I understand addiction now. I never did before, you know. How could a man (or a woman) do something so self-destructive, knowing that they’re hurting not only themselves, but the people they love? It seemed that it would be so incredibly easy for them to just not take that next drink. Just stop. It’s so simple, really. But as so often happens with me, my arrogance kept me from seeing the truth of the matter.I see it now though.Every day, I tell myself it will be the last. Every night, as I’m falling asleep in his bed, I tell myself that tomorrow I’ll book a flight to Paris, or Hawaii, or maybe New York. It doesn’t matter where I go, as long as it’s not here. I need to get away from Phoenix—away from him—before this goes even one step further.And then he touches me again, and my convictions disappear like smoke in the wind.This cannot end well. That’s the crux of the matter, Sweets. I’ve been down this road before—you know I have—and there’s only heartache at the end. There’s no happy ending waiting for me like there was for you and Matt. If I stay here with him, I will become restless and angry. It’s happening already, and I cannot stop it. I’m becoming bitter and terribly resentful. Before long, I will be intolerable, and eventually, he’ll leave me. But if I do what I have to do, what my very nature compels me to do, and move on, the end is no better. One way or another, he’ll be gone. Is it not wiser to end it now, Sweets, before it gets to that point? Is it not better to accept that this happiness I have is destined to self-destruct?Tomorrow I will leave. Tomorrow I will stop delaying the inevitable. Tomorrow I will quit lying to myself, and to him. Tomorrow.What about today, you ask? Today it’s already too late. He’ll be home soon, and I have dinner on the stove, and wine chilling in the fridge. And he will smile at me when he comes through the door, and I will pretend like this fragile, dangerous thing we have created between us can last forever.Just one last time, Sweets. Just one last fix. That’s all I need.And that is why I now understand addiction.

Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.

ligion is the opiate of the masses." "I did masses of opiates religiously.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.

The Memory Of You Is Like A Drug To Me

It’s strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next. After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless. We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete. We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives. The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They’re everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives.

Please don't be overly sober with your precious wings, it's your addiction to freedom that makes me think that i too can defy gravity.

If that’s the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You’ve numbed yourself to make room for the grief you carry.

I gave up drinking before my twentieth birthday. I haven’t touched the stuff since. And I’ve discovered that not everyone who does horrible things is a horrible person.

See, you’ve got to understand, son. There’s two types of guys in this world. There’s guys . . . who think they’re in control, and guys like us who live in the moment. Who accept life as it is.

It’s like you’re always living in your head. . . . Relax and appreciate your surroundings a little.

I lost someone close to me once . . . Taught me to live in the moment. Life is short, you know?

It feels like I’m stuck in one spot. It’s been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you’re moving on without me. And I—I’m not ready to be alone.

It’s like everyone has their own little recipe for happiness, but no one really seems all that happy.

Happiness isn’t something you work toward, the same way misery isn’t something you work toward.

He pondered his turmoil, wondering which he feared most—losing his father or being alone in the world. Both were inevitable. Neither could be stopped or slowed down. All he could do now was brace for impact.

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.

By drinking, a boy acts like a man. After drinking, many a man acts like a boy.

You can get addicted to trouble if you're not careful.

I am a work in progress.

There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.

I wind up stretched across the couchstill nodding with Sherlock Holmesexamining our crushed veins

It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years

Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")

I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.

It will take centuries to disconnect people from an addiction like religion; no matter how bad and disastrous it could be, but addiction is the worst of all.

Mental slavery is a cheap & easy to find addiction. Knowledge stimulates mental faculties immune system.

Knowledge stimulates mental faculties

Why, then,' answered the squire, 'I am very sorry you have given him so much learning; for, if he cannot get his living by that, it will rather spoil him for anything else; and your other son, who can hardly write his name, will do more at ploughing and sowing, and is in a better condition, than he.' And indeed so it proved; for the poor lad, not finding friends to maintain him in his learning, as he had expected, and being unwilling to work, fell to drinking, though he was a very sober lad before; and in a short time, partly with grief, and partly with good liquor, fell into a consumption, and died.

Changing a Habit is Never Difficult.Difficult is to Address Your Unwillingness to do it

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters

We all have those things that help us carry on through life. It is important that these things upon which we depend for daily strength are healthy for our character rather than harmful. We must ask ourselves whether the comforts we reach for each day are vices or virtues? Do they feed the best parts of us or do they rob us of them? Even when we are at our most fatigued and are tempted to reach for self-destructive things, we must try to seek out and take solace in those things that will lead to our eventual renewal; rather than those things that will only serve to bring us lower.

I bought salvation from a man on the street. He said, "Go down to the beach and let the waves wash your feet.

God made you for His pleasure. And He made you intrinsically needy and dependent on His unspeakable joy. If you are struggling with sin our addiction, don’t try to kill your appetite for pleasure. It is impossible. Just direct it to the source of all pleasure. You will be amazed to find that He has perfectly and supernaturally designed you to have all your deepest needs met in Him

God wants a people addicted to His pleasure, a people who serve Him for no other reason than the delight they take in Him. This is the very heart of worship. It is not self-centred. It is putting God at the very centre of self so that self cannot possibly be satisfied without Him.

1. We admitted we were powerless over our emotions, that our lives had become unmanageable.2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to emotionally and mentally ill persons and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

You can't solve a spiritual problem with a physical solution.

It will all be over in 2 weeks

Darkness always causes fear and chaos inside us. We are always scared of losing ourselves somewhere inside there. But some of us get so much used to it that we start feeling peaceful in there and we start spending more time in it. One weird thing about darkness is, we meet ourselves there. Who are very different from what we are. And once we start speaking with them we become addicted to that kind of conversations. We fall in love with the same thing that we tried to run away from out whole life.

In all of your living, don't forget to live.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

I've had so much of you in such little time that I shouldn't be suffering from withdrawal!

I HOLDIf I could have had him,I could have let himgo.But withoutthe having there was nothing—so to the nothingIhold.

A POCKET-SIZED GIRLHe keeps me in his pocket for a rainy day; he swears I'm not an object as he yo-yo's me away.A friend is what we'll call it,but my friend, he does not know,each time it rains I love him— so to his pocket, I must go.He thinks he's being clever,but I am not a fool;his love ain't worth a penny,so to my heart I must be cruel.

MY MOONI'll always wonder what time it is there; if you're dreaming, or awake. My moon is your sun; my darkness, your light. I'm in the future, you'd jokingly say.And I know where you are, because I'm watching you from the past.

7amThey said that I’d forget you,and I knew it wasn’t true.But sometimes I wake up now,and my heart’s no longer blue.I press the Keurig button,dancing across the room—Sometimes it’s nearly seven,before I’ve thought of you.And though we sleep together,all night side by side,one day I’ll have my coffeewithout you in my mind.

WORTHYIf you ever decide to feel— feel this:I love you. I always have. I always will.Not because you're charming, beautiful or lovable.But because I choose you.Everyday I wake up and I choose you— again, and again, and again.But if you cannot feel, and if you never feel this, then know:I do not love you. I never have. I never will.Because you're not worth my love.(Come back my love, I am drowning.)

