Hero vs Heroin
On the Misunderstood Power of Addiction.
“You are often most gifted to heal others precisely where you yourself were wounded, or wounded others.” ~ Richard Rohr
Welcome back! I recently deleted my personal instagram, but I swear this isn’t going to be an article where I chest thump my moral superiority (quite the opposite), so stick with me!
Deleting my Instagram was somehow both anti-climactic and still a tectonic shift in my life.
In the moment I had a laundry list of reasons for making the change, most having to do with cultural digression, attention spans, economic values, putting my money where my mouth was, so on and so forth. All of those were valid, but if I’m being really honest, none of them were the core issue.
Underneath all the noise was this deep groan in my belly that I have become very familiar with over the years - the groan of addiction. I had once again become addicted - hook, line, and sinker.
I was first called an addict in 2018 by my friend Dan. We were out on a walk in the beautifully crummy town of Chicopee Massachusetts, talking about my recent relationship issues with my then-wife, and Dan was a recovering Heroin addict.
I highlight that not at all as a dig at Dan, but to highlight the severity I gave to his claim. He was a man who had stared death in the face multiple times, venturing in and out of rehab and disappearing for months at a time all in search of a needle. I took his words seriously, and asked what I should do. His answer was to buy a book called Breathing Underwater, and to join AA. I immediately did both, and I immediately learned the first lesson of healing.
“Once you live in your properly humbled state - in in this case humbled is not a put down, it’s not a lack of dignity - it’s discovering your dignity at such a foundational level, and that it has nothing to do with your meritocracies. Your practice is to not let your failure humiliate you. To the degree your failures humiliate you, to that degree you’re still trapped in ego.”
~ Richard Rohr
Now I want to be clear about one thing right off the rip - I was addicted to a lot of shit at that point in my life. I was a veritable layer cake of avoidant tendencies and shame spirals all knotted together in one chunky and blissfully ignorant body.
Even still, at that time I had a hard time identifying with any particular addiction, and honestly? My life didn’t feel especially unmanageable… Outside of the fact that my wife really didn’t like me. I’d have a few beers after work, but I had never been drunk. I had never tried any drugs, not even weed. I’d play video games in the evening to connect with friends and family I had moved away from, but I never missed a work deadline or important event. I was at a peak in my career, shooting big commercials all over the country for Apple, Walmart… You get the picture. I was also running a podcast, a large facebook community for filmmakers, a blog, community events, and two Patreons. As far as I was concerned, I was killing it.
BUT: My wife was unhappy, and my heroin addict buddy had confidently said I was an addict, so I decided to read the book and show up to the meetings. I definitely resonated with a lot of the teaching, and felt really grateful to be connected to the other members of the community, but something felt off to me… These people had legitimately fucked up stories, and I felt like a wimp with my c-tier addictions. They said part of the goal was to no longer feel especially broken, and I definitely didn’t… Did I really belong here? Or had I been duped?
One day we got to the topic of secrets and their role in addiction, and that was when the lightbulb finally clicked for me - OH, it’s the porn!
On Sexuality and Shame:
If you’ve been following for any length of time you’ll know that I grew up in a very conservative and sex-averse household as the oldest of six kids. As far as I know my parents only had sex six times, and they didn’t enjoy a single moment of it. I honestly don’t recall a single moment in my entire life where I got any sense of my dad’s sexuality… Which is sad.
My mom would cover our eyes walking by Victoria’s secret in the mall and flip over Cosmo magazines in line at the grocery store so we wouldn’t be exposed to women’s bodies. Something about sin, hell, women of the night… Thankfully she’s not that person anymore. But as a child, it was ROUGH.
I was surrounded by purity culture, the book “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”, and regular youth group reminders that “holding hands leads to sex”, “looking at women with lust was just as bad as banging their brains out”, and all of the above was a short walk off a long plank straight into the lake of eternal damnation.
So safe to say that when I started experiencing arousal in my body as a young man, I fucking PANICKED.
Earlier tonight I was listening to a fantastic seminar on the Urogenital Microbiome by Dr Andrew Miles who said something to the effect of “When the fear hits, you panic. When you panic, you’re not you. It’s hard for anyone to like you when you’re not you.”
Damn if that ain’t the truth.
Well for young Evan that panic started in the car one day as he experienced his first spontaneous erection. I still remember being in the left captain’s seat of our Mini-van, not knowing wtf my body was doing. Somehow my instincts kicked in through the panic and deployed “the tuck move” all teenage boys know how to do. It’s sorta like blowing into a N64 cartridge - no one knows where it started, but we all did it.
Now don’t worry, I’m going to spare you the gory details of my awkward awakening.
The key point here is that I had no one to share these experiences with. Every very normal biological and psychological experience I was having was buried under a blanket of shame and secrecy, creating the narrative that something was wrong with me which made me deserving of isolation and needing to be fixed. This is the core of addiction - terminal uniqueness, or a chronic sense of separation.
“Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.” ~ Marion Woodman.
