The Genius of Addiction: Facing a festering sore
The journey to break free from the compulsion of addiction has been long, difficult, and tedious for me. I have chosen to stay in the tough conversation about ‘it’ for over a decade and a half. In my journey, I have tried everything to “fix” this problem. Conventional therapies like counseling, cognitive behaviour therapy, prescription medication, 12-step groups (Narcotics Anonymous and Refuge Recovery), as well as alternatives, like yoga retreats and illegal (yet proven-to-be-effective-in-clicinital-trials) drugs.
What has worked has been the deeply intimate conversations I have had with the various WEL-Systems® facilitators and CODE Model Coaches™.
Why? Because this is a paradigm that sees the world very differently than the status quo. Those who awaken to the power of this paradigm notice that, before we join theses conversations, there are a lot of things we didn’t know about ourselves, our upbringing, our culture, our mindset, our potential. From this paradigm of the world, addiction is genius. It is intelligence. It is information…hearing that information is critical to digesting and metabolizing it so we free ourselves from the constraints of it.
I remember after my first experience of Decloaking and Living Authentically five-day intensive I asked Louise LeBrun (founder of WEL-Systems) to be my sponsor (given as she had spent years in 12-step programs). Her response transformed my life forever — she said “I will be your sponsor, but not as an addict. As a godForce.” WHOA!!! In that nanosecond, my world expanded and my fear dissipated along with my desire to attend any more mandatory (intimacy-less) meetings (filled with problems).
Fastforward seven years later and I found myself, once again, pulled to appease the internal state of chaos with drugs. No, I didn’t actually do it because I have a different process to now engage. So, I wrote this piece instead, sent it to Louise, and am now sharing with you my portion along with her responses (as quotes) throughout.
The Compulsion of Addiction
There are moments where the pull of “addiction” is so strong, it takes intentional mindful Presence to recognize what’s happening and to be able to pause sufficiently to create space between my compulsions and actually doing the thing.
The pull of it intensifies as you get closer to the root cause of it. The purpose of the addiction is to ensure you do NOT touch the festering sore that sustains its necessity. In ‘using’ comes relief…temporary…and the joyous surrender into that nanosecond of relief. It is that process of relief that we are addicted to. You know another way to get there. The ‘subsrance/process’ is a surrogate necessitated by our need to deny the festering sore. That is a critical realization: we are NOT addicted to any ‘thing’- we are addicted to the relief that allows us to continue to deny the festering sore. (Moving directly into the festering sore reveals things…especially about those others we do not want to know that about.)
-Louise LeBrun
In my now twenty-year journey of the presence of ‘addiction’ in my life, I have come to discover that without the integration of the intelligence of what’s presenting, I would never have broken free of it. I would have been stuck in a control mindset, “mind over mood” mindset that would inevitably lead me to a cycle of abuse that involves abstinence and relapse, in a closed loop with no escape.
You see, as we now know and accept scientifically, addiction is the intelligent response so many people resort to in order not to feel the lingering pain of their early life. So much of what we experience between the ages of 0 - 7 is what becomes the platform for how we live the totality of our entire lives. Those years are critical to shaping who we will have become as adults. Once the habits set in, what’s left is to play out the programming in a predictable and seemingly inescapable manner.
All this pain to never face the festering sore caused by secrets and lies.
Despite what I viscerally remember from those early formative years, I know that my story is the norm, not the exception.
What’s the exception, as far as I’m concerned, is my ability to notice and refrain from engaging in self-destructive habits when the pain of living steeped in secrets and lies manifests as real.
For me, the link between seeking to escape my internal turmoil is intimately linked with my husband’s absence. Now, given that I live my life from metaphor, when I notice this compulsion show up, I become aware of invasive, long-lingering threads of abandonment. I have written about that here before.
As adults, we have been programmed to believe that we can override the sensations in the body through the intellect. So we attend conferences and we do talk therapy and we read all the books, but what we are not noticing is that no matter how much effort we put in, we are not getting the outcomes we had hoped for.
Why is that? Because pain lives in the body, and most of what’s lingering is pre-verbal. In other words, the pain that you feel, though generalized and predictable when you know how to interpret it, is unique to you. How you manifest the consequences of that pain is unique to you – and your body is the key. Your body holds all the information that you will ever need to be able to decode the intelligence of what you’re manifesting (intentionally or otherwise) in your life.
Your body is the platform from which you can discover the intelligence of what’s there for you to discover.
I know what it takes, because I live it. I know how difficult it was when I was immersed in the Narcotics Anonymous way of seeking to control the outcome of not-giving in to the compulsion. But the compulsion is so viscerally strong, the intellect has little chance to impose reason and logic upon it. The demands of the compulsion are unforgiving. The demand that causes the pressure: avoid, at all costs, the secrets and lies.
If you are reading this hoping for a shortcut of how-to overcome addiction, you won’t find it here. There are no shortcuts to integrating the compulsion of addiction. There can be no distractions from it, because it shows up in the moments where you feel the most vulnerable, the most alone, the most raw and exposed.
You are never alone. You know what the vast majority only long for: YOU are a living god-Self.. and have nothing to fear. If it is presenting in YOUR life, is is taking shape from that god-Self as the next layer of your massive arrival! Just sayin’...
