Chapter 40

It may be a huge step to help an addict see how positive outcomes to behaviors closely aligned with spiritual principles are useful, beneficial, preferable, and desirable; however, it may prove difficult to identify and isolate the personal logic used to justify an unconscious willingness to suffer. Though this may be due to a wide variety of misplaced psychological incentives, an addict is perfectly willing to suffer for reasons of at least some significant private values connected with self preservation. The irony here is that the symptom or solution of chemical abuse achieves the opposite end-result. Because of the dual nature of chemicals used as a preventative to pain or a celebration of the absence of pain, an addict learns that drugs are the cure-all. The medicine that cures, in this case, becomes the poison that kills.

Sometimes the delusion of a power position in being a victim is thought to deserve special consideration and may be carefully, yet unconsciously safeguarded against loss; therefore, it may be difficult to achieve an initial breakthrough. I believe an initial treatment approach can simply be asking the addict to envision what a life would look like in the absence of drug use by merely calling upon common sense. Is it possible to learn or visualize life operating any other way? Since we can only do what we have learned how to do, are you teachable? Here we want to identify the apparent personal values, judgments, and convictions that argue against spiritual principles and direct a new life movement.

Curiously enough, addiction is a disease that has foundations resulting from our habits of thought, feeling, and action. I believe it is helpful to attain a complete mastery of ideas linked to the use of drugs and alcohol as inflicting physical damage that must be interrupted, though this knowledge is not to be relied upon as a cure, nor is the disease concept to be used as an excuse for continued drug abuse.