My Own Addiction

Gerald May opens his book Addiction and Grace with the assertion that each of us is born with an innate desire for God, and I would have to agree with him. We do desire God; the only trouble is, we desire a great number of other things as well. Adam and Eve as our archetypal representatives showed us that, with the right application of bad peer pressure or just the wrong circumstance, we will choose other things (and ultimately, choose ourselves) over God. That desire for God is not crushed out, but rather buried underneath quilts of frivolous luxuries and simple ambitions, so that at best, it is muffled and at worst, it is forgotten. While it does, at times, find a way to peak through and, just for an instant, shine its full brightness into our lives and elicit a wrenching longing that C. S. Lewis called joy, most of the time this desire for God is stifled by things we have decided to want more. As we are often prone to do in relationships with people, so it is with our distractions, as we seek out one true love and throw ourselves fully into the pursuit of what we think will fill us up. Ironically, we are seeking to fill the emptiness left in the hole that we created when we said a “thank you but no thank you” to the one wonderful Thing that could have actually contented us. Amidst our armies of distractions, we often tend to find one that we hold particularly dear, one that just perfectly feeds our particular tendencies, and we happily commit to what we do not yet realize will addict us.
In Addiction and Grace, May deals with the problem of addictions and attachments, as well as the spiritual process of loosening one’s grip on that addiction. He does not, however, focus solely on traditional addictions like narcotics or alcohol, but rather allows for a full gamut, wide enough that most honestly introspective people could find a spot for themselves upon it. By making room on the spectrum of addiction for more subtle ones, such as stress or work addiction, May is able to make his assertion that each of us, in some way, suffers from addiction (3). This is particularly appropriate for me, because the true love I found, the one with whom I became infatuated and the one whom I trusted to satisfy me, was and is my own achievement. I can say that I am addicted to achievement and success. Not stress per se, because if my success can come easily down the path of least resistance with time to spare, so much the better. But however it comes, I see in myself a compulsive need, at all times, to be achieving a goal so that I have something to show for myself. My love of success is anchored in the hope of what I want it to provide for me. I am hoping that my success will give me value – the more I have to show for my day, the more I was able to accomplish, the more useful I was, the more I am worth.
The deep irony is that this provision of love and assignment of value that I seek for myself is exactly what God wants to give me for free, and inconceivably, I wouldn’t even have to do anything for it. But I daily choose to ignore that gift of value and instead to go out and fight for it myself. It might be that, if I were to allow someone else’s work, like God’s, to give me worth, that would be too dangerous a thing because, what if He couldn’t or wouldn’t or chose not to deliver? How devastated would I be then? No, I would much rather anchor something as fragile and deeply important as my own value to that which I can control. May puts it aptly when he asserts that these addictions are idols, displacing the worship that should be focused on God (4). Instead of trusting Him to provide this love and value that I need, I go after it myself, because my own work feels more trustworthy than His does. I can force myself to work things out, but I cannot ever force Him. So I would rather love that which I know, if worst comes to worst, I can control. If I am working and achieving and providing myself with value, then there is no need to trust anyone else. Much safer that way, it would seem.
Like Eve who so aptly represented me, I allow Satan to convince me that it would be much wiser to just take for myself than to let God provide. And with this dynamic in place, I work everyday to prove my own worth, and have become addicted to my own achievement. May asserts that an addict is making an attempt to control her own environment. This is most certainly descriptive of me. Aside from a twelve-step program during which members are required to simply sit and accomplish nothing, what I feel will help me to be honest about my own unhealthy and addicted priorities and will help me to begin to loosen that grip on control is the practice of contemplative spirituality.
I feel that this behavior is an addiction in my life because it has begun to interfere with my choices and healthy functioning. There have been many times in my life – this semester being no exception – when I have been stretched to capacity. I have maximized every second. I have grossly overscheduled myself and can only survive by using a weekly planner that is so meticulously detailed that I have even had to schedule in my own free time, or else I would not take any. Monday, 4:00-4:45: watch TV. Thursday, 3:00-3:30: read for pleasure. And that is it – that is the free time for my day. Nothing can spontaneously come up, no plans can be made at the last minute. I have six classes. I have three jobs, each of which has been described by others as the only extra thing anyone could possibly do in a semester. No minute is wasted.
