Touchy Topic: Addiction
The topic for this week is an ocean I can’t hope to do more than dip a toe into, so please bear that in mind. This topic also is one close to my heart. I’ve known addiction in several forms. Pitched battles between my better nature and addiction often resulted in exhaustion and surrender, less frequently a rout. Like a Benedict Arnold wearing red lining inside its jacket, fickle Shame would sometimes act as my ally, rallying my efforts at resistance. At other times, it was Shame who stabbed me in the back and delivered me, powerless, to my foe.
That war might be raging still if someone hadn’t stepped out of line and shot Shame dead.
Thank God.
A host of Scriptures have been used to support shame’s control of people’s lives—a byproduct of the living Word being handled by broken men and women. I can’t pretend I’m not also a woman capable of making mistakes and misleading people. Please read the Scriptures for yourself. Don’t take my word for anything. Call me out when you find discrepancies! The thoughts on this blog aren’t mine in a proprietary sense, rather I’d love to use this as a space for mutual encouragement and polite discussion. A place to hone ideas.
With that said, there are some wonderful verses which can liberate us from shame’s lies regarding addiction.
Lie #1- There is no hope. You will always be addicted to ( ).
“None who wait for you (God) shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. Make me to know your ways, O Lord” (Ps. 25:3,4).
Lie #2 - Succumbing to addictive behaviors is evidence you’re going to hell.
“Beloved, we are God’s children now… we know that when He appears we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. Everyone who thus hopes in Him, purifies himself, just as He is pure.” (1 John 3:2,3).
Lie #3 - If you really loved God, you’d obey Him.
“I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin” (Romans 7: 22, 23).
And then, for the sucker-punch that puts shame in the dirt (with my paraphrasing in parentheses)—
God speaking: “I will allure (you)… and speak tenderly to (you)… I will remove the names of (the addictions you think you love) from (your) mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more… I will betroth you to me forever, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord” (from Hosea 2).
Addiction is a very real monster wreaking havoc and destruction in the lives of many thousands of people today. It will not evaporate if we ignore its presence in our relationships. Those suffering at its mercy need us to acknowledge their pain and the lies they wrestle with daily. They need us to accept them as God accepts them—with compassion and a hope-fueled determination to slay the beast.
You’ll often find addiction lurking in the pain-riddled characters in my fiction. Because I know firsthand how a person uses addictive and pleasure-seeking behaviors to numb the pain. Psychologists sometimes speak of “primary” and “secondary” issues in mental health. The primary issue is the root of the problem, from which is emanating anguished feelings and problematic behaviors. Often, these problematic behaviors can be categorized as “secondary” issues. Because while they are mental health problems, they aren’t the root cause. They’re like symptoms of an underlying disease.
Addiction is often pretty easy to detect, so it bears the full weight of our friend’s and family’s attention, whether positively or negatively. Meanwhile, the underlying primary issue goes untreated. We might not be self-aware enough to know why we are returning again and again to our addiction, but we feel a pain that goes very deep. It can be incredibly hurtful for those who are closest to us to be oblivious to the source of our pain, especially if they only respond with criticism to the more obvious addiction.
The best weapon against the dynamic duo of addiction and shame is unconditional love. Obviously, that doesn’t mean being apathetic about the destructive behaviors of our loved one. It means you team up with them against their demons; you infuse them with hope whenever they can’t see hope on the horizon; you get them professional help; you never shame them for being stupid enough to make the same mistakes over and over, despite already knowing the consequences.
If you can capture that kind of relationship in fiction, you’ll be writing a story thousands of people will be better for reading. Because the likelihood is that your readers have addictions of their own.
