Craving (22 page)

What do these categories actually represent? Let’s look at some examples. It turns out that you do need mental intimacy. You need to connect with other people around what you think and how you think. If you have ideas in life (about how to take care of yourself, how to be helpful, or what might make life a little more fun, for example), then you need to share those with others. If you keep your ideas to yourself (which does happen sometimes, especially when a person believes that their thoughts are worthless or that nobody would care to hear them), then your fundamental need for mental intimacy is not being met.

Similarly, you need to experience emotional adventure. If you just emotionally squeak by in life, never allowing yourself to take emotional risks and experience the full range of emotions, suppressing them or always trying to rigidly control how you feel, you will not meet your fundamental need for emotional adventure.

In just the same way, you can examine each of these basic needs. I can assure you that if you ignore any one of these areas (and most people ignore
most
of them), then you will run into serious problems that will seem to be entirely unrelated to that particular need category. This is because of the fundamental axiom that if you don’t meet your needs in a healthy way, you
will
meet them in an artificial way. It could be a late-night sugar binge, a gambling spree, another cigarette, or any other unhealthy craving. We’ve all heard of “emotional eating.” In my experience, this type of eating is rarely simply “emotional.” Rather, it’s a result of not meeting several of your fundamental needs.

If you ask yourself how well you are currently meeting each of these twenty needs (rate each one on a scale of 1–5, with 5 being extremely well and 1 being not at all), you’ll get a sense of what areas to focus on first. Take the areas where you scored less than 3 and ask yourself what you are doing to meet those basic needs and what you could do in order to meet them. I’ve worked with people who have identified specific actions they could take to address these unmet needs. For one man it was taking drawing classes, as he was always afraid of drawing (he had rated himself a 2 on physical creativity). A woman I worked with decided to try skydiving because of her low self-rating on physical adventure. For another young man it was working up the courage to finally ask someone out on a date (emotional intimacy), and for yet another it was signing up to volunteer with the Big Brother program. These are the actions that these individuals decided to take, and they won’t necessarily be right for your program. But by making a focused, concerted effort to work on their basic needs, they were able to take care of themselves at an extremely high level. Because they were taking care of their needs in a healthy way, their brains and bodies no longer needed to try to meet those needs in an artificial way (like binge eating, for example). Their shame dissolved, and their acting out on their cravings diminished or completely disappeared. Most of the recommendations I’ve made in this book are designed to help you meet many of these needs. For example, Twelve Step meeting attendance and Twelve Step program participation can help you meet a large number of these needs, although recovery is
not
one size fits all.

The amazing thing about these solutions to cravings is that they can seem entirely unrelated to the problem if you don’t grasp the underlying processes. Fortunately, you don’t actually need to understand these processes for the solutions to work; you just need to take the actions. But if you want to make sense of them, it helps to know the
why
behind them. When something is a need, it’s not optional. Your needs will be satisfied. If you don’t meet your needs in a way that is helpful to you, they will be met in a way that is not helpful to you. They will not, however, be ignored. Through my experience helping people with cravings, I’ve discovered the ridiculously simple and obvious truth that your needs really are necessary. If you do not achieve emotional intimacy in a healthy way, for example, your brain will demand that it be satisfied in an artificial way (which could be a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, another cigarette, or a trip to the slot machines). You might be able to put it off for a while, but in the end you won’t really have a choice. The need will be satisfied one way or another. Why not seek relief by identifying your needs and meeting them in a productive, satisfying, and healthy way?

…

10

Joy, Hope, and Recovery

“You were born with wings—Why prefer to crawl through life?”

— JALAL AD-DIN RUMI

By now you’ve learned that a combination of nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) are responsible for cravings, and changes in your brain fuel addictive behaviors. You’ve learned that your brain tricks you into believing things that aren’t true—things about yourself, about your cravings, and about what it takes for you to be satisfied. You’ve learned that there is no shortage of ways that your brain lies to you to undermine your success in releasing your cravings.

But you’ve also learned that there are specific actions you can take to change your brain in ways that can bring relief from cravings and get you started on a path to experience a sense of joy and hope that is nothing short of extraordinary. Yes, many of these specific actions may seem unnecessary or even counterintuitive, but it’s this very sense that the actions won’t work, aren’t necessary, or don’t make sense that has been blocking you from making the changes you need to achieve freedom from self-destructive cravings.

We’ve all met dry drunks or people who are “white knuckling” (using the sheer force of will to resist cravings). These folks are often bitter and resentful, or contemptuous and angry. In many such cases, the friends and loved ones of these people often liked them better when they were not resisting their cravings! That’s not recovery and freedom. For this process to be worth it, eliminating or resisting cravings is not enough. The recovery process cannot simply be about stopping something. Most people who have achieved successful, long-term, contented release from cravings and addictive behaviors report that recovery is about 5 percent what you stop doing and 95 percent what you start doing.

As mentioned earlier in this book, some people achieve recovery through religion, others through a transformative experience, and still others through group aid such as Twelve Step programs or SMART recovery. Sadly, much energy has been wasted as members of these various organizations bicker with each other about which works best, and this leaves the newcomer perplexed about which camp to believe, as everywhere he goes one group’s members seem to be debunking another’s. A recent examination by my colleague Mark Willenbring, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on alcoholism, concluded that over 20 million Americans are in recovery from addiction to alcohol and drugs. I can tell you this much: they didn’t all do it the same way.