A WISHSometimes I wish that he will liveand I will see him.But mostly I wish that he will die, and take my memories with him.

What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ("Give me more images")

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.

There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

I think Amy Winehouse's decision not to go to rehab was a bad one. In fact, I think it was the worst idea since Dodi Al Fayed said to Princess Diana, "Ooh, look! A tunnel! Whack that seat belt off and let's have a fuck.

It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso

Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.

The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.

It is strange, is it not, how an accident of a millimeter here, a millimeter there, makes one face so important. Think about it Elliot, She has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, just like everyone else. It,s all in tiny degrees of placement, such small area of magic to make such a big difference. For me, Elliot, I must tell you it is a hard thing to understand- why these things, these millimeters, are so crucial to you, you of all men.

Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?

If you do not cultivate your life's environment, you will not captivate the worlds enlightenment.

Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you

The Bible does not deny that we were various things—addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators—but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _____ and I am an X Y or Z.” The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed.

Don’t ever forget you are beautiful, although your life, your past and your present situation may be ugly. You are beautiful.

We are all hungry for genuine connection and caring, and we will not get this unless we find our Soul's tribe. If we don't find this, we'll kill ourselves, either by finding an addiction to mask the pain or by ignoring what we need to stay healthy.

A lot of people here some South in your mouth, and they automatically think you're dumb. They think if you talk funny, you are funny. – Lloyd Hand

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did,and as was the case with all addicts,gratification was the important thing.

Reading is an addiction that I adore.

Reading is an addiction, much like living and breathing is an addiction.

Addiction to reading... There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to. I admire your hobby choice it's mine as well.

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

Jesus came to bring life more abundantly. He came to save the soulsick, to deliver those bound up in sin, to break the chains of bondage and addiction. He came to heal the hurting, and comfort and restore the used, abused, bruised, battered, and broken. He came to forgive the worst sinner and to bring life to the lifeless. He came to reconcile us with God so we can have relationship with our Father.

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.

The past does not define me, it ignites me. The past is not a piece of me, it has placed me

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.

I know an alcoholic is the worse, but sometimes I wonder if it's better to have a drinking father that lives at home, or a drinking father, that never comes around.

Addiction brings apathy. Break the apathy, and you break the addiction.

Men are a compilation of every experience and relationship they have ever lived through. Some experiences have bettered your man while others have battered him. The man standing before you is the result of a lifetime of surviving.

My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror of intimacy.

Just because something is addictive doesn't mean that you will get addicted to it. But . . . if your stomach ties up in knots while you count the seconds waiting for a phone call from that special someone . . . if you hear a loud buzzing in your ears when you see a certain person's car (or one just like it) . . . if your eyes burn when you hear a random love song or see a couple holding hands . . . if you suffer the twin agonies of craving for and withdrawing from a series of unrequited crushes or toxic relationships . . . if you always feel like you're clutching at someone's ankle and dragged across the floor as they try to leave the room . . . welcome to the club.

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.

It's hard to get enough of something that almost works.

Music gives you a certain high that any drug in the world cannot.

I used to have a drug problem, now I make enough money.

I don't see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don't see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction.

When we practise self-compassion, we look after ourselves just as though we are nurturing a small child. In fact, a major part of grieving our original pain work (so that we can heal and be emotionally liberated) is to re-parent ourselves and reconnect with our inner child. This is what the author, John Bradshaw, meant by ‘reclaiming our inner child’. In recovery, we can begin to nurture our inner child and connect deeply with our heart and spirit.

People don't care about being duped as long as they're happy, which is the shortest form of happiness; hence 'self-duprication' becomes a habit.

It is only the Creator that can set thy soul free from every struggle.

I think of drug dealers like I think of my father— never really there when you want them to be.

Always make your familial environment a safe and inviting place.

I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out.

Bookworms are the most precious worms in the world when they are humans, feeding upon the paper's body with their starving minds.

Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. (“Buying now, dying later”)

Competition works best in sports, but humans get addicted to stuff.

In the beginning, the taste of power is sweet, savored on the tongue, like fine wine. It whispers promises in your ear and pretends to be your friend. It is easy to become addicted to this feeling.

Powerlessness implies inactivity, like an appliance that is not plugged into its electrical current. Empowerment is about plugging into responsible choices and then acting upon them to your fullest capacity.

While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the ‘moment’ but also sense the vital spark and spirit of “otherness”. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me")

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse (and vice versa).

Reality was dawning on him and he hated reality. If you were him, so would you.

When you are secure in yourself, know what turns you on, and enjoy watching your partner watch you experience sexual pleasure, you have a highly novel relationship grounded in love. The experience of seeing and being seen fuels lust and desire. This is exactly the way you integrate healthy lust and love into your sex life. It’s relational sex, not the old pornographic sex of past addictions.

I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.

I think it's better to be comfortable in your skin than to be miserable being who you are. Sure, the meth is horrible. It ruins people from the inside out. It's a waiting game --- it's not a matter of if it destroys you, but rather a matter of when it will. I've made it this far. I'm not sending a message that it's "cool" to be on drugs and tell everyone about it. I don't sum myself up as a drug addict and a hooker. That's not what I am. Those are juts things I do, they don't define me. Jobs and addictions do not make us who we are.

My desire to self-destruct is a one-night standon Groundhog Day.Fucking repetitive. Repetitively fucking.

I talk too much, but there's a lot unsaid. I've slept in a lot of beds.

You grow bored of these shrines, and you abandon thembecause you know for a fact that you will worshipanything you kneel before.Like God.Like cock.Like porcelain.

I have a very addictive personality. If it isn’t women, it’s money. If it isn’t money, it’s speeding. And if it isn’t speeding, it’s women. I also like expensive video consoles where I can punch, kick, screw, shoot and drive legally all night anywhere I fucking well want to.

I am not your victim because you are not a predator any more than a bottle of scotch stalks an alcoholic.

That first drunk, first high, first sexual encounter, those feelings of first are the most intense, the best remembered, always impossible to attain again.

Sex had nothing to do with feeling good, everything to do with superficialities, and was always accompanied by a masochistic agenda to feel anything but dead inside.

Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing.

Fireworks. Snowflakes. Sunstroke and frostbite. It was all that I could ask for and completely unexpected. I expected demands. He gifted me with tenderness. I expected ego. He let me experiment. I expected disrespect. He called me beautiful. I expected him to expect perfection. He taught me all I needed to know.

The events that occur in my life are workout situations. They are there for my benefit so I can become strong and gain wisdom and information by working my way through those situations.

Every pain, addiction, anguish, longing, depression, anger or fearis an orphaned part of usseeking joy, some disowned shadow wanting to returnto the lightand homeof ourselves.

The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.

Habits are good if you have the habit of the best.

See, I am very dependent... on beauty and peace of the world... on loyalty of friends... on love in families... on happiness and health of children. And I do not want to be free as long as I have it all...

