Dismantling the Myth of Powerlessness (Part 1)

In this series of entries, I’ll introduce some of the main works and theories that helped me to correct my thinking, and turned me away from the dangerous error and myth of powerlessness. This first entry is a general introduction to these conceptual tools. 

It took western science and psychology almost two and a half thousand years to catch up with Buddhist psychology, and to develop a practical methodology to apply to the treatment of addictions and other issues which may be broadly classed as disorders of desire. The efficacy of such cognitive-based methods as REBT (rational-emotive behaviour therapy), and DBT (dialectical behaviour therapy) are now being verified by the science of neuroplasticity. In essence, neuroplasticity finds that brains are not held locked in a static state of development, but are amenable to thought, and are thereby adaptable and mouldable. Where the mind leads, the circuitry of the brain follows. Like a stream that erodes a channel into a hillside slope, in a similar manner the brain works tendentious channels into its circuitry, setting one up for any manner of habits and tendencies. Or just as rainfall will seek a path of least resistance in a channel eroded into the ground, the brain defaults to habits and proclivities that have been eroded into the structures and neural pathways of the brain. But the erosion can be re-landscaped. Both the rain waters and our thoughts can be re-routed. New routes can be formed in the neural pathways, and habits and dispositions can be unlearned and ultimately curtailed.

In his excellent book The Easy Way to Stop Drinking, Allen Carr uses the word “schizophrenia” to describe the tug-of-war that takes place between desire and revulsion in the mind of an addict. The word describes perfectly the inner conflict that torments affected persons. The word is from the Greek “schizein,“ meaning “to split/divide,” and “phrenos”  meaning “self.” An addict suffers a conflict or division of self. If the mind is the seat of the self, it is the battle ground of the conflict. The battle is won or lost in the mind. In his work Phaedrus, Plato describes how the soul or self is akin to a charioteer whose chariot is pulled by a team of two horses of conflicted nature – one is noble, the other, ignoble. “The driving of them,” Plato asserts, “naturally is a great trouble to the charioteer.” In a dramatic passage, Plato describes the “unruliness” of the steeds, and the chaotic struggles that occur between them and their charioteer. Many are those charioteers and horses who,

” . . . not being strong enough, are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers.”

Jesus of Nazareth would later see the conflict as one between spirit and flesh: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And Paul of Tarsus would later say “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” With these words of Paul, the western mind seems to have thrown up its arms in defeat, and raised the white flag of surrender to the inviolable, insuperable tyranny of the effects and affects of dualism: “I can will what is right,” Paul continues his lament, “but I cannot do it.” A facile, uncritical reading of Paul laid the groundwork for the dangerous notion of helplessness that continues to poison traditional approaches to addiction treatment as well as other facets of culture and society. While some who drink pin the blame on the effect of having a ‘disease,’ and while Paul attributes his powerlessness to the presence of “sin” in his person, there was in the media recently a story in which wealth was to blame for a great tragedy. A drunk driver killed four pedestrians and injured eleven others, and the driver’s lawyer attempted to make the case that his client couldn’t be held accountable for his actions due to his being raised in a well-to-do household. “My client can will what is right,“ – one can almost hear the lawyer of the “affluenza” teen – “but he cannot do it.” The myth and defence of “the devil made me do it” is spreading its wings to gather up ever more victims.

Happily, there has been a decisive turn away from this helplessness and pessimism. In Buddhist psychology, the conflict begins (and ends) in the mind. As the Buddha taught:

“The mind is fickle and flighty, it flies after fancies wherever it likes: it is difficult indeed to restrain. But it is a great good to control the mind; a mind self-controlled is a source of great joy” (Dhammapada 3.35).

How far removed this is from the self-manifesting impotence and hand-wringing that traditional methods of addiction treatments have foisted upon so many lives. I hope that this series will provide some hope for those who might lack it in some measure.

Recommended Reading

(The following works will be explored in subsequent entries in this series):

Dhammapada. This book is considered to be one of the earliest surviving sources of the actual words and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (who became known as The Buddha). I cannot overemphasize the impact this book has had – and continues to have – on my life. It’s deceptively simple, by which I mean it is a quick and easy read – yet it is a seemingly endless resource to apply to one’s day to day life. This is a book that never stops giving.

Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Drinking. This is a brilliant book. The essence of it is Carr’s dismantling of desire through a clear presentation of what alcohol is and does. Carr’s book was massively helpful for me; it uprooted the roots of desire so that the tree of addiction ceased to grow, and quite simply and decisively withered completely away.

