Fear, anxiety, and addiction work together in a hooker and pimp relationship. In order to quell the fear of death or abandonment, an addiction was created to cope. Not the truth necessarily but our primitive brains think it is. The addiction is then an alleviation of the fear of something that isn’t true. Often the substance or act releases the calming hormones in our brains that we are also addicted to releasing. So addiction relies on anxiety to amp up the fear trigger and give it a reason to feed. Fear’s lie is that if you don’t quell it, you’ll die. A shortcut and circle has been made. Anxiety equals feed or die and repeat.
Fear’s lie is that if you don’t quell it, you’ll die.
Breaking the cycle however, may actually be the only way to in fact survive. Quelling the anxiety medicinally with an anti-depressant helps immensely to clear the brain from rapid fire lies but the battle to retrain these repetitive malicious thoughts is the true war winner. Augusten Burroughs, in his book Dry, referred to the addiction as a sort of hungry beast that will always seek to quell itself and recreate reasons to be in peril. Always. Until the fears that cause it stop. The image he created struck me as the addiction is a dark beast with a controlling mind of its own. It makes nice normal people do crazy things because they are convinced they will die otherwise. Refuting the lies is the only hope. And that is where I discovered the beauty of Cognitive Therapy. Conscious and mindfulness used to their greatest potential.
Practice Cognitive Therapy on yourself. Refute one lie, one cognitive distortion, at a time. Be wise.
Will you always be a loser?
Will you never get what you need?
Does everyone you meet think you are a bad person?
Look hard at those thoughts. It’s possible that occasionally any of those thoughts may be true but they’re not always true. Tell yourself the truth that you find. Believe that feelings are not always facts. What do we achieve by swamping ourselves with tsunamis of self-hate and judgement? When the truth may be a trickling brook that you may be able to easily step over and continue your life journey. Why is cruelty and condemnation our first thought, our default? The quickest route to wrapping up our worth on earth and delivering ourselves to the garbage heap every day by noon.
What do we achieve by swamping ourselves
with tsunamis of self-hate and judgement?
Fear, anxiety, and the addictions they create keep you from living, from hoping, and from moving. You are standing on the shoulder of the road of life while people are passing you who owned their choices and chose life over death or misery. You wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone so why are we living this fear loop for years? Because we don’t recognize our choice to choose hope.
Your life is what you choose to do with it. And know that when you choose misery and hopelessness, that is still a choice. When I realized that’s what I’d been choosing for myself, that I’d served a life’s sentence and incarcerated myself for having a soul unworthy of love, I grieved. Hard. And then I went about figuring out the choices I could make that would be the opposite. Like happiness and adventure and family. And tons of Hope. I gave myself permission to hope. And I’m still high on it. I believe in it with so much of my heart that I hope it spills out onto other people. And that is one of the few best reasons why I write and try to do any and all of what I do. For you to find one small spark of hope that can light the flame under the worthy fire of your hopeful future.
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And, as always, Thanks to you for your visit.
2 Comments
Yes, yes, yes.
Thank you so much for reading Jenn!