I have seen people who suffer from cravings for alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, compulsive eating, compulsive exercise, and even self-destructive sex patterns achieve joyful, contented recoveries in many different ways. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So members of the various self-help and mutual-aid organizations often seem to privately believe that theirs is the only reasonable approach, even if they publicly proclaim that they don’t own the only solution.

The key to a joyful, hope-filled, and contented life free of cravings and addiction is to look past the noise and find the approach that works for you. That does
not
necessarily mean the path that feels right. Often the method that feels most comfortable is not challenging you enough on the areas that really need to change. So I always advise my patients to find what works, not necessarily what’s comfortable, especially at first, when the discomfort of change is actually most needed. And that means finding people who have been successful, whom you can trust, and then sticking close to them. It also means laying the groundwork to render yourself truly open to feedback from others whom you trust.

A common saying in AA is that if you wrote down everything you expected from recovery when newly sober, sealed it in an envelope, and then opened it years later, you would find that you had sold yourself short. Over and over again I hear from people who have achieved long-term freedom from their addictive behavior that the life they’ve obtained as a result of allowing themselves to be transformed and helping others is so much better than they ever could have imagined. I’ve heard this so many times, in fact, that it seems to be the rule, and anything less is the exception.

In most cases, what seems to limit us is ourselves—our attitudes about how things
should
be, a sense that perhaps we don’t deserve better, or a profound underestimation of what we are capable of achieving. This feels true, and yet the real truth is that this underestimation is not and cannot be authentic, because our true selves are far more than we could ever imagine.

Earlier we explored how addictive cravings are shame-based phenomena. Shame, the profound sense that “I am broken” or that “I am worthless,” is a devastating force. It eagerly consumes joy, peace, and contentment and renders a person worse than sick—it renders them unable to believe that things could be any other way. In other words, shame destroys hope.

As I’ve witnessed people’s lives be destroyed by shame and then rebuilt by recovery, one thing has been consistently clear: the process of recovering from shame is profoundly courageous. For some people, simply telling themselves that the shame is based on a lie is enough. Affirmations, for example, are one way that many have achieved some relief from the black hole of shame. But for most people who suffer from the shame-craving-shame cycle, self-talk, although helpful, will not be enough.

Shame destroys joy; shame destroys hope; shame destroys peace. Shame destroys connectedness and fosters isolation and loneliness. There is, however, one force that seems to consistently neutralize shame time and again.

What then, destroys shame? The answer is deceptively simple and perhaps counterintuitive. It’s love. Love is the force that allows shame sufferers to outgrow shame and transform. Love restores hope and creates the sense of peace and contentment that allows for long-term, happy recovery. What exactly does that look like?

Am I suggesting a return to 1960s free-love, commune-style living where organization and structure are to be vilified and hippie culture worshipped? Don’t tie-dye your business suits just yet.

Altruism

Most major movements that have helped people achieve relief from cravings emphasize helpfulness to others and a sense of altruism. Even groups that emphasize the role of self-directedness and self-will in eliminating compulsive and addictive behaviors are primarily driven by people who genuinely enjoy helping others. The sense that we are self-sufficient really isn’t true. The love of one’s fellow human being and the genuine desire to be of service is core to recovery, central to eliminating cravings, and critical to neutralizing shame. Although most attempts to define spirituality seem to reveal only
our own
limitations rather than telling us anything about what spirituality is, for many who have successfully recovered, another word for spirituality is really
connectedness.

I’ve met many people who struggle with addictive behaviors who have told me that they felt alone even when in a roomful of friends. The isolation that cravings and addiction create may sometimes outwardly appear to be a physical isolation, but at its core it’s a spiritual and emotional isolation. The old joke that “intimacy is really ‘into-me-see’” turns out to be true. Allowing yourself to be seen—eliminating dark, toxic secrets, like cleaning out a wound—is essential to the processes of intimacy, connectedness, and, ultimately, recovery. In recovery talk, recovering addicts describe themselves as “clean.” This sense of being clean derives, in part, from losing the toxicity of shameful secrets. This level of closeness to trusted friends, initially terrifying to those who suffer from addiction, becomes not only acceptable but highly desirable.

Recovery, however, usually takes people well beyond connection and toward compassion. For many, the joy of recovery includes a “burning desire” to share what they have gained from personal transformation with others who are still struggling. Earlier we saw how altruism and helpfulness promote reduction in cravings and addictive behaviors. Here, in recovery, we see how the capacity to be helpful is not only a cause of recovery, but a
gift
of recovery, as a certain type of peace and joy derives directly from the act of helping others. A genuine sympathy, and even empathy for others, and a deep, personal striving to reduce the suffering of others are natural consequences of recovery-oriented living.

Finding Your Authentic Self

As I think of compassion and sharing, I’m reminded of the story of John Woolman, an eighteenth-century Quaker from New Jersey who recognized, well ahead of his country, that something his peers were doing did not make moral sense to him: slavery. This awareness alone was not, however, enough for Woolman. His beliefs took him to a point where he would not write a bill of sale for a slave, nor would he use or purchase the products of slavery, which was no mean feat in mid-1700s America.