The Last Addiction

by Sharon A Hersh

  “Sharon,” he said, “Someone paid the price for all this suffering. We can’t lose sight of Him.”

  That is the hard work of staying in the way of redemption, keeping our eyes on Love. How do we stay in the Way when we fail, when we experience inexplicable sorrow, when community falters or sends us back into hiding? We need to remember that our own failures and the failures of others—even in the midst of earnest commitment—reveal our thirst for One who does not fail.

  Jesus understands thirst. When He was nailed to the cross, among the last words He uttered were, “I am thirsty.”9 He was suffering in His human body the same brokenness we know ourselves. And He suffered even more, because He let Himself be wrongly crucified, deprived of life by human wrongdoing, accepting the brokenness of humanity in Himself. Jesus chose death because of His love for us. From the tree He whispers, “No more shame. No more hiding. No more justifying. No more working. I condemn sin in the flesh. And you’re free, free to love God without fear and shame. I am thirsty for you to love Me.”

  Jesus’s thirst. His love for us and His longing to be loved, is the only reality bigger than our addictions, our sufferings, and our failures in community. In the midst of craziness, understanding will get fuzzy again. Community will fail us, and isolation will seem like a reasonable alternative. Forgiveness will be diminished when shame and suffering resurface, and our perspective will grow dim, threatening to send us back into the quicksand of addiction. Redemptive hard work always returns to Jesus and His view of us from the cross.

  When you struggle with an addiction or you have a loved one who does, it is hard, humbling work to remember that the alcoholic is not merely a drunkard, the sex addict is not just a pervert, the drug addict is not someone morally bankrupt seeking another high. No, they are all, we are all people thirsty for the One who is thirsty for us.

  Pay attention to your soul. It is thirsty for More than a quick fix, a temporary escape, an accumulation of material possessions or accolades, or a neat and tidy life. Love has been looking for you all of His life. I think that’s why His story won’t go away. On a cross, Jesus died, naked and beaten for love, and His suffering connects to ours when, in the midst of suffering, we look at Him.

  I remember a client who decided to take a risk by joining a support group for her eating addiction. She had been closed off, numb, and hidden for so long that she went with great fear and literal trembling. She said to me, “I felt like a lamb going to the slaughter. I felt like a fool.” Her words connected her to Jesus, who is described as the lamb of God, slain for the world.10 She was experiencing pain like His. What was He thinking, to die for us? He made a fool of Himself He gambled everything on die power of love.

  I suspect that some of my readers are frustrated once again, wondering. But what do we do? Again, I answer, do everything. Find a good therapist to help you understand your story. Join a support group and risk community. Engage in theological discussions with trusted friends about suffering and its meaning in the world. But always, and finally, “Behold the Lamb.”

  Our intellects and our wills drive us to find a way by ourselves. Even within religion, we create our own paths with systematic theologies and new insights into old truths. Through addiction, we try to find lives apart from suffering and trust. We wander, seeking something central to our lives that we can understand and manage. But our thirsty souls are incorrigible. We can’t satisfy them. All this thirst has to be about something besides us. Redemption begins when we don’t forget that there is One who is thirsty for us, no matter how good or bad we are. Remembering His thirst doesn’t explain everything; it doesn’t erase suffering or give us an outline for success. But it does answer our deepest craving—to be loved. When we rest in that love, we can take a breath and return to understanding in the midst of craziness, community in the midst of isolation, and forgiveness in the midst of shame. Believing in Love is the hard work, but we can relax right in the midst of it, because Love is even stronger than our unbelief.

  Not too long ago, my college-bound son told me he was struggling with faith. “Mom,” he said, “I’m not sure that I’m a Christian. In fact, if I hadn’t been raised in the church, I don’t think I would believe any of this stuff.”

  My heart started pounding and my palms were sweating as I tried to formulate a brilliant answer that would keep my son on the straight and narrow.

  Taking a big gulp, I asked, “What made you start thinking this way?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just have a lot of questions and doubts.” Relief flooded over me. “Oh, I understand that,” I said. “I do too.” Graham looked at me in surprise.

  “The truth is, you can t doubt someone you don t believe in. God can handle your questions,” I said.

  And then I did what mothers everywhere are guilty of. I took a little trip down memory lane. I reminded Graham of a drive in the car when he was about four years old. In childlike simplicity he had asked me, “Mom, how do you invite Jesus into your heart?”

  “Well, you just ask Him,” I said.

  “Okay,” he answered. My little son bowed his head, and I saw his lips silently issuing an invitation.

  “Remember that time?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Graham said, “I’ve met God, and ever since, I haven’t been able to get rid of Him.”

  I smiled. I knew the feeling.

