I let the emotions wash through me, soak me. I feel them. Sometimes I just wallow in them. Other times I try to distract myself to no avail.
I think at the heart of addiction is my past inability to suffer. And on top of that I think addicts have an extremely low frustration tolerance level.
Loss and pain defined me from an early age, through suicide attempts of my mother beginning when I was four, to her successful suicide when I was 20, to the devastating loss experienced in divorce, to personal losses that continue to pile up after 3 1/2 years of sobriety.
How do I deal with them? I don't. I feel them, knowing that drinking or drugging will do nothing to alleviate the pain but rather simply mask it and in so doing drag out the suffering, or dampen the effects of the trauma and allow it to morph into some delusional thinking that infects my every breath, thought and sense of being.
I have come to realize I would rather experience the intense pain now in hopes that it will ease -- and it does inevitably ease if allowed to to peak instead of medicating it --and grasping a thin ray of hope that the next minute or hour or day or week or month or year will get better.
I have found if I don't experience the trauma in full force, if I dull it with booze or drugs, the cathartic experience isn't allowed to take its beautifully ugly journey and I suffer for years instead of days.