The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  The Giver longs for us to receive this gift. As Richard Foster wrote, “Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.”12

  The surprising and oh-so-relieving gift of getting caught is that Love simply longs for our presence, when we are too weak and wounded to do anything to make ourselves lovable.

  God pursues us. Sometimes silently and sometimes shouting. The light of His love is sometimes dimmed and sometimes glaring. He uses our struggles and our self-sufficiency to catch us and reveal our need of Love.

  Is getting caught The Answer to addiction? Obviously not. For there are many who have been caught, arrested, and hospitalized who return to their addictions. But being caught by Love opens the heart to the hint that there might be More. And that is the beginning.

  3

  THE ENERGY AND EXPERIENCE OF ADDICTION

  It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most [human beings] live only for the gratification of it.

  —ARISTOTLE

  Brian doesn’t look like an addict. He wears starched shirts and polished shoes. He drives a 2006 Lexus LX470. But Brian can’t sleep at night. He often arises before 4:30 a.m. and leaves his home while his wife and children are fast asleep. He’s begun experiencing chest pains, and he finds that the only way he can relax and interact with his family is after two glasses of wine. He is irritable and short with everyone, feels like most people in his life take him for granted, and finds himself withdrawing from any close friends.

  What is it? Drug addiction? Maybe cocaine? An extramarital affair? No, Brian is addicted to work. He works over fifty-five hours every week, and when he’s not at work, he’s thinking about work. He has built his own company from the ground up and is proud of his accomplishments, but he feels the pull of the “golden handcuffs” every day. He can’t stop. He is in too deep.

  Workaholism is one of those behaviors that is hard to classify as a serious addiction. After all, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 49 hours per week; that turns out to be 350 more hours per year than the average European. Expedia.com reports that 12 percent of Americans never take a vacation.1

  We really don’t want workaholics sitting around on folding chairs in church basements confessing their addiction and trying to stop working so much. That might limit productivity. Unless, of course, that workaholic is you or a family member. Workaholism has the same costs as any other addiction; relational, physical, and spiritual consequences are part of the toll we pay for being so productive. According to Diane Fassel, author of Working Ourselves to Death, “workaholism affects all walks of life, not just high-powered executives, and it can affect physical health. Often a workaholic will die before an alcoholic.”2

  When Brian and his wife first came to see me, they described the treadmill they were on and the toll it was taking on their family. Brian finally said in exasperation, “I don’t have any choice. Sure, everyone says that they want me home more, but they would be sorry if I stopped bringing in the money.”

  His wife snapped, “You couldn’t stay home if you tried. Work is your escape from everything else.”

  This couple clearly exposed the cunning nature of addiction. If addiction is primarily obsession and compulsion, then whenever you feel like you don’t have a choice, you are in the radar of an addiction, even if that choice might look like a good thing. Remember that every addiction is a good thing gone bad—desire gone awry. Brian’s story also highlights the powerful energy that is a part of every addiction. Addiction becomes the central activity—the momentum of life—because something gives it energy. At the heart of every addiction are two jolts of charge: the belief that I deserve escape and the fact that I demand control.

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  It might not look like Brian is escaping at all. In fact, he says that he feels trapped. Understanding the three components of the great escape reveals how Brian fuels his workaholism with an energy that might look good on the outside, but on the inside he risks losing his own soul. Workaholism forfeits the wisdom that comes from struggling within messy relationships, the strength that is forged by dealing with our human weaknesses, and the healing that comes when we risk giving and receiving love.

  What good would it do to get everything

  you want and lose you, the real you? What

  could you ever trade your soul for?

  —THE GOSPEL OF MARK3

  I Want Relief from the Struggles of Living in a Messy World

  The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the misery of their existence. This is what maintains an addiction—it initially provides relief, and the addict continues to try to re-create that initial experience. Life is sorrowful; we taste it daily in grief, fear, loneliness, shame, and longing. Addiction provides a means of fleeing the depths of reality for a more palatable world. When Brian spends fifty-five-plus hours a week consumed by his work, he doesn’t need to think about his wife’s loneliness, his daughter’s heartbreak with her boyfriend, or his friends’ failure to support him.

  Brian’s escape may actually look more like turmoil than relief. That’s what addiction does; it exchanges one passion for another, lesser passion. When Brian spends all of his passion at the office, he doesn’t have much passion left for messy relationships. Even in workaholism there is immediate gratification. The minute I turn on my computer and begin writing, I leave behind the dirty laundry, my daughter’s angst over her major in college, and my worries about my aging parents.

