Drug dependent: Your life is essentially negative

A progress note and its translation:

“We talked about his relapse, and I presented a new idea for him. This included the layman’s concept of ‘fear of success,’ but which at its heart is the complex problem of ‘the truth’ of one’s history – unhealed psychic injury – pushing upward when it feels itself being paved over by superficial indicators of success. I suggested to client that these deep splinters of early pain and injury will not relent, but that two approaches can mitigate their power. One, to know that these ‘saboteurs’ exist, to know about them, is to have some power over them. Two, he will have to find positive purposes in his present life, to endure into his future, that will over-balance the ‘undertow’ of his past. This idea made a lot of sense to him.”

Essentially, this was a bluntly pessimistic approach that was optimistically appreciated by the thirty-year-old man and his mother, who had moved to town to be his support. He has real hope now, for the first time since the addictions took over his cells in his mid-teens.

Here’s the idea: Dethrone willpower, positive thoughts and intentions, 12-step meetings and sponsors and mentors. Dethrone drug programs and substance group therapy where feelings can be expressed, and even childhood talked and cried about. Normally I value deep-feeling expression, inner child work. But an addiction – or at least his and many other people’s addiction – means substance has soothed a sad, lonely, painful, fearful childhood and adolescence. In my client’s case, substance replaced that abortive foundation. This was the failure to grow up: Many alcoholics and addicts know they never lived their childhood and most adult years as they sleepwalked addled through those years. So now they are still children acting to be grown.

There is this phenomenon: that we need to be ourselves. Faking happiness when our body is tragic – though many people do this – must feel achingly wrong, noticeably or not. Smiling through depression adds to the burden of it: denial of self on top of depression’s original loss of the real self. So this is what happens when an alcoholic or addict engages in “success” behavior: He feels worse despite feeling “happy.” The past exhumes because it’s still critical, still the primary truth. Here are some examples of success: getting a job; running every morning, working out; getting on prescribed meds; paying off debt; ninety meetings in ninety days; going to therapy (in most cases); praying. These improvements will not only fail to overpower the drug’s pull of feeling good for the only time in your life, they will trigger the pull because the body will be yelling: “How dare you abandon me when I’ve never stopped bleeding. You can’t move on when I’ve never stopped needing.”

I told him he needs to understand that his youthful self-medication became his savior, his replacement life. Drugging is the real one good feeling he knows. He will need a new life to replace the replacement. I mentioned that this is what I did, though my self-medications were narcissism, codependency, and many tic tension-relievers, not substance. I became a counselor, my superseding good, my new landscape. He will need to study: What can he become, possibly based on some dormant root in his childhood, or some early or later fancy? What might he go to school for, go on some odyssey for? What can he not just do, but be? Part two of the new road would be the difficult wise acceptance that his life is essentially negative. He grows up, now, or he remains that sad child who has to numb himself with poison. “You understand that that is still who you are, but you will be growing a garden and a new life on it.”

Personally, professionally, I believe that this kind of childhood is too much to grieve.