Suffering. We all experience it as a fact of human existence. But what happens to us when we begin to define ourselves by our suffering? Some say that suffering is a choice. For those who actually suffer from mental health challenges, it does not appear to be or feel like any sort of choice. It feels more like a natural and involuntary state of day-to-day and even moment-to-moment experience. Those of us who have been able to diagnose what ails us are often given an opportunity to embark on a healing journey. For me, my primary challenge is addiction, while my secondary issues consist of depression and isolation arising from social anxiety and shame. By treating my addiction first, I create the conditions by which I am able to address my secondary issues.

I suffered when actively addicted. I felt powerless and hopeless over my substance use and that fed depression and shame which created more suffering which I numbed out by using more and more. Did I have choice in that self-destructive feedback loop? I might have had the power of choice early in my addiction progression, but my lived experience says I lost the power of choice at some point along the way. I needed to experience that cliché ‘moment of clarity’, when the addict sees the truth of their peril and has a window of opportunity to reach out for help. I had a number of those moments and tried on my own to control my substance use, but each time I failed miserably. I could not do it on my own.

Numbing-out, blacking-out, and hiding-out are not effective means to cope with pain. When we stop drinking and/or drugging, with the help of others, we lose our one and only mechanism for dealing with our suffering, maladaptive as it is. How do we cope now? We reach out and accept the help of others—doctors, counsellors, social workers, and other professionals who are experienced in the treatment of addiction and concurrent mental health challenges. We also reach out for the company of our peers, those who have been where we are, those who know the way out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.

But still we suffer. Early sobriety is not an easy ride. The band-aid of doping is peeled-away, leaving a festering wound exposed to the elements. We start to experience strange sensations that seem foreign to us: feelings. Raw, unfettered feelings arise and, without our numbing agent, we are forced to feel them. Anger and fear were pretty much the only feelings I have felt in my early sobriety. I was angry at mostly myself and fearful of mostly everything.

Sober, raw, and barely hinged, we struggle through the days. And gradually the days turn into weeks, then into months, and one day at a time we find ourselves with some continuous sobriety. We need a program of recovery simply because we need to have our mind re-programmed. The addictive drive can continue relentless—it seeks every little crack and opportunity to exploit for itself. A program of recovery offers new, adaptive tools for coping with life’s pains and suffering—tools to replace the maladaptive dependency on substances. This is my own story, as well as that of many others I have met. Some flourish in early recovery, but I have had difficulty rising out of depression and suffering. My goal today is to unpack what I believe to be the causes of my suffering, and perhaps my experience can help myself and anyone reading.

I have written about how, in surviving childhood trauma and in particular the narrative surrounding it, I adopted the belief that I was saved for a purpose. This belief played out in all kinds of strange ways, including: feeling responsible for saving others, believing I held some sort of ‘master key’ to hidden spiritual truths, that I held a special awareness that others did not, and that I was here on Earth to do great works. Today, of course, I can observe these beliefs as highly problematic for many reasons, as I have discussed in previous posts.

A by-product of the interaction between the ‘saved for a purpose’ belief and my lived experience of life as an addict is, not surprisingly, self-pity and martyrdom. I could not possibly ever ‘measure-up’ to the standard set by that belief. I always felt like the world was against me, preventing me from attaining the glory of my destiny, and that I was a failure. I believed that life owed me something. Something big and beautiful. Of course, this all sounds very egocentric, and it is. But I was programmed this way from an early age, and it was a very deep, core program. I also kept this belief secret, since even I knew it was not something one shares with others, lest they back away disturbed. There was always a big gap between my expectations of myself and my actual performance. There were moments in life when I felt as though I ‘measured-up’; for example, when I won in competition, when I earned awards, and when I able to help others in need. That last is significant, because helping others ought to be an end in itself but, for me, it was a means to ‘measuring-up’. I could privately tick a box on my list of ‘great things to do in life’. I was a rescuer in relationships, and my addictive drive grabbed a hold of that too.

Of course, I always fell short, and this created self-pity and shame. My suffering could have led to clarity about how my sense of purpose, distorted since childhood, was the cause of my grief. It was a blind-spot, however, until only a few months ago. It takes time and a lot of work to dig down into issues like this—core programming cannot analyze core programming! We need a software update to access and read that stuff. The only way we can break out of the cycle of self-pity and shame is to get beneath the pain and examine root causes. And to get beneath pain we need to actually feel it, something active addicts are loathe to experience. For as long as I can remember, I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders. I was so very hard on myself. And I felt sorry for myself because no one could ever possibly understand my burden. (I also kept it secret which didn’t help much!). I learned to define myself by my suffering. This was the original pain that fed my addictive drive for my entire life until I found sobriety.

Today, I combat my old programming primarily with awareness and acceptance. It’s a struggle most days, but the pain is cathartic and yields to a pathway to freedom. If I choose to not suffer the false beliefs about my life purpose, I am more capable of greeting the moment with an open mind. Instead of dwelling on illusions of grandeur and how I have never reached whatever-I-was-supposed-to-become, I can be just another person trying to do the next right thing, leaving outcomes to the universe. Some days, my destiny of glory is to wake up and have a productive bowel movement. Some changes are incremental, some are excremental. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

There is a beautiful freedom in letting go of the word should, the auxiliary verb of self-pity and shame.