3. Addiction is seen as a search to fill emptiness

By Tom O'Connell

It's a reflective time of year, and I feel moved to reflect on how my own philosophy of addiction evolved. My shift from simplistic ideas about addiction did not come all at once. It was an evolution that grew slowly. But eventually I realized that addiction is as complex as the human condition itself, and involves all aspects of a person: physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual.

Today, despite advances in public awareness during recent decades, I believe addiction still remains widely misunderstood, underrated, and often understated. Addiction, to me, is the world's number one public health problem, and is at the root of most health problems, crime and violence, and widespread deterioration of moral values.

Originally, I thought the only "alcoholics" were those lying in certain Boston alleys. They were the people I could see from a higher vantage point on the elevated railway, affectionately known as "the El" at first, then the MTA and later the MBTA. As for "addicts," I thought they were the people in opium dens in distant China, or perhaps jazz musicians, or hippies.

When I operated as a crusading executive director at the Massachusetts Safety Council in the 1970s, I organized massive awareness campaigns about drinking and driving, but I still had limited knowledge of addiction. It was when I embarked on a freelance career as a health writer in the late '70s that I began to gain some insight.

As mass media consultant to the North Shore Council on Alcoholism I began to catch on to the complexities of alcoholism such as the craving, the obsessive/compulsive behavior, the loss of control, and the devastating impact on individuals and families. Later, when I became media consultant for the Third Nail Drug Rehabilitation Program serving hard core addicts in Boston's inner city, my curiosity deepened.

I wanted to get to the root of the addictive process, and the director of the Third Nail, Bill McCue, didn't give me a scientific analysis of addiction when I asked what it was all about. He simply pointed to his chest and replied, "It's about the hole in the doughnut, Tom." He explained that addicts were trying to fill an inner emptiness that couldn't be filled by drugs, including alcohol. Gambling or sex couldn't fill the emptiness either.

A year or two later, on a spiritual retreat to Graymoor, a monastery in mountain country near New York's Hudson River, I was separated from the rest of my friends and was the only one given a monastic cell in the old wing. This coincidence led me to the cell of Father Dan Egan, a Graymoor friar who had gained national recognition as "The Junkie Priest." He was not a junkie, but worked with addicts and understood them well.

When I interviewed him for an article that appeared later in Catholic Digest, he told me this about addiction: "The basic problem is that deep down inside there is something missing...and what's missing is the spiritual dimension."

Among the root causes of addiction he discussed were lack of love and the absence of positive values. He described the futility of searching for pleasure as an end in itself, and pursuing instant gratification. And he affirmed that in addiction there are  symptoms of an underlying "spiritual illness."

With these notions in mind as the 1980s progressed, I spent nearly a decade attending addiction conferences and writing about experts' views on addiction for the U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. And I adopted the medically based concept of addiction as "a condition of unhealthy dependence on behaviors that impair a person's ability to perform to full potential." This was a good basic definition, but a doctor named Stanley Gitlow helped me to move a bit beyond it. I will touch on his insights in the next essay in this series.

- Back -