Throughout my life I have been on a journey. Along that journey there have been waypoints, milestones, diversions, delays and walking along the edges of cliffs. There have been hills to climb and reversal of course when the terrain became too tough. There have been times of walking in the wilderness with no lantern and no compass, crying out into the dark for someone or something to save me. There have been many sunrises and sunsets, and everything that happens in between those moments.
There have been times when I was embedded into a lifestyle that could at the time seem inescapable. Sometimes a lifestyle would be beneficial and then turn sour. Sometimes the sour was all I had. Other times the beneficial was going away and I held on so tightly that I had to open my gripping hands to see that what I was holding onto had long ago disappeared. I held onto the darkness in search of the light and shielded my eyes from the light and craved the darkness.
What is a common feature in my life is that there are periods of time that I have become rooted in human relationships. Looking back, an analysis of the many relationships of my life will show that there wasn’t always finding the good, manifesting the abundant, or taking the higher path. My life has been a search for arenas with circumstances that entertain my mind in some form or another. All of it involved human interaction that formed a balance.
Take romantic relationships for example. I can count on one hand the number of positive, fulfilling and (at the time) sustainable relationships I have had with a partner. Each time the beneficial nature of the relationship grew to a pinnacle and then waned. When it was time for the relationship to end it ended outside of some mutual and voluntary dissolution. It ended because the elements that had held it together were no longer solid. The micro-bonds, woven into a firm tether, had unstrung themselves in a series of small breaks that eventually weakened the need for a connection altogether.
The vocations I’ve held don’t differ all that much from the platonic and romantic partnerships. In this instance, we’re dealing with a fictional corporate entity animated by human beings, of which each individual relationship carries its own level of connection and evolution. The maintenance of a job is as much between interpersonal relationship health as it is maintaining the mental and physical workload of the company functions. One can find in western society that manual labor jobs require less human interaction and a greater amount of physical labor and therefore pays a different wage depending on the specialization. Whereas a white-collar job requires the ability to interact with any number of human variables and create a concert of sorts that can function with profitable efficiency or fail with fractured liability. Those that can work within and maintain those relationships flourish and are promoted with ever increasing compensation. Those that cannot are stagnant and ultimately must move on to something that is more attuned to their ability.
In each of these examples there is a human or set of human relationships in play. We as humans willingly engage with others and then become settled into a holding pattern with those engagements. We work towards keeping those relationships as attachments to some kind of benefit they offer. That benefit could be validation, fulfillment, money, sex, competition, joy, or a partner to empower actions. It could be a combination of all of those things and many more, depending on the strength of the relationship bonds. When things are going right, the work is to maintain and possibly grow the relationship dynamics. But when they are going wrong, there is still a tendency to hang on without a lesser incentive of maintaining the relationship bond.
There is something to be said about the warmth and protection of the relationship structures we embed ourselves into. It reflects the shelter and sustenance provided by the mother (and as an extension, the father) that we require and seek out. To ‘break out’ of these establishments, like a hatchling from nest, would mean engaging in cold and fearful world that contains the challenges of future growth and the dangers of independence. Within our relationships we have shelter, sanctuary and purpose, and we can offer those things as well in a symbiotic balance. When we break out from those, we have the imbalance of accountability and responsibility for many things that were handled previously in partnership. Yet it’s the partnership that breaks down and is the disintegration of the nest that not only encourages escape but oftentimes demands it. Once the belief system that is the nest shows it’s failures, it takes increasing amounts of work to keep the perception of relationship benefits intact.
Rarely are our nests forever. The relationship may no longer hold us in and may thrust us away. At that point, we are a cold, wet and pathetic thing being thrust from a sanctuary of broken sticks and shells, and expected to fly on our own. But we are also not that. We are survivors of a myriad of nurturing interactions, breakdowns and escapes. This is not our first time at the hatchling rodeo. In fact, closer introspection will reveal that we are entering and disengaging in levels of trust and dissolution all the time throughout our lives. Each of these breakthroughs and breakouts is the opportunity for the collection of our previous experiences to be applied to a new arena of development. Along with that is the baggage of losing connections with others that was real, trusting and held benefit. Moving forward carries fear and trepidation, knowing that the work towards establishing new bonds will likely lead to loss in the future. The question becomes, is it all worth it?
Here we are then. Pain behind, pain ahead. The now is moment to moment dissatisfaction. Something is going to have to give because the circumstance of inertia is equal to solitary confinement. The mind drives us to have relationships because they provide us with the necessary elements of seeking, shelter and love. Relationships in their many forms are why we are here. We are designed as social creatures to be social creatures, and what that requires is interpersonal interaction with other social creatures. When this is lacking, with limited positive and fulfilling interaction, mental suffering can quickly move from discomfort to depression to darkness.
