for being a conforming ‘leader’.
I am not a natural leader. I am naturally a creative.
If I lead others, the leadership I believe in is to show independence and bravery and creativity, so as to challenge assumptions and the pressures to conform.
My soul was corrupted from a very young age.
My wings were clipped. Seeds of addiction to responsibility were planted in me.
A shameful aspect for me in my successful development of responsibility is the inflation of my ego and sense of self-importance. I became arrogant. Maslow explains well.
It would be many years before trauma and loss would force me to see humility as a strength.
My increasing sense of responsibility was driven by guilt.
Because I believed that if I displeased my parents they would not love me.
I carried this belief through my life and from my early teenage years I extended this false belief to relationships, especially with women.
I believed that I was not worthy of love unless I earned it or paid for it.
I recall being told by my Mum and Dad as a young boy that because I had behaved badly that they would be sending me away to a boarding school.
They had threatened me with this on a few occasions prior, but this time I believed it was actually going to happen.
I went to my bedroom and cried a little (not much because big boys don’t cry, is another lie and conditioned belief, and also for most men becomes a habitual or addictive response to shock and grief), and I made a gift for them out of a wooden ice-lolly stick and a piece of paper I’d cut out in the shape of a flower head.
Bizarre that I wanted to give them a parting gift, for such a nasty punishment, so I guess by that age (I think about 7) I was already quite addicted to my sense of responsibility :)
The next day, or soon after my Mum and Dad told me I could continue to live with them. I can’t remember what I understood about it all at the time, but looking back there is no doubt that fear was being used to control me, which seems to me to be an extremely common method of parenting.
I am not proud of how I parented my own children, and for many years I was ashamed.
I recall as well that after secretly lighting a (very well controlled) small fire in our back garden, and involving my younger brother in the adventure, which entailed burning many ‘bookmatches’ that my Dad had brought back as mementoes from a trip to New York (that he’d won for being the top UK salesman at Rank Xerox selling photocopiers, in the very early 1960s), that my Mum and Dad discussed through the afternoon and early evening what my punishment should be.
My Mum and Dad were not violent people.
I was lucky that I was quite rarely smacked as a small boy (mainly because I knew that I must behave myself and generally I did so very well), but the garden fire adventure, and the theft and burning of my Dad’s treasured bookmatches were serious enough to warrant an extremely severe smacking.
I’d forgotten about this incident for much of my adult life, but looking back I think it was a highly significant ‘teaching’ for me.
The premeditated nature of the beating and the memory of it, being dragged from my bed and held dangling in my pyjamas by my Dad, while he whacked me as hard as he could on my backside, is interesting.
In the aftermath he attempted to make light of it, and maybe to repair the emotional wounding, saying that he’d hurt his hand, smacking me so hard. Looking back and sensing it again I’m not surprised.
I don’t blame my Mum and Dad. They were doing their best to raise three boys in the ways they’d been taught themselves.
I had an adventurous creative spirit. That’s how I was born and, and actually raised.
My Dad was a great footballer and sportsman. I inherited his love and ability in sport and athleticism.
I climbed trees in very dangerous ways, and I did other very dangerous things. I enjoyed risks and conquering my fears.
Children like this - who are risk-takers and adventurers - are not easy for parents, especially when the parents believe that first-borns should be responsible for others, and should be stay out of trouble, and this becomes even more difficult for children and parents in the teenage and young adult years, when the mistakes have bigger implications and police become involved and worse. Alcohol and drugs become new fuel for risk-taking, thrill-seeking, and addictions.
Many young men behave idiotically. I certainly did.
I wonder about other seeds of responsibility and guilt that were planted in my life, especially at school, that were part of a cycle of addiction and reward.
None of this is anyone’s fault. Especially not our own fault.
This relates to the forgiveness of ourselves.
It’s life.
Mistakes are how we learn.
Traumas are our biggest growths. We can reframe them to be gifts.
We become able to do what we never imagined existed as a possibility, when we become aware of the possibility.
The more we become aware of how it all fits together, the more we can become interested and able to ‘switch’ our responses to the triggers of addiction.
The more we understand how to convert failure to success.
Arrogance to humility.
Recklessness to compassion.
There’s a lot more I could write about my self-destructions from 2015, but this is enough for now.
Self-forgiveness is an interesting process.
And addictions are a very revealing lens through which to see ourselves.
Addictions to sugar and foods, and alcohol and self-loathing, to overwork and over-exercise. Addictions to false beliefs of who we believe we are, and what we believe our purposes are in this crazy beautiful addictive life.
I can only speak for myself, and be humble and grateful that I can do so, now being well and peaceful.
The more I learn about myself the more I discover to love and forgive.
For myself and others.
And this seems part of the harnessing of quantum, which is another even more exciting story.
> addictions are a very revealing lens through which to see ourselves
Amen to that. Peering through that lens takes time and courage.