The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  When denial is the lens through which we see our lives, we can’t answer the questions that orient us to reality: What is it that keeps me in self-destructive behavior? Why am I experiencing loss and depression instead of fulfillment and life? Why do I seem to be drawn to the exact opposite of what I really need and want? What convinces me that I need this central activity to live? Why have I given my heart and soul to something that does not give back?

  When Brian began to answer these questions honestly, he was able to see what he had become. He was an addict, no more and no less than those who gather in church basements and begin to speak by saying, “My name is …, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  We crave release, but refuse to release—and

  so long as we cling, we are bound.

  —ERNEST KURTZ AND KATHERINE KETCHAM,

  The Spirituality of Imperfection13.

  Something mysterious happened the day when Brian began to acknowledge his idol: he received the slow and life-changing gift: of surrender. As Brian acknowledged that he was addicted to work, he gave in to those truths that initially scare us to death but eventually set us free. Brian attended a two-week spiritual retreat on soul-care and learned important strategies for slowing down, stopping, and taking time away from his central activity. As he began to incorporate these strategies into his schedule, he also started paying attention to his family, noticing what they needed and wanted from him, and realizing what they had to give him.

  Perhaps the most important lesson Brian learned was that he could not make these changes on his own. He found a businessmen’s breakfast that incorporated spiritual study with specific application to business practices. He confessed his workaholism and discovered that he was not alone; he found many other people who felt used and used up. I asked Brian how he would describe his process of surrender. He said, “I simply let go, and that let in God and other people.”

  We are going to look in depth at the gift of surrender in the next chapter, but I think Brian defined the mystery of change very well. And over one hundred years ago, before the Internet, cell phones, and mergers, theologian William James also identified this process of surrendering the energy and experience of addiction: “[Surrender is] a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go …. It is but giving your private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. “14 Surrender is the path to redeeming time.

  4

  THE GIFT OF SURRENDER

  In accepting ourselves, we become ourselves. As released, we gratefully enter into the play of which we are already a part. Releasement means “homecoming.”

  —MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN, Eclipse of the Self1

  When we stepped off the small plane in Phnom Penh, we had been traveling for two full days. We’d flown from Denver to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My daughter Kristin and I waited by the side of the plane to gather our luggage. As we walked to the curb we saw a tiny Asian woman, Rhonda Lee, our guide. She immediately began motioning and talking fast and furiously in words we did not understand to a man beside her, a man we would later come to know and love. Tan, our translator. I assumed that they were just very happy to see us.

  And then Tan got into the dusty Honda by the curb and drove off! Rhonda looked at us with big brown eyes of wonder and said, “You have so many bags. Tan go get truck.”

  This was the first of many lessons that we would learn from the people of Cambodia, who offered us far more than we gave to them. Tan came back with a beat-up old Ford pickup, and Kristin and I rode in the back to hold on to all our bags. As we rode through the dusty, jam-packed, busy, smelly streets of Phnom Penh, our bags were at the forefront of my mind. We were holding on to them for dear life to keep them in the truck, but also to keep us in the truck.

  And I thought about surrender. This may seem like an unlikely context—right when I was fiercely holding on to things—but my mind immediately went to another unlikely setting, where I first learned about holding on and letting go, about surrender. It was a dusty, jam-packed, smelly room at the Arapahoe House, a treatment facility for drug addicts and alcoholics. The meeting room in the suburban office building had signs on the wall: “One Day at a Time,” “Let Go and Let God,” and “Fake It ‘Til You Make It.” I was taking a weekly class there as a result of the relapse I mentioned earlier, and I was fiercely holding on to my belief that this was the last place I needed or wanted to be.

  The room was filled with people, including many who barely spoke English. A woman named Maria had tattoos across her body, big brilliant ones. I could not stop staring, and I finally asked her about the design that seemed to cover her entire chest. She explained, “It says ‘Phillip.’ That’s the name of my ex-husband. He’s in prison.”

  One young man always seemed to sit next to me. He had recently been released from jail and wore an ankle bracelet (not the decorative type). Every week there were new people in the class, and we all had to repeat why we were there. Every week the group leader asked this young man why he had been in jail. Every week he replied, “I’d rather not say.” I’ll admit that this kind of freaked me out.

  I was taking this class just to make family and friends happy. I really didn’t think there was a thing that they could teach me. They didn’t know who I was. After all, I had written about addiction. I taught graduate classes.

  THE BAGGAGE CART

  During one session, we were watching a video about emotional baggage. I was bored; I had taken a whole class on that in graduate school. Now we had a worksheet called “The Baggage Cart,” which we were supposed to fill out as we watched the video.

  I was making a list of tasks I needed to get done the next day.

  And then the woman on the video said something that woke me up. She said, “Your bags are not the main thing. Everyone has baggage. And we tend to accumulate more the older we get. What determines the quality of your life is what you use to carry your bags.”

