I Struggle With Addiction. Does That Mean I Don’t Care?

When you are in the process of developing a substance or event addiction, an addictive personality is formed. It is as though there are two people within you, your true self and the person acting in addiction. When you are in control you do care. The more the addictive personality strengthens the more you focus on self.

The addict portion of the personality develops its own way of feeling, thinking, and behaving. When you get high and enter into the trance like state, it changes your thought patterns and any feelings you experience are a signal to act out. Your focus develops deeper and deeper into the addictive patterns and how you act. Then, what you care about is gravely changed.

When the primary focus is on a substance and you become preoccupied with acting out, it forces you to withdraw from others and your ability to have meaningful relationships dissolves. Your relationships change as a result. Your personal identity is affected; your relationship with self and the ability to care for self is distorted.

You and I have ten needs that we seek to be met. They are acceptance, affection, appreciation, approval, attention, comfort, encouragement, respect, security and support. You have received these in varying amounts; however, life experience has taken its toll and you have fallen short of fully receiving these needs.

The struggles that you face are often due to how you cope with external circumstances based on trying to meet your ten basic needs. These experiences create your response with internal beliefs, emotions, and reactions to these challenges. You do what you feel you have to in order to meet your needs.

Your experiences have produced messages that developed into faulty thinking patterns and core beliefs that drive what you feel, speak and choose in your behaviors. For example, do you know anyone afraid of large dogs? I have a large Labrador and have observed peoples’ reactions around him. If you were bitten by a large dog when you were ten years old you may panic when you see him. It doesn’t matter if he is friendly and wagging his tail because your core belief screams, “Danger! Danger! This dog could harm me.” Is it based on the present circumstances? No, it is based on a message from a past experience and your emotions, speech, and actions reflect the belief.

Your soul – mind, will and emotions, has experienced varying degrees of damage from living in this world. We are all wounded to some degree. Your story is unique and yet has several of the same struggles that many of us have experienced. Wounds come from your experiences with rejection, betrayal, abandonment, invalidation, abuse, fear, shame, powerlessness and many more experiences. Who hasn’t felt this sting? If you are struggling with abusing alcohol or any addiction, you have developed specific thinking patterns and life skill choices to handle daily situations. These can be described as self-medicating. Your wounds create undesirable thought processes and core beliefs that have urged you to self-medicate as a means of changing your mood.

Sometimes the beliefs and behaviors that you adopt are destructive. They mask themselves, deceiving you into believing you are meeting your needs. You don’t do this as a conscious choice, but rather you react to your environment and produce thought patterns, core beliefs, life and relationship skills to maneuver your way through life. If these are defined by unhealthy ways of meeting your needs, you are going to have negative consequences. You can examine and remove unhealthy foundations so that you can restructure your life to meet your needs in a way that produces life, hope, and healthy relationships. We all have some deficits, however, these foundations can be healed, but if they are ignored they will produce negative fruit in your life.

Every day you have thousands of reactions based on your thinking and core beliefs. When these thoughts are faulty, they can lock you into destructive patterns until you tear down the foundation and restructure how you think. You can learn to identify faulty core beliefs that drive you into unhealthy choices and you can learn to recognize distortions in your thinking. This is the key to living a successful life.

If you have a faith in God and your beliefs and behaviors don’t line up, you experience a disconnect. This is again based on the faulty core beliefs that have been produced by messages from your past experiences. They override what you believe intellectually, and in your knee jerk reactions and behaviors have you struggling in conflict and often shame.

Romans 7:21-25 describes this internal conflict well:

 “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (NIV)

It is not that you don’t care; it’s that there is a developed system of thinking, behaviors, and choices that stand between you as yourself, and you as the person acting in addiction. When the shame and pain from your addiction rise, you wonder how you can act in such a way until that very pain sends you back into the cycle of self-focus to achieve acting out once again. This pattern can be changed and you can be set free from addiction. You can recognize when you are thinking poorly, restructure your thinking so you can be free to live your true beliefs, operate in a healthy identity, and take control of your life. If you are struggling with an addiction, I encourage you to seek professional help today. Let Jesus deliver you. Jesus isn’t going to condemn you; He wants to set you free!

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” John 3:16-17 (NKJV)

Dr. Michele

Copyright © 2014 by Michele Fleming, Ph.D.