Addiction
I have such a large hole inside of me. It’s something that I’ve never been really conscious of until recent years. Nevertheless, on some unconscious level, I’ve always tried to fill it. I’ve poured alcohol, substances, anger, money, cars, video games, gambling, sex, and even addictions to people into that black hole. As a child could probably guess, nothing worked. This is probably a familiar story to most…it seems almost everyone has some kind of addiction — whether conscious or unconscious…whether it’s something as heavy as heroin or something as innocuous as caffeine — something to make you feel okay and a little more at peace and at home in the universe.
Someone who really helped me understand both what addiction is and how it manifests is Gabor Maté, who is a specialist in childhood trauma and how it relates to addiction. Before, I thought that if you were an alcoholic, then you were an alcoholic, which was separate and distinct from someone who was addicted to gambling, or sex, or what have you. Now I understand that all of those seemingly distinct addictions were all just manifestations of the same underlying force. This is why many people are able to substitute a “healthy” addiction (perhaps exercise) for an “unhealthy” addiction (let’s say cocaine). I put “healthy” in quotes because, while it obviously is a net positive change in an addict’s life, it never truly addresses the underlying issue and I am wary about referring to anything that is pathological as “healthy”, per se.
Gabor Maté defines addiction as:
“Any behavior that a person finds relief in and therefore craves in the short-term, but suffers negative consequences in the long term, and doesn’t give up despite the negative consequences.”
So we have a solid definition of addiction, but what is it that the person is trying to find relief from? What is the cause? In this short but brilliant talk (https://youtu.be/BVg2bfqblGI), Gabor contrasts the “official definition” of addiction as being a “Primary brain disorder that arises in the brain largely due to genetic reasons”, with his theory of addiction arising from childhood trauma.
He outlines two fundamental human needs:
- Attachment/Connection/Relationship
- Authenticity and being connected to our true self
When I look back in my life to a time where I knew I was genuinely happy, I always go back to one Christmas when I was still in elementary school. For a myriad of reasons, from geographical distance to cracks and rifts in my family from generations of trauma, I barely ever saw my extended family. My parents were divorced and we moved a lot. My dad also had a gambling addiction, and sold my childhood dog for cash. This resulted in me as a child feeling that I didn’t really have a family. I remember having school projects where we would have to share about our families. Every other kid was so connected and close to their families, and I was at a complete loss. I knew that there was some fundamentally important experience of love that I was missing out on, and inside I was devastated, though I of course never let it show…for my entire life up to this point.
However, this particular Christmas was special. For whatever reason, everyone in my family — aunts, uncles, cousins, significant others — all converged upon my house this year. I can vividly remember going from room to room and finding love and a sense of belonging everywhere I went. At school I was a loser. I was picked on a little, but mostly ignored. I was the quiet Asian kid who felt nowhere near to being comfortable in his own skin. But at home, during this Christmas break, I was on top of the world. I truly felt comfortable in my own skin, and I could fully express myself being a wild, crazy, and curious child, knowing that no matter what, I was surrounded by unconditional and understanding love.
Despite the reasons for the separation between us, I loved everyone in my family and they loved me as well. However, the two most important people in my life were my sister Teresa, and my cousin Emei.
Teresa was 11 years older than me, and because my mother worked overtime and double shifts at an oil refinery to support us, Teresa ended up taking care of me most of my childhood. She would always tell me about how she excited she was when she found out she was getting a baby brother. She was not popular growing up, and she was physically abused by our father prior to our parents’ divorce (something I did not find out about until much later in life). I think she was happy that she would finally have someone on “her team”, in a world that did nothing but reject, misunderstand, and abuse her. She treated me as such, and always had my back and made sure I was okay. I remember once she took me to Taco Bell (her first job), and when they made me a shitty bean burrito, she sent it back and made them remake it (who sends back something at Taco Bell??). When I had a crush on a girl in elementary school, she helped me craft a special valentine.
