The Nature of the Beast

In CMA one often hears “my disease wants me dead.” This may be true, but I think its more immediate goal is to make sure you are so preoccupied with the satisfaction of instinctual drives that you are cut off from any sense of spiritual contact with a God of your understanding. If killing you is required, the disease is more than willing, but keeping you high or numb is fine enough, as long as you’re thinking only of yourself.

I have found it very useful to conceive of the disease of addiction as having intelligence, even the capacity to think and strategize. I believe it occupies the same area in your brain your ego operates from, and has the capacity to parasitically engage all of your brainpower in manifesting its agenda of getting you loaded again.

In my experience, the disease doesn’t even always “object” to short periods of sobriety. (After all, it’s a great way to delude yourself you have things under control.) However, when your disease starts to sense that you really might do this sobriety thing, it starts to panic. Suddenly everything becomes a trigger; cravings mug you around every corner. When you get past that, it tries less obvious approaches, like finance and romance—“I’ll always be poor” and “I’ll never have a boyfriend” are favorite tapes my disease plays. As you stick to your guns, you can expect bouts with free-floating anxiety, boredom, and depression with no evident cause.

As your disease adjusts to the new reality of layers between you and picking up, it tries various back doors, to nudge you over to the chair next to the chair next to the hotseat. This most impatient of syndromes can actually be very patient. It can seem to lie dormant for years, but it’s lurking all the time, waiting for an opening.

It may seem irrational that to say that the disease is smarter than you, but it's not for nothing that we say “my best thinking got me here.” That’s why a power greater than oneself is an indispensable ally. Here’s something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t weigh or measure---it’s the only thing more irrational than the disease itself. That just might be why it’s the very thing that works.

M.O.