The Purpose of Addictions

Rothko

More from Hollis Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

The chief motive of any addiction is, of course, to help one not feel what in fact one has already been feeling. Breaking the tyranny of the addiction will require one to feel the pain that the addiction defends against.

The psyche is always speaking, and its urges will manifest first as ennui, then more conscious boredom, then inner resistance to our conscious scripts, and, as we continue to turn deaf ears, finally, an eruption of invasive feelings and behaviors: interrupted sleep or eating habits, the lure of an affair, troubling dreams, self-medicating addictions, and so on.

It may have been that a parent was repeatedly not there for us, perhaps caught in his or her relationship difficulties, his or her depression, distractions, addictions, or real-world pressures. Even insufficiencies outside parental influence, such as poverty, contribute to this sense of scarcity. At worst, we have the experience of literal abandonment.

Perhaps the two greatest addictions in our culture do not include street drugs, which make for easy scapegoating by politicians, but are television and food, both of which are readily available on a twenty-four-hour basis.

As we have seen, we live in a culture that breeds addictions, for our psychic roots are severed from a deep mythic ground. This mythological dislocation increases the steady harm of anxiety, always just beneath the surface of even our most mindless forms of escape. No one is free of addictions, for addictions or anxiety management techniques the purpose of which is to lower the level of psychic distress we feel at any given moment, whether we are conscious of the distress or not. In no person’s life are these anxiety reduction patterns absent. For one person stress is relieved by a cigarette, for another food, for another a phone call to a friend, for another work, for another some simple repetitive activity such as cleaning the house, for another compulsive prayer.