What do you think addiction is? Most would say it is about alcohol or drugs. But that would be a very, very narrow definition of addiction. That definition is narrow even in medical circles because we, as a human society, have never really tried to understand addictions, or never really tried to help people who are addicted. What we usually do is we shame them – \u2018Oh, you should not be like this, you should not be addicted to this or that, you are wasting your potential, you are ruining your life and life of others.\u2019\u00a0 So we, in general, use shame and guilt to control addiction, but I can guarantee you, you will not find a single case of someone who has truly come out of any addiction that has come out through shame and guilt. Because it is the opposite of what most addicted people need – what they need is someone to see them, and understand them. And out of this understanding of addiction loses its grip. What most truly needs is direct awareness of what addiction is – neither supporting addiction, nor condemning it, but direct understanding is required.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is a broader definition of addiction. Addiction is a compulsive bodily desire for an external object, as if it were a life and death situation, an urgent desire, something that is about immediate survival. So in this sense, you can be addicted to anything. You can be addicted to food, sex, money, alcohol, drugs, power, knowledge, porn, books, movies\/TV shows, travelling, shopping and so on. You can be addicted to anything.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0Now you can say many of these things are really needed in life. True. Like a tree needs air, sunlight, water, and minerals from the ground to grow and thrive, we as human beings also need food, sex, money, and many other things in life to grow and thrive. But here is something to ask: Do you need an external object for growth, nourishment, like a tree needs sunlight, or do you need it to soothe yourself from something? Is it really about your growth? Or is it about something else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This ‘something else’: the urgent need to soothe or regulate yourself,\u00a0 is exactly what drives addiction. A more precise term used in medicine and trauma research is self-regulation, particularly of the nervous system. When we cannot regulate our own body, emotions, and nervous system from the inside, we turn to an external object (substance, behaviour, or thing) to do it for us. That external regulation temporarily calms the storm, and that is precisely what addiction is. A temporary solution to a permanent problem. Now we have to understand where this permanent problem is originating from.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say a child gets beaten by his father. Maybe the father was already angry when he came home, and he saw the child not studying, so he immediately gave him a few slaps. It happens more often than you realise. First, the child gets an immediate shock: \u201cWhat did I do? I did nothing, actually.\u201d Immediately, the child starts crying out of pain, crying continuously. So what do the parents do? They either give him some food, or milk, or give him a toy so he stops crying. In this way, they teach the nervous system of the child that you can immediately soothe or regulate your pain by picking up an external object like food or a toy. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Because obviously, the child can\u2019t fight or punch back at parents. To a small child, parents are big, adults; they provide for him, protect him. So to a small child, parents are extremely powerful people. So the only way he learns to cope with this abuse or pain and regulate his nervous system is by using an external object. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, you were in a very toxic relationship, and you were emotionally abused. Your partner constantly made you feel worthless and unworthy of love and attention. They might say things like \u201cYou are too much,\u201d \u201cYou are nothing without me,\u201d or \u201cNo one will ever desire you.\u201d Most of the time, such toxic relationships actually happen on top of childhood abuse. Someone in your past already made you feel worthless and unworthy of love. So when your abusive partner triggers the same feeling again, you feel powerless. Because to a certain degree, your mind already believes you are worthless, the abuse hits even harder. It brings an immediate shock and deep pain in your body.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, what do you do to survive this pain? You reach for something external to regulate or soothe yourself. Because you feel too powerless to do anything against the emotional abuse of your partner, turning to food, alcohol, scrolling, binge-watching, or anything else that gives even a few moments of relief. And again, the key to this is that you feel powerless to do anything against the emotional abuse of your partner.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, you have to understand that you only start using external objects to regulate yourself when you are being abused to a certain degree by a very powerful entity or person. A powerful abuser is almost always behind the start of addiction. That is why most of the time, addicts actually feel like an abuse victim without understanding why they feel that way. That is why people in heavy addiction feel like a total victim. Real addicted people feel powerless, helpless, hopeless and worthless all at the same time. They feel as if they are being constantly abused, and they have to or need to do whatever they are addicted to soothe themselves or regulate their nervous system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, now many people with addiction might ask, \u201cI can\u2019t trace back any kind of emotional or physical abuse to my childhood, but still, I have so many addictions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a real reason behind this. And once you see it, you will understand why so many alive, vibrant, sensitive and creative people actually end up as addicts or, more truly, as abuse victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s look at how human society views life, and how that view often goes against life\u2019s true nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Life is impermanent. Everything changes – that might be the only thing that is true about life. But look at what almost all human societies aspire to be. They aspire to reach a state of permanence in something. People aspire to be always happy, always relaxed, always fulfilled, always wealthy. This is the key aspiration of most people. And look at the epitome of a relationship, \u2018marriage\u2019 – a permanent relationship that everyone aspire so that they can finally declare that they have reached the peak that any relationship can reach. So the whole society is against life and its impermanence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Life is cyclic. You are born, you die. Good always comes with bad, right always comes with wrong, light always comes with darkness and so on. In-fact my whole blog is about the sacredness of this duality of life, like two sides of the same coin. Yet religions, philosophies, society, has been teaching morality to everyone for 1000s of years on how to be only good, only pure, only right. And people can never achieve that true moral goodness, because it is impossible to be only good without having bad within.\u00a0 The whole society programs children to divide life between these duality and aspire to be one of them while rejecting the other. Again, society is against life and its fundamental duality.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Life is not competitive or hierarchical by nature. But we human being has impose hierarchy in life. Almost all of our societal system is about hierarchy, a ladder, and we have been taught in school to interpret our whole life as a ladder. So, perpetually, we live in competition to win, a ladder to climb, and sit at the top. However, we fail to see that we are simply part of life; we are nothing special or not special at all, we are as ordinary and intelligent as any other animals or trees. We might be different from others, yet we are not better than others. So with our extreme attachment to hierarchy, we are against life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sexuality reveals the conflict most clearly. Life itself grows and thrives through sexual energy; it is creative, alive, and natural. Yet society has always viewed sexuality as something unnatural. And there are two kinds of unnatural sexuality: one is indulgence, the other is repression. In places like India, back when I was a child, people didn\u2019t even acknowledge that sexuality is part of life, and everyone behaved as if does not exist. Many societies are sexually repressive – they behave as if it does not exist. And many other society is sexually indulgent. That might seem like a revolution to repressed people, but that too is a very unnatural expression of sexuality. Because you will rarely find sex is about sex. For most who are hyper-indulgent in sex, it is about something else. For example, someone who feels unworthy might indulge in sex just to feel worthy and get externally validated. Some indulge in sex because it makes them feel powerful, some do because it makes them feel safe, some do because it makes them feel weak and so on. It reminds me of a quote by Oscar Wilde: \u201cEverything in the world is about sex except sex.\u201d <\/em> And with this, we as a human society are against sexuality – that essentially means we are against true vitality, aliveness and creativity of every individual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These are big topics, and it needs almost multiple chapters of a book to write in detail. However, I wrote this to show how our society is fundamentally against life and its essence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It took me a while to realise, as an adult, that I was a bit sensitive as a child, but what I could trace back all my life is: why the whole society hates me so much, why they really, really reject me so much, why they are so against me? This has been my feeling most of my life. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To be sensitive is to be close to life; it is an experience that life is flowing through you that gives you a sense of aliveness, the capacity to feel things deeply. But think of every sensitive child born into this human society. The society and its fundation is against life, and the child is close to life. So naturally, the child feels an unnatural level of hate, rejection, and disconnection from people around him. And of course, to a small child who is dependent on the outside world – parents, teachers, society, culture, it feels extremely overwhelming. Everyone, constantly on a 24×7 basis, energetically, verbally, and emotionally tells that sensitive child that something is wrong with you, you are fundamentally not right. This exactly feels like a deep abuse of the child by this all-powerful outside world he calls society, and this abuse makes the child feel powerless and helpless against the outside world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason many creative, sensitive, most alive and vibrant people, men\/women alike, become addicts is due to the abuse by human society of their very existence. This abuse is not like a normal abuse; it is an abuse at the very fundamental level, it is the abuse at the level of their existence. It is as if someone makes them feel like they are fundamentally wrong and have no right to exist as they are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I would always be grateful to Osho for awakening me from this deep abuse that I felt by the fundamentals of human society for simply existing. Without his words, I would have always lived in shame and guilt for simply existing. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What an external abuser does is a few years, maybe a decade of abuse. The real trauma or wound is not the external abuse but what happens internally as a mechanism.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you really want to understand in detail about the formation of an internalised pattern, you can visit this post <\/p>\n\n\n\nAbuse: The Real Problem<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Human Society – The Existential Abuser<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
From External Abuser to Internalised Critic<\/h4>\n\n\n\n