  The hard work of seeing redemption in the midst of addiction is summed up by the apostle Paul in the New Testament: “It is [God] who gives to all men life and breath and all things …. He created them to seek God, with the hope that they might grope after Him in the shadows of their ignorance, and find Him.”11

  9

  THE PROMISED LAND:

  LOVING AN ADDICT

  You have no new ideas on how to make it work. You have tried everything …. You have been trying so hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear …. But you can’t save yourself, … because we are addicted to our allergies, and you are allergic to [this relationship]. Stop trying to be your own savior. Give it up to God. Let God be your savior. It gets you off the hook, and it puts God on the hook, where He belongs.

  —ANNE LAMOTT, Joe Jones1

  Well, I certainly hope that the next five years are better than the last five have been,” Shirley sighed with a hint of resignation. “What’s been so bad for you these last five years?” I asked.

  Shirley and Sid were the parents of one of my closest friends. I’d just met them at a shared Thanksgiving meal.

  “What hasn’t been bad?” Sid responded irritably.

  “Our daughter got a divorce,” Shirley began, “and our son is an alcoholic. He has been in two different treatment centers, and last spring he got a DUI. It just seems like it’s one thing after another.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. Another guest tried to shift the conversation. “Well, it sure sounds rough for your kids. What have you two been up to?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What have we been up to?’” Sid asked angrily.

  “We’ve been doing damage control. We don’t have time for a life!”

  Shirley saw that we were caught off guard by Sid’s angry outburst. “We wouldn’t have it any other way, though,” she interrupted her husband. “I mean, when your kids suffer, you have to be there for them. They are our life.”

  Someone at the table complimented the chef on the turkey, and the conversation took another turn. But later that night, I found myself thinking about Sid and Shirley’s reflections on their life. I didn’t know all of the details, and I certainly did not presume that I could judge them or evaluate their choices, but I recognized something, something I have struggled with myself the tendency to immerse myself in the lives of people I care about while forgetting to look at myself.

  Psychiatrists and psychologists might call this approach to life co-dependency. Family counselors might prescribe a course of
“tough love.” Self-help gurus might encourage Sid and Shirley to take care of themselves, no matter what. However, their situation is more complicated than one-dimensional diagnoses and treatments. Loving an addict immerses you in a world that you would have never chosen. It takes up all the air in the room, leaving you gasping for breath. When you are in a relationship with someone who is struggling with an addiction, you are always scrambling for a solution to the problem and “waiting for the other shoe to drop” at the same time, which leaves very little energy for self-care.

  I felt this energy of simultaneous desperation and negligence when I was in Cambodia. We visited the bustling, changing city of Battambang and stayed in the Teo Hotel, right in the commercial district. The door to our room opened to the roof, and we would spend the early mornings and evenings watching the city wake up and close down. Every day, hundreds of merchants set up their tiny stalls amid the teeming crowds of children, goats, and automobiles. Young Cambodians were working desperately to better their lives, to make a profit, become more Western. On almost every corner of the dusty dirt streets, where vendors were selling everything from used cell phones to deep-fried spiders, were plastered large colorful signs that read Tourism—The Way of the Future.

  But when the vendors closed their booths and the traffic slowed, we witnessed another side of the city. People shoved mounds of trash along both sides of the streets, right in the middle of the market district. Waves of nauseating stench swept over us from the Stung Sangker River where human waste was dumped. Sent by their parents, young children wandered past the closed-up shops with their hands held out, begging from passersby. This unsettling urban combination of desperation and carelessness struck me as very much like being in a relationship with an addict.

  In desperation, believing we are responsible for changing others, we ache, complain, and try to control the addict. We can recite her problems and describe her struggles in great detail—what she thinks, feels, does, and says, as well as what she doesn’t think, feel, do, and say. Melody Beattie, author of the best-selling Codependent No More, describes the desperation of the man or woman in relationship with an addict:

  We nag; lecture; scream; holler; cry; beg; bribe; coerce; hover over; protect; accuse; chase after; run away from; try to talk into; try to talk out of; attempt to induce guilt in; seduce; entrap; check on; demonstrate how much we’ve been hurt; hurt people in return so they’ll know how it feels; threaten to hurt ourselves; whip power plays on; deliver ultimatums to; do things for; refuse to do things for; stomp out on; get even with; whine; vent fury on; act helpless; suffer in loud silence; try to please; lie; do sneaky little things; do sneaky big things; clutch at our hearts and threaten to die; grab our heads and threaten to go crazy; beat on our chests and threaten to kill; enlist the aid of supporters; gauge our words carefully; sleep with; refuse to sleep with; have children with; bargain with; drag to counseling; drag out of counseling; talk mean about; talk mean to; insult; condemn; pay for miracles; go to places we don’t want to go; stay nearby to supervise; dictate; command; complain; write letters about; write letters to; stay home and wait for; go out and look for; call all over looking for; drive down dark alleys at night hoping to see; chase down dark alleys hoping to catch; run down alleys at night to get away from … placate; provoke; try to make jealous; try to make afraid; remind; inquire; hint; look through pockets; peek in wallets; search dresser drawers; dig through glove boxes; look in toilet tanks; try to look into the future; search through the past; call relatives about; reason with; settle issues once and for all; settle them again; punish; reward; almost give up; try even harder; and a list of other handy maneuvers I’ve either forgotten or haven’t tried yet.2

  Whew! It’s easy to see why there’s little energy left for self-care, why we become careless about our own lives.

