Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Addiction and mental health are intertwined phenomena. In some ways you could say they grow together, like plants that tend to be found together in the wild.

Addiction and mental health problems grow together because they come from the same root conditions. Wherever there is a lack of wholeness and safety inside the self, you are likely to see either or both crop up.

Mental health and addiction are fostered in that profound suffering – the state of inner fracture – and both can be understood as attempts by the human psyche to find a way to cope with that state. The psyche tries to keep itself together, by coming up with ways to rebalance itself. Mental health problems and addiction can both be understood in that sense, as adaptations to a core imbalance.

Addiction is what happens when dependence on an externally-sourced substance develops. That externally-sourced substance is addictive because it helps modulate (temporarily) the experience of having a broken self. Addiction can develop also to behaviors which induce a state change inside us, but the purpose is the same – to help make living with a broken self more tolerable.

Whether to substances or behaviors, addiction is characterized by a gradual loss of freedom while life becomes more and more devoted to maintaining the chemically altered state of being, as well as avoiding the state of withdrawal.

What’s tragic about addiction is the extent to which a person’s life energy can be consumed into the needs of the addiction, and the way that feeding the addiction eclipses all other life activities and purposes. Relationships, career ambitions, experiences of human aliveness – all can become less important than the requirements of the addict within. The spirit of addiction consumes a person from the inside out, much like a parasite, eating its way through its host, eventually killing it unless treated.

Mental health roughly refers to the state of mind and state of psyche which we would call whole, intact, or even just functional enough to get by. When we have good-enough mental health, we are considered sane. When there is a severe imbalance, a distortion favoring a problematic, counterproductive way of coping, it can come to be considered a mental illness.

Mental illnesses can be considered as maladaptive coping mechanisms, or ways of adjusting to life that create serious problems for us.

What is helpful to understand about the two is that they interact with each other – people with addiction almost always can be said to have had an underlying mental health condition which sets them up to need extra help finding peace and safety internally. Likewise, if you didn’t have any before, addiction gives you mental health problems. During withdrawal we suffer terribly, but also long afterwards, when the ravages visited upon a human soul through addiction can take on the characteristics of mental illness – depression, anxiety, obsessions, even psychosis.

The best approach for healing mental illness and addiction is to treat both at once, while understanding that more important than the names and classifications, which particular diagnostic code you may be given, is to understand that suffering can be healed.

Whether that suffering looks most like addiction, mental health imbalance, or most likely, a combination, the cure is the same for both. The cure, in essence, is to develop a path back to wholeness that is just right for you.

Via this personalized path back to wholeness, you come to experience a kind, loving presence at the center of your experience. This kind loving presence inside can bear witness and teach you to tolerate and withstand the many shifting states of being which come to arise in you in the course of your life.

12 step programs help you anchor that presence in by calling upon a “higher power” who comes to help you with your daily life, all your activities, to help you tolerate your feelings, make decisions, know what to say and do. Mental health programs and therapists help you to activate the aspect of your own self who is like that higher power, the wise one. Both usually work best when there is an element of community as well, so that people outside of your own psyche can help you recall your value, your tools, and your belonging to the family of life.

Ultimately it does not matter what you call it or how you think of it, as long as you develop a personal relationship of trust and relying upon this centered, loving best wisdom to help you get through life with a sense of coherence, purpose, and safety.

The addict within lies to us about many things, but most of all it lies to us about what we are doing to other people. That is why when we get sober we may find ourselves surrounded by people who are not quite ready to forgive us.

Some of us are lucky enough to have a wise friend or family member who can give us the understanding and support we need. More often we will find our close loved ones blaming us for being addicts, cutting us out of their lives, or withdrawing sympathy.

If we want to recover, we will have to understand that while we should not victimize ourselves further by blaming ourselves for having an addiction, we have to accept that this is what addiction creates. It devastates bonds of love and relationship.

It is also wise to be aware that people who love us are entangled with our illness in a way that can result in some very dysfunctional behavior. When there is an addiction present in a family or other kind of love relationship, the loved ones are sick too, with a co-occurring condition called codependency.

Codependency is what happens when a family or partnership becomes fused and mixed up psychologically so that no one is sure whose feelings are whose. Controlling, scapegoating, denial, and enabling are typical dysfunctional behaviors where codependency is present.

