Transcription
[Music] Addiction and Grace, by Gerald G. May, is a book written on love and spirituality, and specific to healing with addictions or healing those with addictions. The author provides a description of attachment that leads to addiction and examines the relationship between the addiction and spiritual awareness. He includes more than just alcohol and drugs, which is typically referred to or seen as more addictive than sex, work, performance, responsibility, and even intimacy. So the author draws on his own experience working with those suffering from chemical dependency, focusing on addiction to represent a doomed attempt to assert complete control over their lives. This book provides a compassionate, wise treatment approach while offering a critically hopeful guide to a place of freedom based on contemplative spirituality. Also included are two additional essays by the author not included in the hardcover version, and those essays are Lightness of the Soul and The Dark Night of Recovery.
Gerald May was born in 1940 and passed away in 2005. He was a psychiatrist, spiritual counselor, senior fellow at contemplative theology and psychology at Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation at Bethesda, Maryland. His other writings include The Dark Knight of the Soul, Addiction and Grace, and The Awakened Heart.
So as we look through the contents, because today is going to be an overview of what you're going to be reading the next few weeks, the preface provides a context for the author's writings. Chapter 1 is about desire, addiction, and human freedom: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” according to the Gospel of Matthew. So when we repress, um, we tend to repress a desire to keep it out of our awareness; we try to keep it out of our focus. Um, psychology calls this displacement, but something that has been repressed does not really go away; it remains with us, skirting the edges of our consciousness. So when we're looking at Chapter 1, we're looking at our desires; the paradox of addiction. Addiction attaches desire, bonds, and enslaves the energy of desire to certain specific behaviors, things, or people. There's a preoccupation, and the attachment basically nails our desire to specific objects and creates that addiction. So it's almost like this vicious cycle that we stay in. So what we have to do is we have to provide for our account, our clients, a journey toward understanding, explaining to them how the fall happened in Genesis and walking them through the process of redemption, looking at addiction and freedom in the sense that God created us out of love, and that this love is perfect, which is hard for most people to understand, especially if they're struggling with addiction.
Attachment, detachment, addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person's will and desire. Attachment is that process that enslaves desire and creates a state of addiction. Again, we're talking back to the circle. Detachment is used in spiritual traditions to describe a freedom from that desire; it's not freedom from, but freedom of desire. So it's very important that we, we make that distinction—that we're free of that desire; we have that desire removed from us; we have been—the chain's been broken. So Chapter 1, in helping the clients to break that chain, is through understanding what grace is and what hope is and how that applies to their life and can revolutionize their life.
In Chapter 2, we look at the experiences of addiction. Aristotle says, “Is it the nature of desire not to be satisfied,” and most human beings live only for the gratification of it. The author provides us some information about the addiction of a nose using a case study and then provides a definition of addiction: any compulsive habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It's caused by the attachment of desire to specific objects, and our behavior indicates that action is essential to addiction. So without the action, without the desire, the addiction is probably not going to take place. Chapter 2, we also learn that tolerance—it's always wanting or needing more of the addictive behavior, of the object of attachment, in order to feel satisfied—eventually becomes a never-enough situation, which is why you get a lot of overdoses when somebody's trying to break free of that addiction. There's withdrawal symptoms; it causes a stress reaction and also causes a rebound and backlash reaction. In fact, that's the reason why most people will suggest withdrawing in a chemical dependency location that is equipped with the physicians and the nurses to assist during that time, because it can be—withdrawal can be just as dangerous as tolerance. We learn about self-deception: how do we deceive ourselves into “this is okay,” and the loss of willpower—that feeling of “I don't care anymore; I'm never going to beat this”—a distortion of attention—where's our priorities—and then we find security within our addictions.
Chapter 2 goes on to provide the attraction and aversion to addictions, and some examples of addictions that are provided such as: attraction—anger, approval, attractiveness, being good, hair twisting, messiness, responsibility, scab picking, sex, soft drink, weight winning, psychotherapy, punctuality, images of God—these are all attraction addictions. Aversion addictions are: airplanes, being in the state of being abnormal, alone, discounted, overwhelmed. It can be people who are addicted who are competent, who are fat or thin, who are ignorant, neat or messy, rich or poor; can be public speaking, sex can also fall into aversion addictions, can be writing, responsibility as well; it's in both attraction and aversion commitment. So these are just some of the examples of addictions, and so some would ask, “Aren't there some good addictions?” And so our author here provides that answer—I'm not going to give it to you, not today.
