The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  Anita sighed, “I can’t believe I’m in this place again. I thought I’d conquered my eating stuff when I was in college. How did this happen to me?”

  Compulsion actually kills passion. It is driven by fear:

  I can’t be fat, or I won’t be lovable.

  I can’t have people mad at me, or they might not like me.

  I can’t express my own opinion, because that might make someone mad.

  I have to exercise, or else I will be fat.

  I can’t eat certain foods, because they will make me gain weight.

  I can’t express certain emotions, because that will cause people to reject me.

  I don’t want to make people uncomfortable, or they won’t want to be around me.

  I have to purge myself of anything I eat, or I will gain weight.

  I can’t be angry, because that will make others uncomfortable.

  I can’t gain even one pound, because that will result in a larger weight gain.

  UNDERSTANDING IN THE MIDST OF CRAZINESS

  Experts in the field of addiction often say that genetics “loads the gun” of an addiction and environment “pulls the trigger.” I asked Anita to tell me a bit about her family history. As she started naming the members of her family tree, we began to see a pattern of addiction, depression, and anxiety. Understanding biology and family history is important because it makes sense of addiction.

  I said to Anita, “Wow. You didn’t have a chance. Your biology set you up.” Scientists will be debating for years to come which comes first, but the causes are clearly linked: Does biology change the brain and make you vulnerable to addiction? Or does addiction change the brain, setting you up for further addiction?

  The Smoking Gun

  I asked Anita to tell me about experiences in her growing-up years that might have influenced her relationship with food and body image. She recalled being fourteen years old, in the midst of the hormonal tumult that comes with adolescence. She realized that her body was changing and growing, which was distressing not only to Anita but also to her mother. Anita repeated for me the messages from her mother that still play in her head today: “Always take the smallest portion, always eat something before you go out with others so you don’t eat too much in front of them, don’t eat that or it will go straight to your hips … ”

  When Anita was fifteen, her mother handed her a pack of cigarettes and said, “Smoke these. They will take away your appetite and help you lose that extra weight.” Anita took her mother’s advice. She found power and satisfaction in controlling her appetite and pleasing her mother. Three addictions (smoking, weight control, and people pleasing) were loaded into the gun, with a soul-deadening impact on Anita’s life. Taking a look at her biology and history was necessary for Anita to understand her current struggle.

  Women often describe a personal relationship with their addiction—it is their friend, their secret love, their personal support. Such addictions often grow in the void of healthy personal relationships and can be set off by a person’s response to something that has special meaning for her. Anita’s compulsion and obsession with eating, body image, and people pleasing brought her a sense of power and reassured her that she could be okay in the world. Addiction begins as a constant and sometimes inexpensive friend who will bring comfort and control, but it becomes the most compulsive, demanding, and overwhelming relationship in life.

  Alcohol had become too important. By the end it was the single most important relationship in life. Yes: this is a love story. It’s about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It’s about needs so strong they’re crippling. It’s about saying good-bye to something you can’t fathom living without.

  —CAROLINE KNAPP, Drinking: A Love Story3

  I knew that for Anita, and for many who struggle with addiction, her central activities were the means of relieving the self from being alone with the self. When she ate to an extreme, she had momentary relief from her own inner, emotional life. When she made others happy or comfortable, she had something that took the place of being alone with herself for at least a brief period of time. When you are not connected to yourself, it is impossible to be connected to others.

  I asked Anita about her marriage. She admitted that she kept her husband at arm’s length and that he was growing increasingly dissatisfied with her. Her loss of control in her marriage refueled her eating addiction, where she could temporarily gain some sense of control again. Anita explained further, “I keep everything inside. I don’t want to burden others with my emotions. I hate anger, conflict, and sadness. I know that my husband is drifting away from me, but I feel hopeless to do anything about it.”

  Do you see the sabotage of her desire for relationships? Addiction kills the desire for intimacy. It gives the addict an excuse to not be intimate. When being nice and people pleasing stopped working and her husband expressed dissatisfaction, Anita quickly found another familiar focus that would keep her from working on a healthy relationship. Anita was living in a momentum designed to break and control the sorrow of living in a world where intimacy is uncontrollable and unpredictable. She was choosing behaviors that would make sure that she had no intimacy at all.

  As Anita began to understand and acknowledge the roots and realities of her addictions, she became more depressed. Anita saw herself as devout and believed that God (like everyone else) judged her according to how nice and pleasing she was. She felt intense guilt about her eating struggles. She felt like a complete failure, doomed to a life of misery.

