What Void Is Your Addiction Really Trying To Fill?

Over the past decade or so, the pull toward anything labeled organic or natural has shaped how a lot of people approach their problems. Part of it traces back to how expensive healthcare and education have become; part of it draws on teaching traditions that are old enough to predate most of what we call modern medicine. What I want to work through here is how that same thinking applies to addiction, and how a basic grasp of psychology can turn addiction into a doorway for personal growth rather than a wall.

Start with the word itself. Holism means you treat the whole person instead of chopping them into a list of symptoms. Compare that to a doctor who writes separate prescriptions for five complaints that might all trace back to a single cause. That fragmented approach tends to run on profit, and it feeds a cycle: higher costs, more reliance on insurance, and eventually the subsidies written into the Affordable Care Act that people know as Obamacare.

Holistic healing grew out of Eastern traditions built around the connection between mind and body. Allopathic medicine tends to pull those two apart and leans toward knowledge and money. Once a person actually feels the link between what happens in their head and what happens in their body, the old pharmaceutical fixes start to lose their grip, because the real work becomes finding the root issue and dealing with it directly. I have watched people who could not afford insurance and medication get pushed into lifestyle changes, only to realize those changes outperformed the pills they had been taking.

That same mind-body link is why addiction fits the holistic frame so well. Addictions are psychological at bottom, much like plenty of physical illnesses, and whatever drives us to give in usually lives in the mind rather than the body. So the more time you spend learning how psychology works, the clearer it gets what is actually making you tick, and the more room you have to grow.

Take sexual addiction, which may be the most widespread of the lot. It shows up more in men, who tend to be the more physical sex, though plenty of women deal with it too. Sex in the right setting, between two people who love each other, is a beautiful thing. It curdles when it becomes lust or stays purely physical, because that road leads to perversion. Strip it down and what sex is really about is intimacy. Every one of us is a sexual being, active or not. The holistic path here is to build healthy, loving bonds with people who want the same thing, people you can be intimate with. That intimacy does not have to mean sex, though it can once you find the person you want to share a life with. First, though, you have to love yourself, because without that you cannot love anyone else.

Then there is Workaholics Anonymous, and no, that is not a joke. Work can be an addiction like any other, a way to plug a hole. Maybe you are terrified of running out of money, or maybe the power your wealth brings has its hooks in you. The driver does not have to be anything as ugly as greed, either. Sometimes you were simply made for a calling bigger than you understand yet, so you pour yourself into whatever is in front of your hands while you search for it.

The rest of the familiar addictions, food and drink and drugs, tend to be flags for emotions we never learned to handle. More often than not, the trigger is stress from a job or a bad relationship, and the addiction turns into an exit, a place to run for comfort. Learn to manage those emotions, whether through mindfulness or just by keeping your life uncomplicated, and the hunger for some outside substance to numb the stress starts to fade.

Grasp the basics of psychology alongside the ideas behind holistic healing and the mind-body connection comes into focus. From there you get growth, and growth frees up energy for the next round of self-development, the energy you were otherwise handing over to habits that drain you physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Erwin Wooten, The Daily E Blog