Compassion for pain

Behind every addiction — whether it’s food, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, cannabis, crack, whatever you name — there is an inability to hold enormous emotional pain.

But not only that.

There is also a deep sense of shame about who you are as a person, layered with guilt for feeling what you feel.

Shame and guilt are formed in our psyche as a way to protect us from outside shame and outside anger. We internalize it, and it becomes anger pointed toward ourselves — what we call guilt.

These enormous amounts of emotional pain become so unbearable to hold that people use drugs to bypass the protector — the part that carries internalized shame and guilt — in order to access the vulnerable part.

The vulnerable part is the one that can feel connection with others, the one that still believes it can be itself, that it is allowed to have desires, wants, and needs.

That’s why many people, when they use drugs or alcohol, become more vulnerable.

The situations they find themselves in while high or drunk are often the very situations that would bring this vulnerability out — just in a more intense way. And if that vulnerability is not integrated, the belief that “there is something wrong with me for being who I am” becomes even stronger.

This is the vicious cycle that people struggling with addiction are trying to break.

So I want to express my compassion.

And my understanding.

For how they feel.

For the heaviness of being they signed up to carry in this lifetime.

Have compassion for yourself.

Have compassion for your needs, your desires — even for the moments when you slip and use.

Because using is not “the wrong track.”

It became the only track where the pain could disappear for a moment — where there could be relief.

Everyone wants to live freely.

Everyone wants to love and feel connection.

So why do we blame people who use drugs for wanting those things?

For wanting to connect to who they are without fear, shame, and guilt?

For wanting access to their vulnerable, true self — the self that is so afraid to be seen when they are sober.