  The Gift of Powerlessness

  During one session, I told her a story about my son. He had been praying for God to help him win a karate tournament. When my son did not even place in the competition, he said to me, “I guess God is too busy for stuff like karate.”

  I asked my client, “What do you think?”

  She seemed to almost lose her breath. “Think about what?” she asked.

  “About God answering prayer. What does He really think of us?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, “I know what I’ve always thought. But right now, I’m not sure. I’m trying to believe in God as I’ve known Him, but I’m having a hard time believing in a God who really hears me, and loves me, and will heal me.” She was describing one component of her overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Anita was expressing more than just an inability to believe: this was a fear that she didn’t make an impact on God—a sense of powerlessness at the core of her being. This feeling of powerlessness is more sustained than a crisis of faith, but it can be a gift. When we believe that we earn God’s love and merit His help in our lives, we get trapped in the last addiction. Real life teaches us that being good does not always equal having the good life; bad things do happen to good people. Does that mean that God isn’t moved by our efforts? Are we powerless to get Him to love us? Yes. And thank goodness. If we believe that we have to be really good, that’s perpetually exhausting. If we believe that God is good and can be trusted to love us regardless of how good we are, that’s good news. But it is also completely out of our control, and that’s unsettling. I was hoping that Anita’s sense of powerlessness would lead her to understand that she didn’t want to impact God, she wanted to control Him.

  Powerlessness fuels addiction but can also be a source of its redemption. We feel powerless in aspects of our lives other than just our relationship with God. Powerlessness makes us believe that what we do doesn’t make a difference. All efforts to alter one’s world are ineffective. You can’t make your parents get back together, you can’t make your husband really hear you, you can’t make your wife understand how hard you work, and you can’t make your children act respectful. When powerlessness is not seen as a gift, we respond by trying to kill the suffering self, which makes us vulnerable to addiction.

 
Addiction is a sometimes slow but always certain killing of hope. If you want nothing in or from relationships, then you have no sense of despair when you are disappointed. The sign of a person who has lost his hope and his very self to addiction is that he will not live by his own convictions, choices, passions, and feelings. The experience of addiction is that I will focus on my central activity, and then it won’t matter if I can’t make an impact on my world. At least no one will get to me. When people believe that they are powerless to alter their worlds, they will be at risk for an addiction. The paradox is that the addiction ensures their ineffectiveness.

  Powerlessness, this sense of being unable to control others or God, can become a gift when it shifts the focus from the world around us—the exterior reality—to the inner world. We often are truly powerless to change the people and circumstances that surround us.

  I asked Anita, “Do you think you have what it takes to deal with the external world?”

  Her answer revealed her second, more subtle addiction. She responded, “I think I am good at making people feel happy. I usually know what to do and say to put people at ease.” Most of us who are people pleasers have very similar stories. Usually early in life, we experienced a parent who rejected us or withheld love, waiting for us to perform well before he or she would love us. We began to believe that if we said or did the right thing, we could win our parent’s love and feel okay in the world. Sadly, contorting ourselves to please others actually separates us from ourselves. This addiction is as serious and debilitating as any of the others we have discussed. People pleasing results in losing yourself to others. You know how they feel and what they need, but you don’t have a clue as to what you feel and what you need.

  One of my favorite professors in graduate school often reminded us, “It is the flight from sorrow that leads to a loss of all hope.”4 I asked Anita to begin a feelings journal, to write about times when she felt sad, afraid, angry, glad, or guilty. I wanted Anita to begin to feel the agonizing emptiness and ache against which she defended herself with her addictions. During those weeks of journaling, she told me that she often felt as if she was in the middle of a hurricane, afraid that she might drown. When you have spent a lifetime not feeling, it is hard to believe that feeling is a necessary part of the process of redemption. I quoted a few fragments from a favorite poem of mine by Wendell Berry:

  I let go of all holds then, and sank

  like a hopeless swimmer into the earth.5

  The gift of powerlessness is that it can compel us to let go. This is expressed most succinctly in the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous: “We admitted that we were powerless over [our addiction] and that our lives had become unmanageable.” As Anita let go of trying to defend herself against pain, disappointment, anger, and hurt, she found that she was paradoxically experiencing more joy and hope. She admitted that she was withdrawn and manipulative in her marriage, and she told her husband that she wanted to begin again with their relationship.

  We need to recall that God’s will never enters where self-will dominates. That’s all the admission of powerlessness is. It is a shutting-off of self-will in a particular area.