Albert Ellis, When AA Doesn’t Work For You: Rational Steps to Quitting Alcohol. A ground-breaking work from the founder of rational-emotive therapy. This is an introduction and how-to book for the application of RET to problematic drinking. The heart of the technique involves the disputing of unhealthy thoughts that arise in the mind. These are the seeds of Jack Trimpey’s “Beast/AV [Addictive Voice]” that he will present in his two works, the Small Book and Rational Recovery (see below).

Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering From Addiction. The title of the book itself is pretty much all that needs to be said here. But I’ll say more. For those who might not be too familiar with Buddhist thought, this book is an excellent introduction to those principles of Buddhism which are effective means for the overcoming of addictions – and more importantly, for living a more meaningful and joyful life. Noah Levine, in writing this book and in founding the Refuge Recovery program of meetings and recovery centres, has had – and will have – more positive impact on the treatment of addictions than any other method currently available. The world is a better place thanks to this noble man.

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease. This book undoes the mythology of addiction as a ‘spiritual’ or otherwise mystical, mysterious affliction that is hard-wired into select unfortunates, either by genetic predisposition or a debauched brain chemistry. Lewis doesn’t merely dismantle these errors, however, but goes further and proposes that a remarkable and powerful growth can come out of the experience of post-addiction.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4 Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life. Schwartz’ book is both an introduction to neuroplasticity, and also a program to apply its principles to disordered thinking.

Philip Tate, Alcohol: How to Give it up and be Glad you Did. This is a helpful introduction and method for applying rational emotive behaviour therapy.

Jack Trimpey, The Small Book [&] Rational Recovery. These two books are popular presentations of several facets of REBT and DBT. They are helpful and accessible guides for identifying toxic thought, and for debating it once it has arisen. Particularly in the first book, Trimpey very strongly voices a number of objections to AA and traditional approaches, and turns the reader away from their helplessness of passive victimhood into the active governance of one’s own sobriety.

The Mythology of Powerlessness (Part 3)

I was a member of A.A. for some time, and that membership kept me firmly in the drinking game. The notion that I had a “disease” provided a ready-made excuse that I could fall back upon whenever I craved or chose to succumb to the craving. A.A. taught me the catastrophic myth that I was “diseased,” and that I would always be “diseased.” I would never, for the rest of my days, ever know freedom. I would have to wait until a higher power intervened in my ‘disease.’ Yet even then I would still have to continue to attend meetings for the rest of my life. Freedom, in this scenario, was only virtual, not actual. The bars of my prison had been rendered invisible, but they were still there, holding me inside their constrictive confines, choking me, subordinating and subjugating my true essence and nature as a free being. This kept me in the drinking game for many, many years. My membership in A.A. caused me many years of suffering, directly contributing to a very severe clinical depression. I’m not OK with that. And the myth of helplessness was self-perpetuating. It ensured that I cannot leave the cycle: I was helpless, so I craved, which made me more helpless, so I craved, which made me more helpless, so I craved . . .

I was like a dog chasing his tail. For as long as a dog has a tail, he must chase it. For as long as I was helpless, I had to chase freedom, because I didn’t have it. Because I didn’t have it, I was helpless, so I had to chase it, but I was helpless, so I couldn’t catch it . . .

I came finally to accept that for me, any involvement I had in A.A. brought with it a guarantee that I could never experience true freedom. Ultimately, in being involved in A.A., all that I was doing was trading one jailer, one oppressor, for another. I was enabling myself to remain a victim.

But if the tail ceases to be, the chase ceases to be. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism changed everything, and they changed it decisively, completely, absolutely. In the Buddhist approach in targeting desire – which is the very root of addiction itself – craving is no longer even possible for me. There quite simply is nothing for me to chase. There is no jailer – the bars of his prison have been obliterated.

The First Noble Truth – there is dukkha (suffering, disharmony, friction) in the world – could be seen to be compatible with AA. There is no conflict here between the two approaches. But what either approach does with that suffering is radically at odds. I have yet to hear in Buddhist circles any wallowing in lurid stories of what this suffering has driven one to do in the past. In Buddhist circles, all is forward motion and the fostering and edification of the dynamic which propels one out of the suffering and into the freedom which each sentient being has and is.

The Second Noble Truth parts ways with the 12 step approach. It teaches that suffering is the result not of a disease, but of a failure to recognize the transient, ephemeral nature of all things, and of seeking the fruits of these illusory and transient pleasures. Tanhā (craving, desire) is the result of this failure to see what’s happening as one swims in the stream of change and clutches graspingly at the waters. Buddhism teaches that change is inevitable; the 12 steps teach that it is impossible. Buddhism teaches mindfulness of the subtle and insidious shift that can take place from “want” to “need” to “must.”