The situation I have created is incredibly unhealthy. And yet, when Dr. Greener approached me last week and asked if I would like to be a leader on a team of people to start a new outreach program in North Chicago, I agreed without a pause. One more thing. When I realized that my church service on Sunday morning does not start until 10:30, I started lightly inquiring at Panera, to see if I could get hired for a short Sunday morning early shift. This is no exaggeration, I had this conversation not five days ago. I compulsively add jobs, achievements, and accomplishments into a life that is already full to bursting. For someone who equates usefulness and accomplishments with value and lovability, any down time is an unlovable minute. Any job that I choose not to take (nevermind that I already have three others) feels like a squandered opportunity to better myself and, by extension, make myself more valuable. I compulsively agree to tasks and jobs and projects, but the incredibly unhealthy situation I have created for myself bears no weight the next time someone asks if I would be interested in an opportunity. May was right when he called these addictions a 'counterfeit of religious presence' (13) because it an experience close to religious. I worship this work and, by that logic, myself.
May provides five characteristics of addiction, and I find them very apt and appropriate. He lists: tolerance, withdrawal, self-deception, loss of willpower, and distortion of attention. Tolerance is the dynamic of constantly needing more of an addictive behavior to feel satisfied. Withdrawal manifests as a stress reaction, as the system needs the behavior, and a backlash, as the person experiences the opposite of the addiction’s comfort. In self-deception, our mind creatively blocks every effort to control or admit the addictive behavior. Loss of willpower is a stage during which the will of the addict is divided. Part of him may truly want to be free, but another part finds comfort in the addiction and wants to continue. For a true addiction, the part that remains committed is the stronger of the two. Finally, the addict reaches distortion of attention, in which he focuses so much attention on the addiction that he finds it difficult to love anything else. His new god has his full attention, all his worship, and the idolatry is complete (26-29).
Personally, I see myself in the stage of having lost willpower. I cannot see a full distortion of attention, because I do have many other things in my life that I love and people with whom I connect. I do not only desire my accomplishments and they do not consume my thoughts to the exclusion of other loves, but I feel that I have displayed a loss of willpower. Several times this semester, I have felt the depth of my over-commitment – like butter scraped over too much bread. I have so much to do that I can barely give my all to even those things. And yet, as I mentioned before, opportunities have been presented to me and I have quickly, without any prayer or any thought, accepted them. I have added one more thing when I know well that I do not even have room for my current commitments. Like a glutton, I disregard my present state of fullness and can only see the potential of this thing now in front of me, and I have to have it too. I have wished, later, that I hadn’t agreed to anything more. I wish that I had been strong enough and had had the presence of mind to say, “Thank you, but no. I wisely know my own limits.” But weariness and wisdom are no match for the much stronger bullies of insecurity and desperation for value, and are promptly silenced. Except for the rare victory, usually occasioned by the intervention of someone else, weariness and wisdom are on a pretty steady losing streak: the Chicago Cubs of weaker wills. My true desire is for some rest, for some contented security, and mostly for the Lord’s assurance of my value, but I am compelled to give my energy to something else (14). I want to be made secure and valuable by His love, but I substitute Him for myself, so addiction exists for me. If I think an opportunity could benefit me and, in my eyes, make me better, I will take it. No matter that I haven’t slept since summer.
Not only is my addiction not condemned by the Church, but it is also reinforced. When I bring my addicted need for a goal to church, it is met with praise of hard work and the ever-lovely title of “servant.” Far from seen as problematic, my addiction is in fact upheld as virtuous. The fact that I want to undertake any necessary task makes me a willing servant in religious eyes. It makes me a giver of myself and shows willingness to put the things of God first, nevermind the ironic fact that I am doing these things to try and exclude that very God from my frantic, desperate clawing for self-worth.