  When I first began speaking about addiction, I did a radio call-in program in the Denver area. One woman called in and asked with frustration, “Don’t we deserve a break sometimes?” Of course we do. But only an addict would consider fifty-five hours of work a week, a hangover every morning, or the loss of relationships due to a destructive central activity as a break. I often think of this when I travel to Orlando, Florida, where I go twice a year to teach. When my children were younger, I would take them to the theme parks Orlando is famous for. As we stood in lines for hours sweating profusely, spent over three hundred dollars a day on recreation, and listened to countless children crying from exhaustion and parents yelling from exasperation, I thought. Only in our culture do we consider this a vacation!

  I Want a Temporary Exit from the Human Condition

  This energy of the great escape really began in the first story God tells about humans. When Adam and Eve were tempted with forbidden fruit, the idea that energized their behavior was “You will be like God.”4 They wanted to be more than they were, more than they had been made to be. We replicate their choice when we use a mood-altering substance or experience to provide relief from shyness, from the tension or awkwardness in a relationship, or from the fear of incompetence in any arena. Addiction offers us an escape from being human.

  In his masterful fiction on alcoholism, Jack London describes the exit from humanness that alcohol can temporarily give a person:

  My brain was illuminated by the clear, white light …. I was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience …. For so [i]t tricks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple passages into the monotony of one’s days.5

  The path into the labyrinth of addiction is well traveled and sometimes looks respectable, but like alcoholism, workaholism is a deadly and deadening addiction. Brian justified his escape through workaholism like this: “Nobody gets it. Everyone just goes about their lives without a thought for how hard I work. That’s why I have pulled away from everyone.” Brian’s false sense of superiority kept him from feeling everything else and kept him isolated.

  The New Testament tells a story of two men that
illustrates both the energy of addiction and its antidote in the context of another respectable addiction—religion:

  The Energy of Addiction:

  Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: “Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.”

  An Antidote to Addiction:

  Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, “God, give mercy.”6

  The irony is that sooner or later, our addictions will prove to us that we are not gods, and they may allow us to turn to God with a true sense of who we are, with an integrity that is both humble and confident. We will talk about this gift of surrender in the next chapter.

  I Want to Be Let Off the Hook from the Cost of Loving

  The deepest relief that addiction provides is that it destroys our deepest passions. As addiction continues, it dulls the deeper passions of our hearts for other people and other things. Addiction opposes love. It nails the energy of our longings to someone or something—a person, place, substance, behavior, or belief. And the addictive object or central activity works; it provides relief from living in the midst of messy relationships, so we want more and more of it. But then it imprisons us in self-hatred.

  Brian told me what happened one night when he was tucking his youngest son into bed. His son said, “Daddy, why aren’t you ever here?” Brian felt the familiar irritation at everyone’s lack of gratitude for what he did.

  “Because I have to work,” he answered sharply.

  “No, I mean when you’re here, you’re not even here. Daddy, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” His son had been able to see the cost of his father’s addiction.

  Brian looked at me and for the first time began to pierce the denial about his addiction: “I want to live differently. I hate how I’m living and what I’m doing to my children, but I am afraid.”

  When we are addicted, we cannot love. We must be able to pay attention in order to love others, and attention is kidnapped by addiction.

  The great escape can be summed up in this vicious cycle: “I believe that I deserve an escape, so I will choose the fastest, most predictable, most accessible, and most effective route available, and I will end up with more pain and problems, hating myself more, and feeling shame, thus further limiting my capacity to love … so, I deserve an escape.”

  I DEMAND CONTROL

  Every addiction is a way of saying to God, “I don’t like what You’ve created. I’ll take over.” Addiction is the ultimate effort to control—control pain and self-consciousness, forget mistakes, and even find easy spirituality. When my children were young, we attended a church that invited all the children to the front of the auditorium at the beginning of the service for the children’s sermon. One Sunday the pastor asked the children, “If you were God, what would you do?” Quickly, my five-year-old son, already aware that he was larger than most kids his age, answered, “If I were God, I’d make all the food with no fat in it, so that you could eat whatever you want!”

  Like my son, we often imagine that we know better than God. Addiction is energized by the belief that if God were as He should be, we would not struggle with desire and having to say no to desire. And so we substitute a god of our own making. Really, the heart of addiction is rooted in the last addiction: “I will be in charge, because I know best.”

  Woe to the man so possessed that

  he thinks he possesses God!

  —MARTIN BUBER7

  We will look at eating addictions in depth later on, but every eating addiction is a model for all addictions, a defiant response to the Old Testament words: “[God] humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna … to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”8 Consider the energy of a person struggling with bulimia, a binge-and-purge eating addiction: “I will not be humbled. I will not feel hunger. I will not trust your food or your feeding schedule. I will live on bread alone, but since you are so stupid as to put fat in it, I will take care of that also.”