The Third Noble Truth is where things really diverge. This Truth teaches simply that there can be an end to suffering! Once attachment and craving have been eradicated, suffering has been eradicated. Dukkha is no longer capable of causing suffering. This idea is radically antithetical to the core of 12 step approaches in which one cannot know an end to attachment. In the 12 step approach, for the remainder of one’s life the enemy is perpetually lying in wait, poised to strike. In Buddhism, the enemy is no more – the enemy has been completely and utterly neutralized.

The Fourth Noble Truth tells me how to annihilate the enemy of illusion and craving. Now I no longer have to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder waiting for the enemy to attack; the enemy no longer exists. There is no necessity of attending meetings for the rest of my life. I don’t have to wait for a deity to save me in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to save a struggling and drowning insect.

The efficacy of the Four Noble Truths and of the teaching of the Buddha in general are often described analogously to the practice of medicine. Dukkha is the illness itself; craving is the virus that causes it; awareness marks the transition to health; the Dhamma (teachings) are the path to that health. There is no waiting around for a higher power to flip the switch. The crypto-calvinism which is the heart and soul of the 12 step approach, i.e., the notion of the powerless and insufficiency of the self and the necessity of divine intervention is radically at odds with the central teaching and method of Buddhism. The application of these teachings to the overcoming of addictions is particularly apt and effective, in large part because they affect one’s world view – which oftentimes is the impetus and catalyst of addiction. One is empowered deeply and thoroughly in all facets of life, and in all relationships – the relationship both to oneself and to others. The master-servant relationship of a drug and its user becomes a master-disciple relationship between oneself and one’s will and action:

“Only a man himself can be the master of himself: who else from outside could be his master? When the master and servant are one, then there is true help and self-possession” (Dhammapada 12.160).

In this way of viewing the matter, if liberation from such a thing as addiction is gained via a master other than the self, one must ask: is it really liberation at all? Can an exterior master, a master other than the self, free one from the internal dynamics and poisons of illusion and temptation?

“I have gone round in vain the cycles of many lives ever striving to find the builder of the house of life and death . . . But now I have seen thee, housebuilder: never more will you build this house. The rafters of illusion are broken, the walls of craving are destroyed, the floor of desire is destroyed” (Dhammapada 11.153-154).

The house is our world of illusion to which we uncritically surrender. We ourselves are the housebuilder. Only we ourselves can destroy the illusory house that we’ve constructed in our mind:

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind” (Dhammapada 1.1).

For more information of the application of Buddhist teachings to addiction, please see the Refuge Recovery website.

The Thought of Never Drinking Again

Reading through a number of sobriety blogs, I’ve noticed that the idea of never drinking again is something that plagues a lot of people who are seeking sobriety. It’s something that plagued me a little in the past, when I was first making serious strides toward sobriety. But luckily this was around the time that I was also pursuing a serious mindfulness practice. Mindfulness provided me release from being uncomfortable with the thought of never drinking again. Here are 2 mindfulness exercises that I used to quickly overcome this.

1. Observe the Mind

One of the first principles of mindfulness has been stated eloquently by Joseph Goldstein, in his book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening:

“If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.”

So the second or third time that the thought of never drinking again appeared in my mind as a troubling thought – I simply asked myself, “OK – what’s going on here? Why is this an unpleasant thought?” And since I had already decided with certainty that I wished to give up alcohol, I wondered: “How can this be an unpleasant thought?

One of my first steps was to weigh up in my mind the qualities I felt while reflecting on two possible scenarios for my future, being aware of what sort of mood each presented in my mind as I held them up for reflection:

1. I imagined myself trapped in the cycle of regret about drinking
2. I imagined myself free from the cycle of regret about drinking

Surprisingly, what I found is that the deeper I sat and felt around in my mind during and after this initial reflection, I came to realize that the unpleasant character of the thought had to do with a lack of trust and confidence in myself and my intentions. In some deeper level of my mind, I didn’t really yet believe that I could abstain. There remained some vestige of doubt buried deep down in my mind. I felt that a return to drinking was inevitable. The unpleasant feeling was actually the result of my subconscious entertaining the notion that I would eventually act contrary to my intentions, and would resume drinking. The unpleasantness I was feeling was the result of doubting my intentions, or perhaps predicting that I would fail to carry them out. This awareness was deeply liberating.