My addiction is similarly reinforced by my culture. While I do not believe that every American suffers from this same addicted love of work, I do believe that this has been influenced and bred in some respects by American culture. In my opinion, we are a society that values hard work, personal achievement, and the ability to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps and go it alone on the pursuit of the goal, true to our roots of cowboys and rugged-individualists. We have a colloquialism for what we call “The American Dream” – so dear do we hold it that we have endowed it with a proper name – and we often hold this dream of working as hard as you can, to have as much to show for yourself as you can, up as the highest good. I thought for a while that this was simply the human experience. It is not. The Italian people have a term, il bel far niente, that simply means the beauty of doing nothing. While they are hard workers, the goal of their work is il bel far niente – finally creating a space for yourself to do a lovely bunch of absolutely nothing. It is something, for them, to be envied and valued. I know this to be true, and yet this idea, for me, is so inconceivable that I don’t really believe that anyone actually desires that, much less is fulfilled by it. Preposterous. How useless I would feel! I feel that American culture, with all of its priorities on strivings and accomplishments, has certainly created a platform for the growth of this addiction, largely because an addiction of hard work is reinforced and even praised here. If you can work harder and longer and faster than anyone else, that is an enviable and praisable virtue, not to be worried about until you are nearly dead. I feel that my addiction is not only acceptable, but rather is exalted.
But if American culture was the cultivating incubator of my addiction to achievement, my family was certainly its birthplace. We are all products of my great grandfather, Joe, an independent farmer who saw his children as unpaid staff and had the same tolerance for goofy, fun-loving ease as an English Puritan. Idleness was unacceptable. If you murdered someone, his biggest concern would be the efficiency and cost-effectiveness with which you did it. Better to be productive than godly, if the choice ever came down to it. If you break an arm or a leg, find a job that one requires one leg and get to it while you heal up as quickly as possible. My family is full of can-do attitudes and unstoppable natures that have taught the next generation our family anthems of work. You need to contribute, and God forbid you should get uselessly underfoot and slow progress. Productivity is passed along like genes.
My time at school was no different. My parents had no time for my complaints that the only reason I was in trouble at elementary school was because my teacher was mean. My complaints met deaf ears, partially because they knew well that the real reason I was in trouble at school was because I bit everyone – including that teacher – but more importantly, because my task was to learn work hard, even at the simple tasks of children, and fulfill my purpose, and get my jobs done. Not on their watch would I be the child who could not contribute or did not progress.
As soon as I got my driver’s license, my father told me that anyone who was grown up enough to have a license was grown up enough to have a job. For anyone in our house, a license and a job came together. It was, in hindsight, a positive experience, and I am grateful to my family for instilling into each generation an incorrigible work ethic, just maybe not for the extents to which it has come into my own life. Since then, through all of high school and college, working with all my might has simply seemed self-evident.
My family values that which is useful and helpful, both in our surroundings and in each other, and we see hard work as the highest good. This dynamic has instilled in me a fairly constant – and now addictive – drive to prove myself and my own worth. If you don’t contribute and bring something to show for yourself, you may find yourself flattened or forgotten amongst the perpetual forward-movement of people who have no time for the weak or the useless. As I have grown older, I have realized that this dynamic has created in me a real fear of failure and uselessness. I know in my head that everyone needs rest and no one can do everything, but in my heart, I often feel that my failures and incapabilities mean that I am useless, and by extension, unlovable. It has created a dynamic in which it is very difficult for me to believe God when He says that He is the one who finishes and accomplishes things and that I am made valuable by His work. I know that I should be able to rest in the fact that His love is not contingent on what I am able to do or not do, but this is extremely challenging for me, when so many other places in my life have reinforced the message that I do have something to prove. I have been told so often by my family, my community, even the challenging schools I have always attended that ability, hard-work, and success are what is valuable, and so I have a difficult times transitioning into a relationship with a God who is not turned off by my inability or weakness.
I am in continuous prayer that God will help me to really believe that He values me for who I am, not what I am able to accomplish or offer to Him. I feel that this is vital to my counseling, because my biggest fear is that I will consider myself successful when and only when I have been able to “fix” every client. Because achievement is my addiction, I fear that I will be in danger of seeing clients as jobs that are either successful or not, and that I will hinge my own value on that success. I fear that I will want to impose my values – to figure out the best plan of action and to have little patience when the client does not immediately take the steps to make everything right, because I want to “get this job done” instead of “meet and know this person.” I fear that I will want to help the client take charge of his situation the way that I would and will take it as a personal failure when he does not. I know in my head that I can only do my best in working for the Lord and beyond that, I cannot hold myself responsible for a client’s choices. But I fear that my old family values will creep in and tell me that I should have done better, I should have been able to save this person, and that this will lead to the breakdown and burnout of my confidence and drive. I am working to trust God when He tells me that my value and success, as a person and a counselor, are found in Him, to believe that He makes me worthwhile despite inability, and to take one step towards freedom from a self-worshipping addiction.