The True Purpose of Addiction

Notes During a Pandemic

Rereading Dolores LaChapelle’s Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep, I’m struck by things I had read before, but can also see some limitations of the project.  She had a deep understanding of Daoism through her long Tai Chi practice, for instance, but her writing about Daoism is hampered by the translations available at the time, also by her comparative isolation; she wasn’t part of any institution, and lived alone in the mountains.  But that also means that, unlike an academic specialist, she can say anything she wants.  She doesn’t have to confine herself to some narrow discipline.  And she doesn’t have to be respectful.

She has some fascinating asides in her chapter on Ethnology, for instance.  Konrad Lorenz is speaking of his friend Richard Hargreaves, a psychiatrist who had dealt with a variety of patients, and says “he had disciplined himself to ask whenever he was confronted by some unexplained mental trouble, two simultaneous questions: a) what is the primal survival value of the function here miscarrying[1] and b) is the malfunction due to an excess or a deficiency?”

These questions made me examine addictive behaviors that I struggled with for much of my life, compulsive overeating and compulsive sexuality.  I have long been fascinated by the subject of addiction (something I talked about endlessly with my friend Levi).  I think of addiction as a modern term for the Buddhist concept of samsara.  We keep trying to find satisfaction where it can’t be found.

First the subject of food: I began overeating compulsively at the age of seven when my younger brother was born.  At the age of six I was a skinny runt; by the time I was eight I was the fattest kid in the class.  I had started a behavior that I would struggle with for the rest of my life.

According to therapists, I was compensating for the attention and love I was missing from my mother by taking in food.  If I couldn’t have that, by God I would have this.  That was the survival function.  And of course it’s easy to say “the malfunction was due to an excess.”  An excess of food!

Actually, though, I think it was a deficiency.  I was deficient in whatever feeling I was seeking from my mother.  I was also failing to feel what I was feeling.  I avoided the pain of not getting what I wanted by numbing out with food.  If I could instead have felt that pain, I would at least have been in touch with the truth of the situation.

I don’t remember making that fateful decision, thinking to myself at age seven, I can’t get the attention and love I want from my mother, why don’t I just stuff myself with food?  It was a subconscious choice.  But I do remember the decision about my other obsession.  Late at night when I was five or six years old and vaguely afraid of the dark and the nighttime and the fears that those things called up in me, I would indulge in sexual fantasies, at first just fantasies of kissing, and would think of those things until I drifted off to sleep.

Once I got older and discovered more about sex, the fantasies grew more elaborate.  I became “obsessed with sex” and with acting it out, and that had an enormous effect on my life, which I have chronicled in various places.  I thought sex was the most wonderful thing in life, and felt I had a stronger sex drive than most people.  The more sex I could have, the happier I thought I would be.

The excess, obviously, was too much sex, and too much thinking about it.  But there was a deficiency in this case too.  The deficiency was in facing the present moment as it was, even when it was frightening or painful.  The true purpose of my addiction was to enable me to avoid the present moment.  “The primal survival value of the function here miscarrying,” was to give me something to think about all the time, so I wouldn’t have to think about all the things that scared me, which nevertheless broke through from time to time.

One common puzzle for all recovering addicts is to face the question: what do I do now with all my time, and energy?  I’ve spent years pursuing this obsession; now what?  What’s left is the gaping void of the present moment, the thing that the addict had been avoiding all along, the thing I didn’t want to look at when I was six years old and trying to get to sleep.

Sooner or later we have to face that void.  Or stay addicted and never see the truth.

[1] Not the most graceful phrase in the world, but what the hell.