Confronting The Pain Of Addiction
By Bart Sharp
The pain of addiction often comes from the pain of being able to resolve over whelming incidents in our lives.
In every addictive behavior there are repressed pains or negative emotions we are avoiding. We do not consciously choose a substance or behavior to avoid this pain but somewhere when the pattern began we chose to medicate in order to avoid our feelings. In general we do not do this as a active decision but it is something our unconscious self leads us to. We are drawn to an addiction and before we realize it has pulled us in. In order to break this we have to see what the unconscious, repressed parts are and begin the healing process.
One of the most common reasons people gravitate to an addiction is their inability to resolve repressed anger. For some their anger is something they actively express to control their environment or others through their aggressiveness while others do not even realize they are angry. This is the division of consciousness and that some people are actively expressing in a aggressive mode of consciousness while others are more in the victim mode. What they all have in common is the anger does not feel good and they seek some form of relief from it.
For so many people they will profess that anger is not their issue, that they never express anger. The reason why they do not feel anger is the particular emotion has been expressed through another behavior so much that the anger is not felt. The person may have behaviors such as worry, passively complaining, obsessive habits, overworking, depression, excessive repetitive behaviors such as television or exercise.
What all of these have in common is they keep the persons attention away from feeling themselves.
When the person is alone with their thoughts some form of anger will generally appear whether it be reliving a story that they are angry about, an angry fantasy or living in a distant satisfaction about themselves. All of these behaviors have one thing in common is it is an angry story that repeats itself in the person’s mind while it generates tensions in the persons body.
If we are ever to change or perspectives towards an addiction we first have to come to resolution with our anger, what we are resentful about from our past. Most likely we have lived and relived these stories many times.
Coming clean of something like an addiction creates a sense of freedom within us. But the addiction is just the reactive behavior to a pain much deeper. When were able to begin by looking at our anger we on on the road to finding a truer freedom. Where we begin in this process is is gone beyond our mental memories by exploring how they are held within our body, particularly in our gut. We hold so much of our anger within the stomach or lower intestines and when we are bothered by our stories in our head it is most likely the memories held in our abdomen are inflamed as well. This is the area to resolve more than what we hold in our mind.
On this road to discovering the greater self it is important to begin to learn our stories of how we are angry, to see who we are really resentful of and how we are living in reaction to that. On a deeper level it is important to explore how we hold these memories of anger and other negative emotions inside our body. One way of resolving these repressed emotions is through a body based, shamanistic type of work. In this process we actively engage in the memories of what we repressed. Together with the therapeutic work of knowing how we created our addictive behaviors and interacting with them on a body/energetic level we can fine a speedier resolution to our addictions.
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