With patience and perseverance my day will come!

society's been drugging its women for years

Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Be an informed advocate and support.

Narrow behaviourist thinkingpermeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academicdiscourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a fullunderstanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causesare not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an experton the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in theNational Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seemsastonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be nounderstanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pindown at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, areoften the active representations of emotional states and of specialkinds of brain functioning.As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brainpatterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with varioussocial and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must striveto change not them but their environments. These are the only thingswe can change. Transformation of the addict must come from withinand the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is muchthat we can do.

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...

Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.

An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.

There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: we search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like – well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit”, looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough.

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We’d all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.

Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don't ever want to be again. Everything we do is part of who we are. How we choose to use those memories, to motivate or to submit is entirely up to us.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

May you begin living beyond.

Change must start from the individual. And the individual must want and feel ready to make such change.

Your identity is not in who you can be. It is in who you always have been

Addiction is the primary way people escape the modern world. Unfortunately, it is destroying the modern world.

Take a few minutes now and see your current circumstances- your physical condition, your emotional condition, your possessions, your financial condition, where and how you live, your relationships, the situations surrounding your life, and the way you believe other people see you- as mirrors showing you "Who You Are.

The world actually is a mirror, and as you change, you will see everything around you changing as well as mirroring your changes.

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don’t need to be wasted on naming things.

We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food.We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity.” We are not passive couch potatoes either. “It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.” We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity’s purpose as well.

The ultimate computer game would be a 'total addiction' - a game that shapes itself to the elements you most like to play in such a manner that it totally satisfies you. You never want to stop playing. However, any self-configuring activity always has such risks inherent in it. Will we see one day the goverment insisting that games have time limiters the way that some motor vehicles have speed limiters?

Coming down for the thousandth time, I'm perched on the precipice of a billion broken promises. I'm speeding through the intersections of my own broken heartstrings, blowing red lights and ignoring red flags. I'm thinking, 'history repeats itself.' I'm wondering why. The world outside is still happening also.

Sometimes, when I'm chain-smoking and feeling like shit (which happens more often than I'd like to admit), I let go of a lit cigarette just to see if the ember will outlast the fall.It rarely does.

Another piano falls, but this time it's me— or my lascivious loneliness, or my grab bag of mental instabilities and emotional shortcomings, or whatever.

A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke,Another one bought from the store.If he lights one, his mind's lit upAnother one burns a hole..

Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.

... I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you... use in producing lust can also... be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to... "being in love," much more easily drawn into perversions, much less... generous and imaginative and even spiritual... It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make [a] man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary... than... when he is happy...

You burn bright and you burn hard, like a fire in a dumpster,and nobody is so worriedabout you burning as they are worried about the fire spreading.

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.

It's the causes, not the dependent person, that must be corrected. That's why I see the United States' War on Drugs as being fought in an unrealistic manner. This war is focused on fighting drug dealers and the use of drugs here and abroad, when the effort should be primarily aimed at treating and curing that causes that compel people to reach for drugs.

One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind- altering or mood-altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol.

The treatment must fit the malady and the malady is not alcoholism or addiction, or addictive drugs and alcohol. Once the correct cause is diagnosed, healing will take place and hoped-for cure will come about.

Whether the underlying cause of your dependency is a chemical imbalance, unresolved events from the past, beliefs you hold that are inconsistent with what is true, an inability to cope with current conditions, or a combination of these four causes, know this: not only are all the causes of dependency within you, but all the solutions are within you as well.

The punishment approach and bad consequences approach to treatment is the kind of thinking that is prevalent in every residential substance abuse treatment center in the United States of which I'm aware.

Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.

There is no cell culture for depression. You can't see it on a bone scan or an x-ray. Not everyone with depression will show the same behavioral symptoms.

I dye my jeans jet black once a week, but they never seem dark enough. I bleach my hair bright white twice a month but it never seems light enough. I drink two and a half bottles of champagne every night but I never seem drunk enough. And I know I’m not high enough until someone grabs my face to check my vision to see if I’m still responsive— And even then, I’m thinking to myself that I should probably do one more line, you know, just to be safe.

When the door to suicide opens it becomes a viable option that you never considered before, but, once ajar, it initiates an invasion strategy. Day by day thoughts blacken under the occupation of the new inhabitant. It becomes an all-consuming addiction that makes its home in your head and heart and, before you know it, the whole neighbourhood is talking and thinking about suicide. Eventually, the mind is overwhelmed by the conspiracy of its own darkness and begins to wage war against the body. At this point, the body is powerless.

Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.

Day after day, more and more medications are prescribed for depression and addiction, assuming that these things run in our blood, when really they run in our patterns of awareness.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

I never lie ― I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.

In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.

Attitudes and ignorance” about (any type of) abuse can be passed down through the generations. It is important to our healing that we sort out the belief systems we adopt; belief systems that were taught to us and because they are so full of lies, they lead to all kinds of depressions, addictions and other struggles while we try to cope with the manifestations of the problems instead of the roots of the problems.

I remember a scared, young girl hiding in the guise of arrogance and rebellion. I remember feeling lost in a world where everyone else seemed to have it all figured out. I remember the tears of pain, the rants of anger and the hell that seemed to have swallowed me whole. Although I remember these things, it is now, over a decade later, more like a story that I find hard to believe. Did it all really happen? Even as I write this, my eyes begin to swell. It really did happen. I was that girl. And I’m sorry she had to suffer so. But, that is over now...

The more you engage in any type of emotion or behavior, the greater your desire for it will become.

The silver flask called to him.Blue Coyote Motel

I hope you see what you've done to me.

You know when you send a text message to someone and you don't get a response right away, you feel depressed? You send a text message to someone you really like and you get a response right away you feel happy? You feel happy, the body, it creates the chemical dopamine, the dopamine, it goes through your blood and you become addicted to that dopamine rush, and you associate that dopamine rush with the happy feeling of receiving the text, and that's why you got people sending 3,000 fucking text messages a day, right, we're not even paying attention to what we're saying anymore it's just like a, like a morphine drip, right, it's like a dopamine drip! HAPPY BUTTONS! HAPPY BUTTONS! HAPPY BUTTONS! TIME TO PLAY WITH THE HAPPY BUTTONS!

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.

An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!

Just as one goes on a fast or a body cleanse you owe it to yourselves to detox your mind, it will not be easy but easy never yielded lasting results.

The distressing internal state is not examined: thefocus is entirely on the outside: What can Ireceive from the world thatwill make me feel okay, if only for a moment? Bare attention can showher that these moods and feelings have only the meaning and powerthat she gives them. Eventually she will realize that there is nothing torun away from. Situations might need to be changed, but there is nointernal hell that one must escape by dulling or stimulating the mind.

I love like a beaten child and I trust like an addict.

He in any form was a drug to the addiction of being desired while she was always wanted.

It takes a strong person to stand up to his or her fate and overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom and success, but I believe in you.

