Being Ashamed of Addiction

The struggle for sobriety is a struggle against megalomania, against the Napoleonic “you” living inside your head asserting that you are the warm gooey center of the universe. Recovery from drug and alcohol addiction is a fight against the belief that you and only you are in charge of the fate that becomes you, of the consequences – good or bad – that shape the course your life takes, of the role you play in the world and of the role the world plays in you. The struggle for sobriety is the belief that you are in complete control.

But that’s not true, is it?

Life isn’t that easy, isn’t that definable. Life isn’t a neat stack of paper on your desk. The truth is that life has a slew of moving parts, and if you operate under the belief that the machine caters to your desires – or that it should – the machine will blow up in your face.

Pride and Addiction Go Hand in Hand

The old saying says, “Pride cometh before the fall.” Pride is that belief that no matter the outcome, the choice was yours, and this can work to slowly drive an individual into the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. Why? Because sooner or later, bad things are going to happen: your wife will leave you, your husband will lose his job, your parents will stop supporting you, or your dog will run away. Pride tells you that these things shouldn’t happen, that you are the arbiter of what happens to you and those around you. And the realization that you are not can be catastrophic. It can drive you toward darkness, toward an escape from the realities of life.

Pride and addiction go hand in hand. They are time-tested partners that destroy in tandem. Addiction is an admission that you can’t deal with the realities that life thrusts upon you, an admission that the flaws that exist in you and in the world aren’t normal. They’re glitches in the matrix. They shouldn’t be there.

You are, after all, a beautiful and unique individual. Why should you suffer?

The fallacy of pride is a driving force for loss. Being ashamed of addiction is not a a bad trait. It is an essential component in the endless pursuit of dissatisfaction. Pride serves to delude you of an omniscience that you don’t posses, and in terms of substance abuse, it is worse than any drug in its addictive and caustic properties.

A Humble Step toward Sobriety

The admission that you have a problem, that omnipresent first step toward recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, is a humble beginning. It is an admission of powerlessness, a concession that the actions you take aren’t exactly manifestations of your control, that whether your God is Christian or Jewish or Muslim or nonexistent, there is a power greater than you that often holds the strings.

No matter how hard we try, we are all marionettes, and that was the plan all along.

We are all dependent on one another, on our insecurities and our flaws, on the very things that keep us close to the ground and lessen the pain of crashing to it when we trip over one of life’s many obstacles. And in drug and alcohol addiction treatment, humility will prove the most important tool at an addict’s disposal. It will propel him upward from the deep pit into which he fell from his high and illusory moments of pride. Humility will help to propel him forward with the acceptance that sometimes bad things happen, but no matter what, he should keep his eyes forward to what may come next.