I then made efforts to build up my resolve about sobriety by doing some pretty common things such as listing advantages to drinking (hint: there aren’t any – not even a single one!), and advantages to not drinking (hint: how many grains of sand are there on a long stretch of beach, or how many waves on an ocean?).

2. Reflect On the Nature and Relation of Time, Impermanence, and Freedom

I also thought about why I was troubled about how the future would look without alcohol, and why I was troubled about who I would be in that future. I realized that there is no ‘given’ when thinking about the future. There was no need to feel oppressed by some imaginary condition that I was projecting into the future. Why was I associating the future with suffering? I wondered. I was imagining myself at some time in the distant future – dissatisfied with my state, and suffering with desire – but who or what is that person who I had imagined? Though this person didn’t even exist, I had somehow managed to fill him with the suffering of an insatiable longing, and managed also to fold that suffering back onto my present self, causing myself to feel that longing and suffering vicariously. It was the unreal suffering of an unreal character caused by an unreal longing in an unreal time. Being very clear to myself that it was only a conglomerate of unrealities affecting my uncomfortableness at the thought of never drinking again, was very effective in alleviating that virtual, anticipatory suffering.

I realized that the future will look precisely as I cause it to look. The early Buddhist text, the Dhammapada puts it this way:

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,                                                                      and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow:                                                                            Our life is the creation of our mind.”

And the 4th century Christian theologian, Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

“We are in some manner our own parents, giving birth to ourselves by our own free choice in accordance with whatever we wish to be.”

The only ‘given’ of tomorrow is the freedom of my thoughts and experience of today with which I sculpt who I will be tomorrow. Even at the cellular level the human person is wholly and entirely re-constituted throughout the course of 7-10 year cycles. The Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah put it this way:

“The Buddha said that rich or poor, young or old, human or animal, no being in this world can maintain itself in any single state for long. Everything experiences change and deprivation. This is a fact of life about which we can do nothing to remedy. But the Buddha said that what we can do is to contemplate the body and mind to see their impersonality, that neither of them is ‘me’ nor ‘mine’. They have only a provisional reality. It’s like this house, it’s only nominally yours. You couldn’t take it with you anywhere.”

If there is no “me” or “mine” – then where does this addiction abide? The reality is that it doesn’t, unless I permit it to do so, unless I “take it with me” like the house that Chah mentioned. Such labels as “alcoholic” or “helpless” were every bit as subject to change as the cells of which my material being was constituted. All I had to do was to cease clinging to these provisional constructs, to stop misconstruing them with “me” or “mine.”

With help from these two mindfulness exercises, it eventually came to be that the thought of never drinking again became a source of liberating, boundless joy, and an affirmation of both my power and freedom, while the thought of ever drinking again became a terrifying, nightmarish lapse into an oppressive unreality and illusion.

The Mythology of Powerlessness (Part 2)

The thought that even if I managed to abstain, that I still remained powerless, the attaching a label to myself – i.e., “alcoholic” – did nothing other than strengthen the myth of powerlessness. There is a direct line between a thought, its utterance, and being.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote: “Language is the house of being,” by which I take him to mean that language is not only descriptive, but productive. The things we say and hear not only describe our experience of the world, but also construct it. The beauty of this realization is that one can readily change the materials out of which one’s house is constructed. One can refuse the labels and language that subordinate and oppress one’s psyche and house it in a dark, torturous, phantasmagoric whore-house of illusion. The shadow-plays cast on the walls of that house, those dialogues that sear into your character the labels “addict,” “alcoholic,” “loser,” “failure,” “incurably diseased” , and “helpless” – please reject them. Get up out of your seat. Turn the projector off. Leave that theatre.

In my experience of these things, meditation and mindfulness have been massively effective. The essence of mindfulness and meditation (at least vipissana or ‘insight’ meditation), is coming to awareness and experience of the mind at the preconceptual level. In his book, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein describes mindfulness as “the quality of bare attention, of non-interfering awareness” (p.14). Consciousness loses its neutrality once it steps over to the conceptual mode. Once I was able to ‘get in front of ‘ the labels I had attached to myself, to abide in the preconceptual level, I could see these things for what they are. They are not ‘me’ – they are only descriptors of certain things I had chosen to do.

Buddhist monk Bhante Gunaratana describes mindfulness in this way:

“This is a simplified, rudimentary awareness that is stripped of all extraneous detail. It is grounded in a living flow of the present, and it is marked by a pronounced sense of reality. You know absolutely that this is real, more real than anything you have ever experienced. Once you have gained this perception with absolute certainty, you have a fresh vantage point, a new criterion against which to gauge all of your experience. After this perception, you see clearly those moments when you are participating in bare phenomena alone, and those moments when you are disturbing phenomena with mental attitudes. You watch yourself twisting reality with mental comments, with stale images and personal opinions.”

