Good evening ladies and gentleman.
After postulating on what is one of the most complex issues presiding over us in today’s modern society of flaunting excess and there not really being a definition to the word “enough,” how does one try and and come to terms with an addiction? What steps are needed to breakthrough it?
Take a relationship, for example. Not necessarily a relationship where you were someone’s “boyfriend/husband” or “girlfriend/wife” but just someone you get to know, over whatever long or short period of time. This person has a dramatically positive impact on your life, making you feel much better about your life than before.
Then one day, they are gone. Without warning and without any expectation, you never see or speak to them again. So you have gone from feeling good seeing them every day, to not seeing them at all. This is profound because mentally you lose so much, and all of this good feeling, dopamine surging into your bloodstream every time you see them has to be replaced by something, some feeling, good or bad, that would fill the, nothing.
This is generally what leads to the depression of not having something you thought you needed to make you feel good, so you take steps to try and recreate the feeling, new feelings, drinking, eating, thinking that things will never be as good. This in a way is addiction, not to a person, but to a feeling. The way you felt with that person felt like nothing else, and the subsequent despair you feel when you consider the possibility nobody and nothing can ever make you feel like that again is well, dreadful, worse still its your forlorn imagination running away with itself.
However, a few days or weeks pass, and the dread, the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach begins to lessen, and you feel like normal life begins to resume, that person nothing more than “something that was.” You move forward with your life, meeting new people, setting new goals, doing new things. However, you struggle with the people because you are aware, that little voice is telling you “remember what you screwed up last time- remember how much that sucked?” so you limit yourself, lead to you becoming so self conscious and destructive it will limit your friendships and relationships. Its a natural human reflex action, not wanting to be hurt, but it is severely limiting, and is where your addiction stems from. People are addicted to what they feel is “painless,” after the initial period of feeling “everything.”
It seems like there is almost a step by step process to getting though something like this. The first step, generally is the jump from feeling to not feeling, because while they may have been such a high, the low was to unbearable to deal with, so essentially “fuck that.” Why do we do this? Out of fear. We fear pain, so take steps to avoid it, eventually leading us to wind ourselves up in knots to the point we don’t know which way is up. How to get over it? Make the leap.
Life is pain, everything that isn’t going to potentially cause some pain probably isn’t worth doing, so you have to be prepared for the possibility hardship is going to happen. As we have always stated on Thinking Evolution, its a choice. You choose to feel better feeling thoughts, choose to feel good, believe in yourself and the positive result that will come out, therefore you can live the way you want, be who you want to be and do what you want to do. Nobody has a right to stop you from doing that and its only you that can breakthrough an addiction to avoiding something, and take the first step. See what you are doing and how bad its making you and the people around you feel, maybe not all the time, but eventually and inevitably it brings itself back round. So choose to take that step, that leap.
Believe in the choices your making in life, and believe that they will create positive results. If they don’t create the positive results you were expecting, that is okay too, because you tried, you learnt. You can go back, make modifications and try again. It doesn’t matter whether it doesn’t work three, thirty or three hundred times, you learn each time you go back and you try again. Either that or spend the rest of your life addicted to feeling nothing, which isn’t really living, just existing. Addiction to anything has this affect, so just take the first step, and believe.
Make the leap, choose to think better feeling thoughts, and start your Thinking Evolution.
Until next time. DR.
PS: I know this is longer than normal- seemed worth it.
Random motivation picture