The mind, in Chapter 3, is the psychological nature of addiction. There's a general tendency of our mental apparatus; it seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold on to the sources of pleasure at our disposal and in the difficulty with which we renounce them—Sigmund Freud. There's a level of self-deception here as well as denial and repression: “I don't have an issue; it's you that's overreacting; I'm not addicted,” tends to be some of the key phrases. And then in Chapter 3 we look at the rationalization: “I deserve to drink to celebrate; I have these pills to help me sleep; life is short; why not enjoy it,” or hiding, keeping away from others, harboring the dark secret because if anybody knew it would be unbearable. Delaying tactics: “I simply must figure out how I'm going to stop; I'll wait until Lent to do that.” “I can't handle it.” This may have feelings of failure, self-hatred, um, can lead to an aggressive response: “Yeah, I may be no good, but neither is anything else; who cares? What difference does it make? It's not worth it; I'm going to do whatever I want because nothing really matters anyway.” And then the person moves to “I can handle it.” They're fighting off any impulse to engage in the addictive behavior; they feel secure; they feel a sense of success; they have a joyful feeling of freedom, and they may be saying, “I'm monitoring; I'm moderating it; I only have one drink before supper.” There's changes beginning; may not be complete healing yet, but there's changes. The breakdown: “If I could just get a hundred thousand dollars, my life would be different.” It's unrealistic schemes; it's situations that are probably not going to happen. There can be suicide during this time. In the collusion uh space, the mind tricks of addiction share yet another quality: they're contagious, so they get other people involved; codependency tends to begin around this time. The psychological insights, our psychoanalytic insights, it's looking at the unconscious—what's going on underneath the surface—and how do we—how does that motivate us or keep us from that true purity of heart that we strive to be, to have as Christians, as believers in God.
Then we come to the myth of addictive personalities and looking at: can we blame the addiction on a pre-existing personality problem, or do we have to look at other causes? How does that affect—finally, behavioral insights. This is association—beginning in the thinking and later verified in direct experiments by psychologists and psychophysiologists. Associationism is recognized that new patterns of activity or learning occur because one sensational response becomes associated with another, or some would say kind of the rewiring of your brain. So how does this occur? First of all, we want to look at how attachment happens. Step one is learning, so right here we're learning and we are becoming associated with our addiction. And then as we learn, we feel the pleasure or relief, and as we feel that pleasure or relief, we follow along to habit formation. The pleasure/relief is a feeling from distress; it's escape, and it's reinforced because we condition it, and so the behavior is reinforced through this conditioning of the distress; the escape—we're numbing out, is what many will say. In habit formation, we're seeking the effects; we may increase our usage during this time, and again that increase connects with the reinforcement of the behavior because we're using more, which increases our tolerance, and when we increase our tolerance, it increases our inferencing of getting gratification: “If I do—if I just do a little bit more, I'll get back to this great feeling, this numbing out.” And so we have intermittent gratification that leads to the behavior. And then in Stage 3, the struggle, the withdrawal, the learning that this is no longer beneficial and that you want to make changes. So this is the process of attachment. Now, how does that affect the development of aversion? So development of aversion, we still have the Stage 1 learning with association, but this time we're learning to associate differently, and that leads to pain or distress—aversion conditioning. See, right here we're trying to get to the behavior and it's being blocked because we're changing the way that we're thinking. We begin to associate with other experiences, and then as our habit begins to form, we're avoiding the effects; we're avoiding that numbing out; we now want to connect. And so that's our—when we try to have that decreased frequency occurring because there's no longer a reinforcement because it's being blocked here, we become intolerant; we don't like it anymore. Take, um, somebody who was a smoker and now they can't stand to be around cigarette smoke; they're in that intolerance stage. We continue to repeat, repeat the behavior, and we have intermittent success of avoidance. So it's not perfection here, but it's progress. And then Stage 3 is the struggle where we start approaching our new normals in our new development.
The rest of the book: Chapter 4 is about the body—the neurological nature of addiction; Chapter 5 is about the spirit—the theological nature of addiction; Chapter 6 we go into grace; Chapter 7 we help clients develop empowerment through grace and will; and then Chapter 8 is the homecoming—discernment of the consecrated life.