Are you avoiding pain

It’s not just the buzz we go for in mood-altering substances, it’s the anaesthetic. If you’ve had a tough week, or a bust-up with a girlfriend or boyfriend, or are dead bored with your career choice or have no idea what direction to go in life, one way to relieve the pain is to get drunk, get stoned or get out of it. It works. Temporarily you forget whatever it was that was eating you up. Using a substance to blot out emotional pain may or may not lead to addiction. But the more you do it, the higher your risk. Although it is very normal to want to escape pain, it’s important to understand why you are using chemical substances to do it – and to find a safer way.
How pain comes and goes

All thoughts and feelings have a corresponding change in your brain’s chemistry. In Chapter 2 we learned about how our brain’s neurochemistry rewards us for certain behaviours with good feelings, by stimulating the release of serotonin, endorphins and dopamine. The opposite is also true. When something happens that makes us feel bad, it sets up a corresponding craving for something to make us feel better and get those pleasurable endorphins flowing. ‘Hugs not drugs’, says an AA slogan, since both do have the power to up our feel-good neurotransmitters.
These are part of the brain’s natural painkillers. The reason why morphine or heroin, for example, kill pain is precisely because they lock into the brain’s receptors for its own natural painkillers – endorphins. They are released, for example, when you are dying. They make you blissfully unconscious of any hassles in life.
The same thing happens, although to a lesser extent, with alcohol, cannabis and tranquillisers. They switch off anxiety, helping you to chill out and temporarily forget about whatever was such a big deal a minute ago.
The longer you go on using the drug, the less pain relief you get, and the more pain you experience the next day as a consequence.

Pain relief becomes more pain

In the short term drugs all ‘work’. They relieve the pain and make you feel good. But soon they bring their own pain – the pain of withdrawal, largely due to endorphin, serotonin and dopamine depletion, leaving you wanting more of the same.
But that’s just the chemistry of it. As a consequence of learning to avoid painful circumstances by ‘numbing out’ with drugs, situations that you need to deal with often get worse, or you make them worse by saying or doing the wrong thing ‘under the influence’.
What are you avoiding?

Apart from this immediate pain, what are you avoiding when you are using drugs?

Are you bored or unfulfilled in your work or relationship?
Are you betraying yourself by not being who you are, or not standing up for what you believe in?
Are you stuck in a rut and need a change, a new challenge to absorb your desire to learn or make a difference?
Have you accumulated so much ‘stuff’ (fears, disappointments, anger, relationship problems)?
Are you imbedded in your negative patterns and negative self-talk? (Self-talk is how we talk to ourselves, in our minds or out loud. Some of our self-talk is encouraging and constructive. Some of it is negative and discouraging. When you are imbedded in your negative self-talk you behave as if it is true whether or not it is.)
Are you drowning in your sorrows?
Is your depression really accumulated anger without enthusiasm (‘Don’t get sad, get mad!’)?
Are you lonely?
Are you searching for something – something that gives meaning to life – in drugs?
Is it time you did some work on yourself and where you are going, rather than numbing out with one substance or another?

This kind of emotional healing – getting the past out of your future – is for many a vital component of breaking an addictive habit. Finding meaning and purpose in life without drugs is a vital key for some people. For this reason it’s part of our 12 Keys to Unaddicting Your Brain, explained in Part 2. We outline a variety of options to explore, from one-to-one counselling to intensive life-changing training courses (see Chapter 18).
AA has a 12-step process towards recovery; step four is to ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves’. If you follow this, you may better understand what it is that makes the use of a particular drug so attractive to you. In Appendix 1 (which is on our website www.how2quit.co.uk) you will see a list of questions. This is designed to help you identify what it is you’re compensating for, and whether there’s a better way to achieve peace or fulfilment than using your drug of choice. The combination of unaddicting your brain with optimum nutrition (as we explain later), and resolving the issues that leave you feeling unfulfilled, is a powerful step away from a pattern of addiction.
Understanding why you use substances

One incredibly useful way of understanding the natural behaviour of wanting to escape pain is the model of the Doors of Compensation®, described by the psychologist and philosopher Oscar Ichazo.
In an article on drug abuse he says,

Drugs (all of them) can be characterised as ‘energy consumers’, consuming energy at a rate much greater than our natural ability to replace it. As drugs burn all our acculated vitality in short periods of time, the brief exaltation is inevitably followed by depletion of vital energy, felt as the ‘down’, the depressant effect of drugs. Nothing can replace a natural, clean body capable of producing natural and clean vital energy.

The order of damaging drugs

Oscar Ichazo rates the drugs most damaging to our vital energy (explained on page 81) in the following order, from most damaging to the least: alcohol, heroin and opiates, tobacco, cocaine, barbiturates, antidepressants, amphetamines, marijuana and caffeine.