Let’s remind ourselves that to be compassionate and forgiving doesn’t mean we are endorsing dysfunctional behaviour. On the contrary, it’s essential the harm that was inflicted upon us is properly validated and grieved. Forgiveness isn’t an intellectual concept or an airy-fairy idea. It’s a painstaking process. To be compassionate and to forgive mean we are gradually letting go of poisonous, toxic feelings that are trapped in our minds and bodies.

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.

I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

And finallythe glass that contains and spills this stuff continuallywhile the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathersup empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger towardthe bathroom, some man or woman or even lostangel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?

The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

I deleted your number. Although I know the tired digits by heart, scout's honor, pinky promise.I am trying to talk myself out of every emotion I'm having, and of course, it is failing to a fault.I'm still sad, I'm still mad, I'm still heartbroken, I miss you.

Out of all the addictions in the world, Attention is slowly but surely becoming one of the most dangerous.

Don't drive a car in the dream, else you won't drive it on earth. Don't wish to become, else you won't become. Don't associate with fools, else your ancestors will be insulted. Don't be addicted to wine, else your pocket will be empty. Don't be drunk, else you'll be attacked.

Friends with benefits? More than friends? Don't sample the goodies unless you're willing to risk addiction and withdrawal.

Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other.

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

Be honest with the Lord. If you’re afraid, say so. If you’re feeling abandoned, tell Him. He already knows every sin you’ve committed and He loves you anyway. Confess honestly. Beg for help. Converse with the Lord in reverence and respect, but not as if you were approaching a distant, uncaring being. Nothing could be further from the truth. All you have to do is reach out to feel the grasp of Christ’s hand.

I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. 'It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,' Blinderman argued. 'He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction.

No one can control their results. We can, however, control our attitude. When we practise compassion, it is most effective when it is unconditional and free from seeking an outcome – compassion is a matter of choice rather than a self-seeking action. And so, if we assist another human being from a place of presence and compassion, we are not looking to find our happiness off the back of others’ suffering. Nor are we trying to control them. Compassion is a conscious choice rather than an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.

Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

To stay true to ourselves and remain kind to others is an art. It does require daily vigilance and, at the same time, it’s important to remember that art can often get messy.

Human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with whatever we can find … It is disconnection that drives addiction.

Compassion is the most powerful tool you can have when it comes to healing addictions of any kind. Put simply, what your partner needs most from you is compassion.

No one consciously chooses addiction to a substance or behavior over his partner. There are always reasons – powerful ones – why a person retreats into addiction.

It is not a coincidence that you and your partner are together. You each have something to learn from one another …. The most important thing you can do to support your partner in his [or her] recovery is to show that you are truly supportive and on his [or her] side.

What every man should desire is an ugly woman with a beautiful heart, not a beautiful woman with an ugly heart.

The more we have, the more we realize can be taken from us, and that’s when our lives border on insanity. We live in fear of losing what we think we possess. Once we let go and let God, then we gain a peace that surpasses understanding.

You give the shirt off your back, no questions asked, and you stand alone at the cavernous mouth of your suburban closet—your entire life spent wonderingwhere your clothes went.

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city’s edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it.

But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.

Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others – How did you get that bruise? – would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing.Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

The high is what you crave, what you would kill for... and believe me, you will lie to yourself until it's to late to stop.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more. Are your habits working for you or against you? Are your habits helping you to achieve your goals or hindering the process?

In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense

I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.

After I binged last night -or was it tonight - I was convinced yet again that there were people coming to get me. It was more than just shadows and voices, more than just fantasies....it was real, and I was scared to my core.My bones were shaking...m heart was pounding...I thought I was going to explode. I'm glad I have you to talk to, to write this down. I tried to keep it all together, but then I gave in to the manes and became one with my insanity.

Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.

All human life, we may say, consists solely of these two activities: (1) bringing one’s activities into harmony with conscience, or (2) hiding from oneself the indications of conscience in order to be able to continue to live as before.Some do the first, others the second. To attain the first there is but one means: moral enlightenment — the increase of light in oneself and attention to what it shows. To attain the second — to hide from oneself the indications of conscience—there are two means: one external and the other internal. The external means consists in occupations that divert one’s attention from the indications given by conscience; the internal method consists in darkening conscience itself.As a man has two ways of avoiding seeing an object that is before him: either by diverting his sight to other more striking objects, or by obstructing the sight of his own eyes—just so a man can hide from himself the indications of conscience in two ways: either by the external method of diverting his attention to various occupations, cares, amusements, or games; or by the internal method of obstructing the organ of attention itself. For people of dull, limited moral feeling, the external diversions are often quite sufficient to enable them not to perceive the indications conscience gives of the wrongness of their lives. But for morally sensitive people those means are often insufficient.The external means do not quite divert attention from the consciousness of discord between one’s life and the demands of conscience. This consciousness hampers one’s life; and in order to be able to go on living as before, people have recourse to the reliable, internal method, which is that of darkening conscience itself by poisoning the brain with stupefying substances.One is not living as conscience demands, yet lacks the strength to reshape one’s life in accord with its demands. The diversions which might distract attention from the consciousness of this discord are insufficient, or have become stale, and so—in order to be able to live on, disregarding the indications conscience gives of the wrongness of their life—people (by poisoning it temporarily) stop the activity of the organ through which conscience manifests itself, as a man by covering his eyes hides from himself what he does not wish to see.

This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those who are deprived of the experience, the need freezes and, distorted, it can rent a life. All addiction has as its foundation skewed yearning for the same transcendence. For me, the spell of the material was broken by my brother’s death; after his suicide, all I wanted was the renewal of my connection to the intangible.

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

If those who cause destruction have come to be ‘newsworthy’, and those who heal the devastation of that destruction have come to be less than ‘noteworthy’, has our thirst to be entertained become the truly destructive thing?

But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely...change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

There are a lot of victims when it comes to addiction. I know there's an overdose epidemic. We see those faces. But then I see these other faces - the ones who commit suicide because they can't handle the pain. Those faces mean just as much to me.

Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought "Fu** this," and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.

Sometimes… Sometimes doubt is the opposite of faith, but sometimes doubt can be a pathway to faith. Sometimes weakness is the opposite of strength, but sometimes weakness can be the pathway to strength. Sometimes addiction is the opposite of sobriety, but sometimes addiction can be the pathway to sobriety. Sometimes infidelity is the opposite of fidelity, but sometimes infidelity can be a pathway to fidelity. Sometimes failure is the opposite of success, but sometimes failure can be the pathway to success.

If you examine your motive for doing anything, you'll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.

With God’s help in the grasp of addiction you’ll find the truth. When we understand this and its purity, then true healing can begin.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

As I stand at the edge of the pit, searching for his body amongst all the others, I am slightly frightened by the violent clashes. It seems almost savagery, the way they throw themselves into each other. As I continue to watch, unable to look away, drawn in by their angry and troubled release I see him. His body is sweating, his muscles are flexed and his face holds an expression of pain mixed with pleasure. In that moment I realize their is so much I don't know about the man I am falling in love with and my fear of him excites me.

