Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Psychology of Addiction and Encounter
Dukkha is an inevitable part of life. This was the Buddha’s realization.
In small ways we are constantly experiencing dukkha. My knees are still sore today from a longer than usual period of meditation last week. It is no big deal, but it makes me aware that dukkha is not to be avoided. Sooner or later we experience it in big ways. A loved one dies or we discover a permanent disablement. This is not shameful. It is life. Dukkha is a noble truth. Nothing has gone wrong. We do not need to hide our suffering. Dukkha happens.
When dukkha happens, we have a choice about what we do. At this point feelings arise. The Buddha described these as a thirst or craving. We feel impelled to react, and commonly we respond in many ways that would broadly be labeled by Buddhist theory as attachment or clinging. If recall the description of samudaya quoted in the last chapter, we see that the Buddha speaks of a thirst for self re-creation arising in response to dukkha. Associated with this arise greed and pleasure-seeking. He also speaks of a thirst for sense pleasure, for being and non- being. This last phrase is important and one we will explore in some depth in this chapter. It basically suggests that there are three levels of response to dukkha. Initially we seek sensory comfort to divert ourselves from the pain. Then we fall back on our role or identity. Finally, when these fail, we seek oblivion.
Most of us recognize the patterns of escape only too well. When things go wrong we commonly use a whole range of physical distractions. We eat more. We smoke more. We drink. We have sex. We watch television. We exercise to excess. At times of stress the impulse to escape into such behaviors can feel almost overwhelming.
Escape, compulsion and addiction
Buddhist psychology is concerned with the way that we respond to the inevitable suffering of life with compulsive patterns of escape. These patterns are powerful, particularly because they create cycles, which quickly become self-reinforcing. They develop habit-energy, the basis for what is termed avidya or ignorance. We all have patterns of behavior that we use to cope with the pressures and difficulties we encounter on a day to day basis, but for some people, these patterns can be particularly strong and concentrated in one or two behaviors. They take on a level of secondary compulsion, where the behavior itself creates a lot of suffering or dukkha. This secondary dukkha then leads to further attempts to escape, through the same behavioral patterns, creating a downward spiral of behavior. Such patterns are commonly thought of as addictions.
Addictions are particularly difficult to work with therapeutically just because they are so powerfully entrenched in the mind of the addict. Addictive patterns of behavior represent one end of the spectrum, but they are not substantively different from the processes of compulsive avoidance which Buddhist psychology suggests we are al caught in.
I have spent many years working with women who eat compulsively. Such behavior forms an addictive pattern, which has similarities with the patterns of addiction to alcohol or drugs, though, with food addiction there is generally less chemical dependency. The drive to use food in this way can be a very painful experience. It can also be so compelling that is feels impossible to resist it, yet it also feels shameful. Understanding the roots of the compulsion can be difficult, but breaking it is generally even harder.
Sometimes the cause of stress, is at least in part, obvious. Susan has three small children and is a single parent. Despite her low income, she still often finds herself eating the week’s groceries on a Monday night. She feels overcome with remorse after, but cannot seem to stop herself.
Judy has frequent rows with her partner. Judy’s partner is having an affair with someone from work. He says it has ended, but Judy knows otherwise. She dare not confront him. Judy comforts herself by raiding the fridge in the middle of the night.
The roots of these behavior may be complex. Compulsive eating patterns may symbolize anger, neediness or other unexpressed feelings. Ata more immediate level, however, both Judy and Susan are using sensory ways to escape from their painful situations. Rather than confront difficult feelings, both women take refuge in food.
These two examples both involve a response to a current situation. Habit energy from past situations will contribute to the reaction and that makes it more likely that the person will use eating as a means of escape, but there is also a trigger in the present situation. There is a source of dukkha happening in the person’s life. This is not always the case. Sometimes the urge to eat has become such a strong pattern that it seems no longer to require a crisis to provoke a binge. Here the eating has become a habit-pattern and itself creates enough dukkha to be self-perpetuating.
Gemma binges evvvvvvery night at ten o’clock. She plans her binge and shops for it at her local supermarket. She buys those foods she knows she can easily vomit because she does not wish to become fat. The pain is not always apparent. Gemma seems calm as she talks about her binge eating. One week, Gemma is persuaded by her therapist to experiment with interrupting the pattern of nightly binges. When she manages to do this, she finds herself weeping uncontrollably. For Gemma the eating behavior is effectively distracting her from the painful feelings in her life. As long as she carries on behaving in this way, there is a kind of equilibrium in which sadness she feels is kept at a distance by the behavioral patterns. When these behavioral patterns stop, Gemma becomes aware of the pain both of the behavior and of its original triggers.
Not all of us eat compulsively, but most of us have some pattern of reaction to painful events. We have our preferred distractions. We may binge-eat or drink or smoke, or we may prefer phoning friends or burying ourselves in our work. We may not necessarily see these as addictions, but they are if there’s an element of compulsion behind them. Looking at the patterns of behavior that people suffering from addictions go through, we see a more extreme version of the same attachment behavior that we may think of as normal.
As we then repeat these patterns of distraction, the behaviors create a cycle that has a life of its own. We enact the behavior just because it is familiar. There is no immediate fear or threat, but we still repeat the pattern. And as we do this, the patterns themselves become painful. Being caught in a compulsive behavior pattern, we long to be free of it, but we fail to break out of the cycle. We suffer immensely from the compulsion itself.
What may have originally been a comfort response, has long since ceased to be pleasurable. Ironically, we may take refuge from this pain in the every behavior which is the source of our misery. As Susan despairs of her weight gain, it is all too easy to try to avert the distress with an extra chocolate bar.
In the description of dukkha quoted in the previous chapter, we saw that dukkha was sickness, old age and death, but it was the also the five aggregates of grasping. The grasping that seems to be an escape from suffering is itself a creator of suffering. It is this form of dukkha that we are talking of here. Dukkha in this case, then, includes:
*The original affliction.
*The secondary pain of attachment behaviors.
The response to dukkha described in the teachings on samudaya, the second Noble Truth can be viewed as a tendency to respond to pain through compulsive attachment behaviors. Let us go back to the Buddha’s words. It is thirst for sense pleasure, for being and for non-being. This description offers a model of compulsive behavior patterns. It provides taxonomy for addictive and compulsive behaviors. We have a clue in the earlier reference to self recreation.
