Addictions

What is an addiction?

According to a dictionary, an addiction is defined as “the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.”

Enslavement. This is what an addict is, enslaved. Enslaved to a drink he or she uses as anestesia. Enslaved to a tornado of emotions that they cant control deciding that the only way out is through narcotics. Enslaved to a black hole of life that they did not choose but rather than the illness chose for them. Enslaved to a substance, that slowly and painfully destroys cell by cell of every addicts body.

You may ask what being an addict is, and to be honest, I don’t think I can give you the slightest idea of what this is, because I don’t know.

What I do know is what having an addict in the family is like.

Having an addict in the family is like having a toddler. They feel like they are old enough to handle everything by themselves, but in reality they are too fragile to handle it and too proud to ask for help.

An addict rarely accepts they have a problem. Instead, they give numerous excuses to backup their behaviour, because in their mind, they don´t really think they have a problem, and if they do, they think they can stop anytime they want, but they just simply don’t want to at the moment.

Being the audience of this drama is not easy. Watching how a person you love is destroying themselves and not being able to do anything for them is hard. But thinking that they don’t want to do anything for themselves is devastating.

As the viewer of this caos, we sometimes make the mistake of judging to much, thinking how easy it would be for them to just face their problems instead of avoiding them with narcotics or alcohol, how easy it would be for them to get help, how easy it would be for them to just stop.

But what we don’t really know is how unbelievably hard this is for them. Its very easy for us to judge, because in the outside we don’t really see anything physical; no wounds, no scars. The real wounds are inside them, the real scars are not something we can see, but something they can feel, the real illness is eating them from the inside second by second.

I know this is not easy for any of the family members that have these problems back home, and sadly sometimes the only way an addict can realise they truly need help is when all of their family members have backed out because its just to much for them to handle on their own. Some cases never even get to see the light and its all just darkness to the end. An addiction is not just a sickness that affects one single person, it is an invasive and expansive illness, that painfully destroys everything in its way.

Want to try an understand an addict? Think how much pain and suffering they must have inside them, that they rather destroy their own body and sometimes their family, than standing up to their own feelings.