It’s been said that Addiction has negative consequences which very often span multiple generations, and based on all my experiences and conversations with people, I believe this is true. Most of us can probably even find an example of this within our own family trees somewhere down the line. Certainly, we have heard about numerous situations where people have sacrificed their families, their livelihoods, their futures and even their lives through the pursuit of their particular addiction, sometimes in a spectacular and highly visible way. We scratch our heads and wonder “he/she really seemed to have everything good going on; how on Earth could they have let it go that far?” Addiction to substances is perhaps the example that is most visible and recognized…..but there are many faces of addiction that do not even involve drugs or alcohol.
Addiction hides itself behind different masks; many of which have been encouraged to be seen as “normal” behavior, until they’re not, as the millions of members of “XXX ics (insert your favorite vice) Anonymous” groups all across the world can attest to. People who join these various groups do so because they themselves, or someone close to them has recognized that a particular behavior is having a deleterious effect on life….and they find comfort and support within a group of others who share the same addiction.
Addiction to gambling and pornography have obvious (and generally quickly realized) negative consequences, while addictions like work, social media, and technology are considered “socially acceptable.” Seems to me that this is not actually a good thing.
Addiction happens when your vital life force, your attention, has been hijacked and taken over by something, or someone. It is the opposite of being Conscious, which is a state of Empowerment. Addiction is complete dis-Empowerment; it is a state of being controlled by something outside of oneself. And sometimes, awareness of this isn’t even on your radar.
How do I know this? I was there, myself.
I know now that I was food addicted for as long as I can remember, going back well into childhood. I clearly recall an incident that happened when I was five years old and in Kindergarden. All the children had shoeboxes placed in little cubbies, where we kept our personal things; winter mittens, artwork to bring home to our parents, and our daily “snacks”. The snacks that my mother sent me to school with were healthy and awful; apples, pears and cheese sandwiches, primarily. I hated these things….and I craved the sweet, delicious treats that other children got to enjoy. So I began quietly exchanging my snacks each day with someone else’s snack….until the day that one of my classmates tearfully “outed” me for my thievery. I was embarrassed, and my parents were called in for a conference. It was just the beginning of my obsession with sweet-tasting foods, and as years passed it expanded to include all foods that tasted good. I began putting on weight, and as my parents attempted more and more to limit my intake, I began taking food from the pantry late at night, and hiding it in my bedroom where I could enjoy it away from their watchful eyes. Entire jars of peanut butter, bags of marshmallows, bowls of cinnamon and sugar to lavish upon the loaves of bread with margarine (which didn’t need to be refrigerated)…..all these things became my defiant secret. Every family gathering was an opportunity for me to squirrel away food for my supply; picnics in the summer were the best, as they always yielded unopened bags of chips, packages of cookies, even entire cakes, and I could make these delicacies last long into the fall.
Then, high school happened….and I began to realize that my weight was creating a significant problem for my social life. I didn’t know what to do about this; I loved the taste of food, I just didn’t want the negative consequences of being overweight. And so I began throwing up all the fattening food that I consumed, and voila; a brand new behavior was born. Bulimia. My new guilty secret.
It persisted for almost two decades, and I hid it scrupulously from any and everyone. By the time I had my own apartment and a job, I was spending a significant amount of money each week buying junk food, only so that I could taste it….then throw it up. Some days I did this three and four times….other days just once, but rarely did a day pass by that I did not overeat and end up throwing it up. I was always exhausted and had low energy, and at no time did I ever feel vibrantly healthy, but my life was focused on working and/or school, and my food addiction. I knew it was a terrible habit, and that it was sapping my vital life force….but I didn’t want to stop. In retrospect, I realize now that I didn’t think that I could stop, so I didn’t even try, and since I was getting a benefit that I loved (the taste of all that food), I just gave in to it.
