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We operate with some stock images of the addict: a person with a heroin needle in a park, or
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who nurses a bottle of gin in a paper bag at nine in the morning or who sneaks off at every opportunity
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to light up another cylinder of marijuana. However dramatic and tragic such cases of addiction might be,
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they are simultaneously hugely reassuring to most of us –
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because they locate the addict far from ordinary experience, somewhere off-stage,
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in the land of semi-criminality and outright breakdown. Such examples are dangerously flattering,
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categorising addiction in a sentimental way that lets most of us off the hook – and at the same time,
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cuts us off from identification with, and therefore sympathy for, the most wretched victims of addiction.
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There are, in truth, far more addicts than we think. Indeed, if we look at the matter squarely:
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we are pretty much all addicts. The official statistics on the consumption of hard drugs or alcohol
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don’t begin to give a fair representation of the issue.
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We need to define addiction in a new way: addiction is the manic reliance on something, anything,
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in order to keep our dark or unsettling thoughts at bay. What properly indicates addiction
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is not what someone is addicted to, for we can get addicted to pretty much anything.
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It is the motives behind their reliance on it – and, in particular, their
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desire to avoid encountering the contents of their own mind. Being inside our own minds is,
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for most of us, and very understandably, a deeply anxiety-inducing prospect. We are
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filled with thoughts we don’t want properly to entertain and feelings we are desperate not to feel.
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There is an infinite amount we are angry and sad about that it would take an uncommon degree of courage to face up to.
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We experience a host of fantasies and desires that we have a huge incentive to disavow,
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because of the extent to which they violate our self-image and our more normative commitments.
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We shouldn’t pride ourselves because we aren’t injecting something into our veins.
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Almost certainly, we are doing something with equal commitment.
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We are checking the news at four minute intervals, to keep the news from ourselves at bay.
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We’re doing sport, exhausting our bodies in the hope of not having to hear from our minds.
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We’re using work to get away from the true internal work we’re shirking.
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The most compelling addictions can sound very righteous to the world. To get a measure
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of our levels of addiction, we need only consider when the last time might have been that we
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were able to sit alone in a room with our own thoughts, without distraction, free associating,
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daring to wander into the past and the future, allowing ourselves to feel pain, desire, regret and excitement.
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We may start to see how much we have in common with the traditional addict.
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When we come face to face with them, we’re not meeting anything especially foreign, just
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a part of ourselves in a less respectable form – opening up new opportunities for kindness, towards them, and us.
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We could start to think, too, of how we might wean ourselves off our chosen addictive pursuit.
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We need to lose our fear of our minds. We need a collective
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sense of safety around confronting loss, humiliation, sexual desire and sadness –
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knowing that we will have to keep running away so long as we do not rehabilitate our feelings.
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On the other side of addiction is, in a sense, philosophy – philosophy understood as the patient,
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unfrightened, compassionate examination of the contents of our own minds.
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