Mindfulness in Plain English, 165

Gunaratana later writes, “mindfulness gives us time; time gives us choices” (p. 189). It is at this intersection between time and choice that one realizes freedom, and can choose to cast away any labels that one has attached to themselves. The label “powerless” was one of the first labels that I discarded, and in doing so I then made great strides toward sobriety. To quote again from Goldstein,

“One of the most freeing insights of meditation practice is realizing that the only power thoughts have is the power we give them.”

Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, 199

Present Mind

“There is no such thing as wise abuse or enlightened harm. This is the core truth of harm; it always comes from confusion. Anger, violence, and all forms of abuse and betrayal are always motivated by ignorance or confusion. When the mind is clear, however, it is incapable of intentionally causing harm.’

Refuge Recovery, 36

I suspect that this inescapability of causing harm is due to the clarified mind’s abiding fully in the present, neither locked into resentment of some past event, nor projecting a foreshadow of anticipatory anxiety into the future.

I can imagine nothing else that would drive one to do harm to others or to self; only some degree of a clouding of judgment of the present would drive this. Resentment, which is an unhealthy relation to the past, or anxiety, an unhealthy relation to the future, are the states of mind that enable harm.

Again, the Refuge Recovery book names “confusion” and “ignorance” as the states of mind out of which harm proceed. For the individual struggling with substance use, the “confusion” that was generated somewhere in a troubled and troubling past now drives the desire to retreat from the present into oblivion, to escape into an “ignorance” (in the original Greek sense of the word as not knowing or sensing). A circle of suffering is perpetuated, ensuring the arising of exactly the same tomorrow in the life of the user.

As the early Buddhist text, the Dhammapada puts it:

What we are today                                                                                                                                       comes from our thoughts of yesterday.                                                                                                               Our life is is the creation of our mind.

Transience

“But the truth is we are all constantly struggling with loss; we are constantly grieving the loss of each experience and trying in vain to create stability out of transience. . . The main problem here is that we are addicted to impermanent phenomena.”

Refuge Recovery, 12-13

One of the many paradoxes of addiction experience is that for the addict, the general  human tendency to “grieve the loss of each experience,” is tethered to another tendency: a desire to escape certain other experiences. Both those things which have escaped us, and the things from which we cannot escape become sources of grief. There is grief at having lost one experience, and grief also at the inability to lose another.

The addict is, in a sense, inhabiting an existential no man’s land from which s/he struggles to both escape and return simultaneously. There is little hope of dwelling in the present in this scenario.

Caught in a perpetual tug-of-war between regret and longing, time and life march past, unlived.

Illusion & Suffering

“We have come to understand that all forms of addiction have their roots in the natural human tendency to crave for life to be more pleasurable and less painful than it actually is. The addict is not at fault for the root causes and conditions that lead to addiction, only for the habitual reactive patters that perpetuate it.”

Refuge Recovery, 11

The essence of Buddhism in its addressing the dual dynamics of illusion and suffering speaks well to the experience of addiction. In my own experience, Buddhist approaches to addiction helped me target my addictive desires. I learned that submitting to them lead invariably to both illusion and suffering. I learned that desire was itself, in a very real sense, a form of illusion which increased my suffering, which fed the illusion, which increased my suffering, which fed the illusion . . .

By means of this cyclical trimuvirate of illusion, desire, and suffering, life becomes the antithesis of the original intention of the user; “the natural human tendency to crave for life to be more pleasurable and less painful than it actually is,” falls by the wayside, subordinated under the suffering which the unrelenting cycle perpetuates.

Philosophers seem to agree that the fundamental human desire is this: the experience of happiness, or joy, or contentment – or something along similar lines, and the maximization of such. We want to experience such things as deeply and as frequently as we can.

Finding this notion agreeable, whenever I found myself plagued with a temptation to use, I simply ask myself:

Would submitting to this temptation serve to deny my fundamental desire for the experience of joy? Would it serve to maximize my experience of happiness?

I also ask:

Would submitting to this temptation provide an authentic happiness? If I were intoxicated, could I be fully present in this happiness? Wouldn’t the sorrow that invariably follows my giving in to this temptation undermine the maximization of my happiness – i.e., wouldn’t it involve the loss of some period of happiness and replace this with sorrow and regret instead in the days, weeks, months, or years ahead?

The next step is to simply state my intention