Then, in my mid thirties, I got married….and realized that I wanted to have a baby. It was a conscious choice to stop overeating and purging from the moment that I made the decision. I quit bulimia cold turkey, and about a year later, my daughter was born, the product of an extremely health-conscious pregnancy filled with vitamins and good quality food with almost no sweets at all. I never had any desire or compulsion (not then or even up to this day) to return to a life of bulimia…..but every now and then I would have dreams where I was overeating and vomiting, and I would awaken in a cold sweat, only to feel the flooding relief of knowing that it was just a bad dream, and I hadn’t returned to that old life. But even though the behavior had stopped, the addiction was still there, and at the time, I didn’t realize it. The fact that I continued to seesaw with my weight year after year after year, trying this diet and that diet, only to end up making changes that were short term, then trying something different after I was sick and tired of myself later was proof of that. An addiction is anything that you have given your power to; I had definitely given all my power over to food. I didn’t realize the whole significance of this truth at the time; that came much later.
I was in my early forties when I decided to try hypnosis for weight loss. Julie Ann Kibbe of Key Hypnosis happened to be local, and she did group hypnosis sessions that were reportedly very effective….so I decided to give that a try.
Not only did it work, but suddenly I discovered that I was no longer even thinking about food. Not only was it no longer even on my mind, but I also realized JUST HOW MUCH IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN ON MY MIND BEFORE, and I had never even consciously realized it. I hadn’t been aware how much control food had been exerting over my life, over my consciousness, taking up so much of my attention. All of the daily questions that I had lived my life asking myself every single day:
When was I going to have my next meal?
What would it be?
What food did I need to buy?
How much money did I need to spend on food?
Should I /should I not have that snack?
What snacks would we have at night while relaxing with a book or a board game?
I had not realized just how food had been controlling my life until I suddenly stopped thinking about it at all. Clarity through contrast. It was a mind-blowing recognition. I had never thought of myself as food addicted….and yet, I had given my power over to it, and it had dominated my whole life for more than twenty years.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty; I had guarded the secret shame of bulimia so closely that no one, NO ONE, no matter how close the relationship was ever allowed to know that this behavior even existed. Even a worried remark from someone about how the toilet looked like someone had been sick would send me into a freeze/flight state; I was prepared to take my secret to the grave. My parents suspected, but they accepted my lies on surface value. Bulimia was just a symptom of food addiction; a terrible one at that, but a symptom nevertheless.
If I had not been so self-protective, so closed off and wallowing in my own self-imposed shame and disgust, I may have been able to find support and encouragement from those closest to me, in order to kick the terrible addiction long before I did entirely on my own. But I didn’t. So it had controlled my life for two decades before I finally freed myself from it.
There are many, many people who struggle with a hidden addiction; knowing instinctively that they want to get a handle on it, knowing that they want a different outcome, and generally trying all kinds of different ways to break the cycle of control. And it is generally multi-layered, with the root of the problem buried deep beneath numerous layers of coping mechanisms that we have adopted (and made into habits) in order to deal with the resultant anxiety that comes with the subconscious (or conscious) awareness that we are being drained wherever we have given our power away.
Having come through that particular Dark Night of the Soul as I did, I now have a much greater awareness of what others are going through, and it was what prompted me to search for ways that I could personally make a difference for others. It was what inspired me to learn hypnosis, nlp and several other different and effective modalities that empower emotional freedom; which came together into a unique and integrative practice that has helped many people. Recovery/Sobriety support is an essential part of that as well, which I will talk about in a future stack.
I see addiction as a form of loyalty to a cause. Mothers and fathers can get addicted to the baby, and to each other. That strong bond maybe so strong it can only be broken by death, and sometimes death doesn’t break the bond. There’s somewhere in my mind where I’m still addicted to my grandmother on my mother side, and she died 40 years ago. People who don’t like me say I’m stubborn, and close minded. Maybe that’s just because we’re addicted to different things. My drug using friends from youth wanted me to use LSD, but I was already addicted to love. Addiction, obsession, loyalty, faithfulness are all closely related but distinctly different. Addiction is loyalty to your dark enemy. Faithfulness is loyalty to your most gentle compassionate friend. It’s easier to define an enemy than describe a friend. My enemy is alcohol. My friend is the whisper of wind in the swallows wings flying over the grass blown ridges beneath a clear blue sky after a week with my lover, a memory that won’t die but a dream that words allude to pathetically