For example, take the parents’s need for respect, where the child learns not to say anything negative to the parent or assert their person and talk back to them, in order for their parent’s need for respect to be fulfilled.   Or when the parent needs the child to grow up too fast, and become adult like long before they are developmentally ready to do so.  This, so the parent can have their need to be cared for fulfilled.  In these ways the child begins to act in ways that are not authentic to themself, but rather in ways they sense on some level are expected by the parent.  They realize being loved for who they are just isn’t going to happen.  That in fact, according to Janov, “it is hopeless”.  As a result, the child turns to repeating back their words to the parent and acting in ways that are not authentic to themself, and therefore not aligned with the reality of their own needs and desires.  In time, not being aligned with their own needs and desires becomes the child’s normal way of being.

If love existed in the life of the child, they would be able to be themself, as love is about letting someone be who they are.  It’s the hopelessness of never being loved for who they are that causes the psychological split in the child, between the authentic and inauthentic selves.   The child denies the realization that his own needs will never be filled by being who they are, no matter what they do.  Substitute needs develop as a result.  These substitute needs turn up as symptoms like nervousness, worries, fears, issues with self-confidence, self-sabotaging thinking patterns, obsessions and compulsions.  All outward signs of burried pain.  As the pain accumulates within, repression builds in its own quiet way.   When the child is thoroughly repressed, they lose touch with who they are.  Humans, being the adaptive creatures that we are, find ways to adapt to the pain inside, and go on.  But the pain is still there, and it doesn’t go away as we grow up.  Do you see where this is heading?  The repressed pain that results from not being loved in a way that meets our needs growing up stays with us as an imprint that gets stored in the cells of the body.   In time, depending on circumstance, the child, or youth, or adult  find their own way(s) of coping with the pain, which can include one or more of the addictive behaviours.  In too many cases, making the choice to resolve an immediate condition like pain in the short-term, can lead to the development of a full blown illness in the long-term.  Over time, unmet needs and the pain inside that follows, can mark the birth of addiction.

Please note this post is not about blaming our parents for not giving us what we needed growing up.   Parenting philosophies and practices of their day were no doubt in the way of doing so, not to mention how well our grand parents raised our parents.   This post is more about continuing to cultivate an understanding of our psychological travels through life.  This, so we may recover and heal, and also, so love  may blossom in our hearts for ourselves, as well as for those we care about today.

“If consciousness is like a lake, there are primary waves or fluctuations of consciousness on the surface of the lake. These are easily discernible. An example is that if you are invited to dinner by dear friends and, at the last minute, they ring to cancel, then you’re very disappointed, you’re unhappy, you feel let down, and you deal with that on the surface. You have to calm yourself down, get over your disappointment. This is a challenge, an external challenge as it were, that causes a ripple on the surface.”

“The secondary fluctuations or waves are different. Those are the ones that rise up from the bottom of the lake. The bottom of a lake is covered in sand and so, if in life you experience a sufficient number of disappointments, the ripple on the surface creates a wave that goes down to the bottom, and imperceptibly that ripple creates a little bank in the sand, so there is a little mound of disapointment. As a result you will find yourself frequently disappointed or sad at this mound at the bottom sends off secondary fluctuations or waves.”

“Let us look at another common example. If you constantly find yourself being irritable, annoyed by something – your wife, your children, your parents, or anything at all – a sufficient number of irritable reactions will create, imperceptibly, not in one time only, a little mound of irritability at the bottom of the lake of consciosness, and that will eventually make you what we call an irritable person, an angry person. If you have smoked since you were sixteen, every time you pick up a cigarette in the day you are also brainwashing yourself. “In this situation I pick up a cigarette” mound. That’s why cigarettes are more difficult than almost anything else to give up. Aside from their physical cravings, we create mental cravings because the habit is very repetitive. The habit of smoking puts itself into every situation. The triggers to that situation are so many that many smokers still sometimes want to smoke even years afer they have stopped because the mound is still there . . .”

“The practice of yoga is about reducing the size of the subliminal mounds and setting us free from these and other fluctuations or waves in our consciousness. Everybody aspires to be free. No one wants to be manipulated by unseen forces, but effectively, the banks of samskara* in the dark depths of the unconscious do just that. As stimuli from the conscious surface travel rapidly down through the levels of the lake, the encounter uncharted banks of sediment that cause secondary waves of thought. These in turn stimulate, in a way that is beyond our comprehension or control, behavior that is both reactive an inappropriate. Our reactions are preconditioned and therefore unfree. We cannot break out of the old pattern of behavior, however much we long to. In the end, we may accept the situation and just say, “It’s the way I am,” “Life always lets me down,” “Things just make me so angry,” or “I have an addictive personality.” But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way out.