Addicts tend to exist in families and relationships that are enmeshed psychologically. When enmeshed, people are not fully free to be healthy and whole, nor do they get to experience a balance of individuality with belonging, but rather share a mashed-up group psyche.

Such a condition of fusion tends to co-exist with the presence of unhealed traumas and their corresponding trauma-bonds. Trauma bonds are fused, unhealthy interpersonal attachments formed during overwhelming experiences.

Just like people with addiction, people with codependency can come back to wholeness, but it takes time and work for them too. The upshot of recovery for loved ones is that everyone must learn to care for themselves, which takes self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and a willingness to experience feelings and vulnerability in the light of conscious awareness.

Each person will have to learn to take responsibility for their own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. All must end the cycle of perceiving one’s inner experience to be caused by, therefore only be cured by, what other people do. (The victimized state has to be healed). This means trauma work, which helps develop an understanding that the fused state was an adaptation to unhealed trauma.

Family and/or couples therapy can be extremely helpful and supportive for a family who is sincere about helping the addict to recover. That means the family is ready to look at the ways they have benefited, not only suffered, from having one member be addicted. This means honestly investigating if they have in any way supported or cooperated to keep their family member sick. Education about what does and does not heal a person from addiction is helpful too.

Funnily enough, the addict who gets into recovery often finds herself in an unexpected position. As the person who has committed to healing, she is now a family leader, someone who will gently pull the family forward to evolve out of the state of pain they have been in this whole time.

Through developing more self-awareness (a requirement for sobriety), she becomes someone who can help the family recover from its deep state of trauma-caused enmeshment, and the corresponding avoidance of feelings and truth.

However, it’s also important to grasp the paradox that even though this is her role now, the addicted person can’t actually do recovery for anyone but herself. Rather, to understand that by devoting herself to healing, she is palpably helping the whole family to do the same someday.

In other words, once you free yourself to a good-enough degree, you may be able to assist others. Not by pulling them out, but rather by coaching them through the process of self-disentanglement.

Once disentangled, the individual members of a family can now love each other in a new and healthy way, which will support sobriety and happiness all around.

Most of all, I want you to hear that families and loved ones that want to can heal, with work, patience, and surrender. It is not rocket science, but it does take time and courage, and the reward is limitless. I send you and your loved ones every encouragement to find out for yourselves, how different life can be with loving relationships at its core.

If you’re thinking about getting sober, yes, do it! You’re worth it and life is a million times better sober, it just is. Addiction is a false friend and you’ll be happily surprised how much better your life is when you end this relationship.

There is a huge community of very loving, funny, interesting, kind people who live beautiful lives in recovery without needing to use any kind of substance. You will be warmly welcome among these people, if you can get yourself here.

These people, the recovering, will understand you and accept you in ways that you have not felt in the isolation of addiction nor among those who are not addicts.

If you’re ready, here’s an overview of the basic path to sobriety.

1. Sober Up Safely

Getting sober is relatively straightforward, as you probably already know: stop ingesting the substance that is chemically altering your body, and you will eventually return to a state of sobriety.

You probably already know what it’s like to detox, as most of us experimented with quitting a few times before we were finally demoralized enough to get help.

The process is essentially this: remove the substance completely, set yourself up somewhere where you will not have access, and allow your body to go through the complete process of adjusting to the lack of this substance.

Please note that many should consider a medical detox because depending on what you are withdrawing from, the withdrawal process itself can kill you. Medical detox is a place where you check in to go through the withdrawal process. You may be given medications to ease or counteract the immediate pain and danger of the withdrawal process.

Whatever approach you take, it’s important to understand that you will be sick during this time. You can’t expect yourself to function normally, and you will be at high risk of relapse if you ask anything of yourself. Protect your detox by making sure you are not interacting with friends or trying to live some kind of a normal life during this time.

2. Enter Treatment and/or Join 12 Step

Once you have the substance out of you, you are in a very vulnerable stage in which the risk of returning to your substance is very high.

For that reason, it is very supportive if it is available to you to enter a good residential treatment program, in which you are removed from your normal environment completely for a short term respite during which you have a chance to undergo a lot of work on your inner being in a neutral, safe environment.

Residential treatment will typically involve aspects of education about recovery & help you plan for what you will need to do upon returning to your past life. You will be expected to participate in individual therapy and groups, whether you’re feeling great that day or not, but you will not be judged and your experiences will be understood through the lens of addiction recovery.