  We can tell where Brian was in control—in control of his business, his finances, his employees, his schedule—and where he was out of control— out of control of his feelings, his relationships, his time, and his anger. In control. Out of control. Remember, when you are in relationship with an addict who shows symptoms of an out-of-control life, his or her initial desire was to be in control.

  In her beautifully written book Holy Hunger Margaret Bullitt-Jonas describes the powerful energy of addiction—escape and control:

  So I eat. I eat. I eat past the point of being physically full. I eat until I’m stuffed. I eat until I hurt. I eat until I feel nothing, until I’m numb, until I’m weary of eating and can eat nothing more.

  A triumphant, angry mind, gripped by addiction, and a sorrowing, suffering body.9

  THE EXPERIENCE OF ADDICTION: KILLING TIME

  When we are energized by the desires for escape and control, the experience of addiction dominates our sense of time. Living in the fullness of time includes the ability to redemptively remember your past (faith), to dream about the future (hope), and to remain rooted in the present (love). Addiction keeps us from living in the fullness of time, because life is gradually absorbed by one thing. Faith, hope, and love are extinguished by addiction.

  Like most addicted families, Brian’s family didn’t spend a lot of time sitting around the fireplace remembering what had built their family; they didn’t have a lot of dreams for the future for individual family members. Like it or not, they all worshiped at the altar of Brian’s work and sacrificed living in the fullness of time.

  I said to Brian during one session, “Could it be that you were made for more than work?”

  Brian shook his head, “I used to think I was, but I have forgotten anything else that I wanted.”

  The Past Can Be Forgotten

  The addict murders time by three false beliefs. First, addictions become a partner with oblivion. There is no better example than the alcoholic who blacks out and literally cannot remember what happened that evening. Brian’s oblivion is powerful in a different way—not life forgotten, but life never lived. Memory is the proof of life, and when our lives are absorbed by one thing, we can forget the pain of the past, its loss, failure, and limitations. However, then we also forget what brought us joy, anticipation, and fulfillment.

  I recently attended a weekly meeting of a drug and alcohol education class at a local treatment program. During the class, we were asked to fill out a worksheet titled “All About Me.” On it were three columns: Relationships, Work, and Hobbies. Out of a class of over twenty people, only two people could list any hobbies, evidence that addiction narrows life and destroys passion.

  When I am in the grip of an addiction, I cannot answer the question “Who am I?” I might be able to list what I do, how I fail, or how others see me, but I cannot answer from the depths of my heart who I truly am. I have forgotten.

  The Future Can Be Postponed

  Free Beer Tomorrow

  —SIGN IN SUNSET RIDGE LIQUOR STORE, WESTMINSTER, COLORADO

  Second, addiction also absorbs our passion for what lies ahead. An intense focus on the object or craving narrows my perspective. If I cannot redemptively remember the past, how dare I hope for the future? Addiction tangles up the past and future in subtle and seductive ways. We were meant to ask the questions “Who am I? Who will I be?” The addict, though, says, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

  I asked Brian to talk about his dreams for the future. He talked for at least ten minutes about his goals for his company and financial security, and he had some vague dream of retiring and playing golf all day. Once again I asked him, “What i
f you were meant to be more than a successful businessman?” Brian’s face was blank at first and then contorted with emotion. “I’d like to believe that, but I don’t know what else I could be.”

  Where there is no vision, the people perish.

  —A PROVERB OF SOLOMON10.

  The Present Is All That Matters

  Third, the addict often believes that he or she is really living, caught in the lie that having it all now is the goal. And yet in demanding to have it all now, the addict has no now. Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about the way recreational obsessions distort time: “Time becomes a series of now-moments which must be filled with pleasurable distractions.”11

  This distortion of time takes place in the addicted family as well. Such family life emphasizes short-term stability rather than long-term growth. Family members feel trapped, and survival becomes the focus (not that different from Brian’s experience of his own addiction). Spiritual growth, parenting, and dreams for the future cannot be the focus.

  When the present is all that matters, you cannot answer the question “What have I become?” Friends and family of addicts often cannot understand why addicts can’t see the destructive patterns that they are in. The experience of addiction—the distortion of time—fuels denial. In his book on addiction, The Opposite of Everything Is True, priest and recovering alcoholic William Crisman defined denial: “It is dynamic, constantly drawing energy to itself to buttress itself and expand its hold. And in a very short time, it becomes the lens through which all the awareness, feelings, and behaviors of its subjects are filtered.”12