In the next post, we’ll look at the nature of Yoga and how it can help us to effectively overcome our negative habits.

* subliminal mound; mental impression

Dr. Gabor Mate, a physician working with people struggling to live with and overcome alcohol and drug addiction on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area in the poorest postal code in Canada, writes in his very very good book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts:  Close Encounters with Addiction”, that ‘Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious.  They are emotional anesthetics.’  He goes on to say ’Not all addictions are rooted in trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience.  A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours.’

Through chronic addictive behaviour, over time the unhealed hurt can lead to things like arrested emotional development, arrested vocational development and its tethering to underachievement and  underearning, fragmented relationships, impaired health and well-being, spiritual disconnection from self and the world around them.  It can lead to acting out the unhealed hurt through violence toward self, other, or community property, which  can lead to jail time and loss of freedom.  It can lead to the loss of time, and with it the loss of opportunities to cultivate a life worth living.  Addiction devastates and destroys life in those who seek it, and in those who love the ones that do.  How many of us are not touched by the life of someone who is engaged in addictive behaviour?  Has such a behaviour taken hold in yours?

In our next post we’ll take a look at what can be done to heal the hurt that leads to the development of addiction.  In the meantime, take care and stay safe.  As always, we welcome your thoughts below.

In his fine work titled ‘The Betrayal Bond:  Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships’, Dr. Carnes details the nature of betrayal, betrayal bonds, how we come into them, how we cope with them, how they can devastate and destroy us, and how we can heal from them if we so choose.  There are several well developed tests the reader can take to penetrate to the core of understanding the patterns of the betrayal bonds in their own life.  This reflective work is not superficial by any means.  It guides the reader into the core of the traumatic experiences in their life, and brings to light how and why they repeat themselves.  Not for the faint of heart, but well worth the effort, this book is a sophisticated and welcome resource on the path to understanding and healing from the emotional impact of the bonds of betrayal.

Not only that, but during this feasting period I’ve been given precious insights from my deeper mind about the emotional terrain that I’ve been travelling. I’ve been able to move through this lingering emotional material, particularly in relation to the interpersonal voilence in the workplace and subsequent job change that was mentioned in an earlier post. To this end I’ve been practicing Yoga and reading a variety of books to help clear my mind and understand what I’ve been going through. One such book is titled ‘Safe People’ by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend. It talks about who unsafe people are and the 20 identifying traits of unsafe people. It asks the reader to reflect on whether or not they attract unsafe people, and why they may be choosing to be with the wrong people and how to remedy the problem. The book also talks about safe people, who they are and why we need them. ‘Safe People’ has been a provocative and thoughtful read. If you’re not put off by Christian doctrine, reading this book will help you to understand the nature of the relationships in your life. And it will help you not only to restructure your approach to relationships but to start enjoying healthy and balanced ones as well.

I believe the emotional terrain I’ve been travelling over the past several months has facilitated spiritual growth. This growth can be summed up in the words of one of my all-time favorite spiritual teachers, Dr. David Hawkins: “Anything that is less than integrous and loving you find increasingly painful as you progress spiritually.”

“Depth psychology has shown that there is a form of psychic determinism which controls all our thoughts, actions and words.  In fact, the revolution in modern psychological thought has infallibly led us to the conclusion that our conscious self is but a pygmy before the giant of our unconscious.  The same truth was announced by the saints and seers of India as an intuitive truth, if not as a scientific maxim.  The errors in man’s personality go on multiplying in the process of living.  Rectification of these efforts can only be brought about if one addresses onself to the task of understanding one’s own mental structure. ”  Dr. Vivekenanda goes on to say that the yogic system as articulated by Patanjali is a useful guide in this regard.

“The Patanjali system is in absolute concord with the principles of depth psychology.  Freud said that the unconscious is mud; but it is also to be realized that out of that mud blossoms a lotus flower.  . .  by relentless honesty with oneself . . . one can see oneself as clearly, or more so, as one sees oneself in a mirror . . .”

Yogic practices support this principle of self honesty and evolve the personality through their steady practice, bringing clarity to one’s perceptions of self, and by extension to one’s perceptions of others.   Depth psychology also supports the principle of self honesty in the development of the personality but through the creation of a continent therapeutic relationship.  It is through this relationship that one can turn one’s attention to the task of understanding one’s own mental structure and by extension rectifying one’s errant ways.

Whichever pathway one chooses, either depth psychotherapy or Yoga, alone or together, will surely have a transformative effect on the life of the participant.

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