Avoidance Masquerading as Addiction

If you’re like most people, when I say the word “addiction,” you probably think of someone who is addicted to drugs or alcohol. These are the two that get the most attention … maybe it’s because they are common, or maybe it’s because they can be life threatening. But what about other habits and vices? Things like: smoking; exercising; food; sex? Or what about the need to check your social media account 40 times a day? Or the hours lost to gaming? These may be less overt than a drug or alcohol addiction, but, depending on your relationship to them, they have the potential to be just as addicting.

So what do all of these have in common?

They provide a means of escape, a way to numb yourself out; they offer a path for checking out of the present moment. To be clear: hitting the gym three days a week, or checking your FB account every day does not mean you’re feeding an addiction. But if you use exercise as a way to avoid feeling your emotions, or consistently turn to a box of Twinkies when you get triggered, or spend your evenings scrolling your social media feed instead of polishing your resume so you can leave the job you hate … chances are you’re avoiding looking at something.

 At its heart, addiction is a habit, a pattern. It’s the act of repeating something often enough until the physical body, the mind, the emotional body – or all three – come to rely on the behavior or the substance in order to function.

Let’s unpack this a bit …  

Is it really the exercising or the sex or the food itself that we’re addicted to? Or is it that we’re using these things in place of something else, and that’s what makes it problematic? What if we swapped out “addiction” for “avoidance?” How does this change things? So, instead of being addicted to Twinkies, it’s really that we’re using them as a way to avoid looking at what made us angry or sad. Or, instead of being addicted to sex, it’s that we’re using it as a way to avoid going inward to figure out why we feel so lonely, or why we need external validation of our self-worth.

Do you engage in the game of avoidance?

Sometimes we tell ourselves a story: the self-numbing is my way of processing my emotions … or, I’ve been doing the distraction thing for so long I don’t know any other way to be … or, next time I’ll do it differently. We tell these stories as a way to buy some time, or to justify our avoidance just one more time. But that one-more-time turns into 10 more times or a year of next-times until we feel like the mountain is too large to climb, and we buy that as truth and give up.

How is the avoidance serving you?

I recently realized I was using dark chocolate as a way to numb myself to my emotions. I didn’t recognize it as such for a long time. Part of the story I told myself was that because it was dark chocolate, it was all good – nothing to see here. Every time I got agitated or felt a bit of anxiety, I reached for the dark chocolate. This went on for MONTHS until one day, in a post-chocolate endorphin bliss, I recognized that there was a pattern in play here … every time I thought about X, I felt a surge of anxiety, and instead of looking at my reaction, I grabbed some dark chocolate. It was an eye-opening moment when I understood that my habit of reaching for the chocolate was a way to numb and distract myself from facing what I was feeling.

Do you keep yourself distracted?

Do you slow yourself down with food or nicotine?

Sometimes there are Akashic loops involved – lifetimes of repeating patterns that are playing out, once again, in our current life. It can be why the addiction (or avoidance) feels so familiar and is easy to accept, or why we feel doomed to stay in the cycle, believing it’s inevitable.

Do you numb yourself with TV or social media?

Do you look for ways to escape being present?

What are you avoiding? What habits and patterns do you engage in as a way of escaping something that makes you uncomfortable? What might you find if you ignored your social media feed and sat in THIS moment? What healing process might you ignite if, instead of reaching for the Twinkies or the dark chocolate, you examined the emotions you’re running from?

Awareness of the pattern is the first step.