She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.

The biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are “those people.” The truth is…we are the others. Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being “those people”–the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our kids play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door.

Among young people . . . drinking is for getting drunk. And many go on to become alcoholics.

Drunkenness is not a new vice. Its ravages have always been a scourge on the human race . . .Alcohol is a killer, a murderer.

Thousands are killed and injured every year by teenagers driving too fast or under the influence of drugs and drink . . .others are killing [themselves] with alcohol or heroin overdoses.

In Christ alone there is deliverance from man’s tortured thoughts and freedom from the sordid habits which are destroying so many people. Why does the Bible so clearly denounce drunkenness? Because it is an enemy of human life. Anything that is against a person’s welfare, God is against.

Do not seek solace in alcohol. Alcohol obscures good judgment and leaves you unable to think clearly or understand what God is trying to say to you.

What began as an apparently harmless pastime has ended up as a frightening, overpowering addiction or obsession.

Some [young people] are taking pills called “heaven or hell” drugs, because you’re liable to experience either one.

Drinking and other forms of body-wrecking pleasures are signs of weakness rather than manliness. It takes a better man to live a clean life—free from the stimulants, depressants, and drugs—than to be artificially [stimulated].

The cult of self has become an addiction—feeding off the ego of self-glorification. The word cult encompasses many movements and ideas, but simply put, it describes a culture of alternative beliefs, fads, and trends, and tampers with just enough truth to knock many off balance.

There is hope for the alcoholic: God is able to deliver from this as well as any other addiction.

One of the characteristics of some drugs (such as cocaine) is that they make a person feel strong and alert—when in fact the opposite is the case. Don’t allow yourself to be deceived.

Many people are trying to steady themselves by taking tranquilizers. Jesus is the greatest tranquilizer of all. He can straighten out your life and put you back on center.

Each generation becomes more addicted to the sedatives of life, to dull the pain of living.

The Bible condemns the use of any substance which alters or distorts our thinking (including alcohol, which was the most common drug in ancient times).

Some of the most heart-breaking letters I receive are from people who tell how alcohol or drugs have ravaged their lives and destroyed their families.

When the headlines get black and foreboding, the sale of alcohol and barbiturates rises in the country, as millions try to escape from the grim realities of [such] dangers.

Many people turn to alcohol to try to drown the [cries] and longings of the soul. Others attempt to quiet the longings of their souls in other ways. Nothing but God ever completely satisfies, because the soul is made for God.

Some years ago I was invited to be on a television talk show with one of the most famous personalities in America. Afterward she took me aside and told of the emptiness in her life. “My beauty is gone,” she said, “I am getting old, I’m living on alcohol, and I have nothing to live for.

One of the most conspicuous modes of escape is alcoholism, which is now a national catastrophe.

This self-confident generation has produced more alcoholics, more drug addicts, more criminals, more wars, more broken homes, more assaults, more embezzlements, more murders, and more suicides . . .it is time all of us . . . begin to take stock of our failures, blunders, and costly mistakes. It is about time that we place less confidence in ourselves and more trust and faith in God.

Escapism seems to be the order of the day . . .Escape with drugs or alcohol, and the bitterness of living will be blurred . . .We can’t escape from God.

Researchers have found that peer pressure exerted within a clique has caused every one of its members to experiment with drugs, to engage in murderous gang fights, to steal autos, and to violate the seventh commandment.

Liquor is not necessary either for health or for so-called gracious living . . .It is the cause of untold sorrow, suffering, and material loss, not to mention the spiritual implications of drinking.

Drunkenness. This Greek word means overindulgence in alcohol. Alcohol may be used for medicine, but it can also become a terrible drug. The way it is used in our world is probably one of the great evils of our day. It is a self-inflicted impediment that springs from “a man taking a drink, a drink taking a drink, and drink taking the man.”Distilled liquors as we have them today were unknown in Bible times.12

In Houston, Texas, a man was born again in one of our meetings. He owned a liquor store. The next morning he had a sign on the front of his door saying, “Out of business.

Drinking has become one of the most serious social problems. It is basically the result of an attempt to escape from the responsibilities and realities of life.

A senator once confided to me that the greatest need in Washington was the elimination of the cocktail party. He said: “It consumes so much of our time that we don’t have time for matters of state.

Volumes could be written on the problem of [drug] addiction. Millions of barbiturates are swallowed every night to help the nation sleep. Millions of tranquilizers keep us calm during the day. Millions of pep pills wake us up in the morning. The Bible warns that these flights from reality bring no lasting satisfaction.

The Greek word used in the New Testament to designate a sorcerer or a person who practiced occult magic is “pharmakeus,” or one who mixed drugs and used them to induce spells . . .Such practices are included in the list of “acts of the sinful nature” in Galatians 5:19–21 that God will judge.

. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

Hitting bottom is an inside job — it's something that happens within our consciousness.

We're all princes and princesses, at 5, 50, or 100! It's never too late, we're never too old to rock the world and contribute! Reaching for intimacy in all relationships? Delicious.

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

Just because you feel lost doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. Feeling certain that you are correct in every decision and situation is an addiction. If you think that the journey of self-discovery will bring you more solid facts and certainties about yourself and the world, you will be frustrated. The more you see, the more lost you will feel. That is natural. The more you discover of yourself, the more confused you will become. This is natural. The wiser you get, the more you will see that there are many paths walked by just as many people, and that just because yours is different from someone else's doesn't mean one of you is wrong. This is natural. Over time, you will develop humility, compassion, and a higher tolerance for confusion. If you allow the feeling of being lost to drive you into a search for absolute truths and correct answers, you may feel more secure when you get there, but in reality, you will be taking a step back. Allow yourself to be lost, and you will see so much more of the forest of your soul than if you beeline back for the trail. Explore. Get lost. Embrace the inevitability of confusion.

The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.

Resentment is like a drug. Once you pick it up, it will only get worse and worse until you surrender and do the work to let it go.

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

People say hate is like a poison — but they're wrong. It's like a drug. You never forget your first hit, how it seduces you with its strength and power, and takes you completely by storm. It colors your world in light and meaning, until you wonder how you ever managed to get by without it. And then, eventually, you get to a point where you can't. It takes over your life, until hating becomes your reason for living.

99% of all addicts are liars and thieves. This might sound unfair and even close-minded, but it's the truth. There are some exceptions to the rules, but they are incredibly rare. Most people are no match for their addictions. They will be driven to do things they would normally never have considered all in the name of getting high. Sad, but true. So if you're thinking of trying drugs, keep in mind that all the people you will be dealing with are likely to steal from you and lie to you at your own expense.

I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you'd never do. You'll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly or indirectly. Trust me. It will happen. You might think you know yourself better than anyone, but you have yet to become acquainted with your addiction. It will introduce itself in ways that you never thought were possible.

A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?