  As you read the list, you might wonder, Doesn’t everyone do some of these things for people they love? Isn’t everyone codependent? Yes, many of these actions are common behaviors in a relationship, but when addiction is part of the relationship, we take these behaviors to another level. We don’t “stay on our side of the line.” For example, caring what others think can be healthy, but caring so much that I cover up my spouse’s bad behavior and make excuses for her is not healthy. Helping others is good, decent behavior, but becoming entangled in a sense of responsibility for making some one else okay, and weighed down with guilt when I can’t do it, is not how we were meant to live.

  In her wonderful novel Joe Jones, Anne Lamott describes the reality of someone who is in an unhealthy relationship with an addict. Louise loves Joe, an alcoholic who drops in and out of her life, depending on his sobriety. Louise is desperate for Joe to stop drinking and negligent of her own hurts and needs in the relationship.

  But it is as if there is a picture of Louise’s skeleton, and over it is a transparency showing her muscular system, and over that there’s a transparency of her organs, and over that is a transparency of her cardiovascular system, and over that is a transparency of Joe Jones. It is dark gray with regret, depression, anger, and what the poet Lermontov called the bitter record of the heart … .

  Yearning, said another poet, is blindness.3

  LOVING AN ADDICT ISN’T EASY

  I could fill an entire book with the experiences of desperate, careless people I have known who love addicts:

  the husband who looks through his wife’s dresser drawers every night, trying to gauge how much she has drunk during the day— while she has been home with their children

  the mother who creeps to the bathroom door while her daughter is inside, to hear whether she is purging—while she herself is steadily gaining weight, eating mindlessly all day long to numb her own pain and worry

  the wife who brings her husband in for counseling for his daily marijuana use—while she is becoming increasingly isolated from family and friends

  the husband who calls every telephone number on his wife’s cell phone bill to see whom she is talking to—while he is at risk for losing his job due to poor performance

  the parents who get a second mortgage on their home to pay for their adult son’s drug treatment—while they don’t talk to each other, go on vacation with each other, or share anything in common except concern for their son

  Melody Beattie, in her book Playing It by Heart, recounted the relationship of writer Mary Allen with a man addicted to cocaine: “By the time it sunk in that he was an addict, she said it was too late. She was seated, strapped in, and along for the ride. She was in love.”4 Beattie described the energy of such a sick love: “At its heart is the struggle to control the uncontrollable, to ensure love and security, to make the unsafe safe.”5 Tragically, as Allen relates in her book The Rooms of Heaven, her beloved addict later stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Are you in a relationship with an addict? You wince at some of my statements in this chapter, and then you get angry, like my friend’s father, Sid. You, too, ask bitterly, “What else am I supposed to do?” That is the last addiction taunting you. My purpose in this chapter is not to lay out a program for loving an addict. Instead, I hope to refocus your attention on your own heart. We will consider how your heart becomes diseased when you focus out of shame, control, or fear on the addict you love. Please read me loud and clear. I am not telling you what you should or should not do with the loved one in your life. I don’t know! And if anyone promises you a program that will guarantee your loved one will stop his or her addictive behavior, you need to run from that person! Like the promises that you have heard from your addicted loved one, those promises of a “cure” for the addict will inevitably fall short.

  But some promises do come true. When you relate to your loved one out of faith, hope, and love (instead of shame, control, and fear), you will be transformed, even if your loved one never changes. In order to move from wanting the people in our lives to change to really
wanting our own transformations, we will need to let go of some big commitments:

  the determination to make things happen

  thinking, planning, obsessing about the other person because “we’re only trying to help”

  forcing things to happen because we know what is best

  determining to chart a certain course because we’re in the right

  maintaining control because we’re afraid of what will happen if we let go

  continuing to try to save someone because we don’t know what else to do

  trying to make the pain go away

  staying involved because we have to

  doing things the same way because that’s the way we’ve always done it

  taking charge (playing God) because somebody needs to do it

  THE EXODUS

  The Old Testament offers a powerful lesson in how to be with people who are in bondage.

  Perhaps you remember the story. The Hebrew leader Moses had been raised by foster parents. God gave him a job he didn’t want or feel equipped for, because he also had a speech impediment. Sound familiar? Maybe your childhood and your credentials haven’t prepared you to face the struggles in your life caused by addiction. Maybe you feel tongue-tied about telling your loved one how much his addiction has cost you and how much you want him to change. It seems like your words come out all wrong, and even when they come out right, they don’t have a big impact. You don’t feel like the right person to lead anyone to the promised land. In fact, you feel doomed to a land of broken promises.