ADDICTION: SEARCHING FOR YOUR SOUL

You know that feeling you get right before you decide you’re breaking the rules? No matter what the consequence, you don’t care? No matter if someone gets hurt, you’re going to do it anyways, lie about it, and if someone gets in your way, they better watch out. There is no stopping you, and you’ll hide, cheat, and steal to get your entitled addiction. If someone finds out, there’s always a lie you can tell to distract the blame from yourself and to make your decision seem justifiable.

The force between you and your addiction is so strong that you’re willing to mutilate relationships, your body, and your life to get it. For me, that lying, cheating, scandalous force was against my extremist control and restriction from food and from gaining fat. As soon as I had a bite of something I judged as bad, or that was off my pre-determined and calculated food allotment (like a pastry), my mind would go into a tunnel. My decision to go off plan was usually because I thought I could handle it. That one bite wouldn’t hurt my body (which is true). But what I wasn’t aware of was the emotional reaction that one bite would start within my over controlled and rigid frame of mind.

That one bite became a sin. It was something that created guilt, shame, and something to hide.

That one split second, gave me a taste of freedom--a taste of fun and excitement that my restriction would never allow. That one bite would cascade into an emotional pendulum swing, from extreme control and protection on one side, to entitled liberty and freedom on the other. But I’d never let go of my control, until I meditated a way to get rid of the guilt, and remove my shame that arose as soon as I broke my crazy rules. I was the abuser, I enslaved myself from food, yet I was the one who justified breaking the rules for emotional freedom. However again, I justified mutilating my body through exercise and purging to make up for the shame and guilt that occurred as a direct reaction to my insane perfectionism and self criticism.  Why? It all starts with extremist ideology that defines emotional value.  This is what it’s like to be insane: control, compensate, control, and compensate again. CRAZY.

 At any point during this game with food and my body, if anyone got in my way, I’d lie or hide. Waking at 3:00am to exercise, puking in the shower so no one would know (even if they were in the bathroom with me). No one could get in my way.  Once I decided to break my rigidity, I’d time just perfectly what to eat, where it was, how I’d get it, and if I needed to hide, where I’d go and what lie I’d tell, just in case someone found out. In a single day I might puke 8 times and I’d exercise at least 90 minutes. My entire life revolved around counting calories, restricting food, eating on a strict schedule, studying food and recipes, researching exercise, obsessing over how many calories I burned, my weight, and my waist size. I’d measure my waist at least 5 times a day! Then the rest of my day was spent calculating how to get rid of shame, guilt, and anxiety when I’d cheat or break my rigidity. You can imagine the fear that occurred if I wasn’t able to puke or exercise. It felt like death. Literally, like emotional death and my body would physically react with all of the same fight or flight symptoms, as if I was getting murdered.  

Take this description of my past addiction and recognize that all addicts have the same view of the world, the same need to control and defend their addiction of choice. Wouldn’t you if you lived in that type of insanity? Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, dieting, exercise, binging, working, hording, cutting, controlling another person, or liberty to physically and psychologically abuse another person-- if you relate to what I described, you can understand why people do weird things to feel better emotionally, even if it hurts another human being. I’ve come to realize it’s also very predictable and most people with addiction follow the same severe pendulum cycle of thinking. The wonderful news: you are also capable of getting out of this insanity if you choose and if you’re willing to feel vulnerable and submissive to NOT compensate, even when it feels like an emotional atomic bomb- or death.

You have to be willing to let go of restrictive control and judgment, which causes the resulting excessive liberating compensations, that when ended reduces the feeling of guilt, shame, fear, and rejection. With the submission to all of that, is the end of your need for your addiction.  

For me, I had to let myself eat too much (relative to my crazy restrictions) and then refuse to exercise and purge even when I felt severe anxiety. I had to assume the worse and submit to the idea that if I wanted to end my psychological illness, I had to face what I thought would make my life miserable: fat gain. It was a matter of choosing to stop controlling, to stop compensating, and to accept the outcome, no matter what.  It felt like death, and that emotional death came with a tremendous amount of vulnerability, acceptance of rejection, admittance of the weakness of my soul, and exposure to life without hiding.  For you, the only way to climb out of the dark, dreary, cold, grave you dug yourself into is to let go of everything that got you there.

No more control, no more perfection, no more rules, no more judgment. Let the real you be vulnerable to rejection, but first you have to stop defining yourself by outside views, objects, attainments, people, and activities. Who are you with nothing? How then do you define your value?  When you identify and sense your value that requires nothing to achieve, who can take that away or who can make it better? NO ONE.  

What then creates rejection and vulnerability?

Your indefinable awesomeness is innate to your soul and already exists, has always existed, and will continue to exist no matter what. Once you connect with the essence of your soul, it becomes obvious that others who judge you obviously haven’t yet found their own soul – the soul they lost growing up with criticism and judgment. They still think they are only as valuable as you can see, they can tell you, or from a limit that has to be communicated.  They still believe value has to be earned, controlled, followed, and that perfection based on rules is what matters most. They are addicts.

Any person who’s retrieved their soul from a psychologically controlling grave will tell you: love comes from that essence of the soul, and until you reconnect with that, you haven’t started living yet.  The moment you were taught you only have value if you do this, this, and this…was the moment you starting dying.  That was the moment you lost the awesomeness of your soul, and the moment you started focusing on seeking life outside of that soul. It’s time to go back to that child, back to that soul, and start living again.

Love who you are without control and if you don’t know what that is, list all of the rules you follow by and get rid of them. All of your definitions, let go of. Imagine who you’d be without them. Can you even imagine your value if it didn’t have to be designated by some type of conformity? If that is what you want, you’re addiction is about to end. Freedom is outside of the emotional jail and it’s yours when you’re ready to walk out. LET GO…