Emei was a few years older than my sister, and was like a second sibling to both of us. I think in many ways we were even closer to her than we were to each other. She was the wisest person I knew as a child. She taught me about all the things that people normally didn’t teach you about. She taught me about alternative religions (she was a Wiccan), astrology, tarot, reincarnation, and most importantly to think for myself and outside the box. She introduced ideas such as “bad words” not being inherently bad, but only because it was arbitrarily decided. During that Christmas break, she introduced me to mythology and read me stories about Achilles, Zeus, and Persephone and Demeter.
I believe that Christmas was the last time where I felt that those two fundamental human needs of connection and authenticity were fulfilled. After everyone packed up and left, there was never another Christmas like that with family all together again. I would go back to school life where I was near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Teresa got married and became a mother to my two nephews, and although I still spent a lot of time with them, we gradually grew apart as both of our mental health declined over the years. I would still see Emei a handful of times, but it was few and far between for being the only person who I still felt truly connected to. I never had a strong relationship with either of my parents, so it was just me in my own head, along with a couple of friends I managed to pick up along the way.
Teresa committed suicide when I was two months from graduating high school. She developed an addiction to meth during her high school years and went into rehab. She was falsely diagnosed with schizophrenia, and was put on anti-psychotics which I believed greatly contributed to her eventual demise. Even through everything she had been through in life, she always loved people and tried to bring a smile to their faces. She was on welfare and food stamps and still made the effort to buy a burger for homeless people when she came across them. However, life just never gave her a break. After her initial stint in rehab, she was beginning to turn her life around, graduating from a trade school and earning a job as a medical assistant. Unfortunately after two unexpected pregnancies, and an emotionally abusive marriage that was founded upon a trauma bond, she never got back on track. Severe depression, coupled with side effects from anti-psychotics left her barely able to function and in and out of psychiatric holds at mental hospitals. I would remember visiting her at the hospital during one of these holds, unaware that anything was seriously wrong and not knowing how out of the ordinary the entire situation was. In addition, by that point I was so mentally defeated by the struggles of my own life, that I could barely muster much care and compassion for myself, much less anyone else…even my own family.
I remember the very last time I saw my sister. It is a memory that is burned into my mind. I was with my mom and we were talking to her on the street in front of her house. It had been about a year or two since I had even seen her, as I was wrapped up in the peak of my teenage existential angst. The only way I could describe her was a bag of bones — deathly pale and thin — someone whose soul had already left and had left this catatonic, barely breathing body behind. There’s a line in the Pink Floyd song, “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”:
“Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.”
This line described her perfectly. Her eyes looked dead like black holes, she was monotone, and there was no emotional affect at all. She asked me for a ride so that she could see her friend, but I made up an excuse for why I couldn’t, for no other reason that my own self-esteem was already through the floor and I couldn’t bear to be associated with her. I expected her to put up an argument and get mad like she might have done in the old days, and I had my reasonings prepared to shoot back at her — but she never did. She replied with a nonchalant, “Ok”, and continued staring into space. I remember being slightly surprised that she didn’t complain, even despite her state, and immediately felt a slight sense of remorse…but I didn’t say anything.
We left, and the next thing we knew a few weeks or months later was that she disappeared. She was missing for a month before her body was found in the San Pablo bay. It turns out she got in her car in the middle of the night taking nothing with her. She stopped at a Jack in the Box and bought a soda (no doubt with spare change scrounged from the center console, as we would do when we were younger), and then drove to the Carquinez Bridge and jumped into a final darkness.
She left behind two sons, a husband, as well as the rest of us…though she could hardly be blamed.
Emei passed away from lung cancer 10 years later. For all of her virtues, if there was one vice, it was cigarettes. At this point, I had lost hands down the two most important people in my life…and I was barely emotionally present enough to even notice.