What American would not want truthful and complete information about every product sold in the United States so that we can be more capable of making wise decisions concerning our lives and the lives of our loved ones? These are our friends and our family members suffering from so many forms of cancer, several diseases of the heart, emphysema, poor circulation, blindness, strokes, various skin disorders, bad breath, asthma, poverty, clogged arteries, disfigurement, rotting teeth and gums, birth defects, infertility, sexual dysfunction, high blood pressure, aneurysms, complications during pregnancies, and all too often a slow and painful death. These suffering people are also many of us.

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.

You can't "let go". You can't "detach with love". You can't let them "hit bottom". You can't seem to implement the strategies you have learned when you are faced with your adult child's chaos and anxiety. When you try to do this, it makes you physically and emotionally ill, and the anxiety and fear becomes unbearable.

Loving you has been worse than an addiction to drugs. At least I don't have the drugs c r a w l i n g into my bed at night.

Stephanie, I'm begging you. Eat some doughnuts. I can't keep going like this." - Morelli

Imperfect parenting does not cause addiction. If that were so, everyone would be one.

You have chosen to exist, and more than just exist-- you've been chosen to share in the Universal consciousness.

Nothing worse than someone who goes to the dance, is excited to dance, dances all night, and then complains all the next day about his feet being sore.

Her loving hands, soft lips, and perfumed scents were an addiction for which he had no cure.

He was the kind of boy to crush your heart into dust then snort it off the table in front of you.

Our hearts will be broken a thousand times over, but who is to say that our hearts were ever perfect to begin with? Maybe they can withstand a few cracks. After all, the way that we love is not perfect. We love things to such an incomprehensible depth that these things become worn in. Wouldn’t the most beautiful thing in the world be a heart that has been through all of the wear and tear, as worn in as your favorite sweater that both keeps you warm and grants you a smile in return? That’s the kind of heart that I want. Bruises make for beautiful colors after all.

The childhood sexual abuse taught me that my value came from sex. In adulthood, I was driven to have sex since I always felt worthless. I felt important and desired until it was over and then I felt like garbage—the same way I did after the abuse. I desperately needed to feel valued again, which led to more sex. My sex addiction only stopped when I believed that I’m valuable apart from anything I do.

An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.

If it is irrational and hypocritical to hold a minor to the same standard of behaviour control as a mature adult, it is equally unjust to hold a traumatised and neurologically impaired adult to the same standard as one not so afflicted

Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears!

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:To Gaylene deceasedTo Ray deceasedTo Francy permanent psychosisTo Kathy permanent brain damageTo Jim deceasedTo Val massive permanent brain damageTo Nancy permanent psychosisTo Joanne permanent brain damageTo Maren deceasedTo Nick deceasedTo Terry deceasedTo Dennis deceasedTo Phil permanent pancreatic damageTo Sue permanent vascular damageTo Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage. . . and so forth.In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

People who are dependent are merely using alcohol as a crutch to get through the day. Yet doctors and scientists are still treating "alcoholism" as if it is the problem, when it has nothing to do with the problem. They might as well be studying "scratchism" for people who have a chronic itch.

When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help other discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free.

It's like an addiction, one I battle every day. It appeared at first drink. I was becoming the very thing I feared---my father's son. I wanted to be as far away from that Threshold as possible. I swore I'd never take another sip, no matter how crazy it made me. No matter how much it called to me. Resisting became easier with time.

...[I]f at the time of its release the soul is tainted and impure, because it has always associated with the body and cared for it and loved it, and has been so beguiled by the body and its passions and pleasures that nothing seems real to it but those physical things which can be touched and seen and eaten and drunk and used for sexual enjoyment; and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid what is invisible and hidden from our eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy - if the soul is in this state, do you think that it will escape independent and uncontaminated?

Sin in the world destroys people’s lives through lust, sickness and addiction.

Sin in the world destroys people’s lives through lust, sickness and addiction

Mirrors on the ceiling,The pink champagne on iceAnd she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'And in the master's chambers,They gathered for the feastThey stab it with their steely knives,But they just can't kill the beastLast thing I remember, I wasRunning for the doorI had to find the passage backTo the place I was before'Relax,' said the night man,'We are programmed to receive.You can check out any time you like,But you can never leave ...

Freedom from sin is only granted to Christians. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells believers that they have not been seized by any temptation that cannot be overcome. He is not talking to non-Christians, who Paul establishes elsewhere are controlled by the sinful flesh and cannot do anything spiritually pleasing to God (Rom. 8:7-8)...."...walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh..."(Gal 5:16-17). Again, this command is to Christians. Unbelievers cannot "walk by the Spirit." However, believers walking by the Spirit have the ability to "not gratify the desires of the flesh ." If this is true, that no temptation has ever come across a Christian that is not common to all, and that sin is nothing more than a Christian yielding to his fleshly desires, then how can addiction as commonly understood (i.e., uncontrollable urges and impulses) actually exist for believers?......Granted, sin can certainly feel irresistible, but perhaps it feels that way because we capitulate to it far too readily. We have not built up the essential perseverance to repel it. We have repeatedly said yes, and like muscles that have atrophied from disuse, our spirit has become weak because we have not exercised the fortitude to resist temptation as we ought.

My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams

You're Superman, thinking Kryptonite makes you invincible."

Apathetic in my adolescence,my heart is fluorescent. It flickerslike liquor store lights in the ghetto.

Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

Body scan meditation is mentally scanning through each part of the body with presence. It helps us be one with the body. Thus, we can feel if we are holding on to any tension or heaviness or any static emotions. And by doing so, we can find relief and internal freedom.

When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.

Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can’t feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feels warm. It feels how I want to feel; full of knowledge, full of the future.The time I’ve spent staying in bed smoking dope I’ve been hibernating, recuperating and gaining strength. I’m weak socially, but being away from other drug users has made me resilient. It’s allowed my mind and body to heal and mend. As if the winter is over, I’ve come out stronger now. I’m on my own. I have the choice of what to do with my life.I’m going to stay clean. I’m going to be the woman I can be.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, I watch her take out her gear. She’s been smoking so much the room stinks of it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen her do it so often I’ve resisted the urge. It’s surreal, like I’m watching me from outside my body. My willpower is fragile at the best of times, but my resolve is always weaker in the evening.I feel a dread and a revulsion for what I’m about to do, but there’s a stronger feeling, an unutterable longing. I crack.‘Give us a line,’ I say.

Times change and discoveries are made that render earlier techniques and approaches less effective. Change is inevitable. To remain rigid when the whole world is changing and advancing is to invite misfortune. The AA program in particular is challenged with an opportunity of unprecedented magnitude.

Once upon a time there was a girl named Debbie Jacobs and a boy named Teddy Dennis.

Wait for me.” The words come out choked and pained. “I need you to wait for me.

No one told me you can love someone and still be miserable. How is that possible?

What’s going to happen,” he breathes, “is that I’m going to carry you through this door. I’m going to draw out every single moment until you’re exhausted. And I’m going to move so slow that three months ago will feel like yesterday. And tomorrow will feel like today, and no one in this fucking universe will be able to say your name without saying mine.