If you’re reading this hoping for a process to engage that works, you’re in the right place. All I can share with you is the truth of my own experience. I don’t have a phD in addiction, but I do have a lifetime of living with and without engaging in it.
What worked for me is discovering how to stay in the visceral discomfort without losing my Self to it (Self as metaphor for Truth). In order to stay, I had to discover a process I could trust to carry me through in the tough moments where the pull feels unbearable. I had to discover how to trust asking myself the higher order questions that would allow me to go UP logical levels and see the bigger picture. I had to discover how to trust my intuition rather than the story I would have preferred to be true.
You see, the truth of our experience often fucking sucks (enter: secrets and lies, aka illusion, aka manipulation, aka pain). There isn’t a single woman I work with who loves what she discovers about the truths she carries yet unacknowledged (repressed, stuffed down in the deep dark places hoping to never see the light of day).
I can now confidently say that most people on the planet have suffered from their upbringing. Not because their parents were bad, though many were, but because the cultural conditioning that we are all exposed to is detrimental to our well-being and life (all anyone has to do for that is look around … or better yet, look inward). But, despite all we’ve gone through, we are well-trained to never ever blame and instead avoid any and all things that might cause us to turn our piercing gaze to those who were perpetrators.
Globally, we have become accustomed to violating our children. This is a truth few want to face, because it means coming face-to face with having been perpetrator. We teach them to be in denial of their internal cues in favour of the preferred cultural story. We install fear in them so they become more manageable and willing to comply, then we wonder why they’re unable to make up their mind. We gaslight them into confusion then medicate them for responding. We shame them into being nice to the adults who abuse them. We teach them that their experience of violation is less important than what will people think. We teach them that their tiny bodies are effortlessly movable without their consent. We show them that, without compliance to our authority, they are toast. I won’t even get into the molestation of babies, violent beatings and sex trafficking of children I’ve been exposed to. The bottom line is this, and I repeat: we have become accustomed to violating our children. This is a truth few want to face, because it means coming face-to face with having been perpetrator. The myth of the in-tact family is the most pervasive of all myths, and it is the platform from which the violence is normalized, therefore sustained.
The truth is ugly, and we are terrified to look it in the eye. The shame that overrides the body at least is familiar, and therefore bearable – well, at least when we’re high or drunk or in some clever way detached.
These are the types of things no one wants to discuss at the family Thanksgiving dinner. These are the things that run our lives, yet we are so deeply ashamed of ever facing them that we would rather (cuz actions speak louder than words) pass it along to our children hoping they will be stronger than us so they deal with it someday. What we’re not noticing is that who we are is the template for who our children are capable of becoming. For a free resource about the power of modeling, check out this free Journey of Reflection guide.
Deny. Defend. Dismiss. Those are our coping strategies for hiding our internalized shame. Add drugs / alcohol / sex / drama to the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for repeating your historical and familiar past (but perhaps you’re doing it slightly differently).
I’m not writing this piece to shame people for their habituated choices that emerged out of deep pain; I am writing this piece because I feel the internal call to share just how difficult it is to integrate all the layers that are required for self-liberation from anything that causes compulsion and addiction (as the outcome). What is compulsion, anyway? Louise writes “Think of compulsion as the unrelenting press to engage what we choose to keep hidden…keep ‘in the dark’. We create the darkness to protect ourselves.” Protect ourselves, from what, if not the emergence of the Truth?
In order to evolve through the pain, you have to be willing to face into the (rather ugly) truth of your own upbringing and how you are recreating that in your life right now. If you would rather manipulate yourself into believing what you’re supposed to, that “it wasn’t so bad”, you will live in denial of the truth and amplify the illusion. In doing so, you will live a life of pain. Why? Because the illusion lives in your intellect; the truth lives in your body – and the body always wins.
This is not an easy or an overnight process. It is not a process you can get the answers to through your intellect. It is a layered process of perpetual self-evolution.
It is a process that demands you discover a different platform to stand on – one of safety in your body, mind and Spirit. It is a process that demands intimacy with your body, mind and Spirit. It is a process that demands you discover the power of choice through decloaking so you live authentically. It is a process that demands you worship the truth, even if you have no idea how to access it. As Louise says, “It is a process that can only create resolution once we fully accept: the I AM that I am IS the expression of a living god-Froce…and any and all things emerge from THAT. How can anything other than LIFE come from that which is the fullest expression of LIFE ITSELF?” Indeed.
If you’re curious how to live like this, I invite you to join me in a conversation about what’s possible for you when you embrace the process of decloaking as a way of life. Because that’s what it takes – a courageous commitment to live differently. Otherwise all you’ve got is catharsis and same-old, same-old, getting worse as you get older.
I chose to share this story because the trigger is old as time and familiar to me. I chose to share it because such is the nature of evolution by intention, it never ends. Layers upon layers upon layers of discovery… While the compulsion is present, it is not compulsive like it used to be even a year ago. I have integrated so much of it’s intelligence that its presence now is is not compulsive, but more like a habituated tug that reminds me of how far I’ve come because of the choices that I have made. I can recognize the tug for what it is, and be gentle with myself for feeling it. I have no desire to engage it. I simply notice its presence and let go …
What I’m left with is this stream of consciousness writing, shared. Not a bad way to live …
