18. Addiction: Is it a "sacred disease"?

By Tom O'Connell

Why would anyone call addiction "a sacred disease?" It's because addiction can be viewed as a misguided spiritual quest. Paradoxically, a person's attempt to make life tolerable by altering consciousness leads to intolerable psychological pain. Yet this pain can nudge a person into a recovery process in which higher consciousness is embraced and then blossoms into a spiritual outlook.

In a Hazelden publication, this insight appears: "The process of addiction was our innocent search for wholeness." In that search, addicts look for "external solutions, living life from the outside in." However, in recovery, addicts find what AA describes as "an unsuspected inner resource." That resource is the one psychologist William James called "a Helping Power." AA calls it a "Higher Power," or God.

Even when we look at the word "addiction" we find a spiritual connection. In Latin the word "addictus" means "devoted." Addicts are devoted, like idol worshippers, to their habitual behavior. For the self-centered addict, the addiction has to come first, before all else, because it is the addict's way of adapting to the problems of life.

When psychiatrist Scott Peck, author of "The Road Less Traveled," came to Cape Cod several years ago to discuss "Addiction: The Sacred Disease," he described addiction as "an attempt by people to get back to Eden." And he compared addictive behavior to mystic or religious ecstasy. But he pointed out that when altered states are induced from outside oneself they become a kind of "cheap grace." They don't work for long.

The notion of idol worship also emerged from Peck: "Addiction comes in all kinds of forms...one form of idolatry or another." Then he asserted, "The primary treatment for addicts is God, not Eden."  Peck, who sees life as a challenging journey, wrote this first line in "The Road Less Traveled": "Life is difficult." Life demands maturity, but addicts manifest "infantile behavior," he said. "They desire to return to childhood, not to live as an adult." Immaturity is often cited by addiction experts as a hallmark of addictive disease.

However, even though addicts are immature, Peck has this to say: "Addicts are people who have a more powerful yearning for God.'' Because he sees addiction as a spiritual problem, Peck strongly recommends 12 Step recovery. He says these programs "work infinitely better than psychiatry" because not only do they address the addict's spiritual and psychological struggles, they also "provide a community so addicts do not have to go through the desert alone." What desert? Life itself.

Life, as Peck sees it, can be compared to a desert journey. "The desert is hard...a painful journey." Then he adds, "The more you grow up, the more it's going to hurt." Peck insists that addicts must learn to "go forward into the desert." Why? For "salvation," which is another word for "healing."

Personal growth is painful, he says, and conversion to a spiritual way of living is not easy. There is resistance to it. It seems easier to pursue self-centered addictive pleasure. However,  Peck says, "We are not in this world to be happy, but to learn." It hurts to learn, and change, and grow, and come out of the shadows of addiction toward the light of full consciousness. More on "The Sacred Disease" in a subsequent essay.

- Back -