Our eyes look out and yet we experience within.  When we look outside of ourselves for relief, escape or avoidance we are indeed making a choice.  The easiest act to perform is to not pick up a drink or drug, the hardest path to pursue, however, is to live well.  All behavior is goal directed toward comfort or the  avoidance of discomfort.  More accurately put, behavior is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and action.  Thoughts trigger our emotional capabilities to avoid fear and embrace desire. When our thoughts tend toward fear, instinctively we seek to counter our emotional imbalance toward desire.  Fear of being rejected triggers the desire to be accepted which constitutes conflict.  Many of us look upon conflict as barriers, obstacles to living well, and yet conflict is opportunity. In this case the conflict experienced is the opportunity to self-improvement.  Of course that is easy to suggest, however embracing conflict as an opportunity is extremely difficult to follow.  The difficulty is grounded in making behavioral change happen.  It is easy to avoid conflict and reach out to a substance, follow a cycle of self-defeating behavior.

Behavior is not caused by an underlining disease of addiction.  Do I think that addiction is a disease?  No, not in the definitive sense.  I do believe that “addictiveness” is a diseased condition, a condition manifest of the process of continuous self-abuse of substances.  The “condition” I write of is at the molecular level.  Every thought, every feeling occurs at the molecular level or one brain cell influencing an other.  Over the course of time, we condition our brain cells, they learn how to and what to communicate through neural networking or the release of certain neurotransmitters.  Music for example, you hear the beat of a certain song, it appeals to you, you feel motivated, you start to move.  The outcome of moving to the beat of a song is similar to the outcome of a thought of self-denigration.

Since all learning occurs at the molecular level, and considering the fact that thoughts are a manifestation of molecular neural networking, then “behavior” is goal directed to maintain the human condition.  The human condition is a wanting condition never satisfied, wanting what, wanting competence over incompetence and independence over dependence.  The human condition is the drive behind addiction, for addiction is a mind-set, the basis behind power of control.  Think of two magnets.  Place like poles of the magnet together and the drive, the energy is to avoid and repel against each other.  Now take and reverse one of those poles, and the energy is to approach, or embrace the attraction of the opposite pole.

Now think of the human condition a wanting condition of in part competence versus incompetence.  The negativism of incompetence is attracted to the positivism of competence.  The outcome is the drive behind all thoughts, feelings and actions to maximize competence over incompetence.  The same applies to independence attracted to dependence.  We fear dependence and yet we desire independence.  We fear incompetence and yet desire competence.  It is for this very reason no one is a finished product.

The difference in process of function over dysfunction is in the drive, the competition experienced between avoiding fear and embracing desire.  This drive is the mind-set of addiction.  Addiction is competition.  When we feel incompetent, we are driven by our competitive nature (human condition) to seek out relief.  The difference here is our unique tolerance for relief.  For example, hurt:  you feel hurt.  Rather than embracing hurt as an opportunity of self-improvement or growth, many of us look outside of ourselves for relief because to us, it is the worse thing in the world.  And yet, hurt like pain is our way of letting us know that we need to make change happen.  This is the insidiousness of the addicted mind, the conditioned mind, to be intolerable of discomfort seeking immediate relief. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of getting different results.

Our eyes look out and yet we experience within.  It is within our mind-set that we make choices.  Choice is a matter of goal direction, it is my opinion that all choices are filtered through our insecurities.  Insecurity is a copulation of perspectives of inadequacy, inferiority, and insignificance.  Since no one being is totally adequate, ferior, and significant, we compensate.  How we compensate is a matter of choice.  As I have said, those who are anchored to the abyss of “substancelessness” (my word to describe a void of substance), choose to abuse substances for substance as a means to compensate for insecurities construed as weaknesses.  To look outside of oneself for relief, coping, or mentally flat lining is to compensate for perspectives of “I can’t….It is….I will never….”

Related articles

• Domestic and Workplace Violence (dpeterstone.wordpress.com)
• The Human Will is Addiction (mydiscover.org)

Tags: alcohol and drug abuse, choice, Control