You will be allowed and encouraged to let it all hang out, though there will be rules you are required to follow and you will need to surrender to the structure there. You will not have a lot of choice, especially about the schedule–there will be a lot of planned hours for your own good, and it is best to just go with it.

Typically the first days in treatment are the roughest, and by the time you’re ready to leave, you feel excited about the changes you are now making in your life to live a sober, happy life.

If you are not able to go into residential treatment, don’t worry, you can still recover, through 12 Step (which is completely free) and/or intensive outpatient treatment (IOP), where you stay in your home environment and attend treatment intensively.

If residential treatment is like boarding school, outpatient is like regular day school. This has advantages and disadvantages, but it will work as long you are able to put serious, sincere effort and intentions into recovering. A sincere wish to recover is good enough, you don’t have to know how.

Whether you join 12 Step or treatment, or best of all, both (it has been proven most effective to follow treatment up with joining a 12 step community, so you can have the support of some wise, recovering friends long term), know that by undergoing this stage of deep, hard work changing habits now, you are saving your own life and setting yourself on a path that will lead you to joy, purpose, and meaning. You are worth it, my friend!

Are you chemically dependent on a substance or behavior?

If you are chemically dependent on drugs or alcohol, it means that when the substance or behavior isn’t available to you, you go into a state of pretty strong discomfort. You might have physical symptoms (tremors, headaches, cravings, etc) as well as unpleasant emotional states (grumpiness, depression, aggravation, panic).

Two other hallmarks of addiction are obsession and compulsion. If you are obsessed, your thinking centers mostly around your drug: getting it, recovering from it, craving for more, the how and the when of it.

If you are compulsive, that means your behavior happens almost on its own, without your full consent or control. Even when you have good reasons not to, you find it hard to override your urges to use.

If you think you may have an addiction, and you would like to break it, congratulations, you’re in good company. There are many, many benefits to living free from the enslavement to substance or behavior, and there are many wonderful, interesting, and smart people who have done the same. These people will be your friends and community once you do the work to get yourself there.

Here is how to break an addiction once and for all.

1. Give up mood-altering substances, forever.

Addiction creates a change in the body, brain chemistry, and the spirit, and it is very, very unlikely that you will be able to recover the ability to use your substance casually.

Most people with an addicted profile also find that they cannot engage in another substance as a substitute. For example, if cocaine is your main drug, you can’t switch to only beer or marijuana, and make it very long. This is because the core mechanism of dampening your experience chemically rather than through healing it from within will sooner or later lead you down the same path.

This is more true the longer you have been doing it, and the more severely you have become chemically dependent, but either way it is almost always best to accept that there is no going back to casual use.

This might be hard to fathom just now, but rest assured there are millions of people around the world who are completely clean and sober, all the time, every day, living normal lives, attending weddings, parties and concerts, having sex, experiencing the full rainbow spectrum of human experience, all completely sober.

2. Change yourself from the inside

Understand that you must replace the drug with something else –a natural, organic way of transmuting your suffering into a life you can tolerate. That means you need to heal your thoughts, your emotions, your spirit, and your body, so that you are an intact, fit human being who is up for the task of life.

This can be done, but it takes work and it takes time. The good news is, it is accomplished in a very small, piece by piece way, breath by breath, day by day. You don’t need to know how you will get through tomorrow, but only get through right now without reverting to using your substance.

Typically, a full on, head to toe, thorough personality renovation is required to be able to stay sober longer term. That’s because the reason we turned to addiction in the first place is because of what we’re like on the inside – what our thoughts are like, what feelings those thoughts create in us, how we experience our lives.

We would not become addicts in the first place if we were having a good old time being us. No, usually it’s no fun to be us, sober. That can be changed, but it is a slow process, like restoring topsoil. It is not done overnight.

There are 2 main paths to this self-restoration: treatment and 12 Step. 12 Step has the advantage of being free of cost and mostly likely available in your local area without you having to go too far.

All in all the best approach would be treatment in combination with a 12 step program like AA or NA, for ensuring the long term follow through and daily habit changes which are typically required to turn into someone who doesn’t find life unbearable without substances.

All in all, it’s good to know this: People all over the world recover from addiction and live sober every single day. They live lives of joy, deep meaning, fulfillment and purpose. They have lives far beyond what they ever imagined for themselves. You can have this too!