100 days - my thoughts about addiction
Hi - so it's 100 days since my last binge. I think that's the longest I've managed for a long time.
My addiction started off with food as a child and as soon as I was old enough alcohol took hold straight away This got really bad before I managed to stop and now it's food again (although I do still have the odd drinking binge). I show the same behaviour with both food and alcohol, that sense of relief when I make the conscious decision to eat/drink, the inability to stop once I start. Earlier in the year I thought I'd cracked it with both food and alcohol. I went 4/5 months with it mostly under control, then I had a drinking binge (100 days ago to be exact) and I've been unable to control my eating since. I've put back on half the weight I'd managed to lose. It's forced me to start digging into my addiction again. I came across an article - quitting is not recovery. That's my problem I think, I have stopped and I know why I do it but never practised any tools to deal with it.
Addiction is using whatever it is you are addicted to do feel better/escape and that's all it is. For me like I said knowing I am going to drink or eat I feel a sense of relief, excitement, if I can't and I want to I feel trapped/stressed/anxious and I obsess over it. I watched a video yesterday on youtube a channel called actualized.org. He says addiction is a fear of emptiness. I'm not sure he has worded it right but I get what he means. We are afraid of sitting, and doing nothing. We need to learn to be happy just sitting and being and not doing. I think this is pretty close to the answer. We have these emotions and we want to feel better and instead of facing them we look for a distraction, once our brain has found one that works it creates an emotional response to them so that every time we feel something we don't want to we are reaching for that thing as a distraction and relief. After that things like physical addition and habits compound the addiction. We have to do the work to break that link of needing to do something to feel that relief, to feel better or else there will always be an addiction.