Breaking out from a shell of darkness is difficult. We don’t have others around us to be a cheering section for our successes. We don’t have the scaffolding necessary to prop us up when we aren’t meeting the expectations of our world. There is a pathway down, an escape from a lonely place to a lonelier place; a place in the imagination where the antithesis of love and companionship exists. It can become difficult to believe that we can be loved or are even worthy of being loved because our past is strewn with so many examples of failure that the belief system we’ve developed says don’t even try. Rejection becomes the only conceivable outcome of any attempt at interpersonal functionality.
Recovery is possible from this state, but it usually involves a life-changing event or an intervention from some section of society. Something has to ignite a spark in the imagination that penetrates the current belief system with hope. This is eerily similar to the requirements of breaking out of addiction, which I will expand on later in this piece. What I’m aiming at is a correlation between becoming embedded in life situations, feeling stuck in those situations and the difficulty of breaking out, and what happens when we are ultimately forced out.
At an addictive level, alcohol and drugs aren’t about feeling good anymore. Feeling good was the entrapment of substances at the outset. Feeling good was the high that made the substance attractive. Feeling bad was an alternative that could be cut out of life for a time by brief but infrequent moments of feeling good. The change in the mind’s psychology was derived from a relatively quick and easy method of ingestion that had immediate effects. Life outside of that feeling became less attractive. When the switchover occurs, and substance becomes a means of escaping the less attractive sober life, when being high becomes being not low, the infrequent action of ingestion becomes more frequent and prevalent until it becomes the normal function of life, and sobriety becomes a painful nuisance.
It’s my opinion that all substance addiction is the result of a culmination of breakdowns of relationships throughout a person’s life, the most important one being our relationship with ourselves. This could happen early on in the developmental years of life, post puberty or at any time in an adult’s life. It could be the result of a forced exit from a relationship structure or an inability to escape from a painful relationship structure. It’s likely that it’s a repeated cycle of entrapments, embeds and escapes (or attempts at) that lead to finding something quicker and easier to provide fulfillment, with human interaction that doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t address shame or self-destruction. Our humans become co-users and welcome us to pull up a barstool or a needle depending on the abuse. What’s provided is a repetitive application of fulfillment, however much unreal and detrimental, as a way to ease the mind’s dissatisfaction with not having positive human interaction, or even the prospect or hope of it in the future.
Recovery from this degree of addiction immersion is difficult. There is a built up, rock-solid belief system in place that dictates that the ‘not feel bad’ effect of substance abuse is preferable to everything else that could possibly occur, since the life experience is that ‘everything else’ has only returned negative feelings and circumstances (or at least is perceived as such, discounting all other positives in life). Once again, a life-changing event or an intervention of sorts will have to take place, and a spark of hope in the imagination will need to be planted in order for this shell to be cracked.
What this event is or what an intervention looks like is different for everyone. It’s not a repeatable thing, which is why rehabilitation and sustainable sobriety are proving to be monumental challenges on an individual and societal basis. It isn’t finding a repeatable method to get someone to rehab/sober up that should be forefront to this, but rather an investigation into what can break a person out of a series of embeds that have created the addiction shell in the first place. The shell is comprised of hopelessness. The shell keeps the loneliness and abandonment in.
This starts with hope. Hope is the kryptonite to a belief system embroiled in despair. Hope is a foothold that allows the journey up the cliff to begin. Hope allows positive human interaction to become a conception of reality. Hope is the egg-tooth that breaks the shell open. Keeping it open is where recovery comes into play.
Obtaining sobriety is an obvious step that must occur before recovery can be integrated into the post break-out journey. But sobriety is not enough. Human beings need human interactions. It’s not a wish, it’s a requirement. When the sober person returns to a life of stale and negative relationships, there is a huge chance that substance abuse will gladly join in. When that environment is changed and abandoned the seeking of positivity in life and recovery can take place, and what was despair can become validation. That change in beliefs begins with a seed of hope. That seed is planted in any number of creative ways, but always with the care of other human beings.
Through binding relationships, we become closer to our source, which is God, and can be helped to navigate our way on a path towards heaven. A person can’t be forced to march like a conscript. It’s a voluntary idea generated in their own imagination even if that idea was promoted by outside sources. And once that idea is planted, it must be nurtured by outside sources in order for it to grow into a structure more durable than the temptation to return to the darkness and loneliness.
The method of moving a person toward sustainable and permanent sobriety should be to prepare them for a new life, a rebirth of sorts, to approach the way they handle relationships and their own care in a manner that reflects the lessons they’ve encountered previously. As progress is made, those lessons can be passed on to others to help them to self-generate their own spark of hope, reaffirming one’s own strength of purpose and validity. There has to be an understanding and acceptance that throughout our lives, nests are built and taken away to make room for new nests to be created. With creative effort, we become greater architects of the nests we inhabit, and when that happens, we become a commander of our relationships and ultimately our freedom.
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