On Shame Spirals:
What happened over the next few years took this seed of isolating experience and hammered it deep into my throat, never to be spoken of again. My parents separated violently, our house became a war zone, and I became suicidal. The only way I knew to attempt to regulate my nervous system in the absence of connection with any other human beings was chronic masturbation followed by crying myself to sleep.
As anyone with addiction experience knows - this is a CLASSIC shame spiral.
Life hurts which triggers “I am not enough”
Act of self-soothing which symbolizes narrative of being evil/broken
Momentary relief followed by immediate deeper sense of emptiness.
Now what I want to say right now is that this whole experience was a relatively normal method of coping that had been twisted sideways, backwards, and right into the back of my own neck.
Arousal is normal and healthy.
The desire for physical connection under stress is normal and healthy.
Sexual curiosity is normal and healthy.
Hiding in your room fantasizing about busty women because you’re suicidal and don’t know a single adult who will listen to you, and then praying for God to forgive you, and wondering if somehow your sin is the reason your parents are being so shitty to each other and you is… honestly just really fucking sad.
When I look back now, I don’t judge that kid at all. I’m really sad for him. I wish he had someone to give him a hug, to talk to him about what he was going through, and to encourage him in all the healthy opportunities for relationships he was going to have in his long and beautiful life.
“If we consider addictions are attempts to protect from unbearable pain, then the pain at the root of the addiction to overwork and burn-out might well be understood as that of never having felt good enough, never having experienced our mother’s delight in our being who we are.”
~ Dale Mathers, Alchemy and Psychotherapy
On Journeying Back:
I spent a few years in 12 step meetings. I had sponsors, worked the steps, and never really felt like anything changed. It felt like a confusing place where they tell you not to white-knuckle your addiction, but give out chips for counting the days and all agree to identify as addicts for the rest of their life… After a few years of not seeing anyone actually getting better, I left.
This leads me to a brief note on any and all healing communities: If the space builds an identity around your brokenness… It’s probably time to leave.
“We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.”
~ Richard Rohr
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t share the truth of our experiences, or seriously face the institution problems of our time. But if the goal of healing is a return to the reality of our wholeness, that will eventually require dropping the “broken” identity.
Unfortunately many organizations which claim to be centered on growth are really centered on collective codependency. This reminds me of another story by Dr Andrew Miles who is a specialist in treating chronic pain. It’s a bit long, but very worth your time.
“I once treated two women who shared an apartment. One was the head of a large fibromyalgia organization. She came from a wealthy family with high expectations, and fibromyalgia had become her ticket to the trust fund without the pretense of having a job.
The other was her roommate who moved in to have support for a disease she didn’t understand.
The roommate set her watch three times a day and did the stomach massage and took her herbs. After a few months she was getting symptom relief from all the pain types. This triggered a fight.
The organization leader accused her of deception. Threw her herbs in the trash. Declared that fibromyalgia cannot be cured, and therefore the roommate must have been faking all along, must never have really had it. She mobilized her membership and told them not to see me.
Most of them came anyway. As they got better, her membership shrank. Within a year her group of fifty had largely moved on. They saw me as patients, learned to not need anyone, and got on with life. She was left with no one to lead, no identity, no status.
That is when the stalking started. She broke into the website of a former student of mine and tried to sabotage his practice. His crime was using these same methods to help people with chronic illness.
The roommate today is married. She drinks margaritas on the beach with her family. She has no chronic illness identity because she has no chronic illness.
The leader built a community where getting better was a betrayal. When people stopped being sick, she lost everything, because everything she had was built on their suffering.
Every chronic illness Facebook group is a collection of princesses claiming they are too sensitive for any treatment and that they will always be this way. This is the prerequisite belief. The price of belonging is eternal suffering. Misery loves company, and these groups are very good at keeping each other sick.
When I say it’s evil, I mean it’s evil. It’s an expression of the devouring mother. Poisoned apples. Gingerbread houses.
We are the opposite. The price of belonging is daily action toward better health and supporting others along the way.”
Sounds familiar to me - especially as someone who has worked to release the shame spirals that kept him living in fear for most of his life. The part they don’t warn you about is that for many people, your victory will make you the villain… Just ask Jesus.
What does all of this have to do with social media? Though it is infinitely more problematic than women’s bodies (another wonderful topic for another day) I’m still not convinced IT was MY problem.
Let’s listen back carefully to my laundry list of problems with the substance at hand:
It’s an attention suck.
It’s full of ads.
It’s mostly brain-rot clickbait.
The platforms are promoting hateful content.
The platforms are investing tons of money in causes I do not support.
The kind of stuff I like to share does not perform well as short-form content.
The algorithms are in many ways reinforcing this high-volume left-brain dominant form of capitalist creativity which I find to be fundamentally toxic.
The lack of creator compensation has turned it into the modern version of QVC, where everything is an ad - even the stuff that isn’t ads…
These are all true statements, but none of them address the all or nothing pattern of my relationship to the experience, and they likely never will. Despite being an “addict” I’ve spent a few weeks at a time playing with Nic vapes, Weed Vapes, Zyns - you name it. I’ve gone months without drinking and not spent a moment tweaking. I see no evidence that you can be an addict - you can only experience addiction.
