Addiction’s Withdrawal

…and its Echo

It is said, that an addict’s struggle can be lifelong. Once the body/mind has gotten addicted to certain substances or activities, even if you successfully detox and wean yourself off it, there are biochemical, physiological, psychological muscle memory remnants. Your body/mind, if teased, will refresh the demand for that rush. A person previously addicted to something is usually one hit, smoke, shot, drink, or gamble away from getting swallowed by the lurking, hungry dragon of addiction.

Since religion in the form I lived it, richly and artificially answered to fundamental psychological desires of meaning, purpose and belonging, it was (mechanics aside) like crack cocaine, or like sugar to a child.

I say artificially and speak of it as addiction, because I didn’t develop the states of meaning, purpose or belonging. They were fed to me from infancy and through to adulthood. Nothing of it was natural and from me.

Like a drug, it didn’t just bypass the work—it replaced it, crowding out any real possibility of questioning, struggling, or constructing those states for myself. It offered certainty in place of inquiry, and in doing so trained me to confuse intensity with truth and familiarity with validity. And as with any dependency, the cost became most visible in its absence: without it, I wasn’t just empty or unpracticed—I had atrophied faculties and no real way to generate those states on my own.

Detoxing and weaning off the fantastical religious trip, is not a one-step solution. The answers religion provided were unreal. Replacing purpose, meaning and belonging with something real, will not provide the same quality feeling. Imagined is airbrushed. Real life usually can’t compete with an airbrushed version.

I believed I had special connection to the universe’s creator and that I’d live forever. Try competing with that.

I can find and walk the paths nature provides to produce good feeling. The hungry dragon created by the imagined, lurks in the shadows, regardless.

I call my dragon a phantom limb – a term used to describe how an amputee feels sometimes with his misfiring brain’s message of pain from a limb that no longer exists.

Creating natural sensations now of meaning, purpose and belonging feels less-than, not fully satisfying. The bar was set unnaturally high by god and ITs illusionary ecosystem. Anything less feels unfulfilling.

Presumably with time and exercise I’ll learn to comfortable walk on gravely earth, but every once in a while, I might still lose my footing, absent-mindedly reconjuring the gravity-less bubble in which I once floated for decades. The phantom dragon will rise in that mist.

I will then simply nod, toast him for old time’s sake, and with a tip of his snout, he’ll ride off up and away with Santa Claus and the red nosed reindeers.

Until next time.