  —JOE MCQ, The Steps We Took6

  Unfortunately, when things got tough in their work on their marriage, Anita’s eating disorder would intensify. It was extremely difficult for her to open up and experience intensity, conflict, pleasure, or connectedness. When she felt exposed, she retreated to the covering provided by her eating addiction. Often when we begin identifying feelings, we don’t go on to the next important part of this work—identifying what we need. When Anita felt loneliness, depression, or anger, she could not tell what she needed, so she went into her default mode, believing she needed to binge and then purge.

  During one session Anita acknowledged that she felt completely alone in her struggles. I asked her, “What do you think you need?” She began by reciting all the things she thought she should be doing, a familiar pattern for people pleasers.

  “No,” I countered, “what do you need?” Tears formed at the corners of Anita’s eyes. “I think I need friends, people who know me and accept me,” she answered. I knew that after a person identifies a need, the next question is extremely important: “Is that a realistic expectation?” As Anita and I talked about this need, Anita acknowledged that in order to develop authentic friendships, she would have to be honest and vulnerable, that it was unreasonable to expect real friendships to develop otherwise. I urged Anita to find a support group, but she was afraid that would be too much exposure for her. She knew from her past experience with an eating disorder that it was important to nurture herself with good food, but she still didn’t believe that it was important to nurture herself with good relationships.

  COMMUNITY IN THE MIDST OF ISOLATION

  “I’m so disgusted with myself,” Anita began at one of our counseling sessions. “Last night,” she continued, as I sensed shame creep onto the couch next to her, “I ate a whole box of macaroni and cheese and then I tried to throw up, but I couldn’t even make myself vomit. What is wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this?”

  I took a risk and mimicked Anita’s words in a similar contemptuous voice, “Anita, what is wrong with you? And why do you keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?”

  Anita looked at me, shocked. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Who do I sound like?” I asked.

  “I guess you sound like me, but that’s how I feel,” she answered.

  “I suspect you learned that harsh tone from someone else,” I explained. “And as long as you respond to yourself with such contempt, you will continue to feel neglected and unloved. When you don’t get the nourishment that you need from your own inner voice, you’ll keep reaching for the macaroni and cheese.”

  If you are going it alone with God,

  you are probably going it alone.

  —STERLING THOMAS, Sacred Hearts7

  As Anita thought about it, she acknowledged that whenever she started to feel lonely, tired, angry, or even physically hungry, she heard her mother’s harsh voice:

  “You’d have more friends if you were friendlier.”

  “You wouldn’t be so tired if you went to bed earlier.”

  “You don’t really feel that way.”

  “If you keep eating like that, you’re going to be a fatty.”

  I asked Anita to practice “going inside” herself in response to her feelings and speaking to herself with a nurturing voice. I suggested that she use the voice she might use to speak to her dog or a grandchild. Anita dutifully followed my suggestions. After all, her people-pleaser personality compelled her to be a “good” client! After several weeks of practice she admitted to me, “I’m trying to talk to myself, but I still feel like I’m not really there. I’m still numb.”

  Anita was the equivalent of an emotional anorexic. She simply would not allow anything in—even from herself—that might nourish her. “I just can’t do it,” Anita sighed in exasperation.

  “Will you try a group?” I asked again.

  “Okay,” Anita murmured, without a lot of hope.

  Freaks and Misfits

  At that time I was facilitating a support group for women struggling with different addictions. Each week I asked one woman to bring a song, a film clip, or something else that reflected what she was thinking about or experiencing in her relationship with addiction. I watched Anita listen carefully and quietly to each of these brave women until it was her turn to bring something in.

  The next week she came in with a book of photography by Diane Arbus. I recognized the book as one of my favorites, a collection of photographs of “freaks and misfits” of society. Anita showed the group a picture of a misshapen woman dressed in finery. “That’s me,” she explained. “I have worked so hard to cover me up. My people pleasing is a costume to cover the ugliness that is me.”

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sp; I winced at Anita’s deeply embedded struggle with self-contempt. “Would you like feedback from the group?” I asked.

  The people pleaser in Anita rose to the occasion. “I’d love it,” she said.

  One by one the members of the group asked Anita questions, affirmed her, and invited her to connection. One woman asked, “What makes you feel so ugly?” Immediately another woman in the group said, “Your eyes are always so kind when others talk. I can’t believe how unkindly you feel toward yourself.” I watched Anita smile politely as she deflected their comments one by one.

  “Are you letting anyone in?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Anita answered honestly. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But I really can’t accept what you’re saying.”