  She had my attention. I looked around the dusty, jam-packed, smelly room, and all of a sudden, I knew that this was exactly where I needed to be. I had come to class believing that the quality of my life was determined by other people and circumstances. Her statement reminded me that my quality of life had been compromised—once again—by using alcohol to help me “carry” my difficulties and disappointments. I wasn’t sure why the girl with the tattoo or the young man with the ankle bracelet was in the class, but I suspected they weren’t handling the baggage of their lives very well either. We were linked by our suffering and our common mishandling of our suffering. I glanced at them and saw that they were paying attention. They knew that they needed help. And then I learned something from them. I saw something more true than a tattoo or an ankle bracelet. I saw their hearts, earnestly seeking help. Surrender began for me in a room full of beautiful wrecks.

  The First Gift of Surrender Is Knowing Ourselves

  Recognizing our true condition lets us know who we really are. I don’t mean identifying all the trappings that make you enviable, like your shiny new car, important job, or reputation at your church. Instead, surrender depends on knowing the real you beneath the carefully constructed facade. For most of us, that means acknowledging that we’ve got a lot of bags— the pain, stress, and heartache in life. We can’t begin to acknowledge what we are using to manage our bags if we don’t see what is really there. We have to learn to see and surrender to what is really there. But it is possible to see what is there and still decide that we can carry it ourselves, or that we must carry it ourselves. The process of self-knowledge leading to surrender is crucial, but it is a process that is easily circumvented. Seeing without surrender will always leave a gap between appearance and reality.

  For example, I prided myself on all my self-knowledge. I was a therapist. I’d been in a counseling program famous for introspection. But now I saw my weakness. There was more appearance than reality. The self I had shown to the
world was a public self, crafted with great care. Between my public self and my true experience lay a lot of baggage that I was unwilling to surrender. I thought I had to take everything I learned about myself and take care of it by myself And that is where I got into trouble.

  Keep your eyes open … so you don’t get musty

  and murky. Keep your life … well-lighted.

  —THE GOSPEL OF LUKE2

  As we begin to consider the gift of surrender, I want to challenge you to think about some of your bags, to know yourself, and to recognize what you use to take care of your internal world.

  PAIN

  Maybe one of your bags is pain. The pain of being single. The pain of being married. Physical pain. Economic pain. Children—nothing can bring us pain like they do. Maybe you have pain from childhood abuse or neglect. Researchers in the field of addiction suggest that over half of those who struggle with substance abuse have experienced some form of childhood trauma.3 This can be a heavy, worn, and battered bag.

  There can even be spiritual pain. In one of my favorite books, Deep unto Deep Dana Candler describes a pain that I think most of us have experienced, if we’re honest enough to admit it:

  All emotions seemed to sleep. One hour turned to two as I watched the clock almost minute by minute. This was one of the days when I could hardly remember the point of my focus. Why was I here? What was I doing? What was the point of the waiting? Have I missed it entirely? Is this all a waste? I moved from sitting to pacing, from reading to praying quietly and from praying quietly to silence. Still nothing. No response. No movement. No sound. Two hours turned to three. Morning turned to afternoon. And on and on the day went—slowly and painfully empty.4

  DISFIGUREMENT

  Perhaps you have a bag of disfigurement. Maybe it’s the way you look, the way your life looks, or the way your family looks. I entered early adulthood with an ideal of how life ought to look. During the Christmas season of 2000, I spoke at a conference for college students ages eighteen to twenty-four. I introduced myself this way:

  I have a wonderful marriage. My husband serves me and cooks dinner, does the laundry, and has a fabulous job. We have two wonderful children with no real problems to speak of. They do well in school and would rather hang out with us than anyone. We probably have such a great life because we have a lot of money. We buy everything we want and go everywhere we want, and everything turns out just like we hoped it would. I have a great job. I am a counselor and all of my clients are doing so well—but they keep coming back and paying me just because they like me. And I must say that I am happy with the way that I look. I love my body, my hair, and my wardrobe. All in all, life is just perfect.

  I was speaking on the topic of perfectionism and trying to use irony to make a point. But I was shocked when these young people in my audience took my introduction as true! When I talked about my perfect marriage, they collectively sighed, “Ohhhh.” And when I talked about my perfect children, once again they cooed, “Ahhhh.” For a few minutes, I wanted to hide my bag rather than move into my real introduction. The truth was that my life had broken into pieces that I couldn’t find a way to put back together again. My children were in middle and high school at the time, struggling with the shock of a broken family. In fact, I had gone to a parent-teacher conference to talk about a D that my son received on an essay in language arts, an essay that I wrote! I had to tell my audience that counseling is always hard work, and it was a difficult season at that time. I had recently lost two of my dear young clients to cancer. And I was, well, I was depressed, on the verge of a relapse. I knew the truth, I told them, and I now share this bag with you: the truth is that without imperfections and disfigurements, there is no story. Our imperfections link us. As soon as I acknowledged that Maria and the paroled convict were struggling with the same internal realities that I was—an inability to find something, or Someone, to carry their emotional baggage—I no longer felt separate from them. I stopped looking for differences and realized our similarities. No matter what addiction you or your family member struggles with, we all suffer from the same condition. We all have baggage that we desperately need help with.

