Six Steps Every Drug Addict Could Take

March 26, 2018 Drugs - Addiction, Health & Healing No Comments

Psychology should ALWAYS be part of managing an addiction: not just fighting it but really managing it in due respect for yourself as a ‘total human being’.

Thus, in every case, if you want to overcome an addiction, it’s good to take the psyche into account.

First step: it’s you.

Within the totality of your psyche, an addiction is always a kind of ‘wanting.’ Moreover, it’s always YOU who does this ‘wanting’. It’s not someone else outside you. It’s not in any weird way someone inside you. It’s you yourself. To accept this, is a first step towards good management of your addiction.

Second step: accept yourself.

If you want to really get over your addiction, you have to get through yourself. It may seem contra-intuitive: you need to accept yourself as you are. These aren’t just nice words. It may be one of the most difficult things to do: to accept yourself in a situation such as the one you are in now. YOU are still worth an infinity. Accepting that is also part of the work lying before you.

Third step: stop any aggressive fight against your addiction.

You don’t need to stop fighting! You need to stop the aggression if there is any. Aggression against the addiction is aggression against you. It doesn’t make you stronger. Quite the contrary.

With ‘aggression’, I mean an attempt to ‘cut it out’ of you as with a mental knife without taking care that you don’t deeply hurt yourself in doing so. In the end, the ‘wanting’ that makes up the energy of an addiction, comes from deep inside you and is finally precisely who you are. The form that this energy has taken, is alien to your deepest self but not the energy. What this concretely means, is:

Fourth step: go deep enough inside yourself

in search of meaningfulness. Then – and only then – you can see that so very deep inside yourself, your addiction is about this meaningfulness. This is logical: only this deepest meaningfulness can have that kind of pervading attraction that the drug presents to you. Once again: not the form but the energy that has taken this form.

Of course, there is the physical component of the addiction inside your brain. But that is just the door. It’s not the room that lies behind. It’s not the content (energy) of that room. Room and content are your own deepest self. Therefore we come to:

Fifth step: learn to be there in a positive way.

‘There’ is inside you. A drug experience throws you towards ‘there’ (inside), but as through a kind of Benji-jumping: quite artificial and with some miscalculation you may even badly hurt yourself in the experience. Then it vehemently tears you out again and then you only ‘want’ to get back in.

But falling is not flying. Therefore:

Sixth step: learn to fly.

When you learn to fly, then getting rid of the addiction doesn’t mean anymore: getting rid of the meaningfulness that lies behind it – hidden to you or not. You don’t need to be afraid anymore that something very important to you might get lost – hidden to you or not. Quite the contrary: you will notice that you can even get more out of it. You can go further into it.

And there, then, you may find your deepest core, the well that eventually makes you into YOU.

You can be there and be content then, without drugging yourself, by being yourself.