Soul inspired drug abuse and addictions

This one is going to be a bit of a personal account on my relationship with drugs and alcohol. I hope it clarifies the involvement of the soul in addictions, and how different people get addicted for different reasons and how their treatment should follow accordingly.

When I was 8 years old, I made promise to my father that I would never drink. We were having a conversation – he’s a non-drinker, who has had a sip of sparkly wine at the age of 40-something, the only drink he has ever had. He explained that he had a fear of alcohol, that he might like it too much and not be able to stop. I understood that, and without question I promised I wouldn’t touch the stuff. I knew at the age of 8 that I was an addict. To this day, I haven’t touched narcotics. I share the same fear of liking it too much.

Rum has always tempted me. I don’t see it as the same clean gold colour liquid as it is today, to me rum is dark, murky, with bits floating around in it. It’s cheap and nasty, and we drank it by the litre. It maybe sweet, but it burns like hell. I said, when I was old enough to drink, that the only thing I am seriously tempted by is rum, everything else is for pussies. (There is a logical flaw in there, I know, but that’s how I felt at the time.) I figured that should I start drinking, it would have to be rum, and I would buy the bottle (or get my hands on one, depending on my age) and learn to drink it in my own bedroom so I wouldn’t look ‘shocked’ by the burn in front of my friends. To me, everything is a competition, including getting drunk and high on drugs – which is why people like me are better off not touching it. Firstly, I would have to be able to drink more than my girlfriends. Should be easy enough. Then, the challenge of men would be the next goal. How many men can I drink under the table? Of my soulmates, only Joe would not allow me to beat him at this. The rest of the men would fold, with a happy loving grin on their faces, impressed by the drunkard chick.

To me, this is a competition. I have a memory of a past life, in the early seventies or late 60’s, couple of years before dying and reincarnating. I sit at a club somewhere, on a sofa high as a kite. Looking at the ceiling lights swirling, Lynyrd Skynyrd playing. This was not the day I OD’d and died, but I was happy to be alone, in my own thoughts knowing my friends are out there partying somewhere but their existence didn’t matter much. This was the last life I’ve indulged myself to death.

So what makes a person to whom everything is a competition STOP taking drugs? Another competition. Only the toughest of guys kick the habit the first go. We all know it’s tough, but if you still compete in who’s the biggest drug addict, kicking the habit is not going to tempt you, especially if you regard the nurses and doctors your opposition. Stopping has to be the challenge, but it cannot be laid out as one, because it’ll sound like manipulation. It has to be a challenge, and made out to be as an impossible one. This is not “a should” do, or “a must”. A competitor will go “fuck you, I’ll show you exactly how much of a fuck I give about your should’s!” It should be a “Most drug addicts will fail badly the first time around, I have never seen anyone have easy time at it… But you know, you fail, you come back, we’ll dust you off and get you back on your feet…” and a competitive guy, whose only ambition in life is to NOT appear weak, goes: “I bet your sweet ass that you will not even see me sweat.”

Everyone is different. Every drug user is different, their reasons to do it and start it are different. In my soulmate group we have the extrovert, who took drugs because his image so requires and so he’d fit in – because it will be fun. It would be a bit of a laugh, and the group comedian is always the most popular one. To an extrovert, popularity is important, so a drug will aid in that goal – it’s a tool, not a crutch. (In my group of soulmates we’re all more or less addicts trough the soul, my father included; Probably the only guy in the world who has never drunk but a glass of alcohol nor taken illicit drugs avoiding addictions at all cost and STILL ending up in rehab for head ache medication.) So an extrovert takes drugs in order to fit in and to look cool, so to get off them, he needs to look cool and be popular for the opposite reason. Their friends need to value sobriety more than drug abuse to keep them clean. If in a group of addicts, they should NEVER be made to be the first one singled out to go to rehab, like they did with Steven Tyler (of Aerosmith). They should have sent the introverted lead guitarist Joe Perry and challenged his idea that tough guys use drugs and change the view around as only the toughest kick the habit first go, and only wimps needs drugs in the first place. He wouldn’t have ever touched the stuff again, and he would have been feeling so cool about it, that Steven would have had no choice but to follow suit so he wouldn’t lose ground in Joe’s eyes. Right now, both are sober but not feeling too confident about that, especially Steven still harbouring the nostalgia and the ‘cool’ of drugs. For myself, I’ve re-framed this whole thing as “I bet I can be crazier sober than you’ll ever have the nerve to be when shit-faced.”

Then, we have the user that uses drugs for boredom. They need to be given something else to do BEFORE they get off drugs. Maybe reduce the amount but damned, if your only ambition in life is to get high, why would you bother with sobriety? The people who have a trauma they’re escaping need to be helped to solve that trauma before they get off the drug – the drug is what keeps them coping, and that can help them deal with the issue that led them to the drugs in the first place. Then we have the aggressive user, that is not robbing people to finance their drug abuse, but they are using drugs in order to be brave enough to rob people by gun point. That kind of shit takes a lot of ball, and if you cannot do that sober, you better get high before you do that – a variation of a social drug user, but in this case it’s not a question of a party but street credibility. To an aggressive user, you need to give a cause to fight for, because they are warriors, hopefully that cause will be against drug use and unfairness, often within their own society. Then we have the yuppie user, who uses drugs in order to cope with their cut-throat job. They need to be shown a disadvantage in taking drugs – financial disadvantage, or an advantage in not using them. (Toughie.) Some of these tactics are used, but across the board, not realising the different motivations behind drug use. Even if the addict would tell their counsellor that they use “for fun” the counsellor is likely to treat that as the wrong (cop out) answer and insist they have some other, more sinister reason for using. If you tell an aggressive or competitive user, that they use “because they feel bad inside, (poor baby)” that’s not going to help them kick the habit but potentially make it worse as they have to re-establish their masculinity and independence through more drug use.

A physical addiction is relatively easy to kick, but the addiction that is soul based never really goes away. It’s a combination of your personality as well as your past life experiences, because when we have this drug-related nostalgia in the back of our subconscious minds, everything that we want to experience gets linked to these substances; love, friendship and sex being the most important – and nobody passes on those experiences if they have a choice. In my group, this all goes back who knows how long. Drinking has been our kind of thing for as long as there’s been alcohol to drink and when ever there’s been a fashionable drug like Opium, we’ve certainly been there, done that.

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