A nation forgetting its own laughter is in a sad state of affairs

I love you,” he says again, “and no other man will ever say those words and mean them the way I do.

I’m remarrying you, Lil. Fuck, I’d remarry you a hundred times until it stuck.

Fine. Such a stupid word really. It feels empty and weightless. It’s the kind of word you use to hide the truth.

In this country, don’t forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There’s no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it’s the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore.

We are hardwired for glory because we are hardwired for God.

Domestic violence rarely affects only those directly involved in the abusive relationship.

Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.

The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.

We can see that there are many ways in which we actively contribute to our own experience of mental unrest and suffering. Although, in general, mental and emotional afflictions themselves can come naturally, often it is our own reinforcement of those negative emotions that makes them so much worse. For instance when we have anger or hatred towards a person, there is less likelihood of its developing to a very intense degree if we leave it unattended.However, if we think about the projected injustices done to us, the ways in which we have been unfairly treated, and we keep on thinking about them over and over, then that feeds the hatred. It makes the hatred very powerful and intense. Of course, the same can apply to when we have an attachment towards a particular person; we can feed that by thinking about how beautiful he or she is, and as we keep thinking about the projected qualities that we see in the person, the attachment becomes more and more intense. But this shows how through constant familiarity and thinking, we ourselves can make our emotions more intense and powerful.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life.The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances.I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances.It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

When denial is in play, a person simply refuses to recognize the truth, no matter how apparent.

Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.

There are casualties in war. Those who don’t make it back to a place of sound hopes and dreams. Some take on their demons alone. They are deceived into fearlessness and trampled by the hooves of their oppressor. Besides intervention, there is little justice for the thousands-upon-thousands hacked to pieces all around us. How dare we try to take life to the next level. Instead of merely protecting ourselves or scrounging up our next meal, we have the audacity to hope for something more—a witness for our lives who will survive alongside us.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

People addicted with technology.Technology has indulged mankind. Beware of technology dependency!

I wanted to break you. I never expected you to like it.

He kissed my tears away and whispered sweet words into my ears. Words that he was too afraid to say out loud. He told me I was beautiful. That I was perfect in every way. And that, unconditionally, I was his.

A smart woman would have walked away then. She would have lit a match and set fire to the entire clusterfuck that was this situation. But I was never a smart woman, and if you didn’t believe me, all you had to do was ask my mother.

This was worse than a coke binge. Worse than black tar or the thrill of E. This was the devil himself snaking his way inside of my heart and bending me to his will. This was addiction, quickly morphing into obsession. And somewhere in the clouded fog that was my brain, I knew this was a game I was going to lose.

Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.

Picture for a moment the scene of a son carrying wood up a hill. He is about to make the greatest sacrifice he can make. Is it Abraham’s Isaac? Or Heavenly Father’s Jehovah? It is both. It is you. YOU are also God’s child. If He required so much from them, why should He require less from us? He doesn’t. He doesn’t want a portion. He requires our all.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...

Once you have known awareness, nothing is worth it-- you have known the greatest bliss of life. Then, suddenly, many things simply drop; they become stupid,become foolish. The motivation is not there,the desire is not there, the dreams have fallen.

Do not focus your gaze on things that are wrong, for what you see, slowly begins to penetrate you. You are addicted to fixing your eyes on the wrong; you pay attention only to what is wrong inside you. The angry man concentrates on his anger, and how to get rid of it. Though he wants to get rid of the anger, he is actually concentrating on that white line of anger within him; the more he concentrates the more he is hypnotized by it.Don’t worry! Everybody is! Don’t focus your eyes on the anger, but concentrate on compassion. Concentrate on what is right. As the right gets more and more energy, the strength of the wrong gets weaker and weaker. Ultimately it will disappear. This happens because energy is one; you cannot use it in two ways. If you have utilized your energy in becoming peaceful, you would have no energy for restlessness. All your energy has moved towards peace, and if you have had a taste of peace and serenity, why bother to become restless? You can maintain your restlessness only if you have never known the flavour of serenity. You can dive into the pleasures of the world only if you have not tasted the divine.

There is good weird and good strange and bad weird and bad strange. Your Daddy is good weird and good strange.

THE RELIABLE WAY OUT OF OBESITY IS VIA PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. This point has been lost on the hundreds of folks who have railed against my arguments for food addiction in periodicals, so I"m eager to make it here: No one but me put the food in my mouth. Even if I had grown up imprisoned in a crawl space under the basement stairs (I wasn't), even if tragedy has befallen me every 15 minutes since (it hasn't), I"m still responsible for what I eat. If my food is out of control (it was), then I'm responsible for finding, requesting, and accepting the help I need.

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the to light is, know what it will do to them. And they come anyway.

That night I slept like a baby. When I woke the next morning I knew I was going to smoke heroin again. Everything that day was enjoyable: sitting on the bus, working all day – it all felt good. It was the best day of my life.

Every person in the AA program who's successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol- the power to stop.

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one...

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

We labor under the great delusion that we are in control. Silly humans.

Here’s a simple test to check and see if you have surrendered or if you are still struggling with control. When you are miserable, stressed, doubtful, and fearful, you are in control. When you are happy, peaceful, confident, and faithful, God is in control.

Drug addicts had their drugs. Alcoholics had their bottles. Serial killers had their murders.

I felt that if he touched me, I'd die. and then the thought crawled into my brain that if he didn't touch me, I'd die.

Maria, it sounds like he was insane. Rational people don't intentionally addict people. I feel sorry for those poor people who were unsuspecting victims.

I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.

...Studies have found that children who witness abuse are more likely to accept relationships that are abusive.

We are a society of excuses, shame and blame; we avoid accountability and often project our responsibility when involving domestic violence.

Domestic abusers and the abused need to develop healthy support systems...

Altitude sickness, unregulated drugs and medical gas enabled workers to become drug abusers/addicts

Over-the-counter ‪‎drug‬ ‪‎abuse‬ or addiction was a problem that I observed at Mauna Kea

Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

I am here for readers to see parts of themselves during my dark days, but also for a better way of living in my triumphs and gained wisdom.

Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA. How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive. Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.... I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline. The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasons - I have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of colour that is a northern fall. And now, the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake rages below, I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.But first the winter must be waited out. And that waiting has worth.

Introverts just just don't buzz as easily.

Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see “physical,” “neurological,” and “psychological” as completely distinct.

I grew up being told, "If you do marijuana you'll be a slave for the rest of your life," and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, "If you take LSD you'll be a slave for the rest of your life. Then it got to be, "If you take cocaine, you'll be slave for life." I took LSD, and I wasn't a slave for life. There was a time when I thought, "Hey, I've been taking Heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on weekends." I actually believed that you didn't have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don't lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don't tell people it is, because they'll found out it doesn't, then when they get to the stuff that really WILL, they ain't gonna believe you." - Dickie Peterson

Drugs don't really fix anything, except for everything.

Doing something once can be addicting. Doing it twice is admitting it.