I remember walking in the house after getting off work when they found my sister’s body. My mother was crying on the couch being comforted by my stepdad, and she mustered up the words “They found Teresa’s body”. All I responded with was “Oh, okay”, and I walked to my room and went straight to playing video games as if nothing had happened…as I had planned to do when I got off work earlier that evening. I don’t think I cried once about her death, save for once a year or two later when I was heavily drunk and already suffering through my first real heartbreak/rejection. Not too long after her death, after school while giving my best friend a ride home, he asked me, “Are you okay? Do you want to talk?”. I was confused…”Talk about what?”. It didn’t even register that he might be talking about my sister. It turns out he had seen a newspaper article about her suicide. I told him I was fine, and we never discussed it again.
By the time Emei had died, my heart had grown even colder. I had heard she had gotten cancer, but I shrugged it off as if it were no big deal. After all, I had already shrugged off my sister’s disappearance and subsequent suicide, so what was cancer? She was living in Vegas, and I had gone there with friends a little over a year before she died. I could have visited her, but I chose not to, out of selfishly wanting to stay with my friends. When my mother told me she had passed away, all I responded with was a despicably cold, “She shouldn’t have smoked so much.”
I don’t believe I was ever repressing any of this. I never had to fight back tears or distract myself. I always knew what happened, and I never denied it. I started telling people that I was an only child, but that was purely out of convenience for having to save someone else from having to hear a sad story — not for my own sake. I also think that I was avoiding the embarrassment that they would care far more than I actually did. I was just so emotionally empty and my heart was so closed off, that I just couldn’t feel anything. I honestly feel like I’ve lived most of my adult life, including the entirety of my 20’s, on fast forward. I was always looking forward to something, always working towards some higher accomplishment or achievement, always trying to escape the present moment, because the present moment was nothing but a cold and desolate depression. I used my addictions to try to feel and to try to make the present moment bearable.
Like any addict, I would take it to the extreme. I wouldn’t stop drinking until I was belligerent and out of control — sometimes yelling at random people on the street or trying to get into fights. I had friends to drink and party with who were damaged like me. I wouldn’t stop gambling until everything was on the line (I have lost $50,000 on a single bet…more than once). I wouldn’t stop working until I felt I was validated by everyone who had ever wronged me, looked over me, or otherwise slighted me…..that validation never came even with what most would consider as wild material successes. I played video games or poker at a casino for over 24 hours straight on many occurances. If I was with a girl, it was hard to get off when I didn’t look at and treat the other person as a sexual object. I bought three cars and a house all within the span of a few months, and still never felt more empty. Two of the cars’ batteries died from me never touching them, and one of them I sold for $30,000 which I immediately put on a Super Bowl bet, which I unsurprisingly lost (damn Niners!).
I want to be clear that gambling wasn’t just with money. I was gambling with everything, including my life. I would drive home drunk all the time, and often recklessly at that. Sometimes I would swerve around — not due to a loss of motor function (I actually can drive extremely well when intoxicated as bad as that might sound), but because I didn’t care what would happen. Occasionally I would race other cars on the freeway in my shitty Nissan Versa, and once I even drunkenly and purposefully smashed into taxi cab driver at a stoplight because I thought the driver looked at me funny and was trying to test me (I still wonder how he explained the giant dent in his cab to the cab company). Once, perhaps luckily, I passed out with the keys in the ignition before leaving a party. Another time, I ended up in an ambulance with alcohol poisoning instead of in my car trying to drive home. Remarkably I never got a DUI despite several friends getting one, and despite being pulled over twice while drunk (once while actively drinking a beverage in my hand while getting pulled over for speeding). When I started a marijuana business before it was legalized, it was because I didn’t care if I went to jail. Free room and board and food sounded like a decent deal. I would constantly tempt fate and death in a sick attempt to feel something, and I could’ve ruined my life in many different ways on several occasions. I guess I was just born with a horseshoe up my ass.
Four years ago, prompted by one particular heartbreak where I was terribly cold to a girl who wanted nothing other than my love, I started waking up. I knew that there was something terribly wrong with me. I started studying psychology and the revelations of Carl Jung in order to figure myself out. I learned about psychedelics, and after a couple experiments, all of the work I had done up to that point primed me for a trip that absolutely broke me open, and set me on a path of spiritual awakening.
