Might as Well Face it.... You're Addicted to Love

Recently I attended two speaking engagements.  I had to speak on addiction in the first and on ADHD and Anxiety Disorders in the second.   As I researched these topics I came to one resounding theme, our hearts and bodies are crying, no screaming for more.  Every year more and more medications are prescribed for anxiety and depression.  Every day more and more people are faced with the fact that they are indeed addicted to something. 

When we speak of addiction we generally speak of a drug, or an action that produces a feeling of relief or reward.  So many approaches to addiction come in the form of avoiding a certain outlet.  You’re an alcoholic, don’t drink alcohol and attend a group or therapy.  You’re a shopaholic, don’t spend, freeze your credit card in a block of ice and call your support group.  The list goes on and on.  Now let me be clear, I am not advocating that we not deal with the particular issue that we find ourselves hopelessly and compellingly drawn toward.  Rather when we avoid one addiction we quickly find another.  The issue is not the outlet of choice.  That is the effect to the cause.

Recently I was in the airport, which seems to be a regular staple in my diet. While I was waiting for my flight I watched a child, who was obviously tired and completely over the airport experience, clinging to his mother.  She looked tired as well.  Her response to her child’s constant clinging wasn’t to hold him and allow him to rest peacefully.  Rather in her exhaustion she reached in to her bag and pulled out an Ipad. She handed it to the boy and immediately his gaze turned from the affection of his mother to the shiny touch screen.  He played nonstop for the next forty-five minutes.  He made no sound and was content with the electronic embrace of unlimited apps and Angry Birds.  I am not criticizing the mother.  When it’s late and you are sitting in those incredibly uncomfortable plastic chairs after being herded like cattle through one line after the other there will be exhaustion.  She after all was giving what she had to give in the moment.  She wanted rest as much as he did.  Actually, as I watched him playing I gazed around the corridor and I saw teens, adults, and even some of the more elderly adults sitting quietly texting, playing apps, surfing the web looking for something to fill the void of sitting in a sterile and transient environment.  We are wired at our core and from birth to seek stimulation.  It’s what we hunger for, it is what we are addicted too and this begs the question, why?

Eventually as my gaze returned to the little boy I thought about his original expression.  He wanted to be held, he wanted to feel safe and comfortable and he sought that from his Mother.  When we look for safety as children, and again this is a snapshot not a judgment of a tired mom, and we are given an engaging distraction what does this produce in us over the long term?

Over time our brain normalizes distractions and we crave stimulation once again.  Why do we crave?  Simply put, it is just who we are.  What do we crave?, I believe this is the grandmother of all questions.  In the moment we crave the thing that fills the immediate need, but under the layers of coping strategies, habits and yes addictions I believe we crave something more, something that can not be normalized.  If it cannot be normalized it must be greater than our need, infinitely greater.  

I have written in the past about my own childhood.  It was filled with anger, abuse and neglect.  I found my outlet in books.  My best friends when I was twelve were men like C.S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway.  Lewis covered the constant grappling with God’s greatness and our inability to understand it in the midst of pain and suffering.  Hemingway covered the endless searching and pain that comes from seeking in empty places.  Lewis would dissect love and loss and turn it in to something greater.  He took children and put them in the hands of good but unsafe lion to be saved from those that sought to destroy them.  What a paradox that is to unpack.

Hemingway took an old man in a tiny boat and pushed him to the edge of his existence in an epic battle with the catch of his life.

Both men in their lifetimes fought through huge and painful circumstances.  At one point after the death of his wife, Joy, he even said that, “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world”.  In the process of losing his wife he learned something greater than the philosophical and academically based idea of love, he learned of the experience of love and sadly loss.  He adopted his wife’s son Douglas and raised him as his own.  Years ago at a lecture I met with Douglas.  He was a cheerful man with a grand sense of humor.  He had become a pilot and loved adventure.  His childhood was a broken one.  His mother fled from the States with him, leaving behind an angry and abusive husband and finding England and Lewis.  Lewis was much older than Joy and had his share of adjustments to make from being a confirmed academic bachelor to a husband and Father.  Shortly after the marriage of Joy and Lewis, Douglas faced the loss of the one parent that stayed with him.  In the short time I spent with him I could see in Douglas a love and desire that cannot be learned it has to be experienced.

