The opposite of addiction?

[Alchemica]

What's the opposite of addiction? Like to hear your views.

 

Addictions are real shape-shifters. You can easily just shift between substance <-> behavioural etc and stay in loops

 

To me, the addictive mindset reflects in things like:

 

Suffering vs Acceptance and Growth

Consumption vs Creativity

Filling voids vs Creating connecting bonds

 

To me, the most important thing has been trying to re-instate "I'm OK, you're OK".  

 

The feeling you're fundamentally OK and worthy, not wounded and different. That the world out there is OK too. You're OK. That interactions can be enjoyable. A feeling of engaging in a reciprocal interaction through simple love, connection and presence

 

In that stance, you can engage with the world healthily, not as a wounded person filling voids. You can embrace yourself in your totality as being "you" as a worthwhile person. The world around you as being worth interacting with.

 

 Is it really connection?

 

Some of my most disheartening experiences have been in trying to connect with humans. You can be surrounded by loving people and be miserable trying to connect with them.

 

We promote that people need to connect socially to the point some even say "the opposite of addiction is connection". We even often promote people connect with outer God(s) to heal. Through such an attitude, you induce a state where you're easily not within yourself enough... and when you're struggling with wounds within, at the mercy of social connections.

 

I saw how transient/volatile and impermanent the connections you could seek were. And how there were so many unhealthy things to connect to... and how you could chase more and more connections to fill wounded parts within and how trying to connect from a place of deficiency is really unhealthy. You become heavily dependent on connections.

 

 "Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It's shaping a new way of being.

 

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely." - Sherry Turkle

 

"Why the pain?"

 

What if we really need to take a step back from the outer world and sit with something within, "why the pain"? Be enough through our pain?

 

You cant go into the suffering with the victim or deficiency mindsets or that will simply consume you with deeper and deeper suffering.

 

When you feel deficient, you set the stage for a hungry ghost where you fill your inner voids of unhappiness and feelings of unwholeness in a multitude of unhealthy ways. While there's a hole you're filling you'll stay in a loop of more and more.

 

We're taught we aren't enough, that there's something wrong with us. That's amplified by stigma and social exclusion. The more we believe that, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You shrink further and further and fill that place of 'not being enough' with external things, slide into unhealthier and unhealthier ways

 

You stay in deficiency states and poor ability to delay rewards or sit with discomfort - you're permanently on the chase for something to fill a feeling of unworth, poor-self esteem, isolation etc. It's common in every aspect of our society from feeling we 'need a partner' to be complete, to deriving our worth by external things, to 'there's something wrong with you' to every aspect of our life. It's something heavily ingrained in our society that keeps us relentless consumers, often of things that aren't healthy for us, or more than we need.

 

What if you start to think and feel, yeah - I'm hurting and wounded but everything I need to transform that pain is in me. You start to fill the voids from the inside in sustainable and healthy ways? Not saying you don't reach out for help when needed but "you are enough"?

 

If you rely on external things filling those voids, you neglect the impermanence of life. Social settings change, things that provide hope/meaning/purpose can become easily unstable, you're totally on a collision course with going backwards if anything even slightly changes. You live in dependency of being filled from the outside through connections to tackle a fundamental state of inner deficiency

 

What happens when you stop that chase for connections with the outer and instead connect with the wounded parts that feel like they're not enough? You can convince yourself your caring for yourself and you're in self-love but you really need extreme self-compassion. The pain/trauma, shame, the isolation, the anger etc? When we sit with them and transform our inner relationship with them until they're no longer voids of suffering, rather places we feel whole again?

 

That takes acceptance, going into pain and allowing things to transform...

 

I'm not saying you as a stand-alone unit are the complete perfect existence and you don't need to go beyond yourself but "you are enough". "You are enough does not mean that you are a final product, complete and finished, all done growing and changing and learning things" You can get off the constant striving and be OK. You can sit with wholeness of self-care, self-kindness, self-compassion, self-acceptance and self-transformation, self-love etc as a unit of wholeness within yourself. As you take on those traits for yourself, you gain the ability to radiate the same to others.

 

Edited December 12, 2018 by Alchemica