Eight Step Recovery: Using the Buddha's Teachings to Overcome Addiction by Valerie Mason-John & Dr. Paramabandhu Groves

Author:Valerie Mason-John & Dr. Paramabandhu Groves [Mason-John, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Windhorse Publications
Published: 2014-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

Weighing the benefits and costs of addiction

Addictive behaviors don’t just come out of the blue. There may be an element of chance – we may have been invited to a party with people we didn’t know and offered a drink or some cocaine, and that high we experienced set us off on a road to addiction. Once we have tried the substance or engaged in the behavior, we return to it for certain reasons. We want to enjoy the high again or we want to be part of the in-crowd. Maybe we drink because it makes it easier to socialize. Perhaps control of our food intake helps us to feel more self-confident, or heroin helps us to forget all our worries. We may have grown up in homes where the abuse of alcohol, illegal or pharmaceutical drugs, food, or money was the norm, and so it may seem normal for us as adults too. As the addiction takes hold, these reasons may change. In the end, it may be just that our behavior relieves withdrawal symptoms, and we don’t feel we could live any other way. Nevertheless, whatever our addiction, there is something that we get from it.

The other side is that there are costs to our addiction. At first, these costs may be insignificant. Smoking perhaps leaves the young body with a dry mouth or a morning cough. Serious trouble such as cancer or chest disease may only arrive years later. For others, there may be big costs early on, such as contracting hepatitis C from a first injection, or getting pregnant from unprotected sex while intoxicated.

In this respect, addiction is like almost any other behavior: there are benefits and costs. Shopping online saves us time, and we may find what we want at a cheaper price, but we may end up buying more than we had intended (because it is so easy to click the “add to shopping cart” button). If we go to the movies with our friends, we might have an enjoyable night out, but then struggle to get up early the following day and feel tired at work.

Since most actions have two sides to them, we often have mixed feelings about what choice to make. It may be relatively easy to just go to the movie and not worry about being tired the following day, or to say to our friends: “Not today, I need to get to bed early. How about we go out on Saturday?” Where the stakes are higher, such as changing one’s career in mid-life or moving to another country, there may be much more soul-searching and ambivalence.

Once addiction is entrenched, stepping away from it onto the path of recovery is a big decision, and there are likely to be mixed feelings. Thus, we need to make this choice with open eyes. We can do this by reflecting on the costs of our addiction. What troubles and difficulties has it caused in our lives? What will we lose by giving it

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