Hemingway who was known for his ability to avoid pain through the bottle and the typewriter took his own life, alone and depressed.  He was a regular haunt at a bar called Sloppy Joe’s in Key West.  I remember sitting under a picture of him having a pint just wondering what his days must have been like sitting in the same place.

I am in complete awe of both men as writers and adventurers in their own right but in the adventure of love I have found Hemingway at a loss. 

I remember reading Hemingway as a child and I felt like I was there in the moment with the characters.  Most of them were men that had suffered and were battle weary from rough lives full of loss and looking for that moment of redemption.  I related to that.  I was a child that had seen more than his share of abandonment and violence.  I had attended to overdoses and suicide attempts with some regularity by the time I was a man.

These pains, they build walls inside of us.  They drive us to look for safe stimulation.  Safe, in the sense that our hearts are not exposed.  We are masterful at composure in the right moments and brave with many risks but at the root we crave the very same thing that a little boy, unaware of an observer, sitting in an airport crave.  We want to be loved and accepted as we are.  We are worn and weathered and have so many complicated defenses that distract us from it, and turn those we love away, but it’s there.

I have often asked the question is it harder to know someone or be known by someone.  I believe it’s the latter.  I am terrified that if you knew the real me that you would run for the hills.  I’m skillfully avoidant, and carefully allusive.   These are the habits that you learn with a family that uses their hands for things other than embrace.  Deep down inside I believe that I am a lost cause and that if you knew the real me you would say the same.  At the low points in my life I’ve been told this very thing even to the point that I was not someone that one should cast their pearls before.   I lived for years with the notion that my train wreck was somehow different that yours or anyone else’s.  I thought that I was inherently flawed and I lived years swaying between trying so hard to make up for the lacking and just giving up and destroying any ground that had made.

The reality is that I am inherently flawed and that I shouldn’t be surprised when I fail.  My issue is that I thought that was the sum total of the man I was.  I was addicted to my own shame in ways that drove me to my own addictions.  I eventually became conditioned to the idea that I was and always be a lost cause.  I believed that I was a monster and I treated myself the way that a monster should be treated.  I disconnected, I disappeared, I caged myself so that I could do no harm to those who deserved more than a monster.  I had chosen the path of Hemingway and was headed for the same self destructive path that I had been raised to expect.

In the moments that came when I reached the bottom there were men, braver than Hemingway, more intact than Lewis that stood beside me and fought for me.  At first I remember being so suspicious.  I didn’t know what trust was much less how to offer it to anyone.  They were relentless, they would call and invite me for lunch, for dinner, for fishing trips.  They chased me down and would not let me be content with the monster that I saw in the mirror.

To this day when I am counseling I imagine them in the room and I wonder how they would handle things.  They have seen my tears, my terror,  my inner demons and looked at me as if to say is that it? Is that all that’s wrong with you?  We love you man!  These men have been the parents that stood with men when I begged like a weary child in an airport to be embraced.  Instead of distraction they handed me a new world a new life.  They mirrored the love that they knew, not necessarily from their own childhood memories but from the love they experienced from a God that pursued them just as relentlessly as they did me.  They taught me to love myself and to love Jesus.  They didn’t give me books but gave me the experience, the experience that Douglas had with Lewis and God still uses these men to this day as I am learning to pursue those that God brings to me, weary and broken carrying their own inner monsters and shame.

If addiction is a way of filling something that the action can never satisfy then it must be an endless void that we are trying to fill.  It will only come through and endless source and that endless source comes to us through those that He chooses to send to us when we are dying and broken on the side of road waiting for judgment.  It is at that moment when we have come to then end of ourselves and have no where to run, nothing to offer; it is in that moment that we are met by those that He sends and in the words of Lewis, we are, “Surprised by Joy”.