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

Modest, conventional expectations weren't enough to lure Adam Brown away from the power of drug addiction that ensnared him. Instead, the college dropout already in his mid-twenties found only the big, near-impossible dream of being a Navy SEAL captivating enough to consistently draw him to different choices.

Y'all think a body be who you is, but it ain't nothing but a motherfucking sack of meat.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories of my mother are of her kneeling at the side of per bed every night and praying. As a child, I would always get very close to her as she prayed. I would put my ear as close as I could to her mouth and try my best to hear what she was saying to God, but I never could make out the words. Today, being married to an addict myself, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what she was praying.

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.

Know what’s worse than cold turkey? Just a little bump. One tiny sip to take the edge off. The edges never went away, they only got sharper. Every addict would tell you. Gray areas couldn’t exist in a sober environment.

The more my brain was fed, the hungrier it became.

Love is the best drug, bar none.

For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity.

a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs

All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.

Sometimes Love can mean and addiction for hurt.

The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. He might get burned, but he's in the game. And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll Beat his wings 'til he burns them black... No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . .The Moth don't care if The Flame is real, 'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal. And nothing fuels a good flirtation, Like Need and Anger and Desperation... No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . .

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

If you are an approval addict, your behaviour is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game.

There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.

When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't...

Imagine trying to live without air.Now imagine something worse.

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!

You've recognised a fundamental feature of an addict's life. Maintaining your habit is so important you've no real interest in anything else.

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.

Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it.

Drugs suck more than anything else I have ever liked so much.

This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it's a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it's a trap.

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning.

Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn't fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to sleep, and have fun without a pill or a line to help me function. These days it felt like I might have a nervous breakdown if I didn't have them.

Not feeling is no replacement for reality. Your problems today are still your problems tomorrow

We love the things that destroy us, because in that destruction we truly feel alive.

It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up with [referring to crystal methamphetamines]

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

Intensity-seeking is an enslavement of our own perpetuation. When we step out of the delirium of always seeking someone new, and meet the same old sad and lonely child within, our healing journey begins. Exhausting ourselves with novelty is a defense against our deepest pain, one that we cannot outrun. But once we stop and feel our losses, we can begin our healing journey and be the authentic, joyous person we were born to be.

The need to find out what will happen if I don't relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.

Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.

Memories consumeLike opening the woundI'm picking me apart againYou all assumeI'm safe here in my roomUnless I try to start again.

My daughter, Carly, has been in and out of drug treatment facilities since she was thirteen. Every time she goes away, I have a routine: I go through her room and search for drugs she may have left behind. We have a laugh these days because Carly says, “So you were lookingfor drugs I might have left behind? I’m a drug addict, Mother. We don’t leave drugs behind, especially if we’re going into treatment. We do all the drugs. We don’t save drugs back for later. If I have drugs, I do them. All of them. If I had my way, we would stop for more drugs on the way to rehab, and I would do them in the parking lot of the treatment center.

here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.

If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

Oh and P.S.? I am in dire need of more coffee. Industrial strength.""But we're going to sleep soon," I say."I know." Laila shudders. "Addiction is a bitch.

I got addicted. News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes.

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?" she asks."Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?""I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.

If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S ., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit— no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime— there’s nothing a mother can do.(...)That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers , you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.(...)That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.(...)That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.(...)That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.(...)That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.(...)That most Substance -addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive -type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then gettingready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.(...)That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.(...)That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

Under the influence, I am easily influenced. I try to keep my pants on, but some things are easier said than done.

In the soft light of morning, the sky outside turning light blue, my answer is always and still: “I’m fine.

My slurred speech isn’t from one or nine drinks too many, it’s from my father.

Jealousy in any form will cloud thinking and form bad habits. Jealousy is an addiction.

But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. Addiction has its own mnemonics – skin, smell, the length of the loved one’s fingers. In Tilo’s case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost ­invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing her displeasure even before her eyes did. The way she held her shoulders. The way she sat on the pot stark naked and smoked cigarettes. So many years of marriage, the fact that she was not young any more – and did nothing to pretend otherwise – didn’t change the way he felt. Because it had to do with more than all that. It was the haughtiness (despite the question mark over her ‘stock’, as his mother had not hesitated to put it). It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.

Too much of a good thing is toxic

Desire is alcoholic, desire is the greatest drug possible. Marijuana is nothing, lsd is nothing. Desire is the greatest lsd possible – the ultimate in drugs.What is the nature of desire? When you desire, what happens? When you desire, you are creating an illusion in the mind; when you desire, you have already moved from here. Now you are not here, you are absent from here, because the mind is creating a dream. This absentness is your drunkenness. Be present!

An alcoholic is someone who can violate his standards faster than he can lower them.

The first few days felt quite surreal for gone was that filtered world of perfect angles made up of peoples’ best moments and selves. Gone was the wormhole that one jumped into at the sign of any awkward silence or pause in conversation.

My blood makes noise. And I’m saying this now, because I have a strange gut feeling that it will be silenced someday soon.

Everywhere I go, I kind of half stumble, half stomp. If there’s a balcony within a hundred feet of me at any given time, I am on it— smoking a Marlboro light 100 and complaining about something.

I know it sounds a bit trite, but I really do get everything I want now. They say life is a game, and I guess I might agree if the stakes were a little higher, but it’s just so easy to fall into a cycle. I get bored.

Why the addict is counting on the days of taking off addiction ... simply because he is waiting to know how long he will resits until back in the loop

Two choices; one: tough it oot, back in the room, two: phone that cunt Forrester and go tae Muirhoose, get fucked aboot and ripped oaf wi some crap gear. Nae contest.In twenty minutes it wis: — Muirhoose pal? tae the driver oan the 32 bus and quiveringly stickin ma forty-five pence intae the the box. Any port in a storm, and it’s raging in here behind ma face.

You have to take it off the table,' Jeremy said, finally. 'It's always going to be an option, otherwise. You're going to have to give it up and mean it, or it'll always be your solution when things go bad.

Game: The end.Addiction: It begins.

In a way, we’re all addicts by nature.

I look away from her. “I have felt like an old man my whole life. And they get to have fun and snort their fucking drugs and get wasted and it doesn’t matter who they’re hurting because they’re young and having fun and I’m a judgmental prick if I say anything.” “Do you think they’re having fun?” I don’t have an answer for her. “I’ll never be able to compete against it.” “Maybe you don’t understand how powerful it is,” she says. “How powerful is it?” “Very.” “And that’s an excuse?” “No.” “When do they get to take responsibility?” “For themselves?” she asks. “Yes.” “Always,” she says.

Sometimes I think, Was she thinking about me when she was drinking? Did any of them ever think about me when they were putting straws in their noses and needles in their arms? Did they even think about me once?” And she asks me, “What would it mean if they didn’t?” I stare at her, trembling. She knows what I think it means, and she wants me to say it out loud.

addiction and expectation for the attraction = social media

Sometimes, I worry I'm winning.