My personal moral outrage at social media is largely a projection at my own outrage and shame for participating in something I have publicly said is pointless and stupid.
This disguise is common, with “celibate priests focusing on birth control and abortion as the core of evil, heterosexuals seeing gay marriage as the ultimate threat to society, liberals invested in some current political correctness while living lives of rather total isolation from the actual suffering of the world, Bible thumpers ignoring most of the Bible when it asks them to change, a nation of immigrants being anti-immigrant, etc.” ~ Richard Rohr.
The biggest pattern I have learned with addiction is that it is not the substance, but the state of the person underneath the the substance which creates the all or nothing relationship. A healthy person can dabble with just about anything and knows to pull their hand off the stove when it gets hot. A person who doesn’t trust themselves, hiding in shame and secrecy, and especially someone who secretly thinks they’re either morally superior or deserve to get burnt? We’re cooked.
On top of that, I find that life does have things it needs of me… and when I attempt to settle for anything more or less than that, it turns the heat up until I let go and trust it again.
“Forgiveness has nothing to do with logic. It is the final breakdown of logic. It is a mystical recognition that human evil is something we are all trapped by, suffering from, and participating in. It calls forth weeping, humility, and healing much more than feverish attempts to root out the evil. The transformation happens through the tears much more than through threats and punishments." ~ Richard Rohr
As a part of my body and soul recovery process I finally ended that 12 year long relationship, realizing that a huge part of why we got married was to try and escape the sexual shame spiral we experienced while dating as twenty something year old adults… which is also really fucking sad. Turns out a relationship built on avoiding how you both really feel isn’t sustainable. I thought staying made me a good man, when it really made us both secretly miserable and mutually isolated - the chain of addiction continuing as long as the uncomfortable truth stayed hidden. I’m grateful for the opportunity to finally own my part in that.
On Creative Living:
“There is a parallel process occurring in the psyche of the addict and the creative person. Both descend into chaos, into the unknown underworld of the unconscious. Both encounter death, pain, suffering. But the addict pulled down, often without choice, and is held hostage by the addiction; the creative person chooses to go down into that unknown realm, even though the choice may feel destined.” ~ Linda Schierse Leonard
Sex is great. Alcohol is great. Media is great. Loving work is great. But to quote Marion Woodman “Addiction is anything we to do avoid hearing the messages that Body and Soul are trying to send us” - and that can be anything, including Heroin, Bible-time, Short-Form Content, Burying ourselves in Relationships, Stacking Racks, or even Patterned Over-Thinking (The original POT).
As I took a step back from Instagram for the last few weeks I saw again where I had lost the plot and picked up the POT. I saw all the places where I had stepped back from facing the razor’s edge of the unknown in my life. The places where I’d been holding tension. The friends I hadn’t reached out to since moving. The website I needed to overhaul. The tax info my accountant needed. The time I needed to just fucking sit in the grass and read a book without trying to understand what was going on in the world or prove anything to anyone. I had been grasping at control, and lost myself again. I had once again fallen into all-or-nothing thinking and stood on my soapbox instead of quietly making the changes I knew I needed to make. Social media wasn’t my problem… my clutching at something that gave me the illusion of control was. Instead of jerking off to avoid the pain of my parent’s divorce, I was posting stories to avoid…
Well that’s a story for another day.
“Finally, I think the heart space is often opened by “right brain” activities such as music, art, dance, nature, fasting, poetry, games, life-affirming sexuality, and, of course, the art of relationship itself. Thomas Merton said: “The will of God is not a ‘fate’ to which we must submit, but a creative act in our life that produces something absolutely new, something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation consists not solely in conforming to external laws, but in opening our wills to this mutually creative act. Certainty - not doubt - is the opposite of faith. The insistence on certainty reveals a need for control, not a need for love or understanding. When you’ve loved enough, suffered enough, [and] made enough mistakes, you realize that even your good things had some bad to them, and even your biggest mistakes had some great lessons. That’s what begins to teach you non dual thinking - where you let the whole moment come toward you as it is without dividing the uncomfortable part or separating from the mysterious part. The goal of of life is the contemplative mind.” ~ Richard Rohr
Now from as humble a place as I can reckon… Life-affirming sexuality is way better than porn, and relationship itself is better than short-form dopamine hits. But to quote Anthony De Mello “I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?”
Maybe sobriety is less about the absence of a substance, and more about the presence of a soul. Maybe life is about giving the right amount of space to each aspect of ours, neither over nor under-valuing anything. Maybe it’s simple, everything’s complicated.
“The role of human consciousness is to discern WHEN, WHERE and HOW one statement or idea is true, AND WHEN, WHERE and HOW the opposing statement or idea is also true - not WHETHER either one is true to the exclusion of the other.”
~ John van der Steur
All I know is that lately it feels good to feel more and scroll less.
Maybe that’s all we need to know.
All that to say - Death to Certainty, Long Live the Dream. 🤟
Thank you for sharing. 🙏🏻 💖
Ahhh the ol belly warmer. In the DNA of every man. That Thomas Merton quote about Gods will is money.