Coping

I know a lot of people with drug and alcohol issues.  One of them was picked up by the police last night after a high speed chase and will be heading back to prison, again, for emptying his girlfriend's bank account and taking and wrecking his parent's car.  I'm sad for him for the same reason I would grieve for the death of a loved one.  He is going where he is out of reach to everyone who loves him and he will miss the events that occur in our lives while he is gone.  I also am sad about the life that he hasn't gotten to live.  No wife, no kids, no career, no education, no goals met.

It makes me wonder what gets people to that dark place in their lives.  Why do some people fall so far into the black hole of drugs and alcohol?  From the people that I've personally known that have gotten into this sort of trouble, I've tried to get in their heads to figure out how to help them.  Some of them told me stories of sexual or physical abuse as children.  Some told me painful stories of loss and self-blame and pain.  The person mentioned in the paragraph above told me a story about his best friend committing suicide when he was a teenager.  So what I see is that, much like people with weight issues, they are burying their emotions, guilt, and fear with something that will, only temporarily, erase or ease their pain.

What they don't seem to realize is that, in the process of getting a short reprieve from their emotional pains, they are destroying their lives even more and hurting the people that have stuck with them through it all.  Why don't they understand that facing the pain, guilt, and fear is actually easier, in the long run, than coming out of the fog and seeing the pain on their families faces or cleaning up the mess that they made while they were out of commission?  It's not fun to work through, but in the end, maybe they can find what we all seek.

Let's look at it from another direction and pretend for a moment that reincarnation is the way that things work.  (I'm not going to debate it or go into my own belief system here, this is just to explain a point.)  So each of us is on our own path and at the end of our life we have either achieved what was needed and move up to something better in the next life, have achieved little or still have much to learn and have to stay at this level for the next life, or have been failures at this life and need to go back a level to learn some more basic life skills.  For addicts, it's like the video game player that got lucky and caught the magic orb this time so they had a score jump, but were massacred on the next level because they weren't really ready to level up.  I think it's clear that the addicts of the world are failing at this life and will have to back up and learn about basic survival skills and how to cope with core instincts and deep emotions.  Some addicts do get it figured out and move on to have good lives with connections to other people, but I would say that that is rare.

I think that for the most part we all are seeking to be truly loved and happy.  People search for love and happiness in money, possessions, other people, and hard work.  They also look for it in food, drugs, alcohol, and many other addictions such as TV, exercise, and video games (WOW players do not get to debate if video games are addictive...).  What no one seems to grasp is that love is like a circle because to be truly loved we must first love ourselves, so even the most enlightened human tends to keep running after those that love them, or trying to find someone that will love them, and failing because they don't fully love themselves.  Happiness is similar because people look for things and other people to make them happy when all along happiness has to come from within.  It makes me wonder if those that seclude themselves, to attain a new consciousness or to gain enlightenment, don't have the right idea.  Perhaps we need to separate ourselves from the herd of humanity so that we can find love and happiness within.