I had decided to take a “spirit hike” out in Point Reyes, where I took LSD on the initial leg of the hike, and then a bag of mushrooms on the way back. Halfway back to my car, I had stopped to look at the sun setting over the ocean, and something clicked. I was immediately transported to thoughts about my sister and the trauma she must have been enduring in her mind, and a flood of tears finally poured out…15 years later. Emotionally, it was as if she had just passed away yesterday as this was the first time I had ever truly confronted it. It was like I was processing 15 years of trauma all at once, and then I thought of the one person who I knew I could truly reach out to….it was Emei….and she had passed away almost 4 years prior at that point.
It took another two years of further psychedelic journeys, integration, and the study of spiritual and psychological literature before I fully processed the many many years that I had swept under the rug and ignored. However finally, my heart had opened. I started to feel everything so deeply and I developed a keen sense of empathy, such that I could deeply feel any kind of heartfelt moment that might occur (whether in a movie, show, or real life) and genuine tears would begin to flow….and I was loving every moment of it.
As a result most of my addictions fell away. I no longer felt any need to drink, or do any kind of “drug”, except to have fun with in moderation. My desire to accomplish things to win “badges of honor” mostly faded away, and I no longer felt the same feeling of sexual lust for every attractive girl I happened to come across. The two that remained were gambling, and love. I still had a stubbornly remaining desire to prove myself as worthy, and that validation of my own existence still took the form of gambling. I was smart…very smart, and I wanted people to know and recognize it, and I wanted to be rewarded for it. It was an incredibly stubborn ego trip that remained, despite countless “ego death” experiences I’ve had on psychedelics.
The last addiction remaining was love. Although I had regained that second fundamental need of authenticity, I still felt a hole around the need of attachment/connection. I tried to fill this hole with another person, and I could see all the negative qualities of addiction start to rise up again. I was addicted to both this person’s presence and attention. I was chasing a high that, like gambling, could never be satisfied. I was so identified with my need, that I couldn’t help but see her as the thing that was supposed to fulfill that need, and as a result, felt myself wanting to consume her future and her world like the way I wanted to consume drugs and alcohol until I blacked out. As Ram Dass, the famous spiritual teacher, had once said:
“As long as you’re identified with your desires, you can’t help but manipulate the universe to try to bring about that gratification of your desires. If you carry that to it’s ultimate truth, you see that everybody around you is an object to be manipulated to give you that gratification.”
Invariably, this led to my own self-inflicted heartbreak (heartbreak leading to growth seems to be a trend eh?). This forced me to start to integrate the hardest lesson of all: love comes from within and not from another person.
I believe it is the most difficult lesson because, there is nothing as efficient or effective as a true love connection with another that can bring you to that fulfilled state of equanimity where your fundamental needs are fulfilled and you feel at home in the universe. When the other person is gone, you feel like you’ve lost your connection to that space, and you feel destitute, because nothing else thus far has ever come close to bringing you there.
I know that the truth is that true, capital L Love, does not have an object, but is a state of being that comes from within. However, it is one thing to consciously know something, and another to fully integrate it with your soul and self. I am getting closer to that point each day though. As of now, the desire to gamble has fallen away. I no longer wish to fight with anything or anyone, and do not posses the desire for validation from others. At this point I would truly feel much better about earning something than winning it.
As for love, I can feel the desire for something external fall away piece by piece each day now, and that remaining hole is slowly being filled by my own internal developing state of equanimity.
People say that addiction is an incurable disease, and “once an addict always an addict”, but I don’t believe that to be true. I don’t believe that addiction is something that manifests in and of itself, but rather, is an attempt to feel whole….to feel okay and at home.
I believe there is a path home for everyone, and the guide is your own heart.
And there is no need to be addicted to anything, once you truly find your way home.
🤍