How we keep ourselves psychologically in balance

Ichazo’s model describes nine different ways that we dissipate energy. Stimulants and drugs are just one of these. Compensating in one way or another is completely natural and can be seen as the way we attempt to keep ourselves psychologically in balance. Think of your consciousness – your psyche – as a container. When we react to situations with emotional charge (when things don’t go the way we expected, or when we experience stress in one form or another) the pressure on our psyche increases. To release the pressure we compensate by behaving in a particular way – using one or more of the Doors of Compensation. That’s why, for example, people go boozing on a Friday night as an escape from a stressful week, or take their stress out on the family by being bad tempered, or stuff themselves full of food. Each of these is a way of dissipating energy and reducing the psyche’s tension.
The Doors of Compensation

Understanding how we use these doors of compensation helps to identify sources of stress and allows us to develop healthier ways of staying in balance to support a productive and happy life. Ichazo has developed a one-day training session to help you understand how we all use doors of compensation (see Resources, page 486).
The nine Doors of Compensation

1. Toximania The use of toxic substances, including cigarettes, alcohol and cannabis.

2. Psychosomatic illness Being overpreoccupied with one’s mental and physical health and illness.
3. Overexertion, which might manifest as workaholism or excessive sport.
4. Crime Ways of getting even because you didn’t feel you got a fair deal.
5. Phobia, from dislikes to aversions.
6. Panic Always being in a high-anxiety state and then spreading it to others.
7. Debauchery (excess), which could manifest as excessive intake; for example, with food.
8. Cruelty, which includes being mean, using abusive language and behaviour.
9. Sensuality, which includes excessive sex and over-preoccupation with the pleasures of the senses.

The doors and their domains

Each door of compensation relates to a particular domain where a specific psychological imbalance occurs. For example, when we have stress in the work domain we go into panic. Toximania (the excessive use of toxic substances including cigarettes, alcohol and cannabis) is associated with the domain of our sentiments and feelings. So, having the objectivity to notice which ‘doors’ are attractive to you also shows the aspects of your life where you are generating internal pressure.
Whereas we all use these ways of compensating at different times during every day, the degree to which we use them is also significant. The first degree of use is just occasionally, for temporary satisfaction; the second degree is regularly; the third degree habitually to excess. Using drinking as an example:

The first degree is the odd occasion when you have a couple of drinks after a stressful week.
The second degree is when you drink every day and you are anaesthetised by it.
The third degree is when you habitually drink with drunkenness as the outcome, which is debilitating.

By the third stage such behaviour denotes addiction and represents a continual dissipation of energy and consequent brain chemistry imbalances, which are worsened by poor nutrition.
Foods and drinks that dissipate energy

From the point of view of nutrition, the foods and drinks that are associated with dissipating energy, if used regularly or habitually, are sugar, alcohol, coffee and chocolate. To generate and maintain a good level of energy it is best to either avoid these completely, or at least to get to the point where they are an occasional treat and not a daily prop. (An exception is green and black teas, which have many reported health benefits.)
Overeating

Another way of dissipating energy is to eat too much. Indian lore says we should fill our stomachs with one-half food, one-quarter water and leave one-quarter for the prana, or vital energy. In other words, eat to the point where you are satisfied but not full. This has the effect of energising you, whereas overeating has the opposite effect.
Vital energy

Energy isn’t just about the process of eating food and metabolising it with the aid of oxygen from the air you breathe. Theres another factor, called chi in China, ki in Japan and prana in India, which we explain in Chapter 17. It is also called ‘vital energy’ and it can be experienced through certain exercises and meditations. These exercises can leave you feeling alive and energised, with a delicate sense of vitality that can be directly experienced as heat in the palms of the hands, the feet and in the belly.

Deal with the issues first

So, nutritionally, it is best to avoid all the energy consumers and not to overeat. This will certainly give you more energy to deal with the stress in your life. However, from the psychological point of view, these ‘doors’ are used to relieve internal pressure. So by dealing with the issues that generate the psychological pressure, the need to use energy-depleting third-degree doors of compensation becomes less. In other words, you would need to change how you deal with situations in your life as well as changing what you eat and drink. The two go hand in hand.
SUMMARY

 Through the depletion of neurotransmitters and unhealthy changes in brain cell membranes, drugs produce ‘morning after’ pain.

 Excessive use of drugs often attracts more problems in life and increasing levels of emotional pain.

In serious addiction the drug no longer delivers pleasure but becomes a source of pain.

 Identifying the sources of the pain you seek to avoid, releasing accumulated emotional charge, and finding fulfilment without drugs is an important part of the way out of an addictive process, together with optimum nutrition for restoring the brain’s non-addictive chemistry.

 All drugs deplete energy.

 We often use drugs to release internal pressure or pain, to compensate