  SHAME

  This is the bag that carries all the things wrong with us. Notice that I didn’t say all the things that we’ve done wrong. That’s the guilt bag! This is the shame bag. Ashamed that you’re divorced, that you weren’t asked to be a part of a certain group, that your car was made in the eighties, that you work in the mall.

  A few years ago, I worked with a young woman who was struggling with a relational addiction. She could not be okay with herself unless she was in a romantic relationship with another woman. When she first came to see me, she was in such distress that she couldn’t even speak. Finally, after several moments of silence, I inquired gently whether there was anything that she wanted to ask me.

  She blurted out, “What about hell?”

  “What about hell?” I asked, confused.

  “Well, the last counselor told me that I was going to hell and that no one in the church would ever be in relationship with me again.”

  My heart broke for this young woman. She had been cruelly shamed by others in her faith. I wanted her to know the God whose name is Love. This God is present, right in her experience of shame, waiting for her to identify the Divine Presence, offering His companionship on the often difficult journey of being human.

  The truth is that I believe God is found in every bag, even, and most especially, in the painful, tragic, and most humiliating things about us. God created us, so God’s heart contains every conceivable human emotion. He feels more than we do. His heart contains us, no matter what is in our bags.

  My bag of shame is a lot heavier than you might know by just looking at me. But I am learning that sitting with my shame in God’s presence helps me see that God isn’t shocked by it. In fact, He already seems to know about it, and He still accepts me.

  SIN, WOUNDEDNESS, AND CONFUSION

  And then there is another bag that seems pretty heavy, especially for those of us who struggle with addiction. Right now I will just speak for myself. I do things I don’t want to do and seem incapable of doing the things I want to do. If I am honest, my motivations aren’t as pure or noble as I wish they were. Over and over, my ability to be who I really want to be seems to be sabotaged by some inner agent over which I have no control. I hear television gurus proclaim that everything we need is within ourselves. I hope that isn’t true. It surely isn’t true for me. I echo what the Desert Fathers wrote, “Dust and ashes that I am. I love sin!” I’m in big trouble if I have to be the answer to this internal dilemma. Getting to the heart of this last addiction. Desert Father John Kolobos urged, “If you see someone going up to heaven by his own will, grab his leg and pull him down again.”5

  To be human is to be broken, carrying a bag whose weight bows us down at the core of our very being and keeps us from our original creation.

  Of course, it’s not all gloom and doom. There are bags filled with hope and dreams of beauty and family. There are bags filled with ideas and creativity. There are bags of giftedness, our unique gifts, even the eccentricities that are necessary parts of us.

  We have a lot of bags.

  BAGGAGE CARRIERS

  Surrender did not come immediately for me in that drug and alcohol class. I was the one making a shopping list while the others were dutifully answering on their handouts the question “What are you carrying in your bags?” Then the group leader asked the pivotal question, “What are you using to carry all those bags?”

  Of course I immediately identified addiction as a good baggage carrier. It initially promises to make everything seem lighter, less intense, less demanding. But I only had to recall my relapse and the panic of my friends and family to know that this baggage carrier only brought further chaos, conflict, and confusion into my life. Because I travel a lot, my mind did jump to real-life baggage, and I pi
ctured myself carrying all my travel bags down the corridor of my local airport while I was under the influence. Arrest or disaster could follow. The real-world parallel confirmed to me the foolishness of believing that any addictive behavior—alcohol, working nonstop, people pleasing—could carry the emotional weight of my life.

  There are other luggage carriers, ways in which we manage our emotional baggage. We’ve all tried conforming to certain rules and regulations. We resolve to deny or suppress our pain, disfigurement, shame, sin, and failure, determined to show only that which is presentable. We find ways to manage our bags. I think of addicts and their families who have made all kinds of rules for themselves:

  I will only drink on weekends.

  I won’t eat after 6:00 p.m.

  I will make everyone like me.

  I won’t say anything to her about her substance abuse.

  I will be really nice.

  I will only buy things that are on sale.

  I will be in only one relationship at a time.

  This baggage carrier can look pretty good. I liken it to getting one of those three-dollar luggage carts at the airport and neatly organizing all your bags for transport. I did this once in the Orlando airport. I had a lot of bags. Right in the middle of the reception area, where larger-than-life Mickey and Minnie grin down at you and crowds wait to greet happy people going to the Magic Kingdom, the zipper on my top bag broke, spilling my most private personal garments on the floor. The crowd was entertained, and I could almost hear Mickey laughing.