Addicted? Who? Me?
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Addicted? Who? Me?
Addicted? Who, me? Yeah, sure I am, ‘I’m addicted to my morning coffee’, ‘Can’t live without my weekly dose of Seinfeld’, ‘I have to have my daily run or I can’t function’, ‘Got to get my news fix for the day,’ ‘Sex – just got to have it’, ‘Choc-o-late...!!!’
What happens if someone says, “You need to give up coffee.” At the very thought of giving up anything, our first response is ‘No-o-o-o-o!’ We can feel the withdrawal symptoms and resistance coming on. We make a wild grab for our coffee along with a cup full of excuses; ‘But it’s just co-ffee!’ ‘Everybody drinks coffee’ ‘I could be doing much worse things’ . . . We don't want to give it up whatever IT is, be it coffee or chocolate, alcohol or cigarettes.
To ‘fess up’ to addiction has almost become a fashion – so much so that an international high-end cosmetic company has named its latest lipstick Addict, selling it as a sexy lure, trivialising the seriousness of the meaning of addiction. Addiction is a word that, used jokingly, has become an acceptable bantering mode in café conversation... unless we are talking about addiction to substances like the drug ‘Ice’ or to Alcohol... then the joke is well and truly over. Would we laugh about addiction if we knew what its true meaning is – ‘being enslaved’. Why are we palming off this enslavement as something to laugh about, to flaunt as fashionable?
Looking around it is hardly a shock to realise that we have become a society that is verging on being run by our addictions and the industries that offer solutions to them. Take sugar alone – currently said to be more addictive than cocaine. Giant supermarkets are full of products loaded with sugar. Take away everything in the supermarket with added sugar and you would probably only have the bottled water, toilet paper, soap and fresh produce aisles left. Big business is either selling sugar, or promoting a diet, cookbook or program on how to get off it. Careers are built and centred around this vicious cycle.
And that’s only one industry. There’s the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry, the porn industry the addiction to gaming and screen, the attachment to culture and traditions, the dream factory created by the entertainment industry with our addiction to emotional drama on-screen and off – all have people ‘enslaved’ to their product.
How is it that addiction has become a commodity and is big business?
If we come clean and are honest, it is clear to see that we are all addicted to something. We imagine we are far removed from the lost and foggy world of the opium den of old, but are we?
It’s good to remind ourselves that we live in a world of ‘supply and demand’ as we all know this is the way business works. We demand much of what is on offer from the supplier and the rest we are easily seduced by. Our addictions are actually feeding the supply and the supplier. If we refuse to buy a product it will not be supplied. End of story.
And the funny thing is that the relationship of enslavement to a product is commonly proclaimed as being ‘love’ – ‘I love my morning coffee’, ‘’I love my screen-time’ or ‘I love a cigarette with my beer with my mates’.
But how did addiction ever become ‘love’?
Have we confused love with a craving to feel better?
The coffee or the chocolate, or whatever it is, provides the momentary relief from the mundane, the exhaustion, the pain of our very existence and the hurts we never want to feel: we choose our particular self-tailored addictions in order to replicate feeling good even if it is just for a moment.
The thing is, we all just want to ‘feel good’. And at some level we know that the way we are living and feeling is not delivering IT. It is not a sustainable ‘feel good’ that we are getting. And let’s be honest, our appetites are insatiable, as big business well knows. A recent article on opioids in The Guardian reports that: “Australians’ affection for mind and mood-altering substances is insatiable”. [1]
The actual substance that makes us feel great is never going to be found in any cup of coffee, glass of French champagne, or ‘perfect’ body shape.
In fact there is something that we all have access to – that is free, non-addictive and makes us feel amazing. What we are really craving is the love that is the very essence we are made of, the real substance of life that can only be found within.
We say we love our addictions, but perhaps what we could honestly say is that our addictions are replacing the love that we are missing, that we rarely tend to or connect to. We instead invest our time and money into replacing it with substances that damage the very body we inhabit.
We are great at replacing one addiction with a ‘better’ one, but what if loving our self deeply meant when we are reaching for something that we feel we cannot live without, we ask our self “what is it that drives us to allow a substance to have such an ownership of us?” Is it our uncomfortable feelings that we are attempting to avoid and use these substances to quell them... if only for a short time?
Loving ourselves is bizarrely not something we are encouraged to do, although in retail this is marketed as ‘spoiling and treating ourselves as we deserve it’. Most would agree that shopping is fun and a great part of life, but being owned by products is a far cry from fun, it is a form of enslavement.
Why not simply consider cutting the bonds of slavery, cutting out the middle-man, and choose to reconnect with that essence within, the real love we crave?
As Serge Benhayon has said:
‘You have this amazing place inside you. Don’t leave it there – bring it out’.[2]
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Filed under
Love, Addiction, Alcohol, Caffeine, Chocolate
